The implications of this extraordinary invention were of universal importance. Printing encouraged an extremely wide diffusion of knowledge. One needs however to debunk the belief that culture – thanks to printing – automatically became the prerogative of all. Certainly general literacy was broadened, but the first print runs did not normally exceed 300 copies, and in those times a book remained inaccessible to most people.
The cost of an incunabulum – that is the first books printed, from the outset up to 31 December 1500, thus called because they were still in their infancy, in the cradle (L. in cuna) as it were – was in fact very high. In their making (writing, format, pagination, and later on, musical staves), the organization of the text (marginalisation and ornamentation) and in their images, the incunabula reproduced the tradition of medieval manuscripts.
The miniaturist continued to illustrate by hand, until the work of the xylographer had made its name. The resemblance between a printed book, and a medieval codex, was to do with the dimensions and the character of the letters, and later on even the musical notes. The aforementioned Gutenberg Bible, like the medieval biblical codices, is paginated with two columns in Gothic characters. And the first printed liturgical books provided with notes, had calligraphic rubrics (sections in red) just like their antecedents of previous centuries.
The incunabula respected to the utmost the scribes’ graphic choices. It is only thanks to Aldo Manuzio, in 1501 – also a key date for the printing of music, as we shall see – that italic type, and the littera antiqua, derived from the books employed by the humanist copyists, were introduced. But let us return to Ottaviano Petrucci and his indomitable ambition: to launch upon the market, books with musical notes that were beautiful, easy to handle and also capable of circulating secular repertoire.
Earlier attempts
The enterprise conceived by Petrucci had been preceded by different pioneering attempts that attained varied success. The first printed books with musical notation came out more or less contemporaneously in Italy and Germany, around 1475, some 25 years after the Mazarin Bible.
The relative delay to the start of printed music was due to numerous factors. In the first place the graphical variety of the musical signs constituted an intrinsic obstacle, and the said notation of musical measurement was still evolving, and varied somewhat in different European regions.
The first experiments in printing music were to do with theoretical treatises or liturgical books, and they used square black notation, normally against a red tetragram [four-line staff]. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century no fewer than 270 titles were printed. Together with the first missals, with square black notation, the editors devoted ample space to pedagogical works. As a result publications of music theory centred on grammar and rhetoric flourished, almost always with didactic aims. Music was tacked on almost as an afterthought, as it was part of the seven liberal arts, positioned together with Mathematics, Geometry and Astronomy within the Quadrivium.
As such, we find treatments of music in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (Rome, 1470), in the Etymologiæ of St Isidore of Seville (Strasburg, 1472), and again in the De proprietate rebum of the Franciscan, Bartholomaeus Anglicus (Nuremberg, 1483), where music is analysed from a mathematico-acoustic viewpoint, and in relation to mensuration.
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