With the proliferation of printing works the number of published musical treatises grew. In Italy alone, in the last twenty years of the fifteenth century works by Boezio, Cassiodoro, Tinctoris and Gaffurius were to be seen. Other treatises were to follow, written by their contemporaries, such as Ramis, Spataro and Calza, who did not scorn the use of the vernacular in order to involve more readers.

Printing methods

The majority of incunabula with musical notes were printed by a method known as ‘double- impression’. This involved two printing procedures, the first produced the red stave (tetragram, or more rarely pentagram) and the second, the square black notes. Very often the music was added by copyists, an extremely expensive procedure. At times books with empty musical staves ended up being circulated, or the notes had not been blacked-in. All it needed was a break down in relations between the typographer and the copyist, or unforeseen commercial problems, and the work would end up on the market in an incomplete state.

Prior to Petrucci’s innovation the double impression system had been favoured by typographers. The first example may have been the Missale Basiliense, published in Basle in 1480 by B. Richel. Though the copy of this Missale, conserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense of Milan, still presents staves devoid of notes.

Another method, known as ‘block’, consisted of stamping every note with its own fragment of stave (or stave spaces) so that the figures could be placed at intervals, an extremely complicated operation. Putting all these bits together resulted in an entire page, but it was difficult to combine together the different parts perfectly; the page could end up with obvious and aesthetically displeasing joins. It would seem that this was the first technique to be used for printing music using movable type.

The first copy printed using this laborious method is the Graduale Constantiense of 1473; it employed a stave with five black lines with square notes, completed with hand-worked initial letters. The best realized example of this typology is the Missale Romanum, printed in Rome in 1476. Its printer, Ulrich Han of Ingolstadt, boasted in the colophon of being the inventor of this method.

There was a third system contemporaneous with the aforementioned ones: xylography. One incised an entire page of music upon a plate of wood, or metal, which was then impressed upon the paper, in this way one often obtained results that were aesthetically superior to the double-impression method. But this was a very time consuming method, and above all, extremely expensive, but was in any case still used after the ‘revolution’ worked out by Petrucci. For an admirable example of xylographic printing we must thank Ugo De Ruggieri, who in 1487 published in Bologna the Musices opusculum of Nicola Burzio.

Thanks to these three methods, the printing of music spread out into numerous cities that included Milan, Augsberg and Basle. Later Würzburg, Nuremberg, Wittenberg, Paris, Bamberg, Bologna, Brescia, Mainz, Passau and Strasburg also became important printing centres. But Venice was destined to become the capital of the musical press. In Paris, Ulrich Gering of Constance came to the fore, who together with other Germans had brought music publishing to France, the Italian influences of which were particularly marked in Lyon. And from Rouen, at that time still in English hands, music publishing entered England. For their part Germans such as J. Pegnitzer, Meinard Ungult and J. Luschner introduced music publishing to the Iberian Peninsula. The earliest music book printed in Spain is the Missale cæsaraugustanum, which appeared in Saragossa in 1488, with type by Paul Hurus.