music in venice: a historiographical overview 879
also includes excellent discussions of various aspects of the music book
business in Venice in the middle of the 16th century. some lesser Vene-
tian printers have also received scholarly attention: Andrea Antico and
claudio Merulo.
scholars have also addressed topics not connected with specific
printers, including privileges for printing music, contracts and financial
arrangements, identification of the printers of unlabeled books, the rela-
tionships among the various Venetian music publishers, the relationships
between printers and the book-buying public, and the printing of books
of monophonic chant. one particular polyphonic print, willaert’s Musica
nova, issued in 1559 by gardano, has attracted considerable attention. in
1946, a year following his dissertation, Armen carapetyan argued that this
print, which unusually contains both motets and madrigals, was printed
a year before the date on the title page and that the repertoire, at some
point known by the name La Peccorina, after the courtesan who owned
the manuscript collection before selling it to Duke Alfonso d’este of Fer-
rara, was composed nearly two decades earlier. edward lowinsky argued
for a lost edition of La Pecorina published in the late 1540s, containing a
slightly earlier repertory. twenty years after carapetyan, Anthony new-
comb turned to the problem and constructed a modified chronology,
based on some new documents and re-evaluation of others. He proposed
that following an extended controversy in the Venetian courts because of
the proposed publication by somebody else of some of the works, a pri-
vate, now lost, edition appeared in 1558, perhaps in Ferrara, to be followed
by the extant one a year later, and then, ten years after that, in a re-edition
with the title La Peccorina. that same year, Helga Meier argued, on the
basis of examination of the music, that, as carapetyan had suggested, the
music was early, but, notwithstanding, that the 1559 edition was the first.
More recently, Jessie Ann owens and richard Agee have reassessed all
the evidence and come to the conclusion that there was, after all, only
one edition of Musica nova, published in late 1558, although dated 1559
(perhaps as a ruse to extend the life of the privilege).
Music Theorynot surprisingly, given the intensity of the intellectual and musical life
of Venice, there was considerable interest in music theory. scholars have
identified several manuscripts as having Venetian origins, including one
with some early writing on text underlay, among other things.