I
The deep vital forces which had for two hundred years been urging Italy to magnificent achievement broke through into music during the course of the sixteenth century. Music was, as she has always been, the last to respond to a general movement; but the response, when it came, entailed an entire reconstruction of the art. All through the century the process of reconstruction was active. It was, however, gradual in its working. Only toward the very end of the century a few bold explorers and experimenters turned their backs upon the past, cut loose from the old art of music and started in to build with new stone and new tools a new art. We have to do in this chapter with the old art; on the one hand, with influences which boldly altered it, and with new developments which were set free through these alterations; on the other, with its ultimate perfection and consequent end.
The invention of music-printing just before the beginning of the century had a powerful influence upon the development of music. The beautiful manuscripts in which early music has been preserved to us were the work for the most part of monks, and are another evidence of the restriction of music to the church. With the invention of printing came a liberation from this restraint. Music circulated through the lay society—all kinds of music, both secular and sacred—it stepped from the dim vast cathedrals and went among the people and entered into their homes and into their lives. The world of men and women welcomed it and changed it, formed it to the expression of their joys and sorrows. The superhuman intricacies of counterpoint and canon little by little withered and fell by the way.
Ulrich Han, of Ingolstadt, in 1476 solved the problem of printing music by means of movable types, but his invention seems to have languished until other enterprising men took it up. In Italy this was done by Ottaviano dei Petrucci, born in 1466 at Fossombrone, near Ancona. Petrucci, one of the first monopolists in the business of printing music, was, like Aldus Manutius, a man of good birth and fortune. Some time before 1498 he had established himself at Venice, and obtained from the municipal council the sole privilege, for twenty years, of printing figured music (canto figurato), and music in the tablature of the organ and lute. This meant that, so far as Venice was concerned, all the published lamentations, frottole, motets, and masses were to issue from Petrucci’s press.
His first publication in 1501 was a collection of ninety-six pieces, most of them written for three or four voices, by Okeghem, Hobrecht, Josquin, Isaak, and others. The printing was done by a double process: first the staff, then the notes, in a small quarto, with fine black ink. The parts stood opposite one another on the open page, thus:
soprano │ tenor
alto │ bass
The registry or ‘fit’ of the notes was perfect, and the effect of the whole was admirable.
This expensive double process, however, was superseded about five years later by another, simpler one, involving only one impression. In 1511 Petrucci left his plant at Venice in the hands of others and returned to Fossombrone. Two years later he obtained a patent from Pope Leo X for all the printing in the papal states for a period of fifteen years. Petrucci’s last publication, a collection of eighty-three motets, is dated 1523. His works are rare and highly valued as antique specimens of printing, and the man himself is also remembered for the standards of neatness and precision which he established.
Pierre Attaignant is said to be the first to introduce music printing by means of movable types into France. In the nine years from 1527 to 1533 Attaignant printed nineteen books of motets of various French and foreign masters. These prints are also very rare and historically important. His work was still going on in 1543, but it seems that the famous Ballards were soon to take it up. The names not only of printers, but of the engravers and founders of these first music types are justly preserved. Pierre Hautin was engraver for Attaignant, and Etienne Briard a founder at Avignon. Briard furnished the first known specimens of round notes, in place of the usual quadrangular shapes, and these were used for the first time in printing the works of Carpentras in 1532. This, however, was an exception, as the round notes were not generally introduced into print until about the year 1700. Le Bé was another well-known type founder. His types were of the sort which printed notes and lines simultaneously. Each individual type contained a note and a portion of the staff; but later Le Bé adopted Petrucci’s method of double impressions.
Adrian Leroy, a lute player, singer, and composer, appears as the next printer of renown in Paris after Attaignant. Leroy presently joined forces with another follower of the craft named Ballard—incidentally marrying the daughter of the house—and in 1552 the firm obtained a patent as sole printers of music for King Henry II of France. This patent, frequently renewed, remained in the Ballard family until it was abolished by the French Revolution, more than two hundred years later; and the types of Le Bé, printing both notes and lines at once, purchased by Pierre Ballard in 1540 for fifty thousand livres, were still in use in 1750. One cannot help suspecting that these types, excellent as they must have been, grew old-fashioned long before they were laid aside. But monopoly has its uses. There was no one to compete on equal terms with the distinguished and influential Ballards; so there was no use to them in making expensive changes in type.
For more than two centuries, then, the Ballard family held an important place as printers of music in France. The famous Orlando di Lasso visited them; Lully’s operas were printed by them, first from movable types, later from copper plates. In the early days of the firm Leroy himself wrote an instruction book for the lute, which was translated into English in two different versions—one by a writer named F. K. Gentleman. Leroy also wrote an instruction book for the ‘guiterne’ (guitar) and a book of airs de cour for the lute, in the dedication of which he said that such airs were formerly known as voix de ville. In England Thomas Tallis and his pupil, William Byrd, obtained in 1575 a monopoly for twenty years of all music printing done in the realm.