century, and remained largely in the hands of minstrels
and professional musicians.
The main plucked string instruments were the harp
and lute, the latter of which became very important for
solo performance. Derived from the Arabic ‘ūd, the Euro-
pean lute was widespread by the mid-14th century, al-
though it was only in the later 15th century that solo
players began to use it for playing multivoice composi-
tions. As with the similar Spanish vihuela, 16th-century
musicians translated thousands of polyphonic works into
notation for the lute (“tablature”). When members of the
nobility and royalty were taught music, it was frequently
the lute and keyboards that they learned. Among the key-
board instruments of the period, the most venerable and
widespread was certainly the organ, used in many
churches and cathedrals since at least the 10th century. It
is also a special case, since it was an ecclesiastical instru-
ment, and those who received training on it and theorized
about its construction were church singers. These players
were always more closely associated with the sacred musi-
cal traditions than were other instrumentalists. The key-
boards that came into use in secular spheres included
smaller portable organ types, like the regals, as well as var-
ious string instruments (virginals and other harpsi-
chords).
Further reading: Curt Sachs, The History of Musical
Instruments (London: Dent, 1942); Howard Mayer Brown
and Keith Polk, “Instrumental Music, c. 1300–c. 1520,” in
Music as Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages, ed.
Reinhard Strohm and Bonnie J. Blackburn (The New Ox-
ford History of Music Vol. III.1, Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2002), pp. 97–161.
music printing and publishing During the first half-
century of Western printing, the vast majority of printed
music appeared in plainchant books, produced from the
1470s onward in numerous towns in Italy, Spain, and Ger-
manic regions. Printed chant books created for the Sarum
rite in England were imported from the Continent, with
the first native English example being Richard Pynson’s
missal of 1500. As with many printed books of this period,
the early plainchant prints closely imitated professionally
written manuscripts, and achieved a remarkable state
of elegance and sophistication. The problem of printing
notes over horizontal four-line staves led to the develop-
ment of a double-impression technique, in which each
page went through the printing process twice: first for the
empty staves, then for the notes.
Polyphonic music used a notation system somewhat
different to that of plainchant, mainly on account of the
specification of rhythm. The first examples of printed
polyphony are found mainly in theoretical tracts such as
the Musices opusculum (1487) of Nicolaus Burtius and the
Practica musice (1496) of Franchino GAFFURIO. In these
books, short multivoice compositions were printed from
woodcuts, requiring a significant investment of labor for
each example. The few other late 15th-century ventures
into the printing of polyphony likewise relied on wood-
cuts, serving to reproduce occasional musical items in
mainly textual contexts.
The watershed year for the printing of polyphonic
music was 1501, which saw the appearance of the collec-
tion Harmonice musices odhecaton A, published in Venice
by Ottaviano PETRUCCI. In Petrucci’s early prints, a triple-
impression method separated the printing of staves,
music, and text; the precision of alignment required for
the task was considerable, but the results were visually su-
perb. With the collaboration of an editor, Petrus Castel-
lanus, Petrucci issued a wide variety of prints, including
both vocal and instrumental music, for years before any
other music publishing houses began work. Petrucci’s ac-
tivities in music printing appear to have wound down
around 1520, with one exception (and possibly more) in
1538.
The first followers of Petrucci in the trade of printing
music collections worked in Germany; in the 1510s; how-
ever, Andrea Antico created extensive music prints com-
pletely from woodcuts in Rome (and later, Venice). In the
Low Countries, early examples of printed polyphony
occur in a 1515 book printed by Jan de Gheet in Antwerp,
where two motets by Benedictus de Opiciis are included as
incidental items, reproduced from woodcuts alongside
texts and illustrations. Antwerp would later become one
of the great centers of music printing, home to the firms
of Susato, Waelrant, and Phalèse, among others.
The French printer Pierre Attaignant is commonly
credited with the introduction of single-impression music
printing, in which individual pieces of type included seg-
ments of music staves; this process considerably simpli-
fied the technical aspects of printing, and eventually
became the standard method of music printing through-
out Europe. Attaingnant’s first single-impression print of
1527/8, however, was actually preceded by some years by
several songs printed in London by John Rastell, using the
same technique. Rastell’s examples represent the only
English printing of polyphonic music until the isolated
(and now fragmentary) Book of XX Songes in 1530. The
real bulk of music printing activity in England, particu-
larly after the middle of the 16th century, was directed to-
ward the needs of the reformed Church, with John Day
issuing edition after edition of simple vernacular psalm
settings (see PSALMODY). These prints were inspired by
models from Continental Europe, where vast collections
of psalms in Dutch, German, and French played an im-
portant role in the distribution of Protestant music.
Of course, printing became an equally vital element in
the traditional spheres of Latin art music for the Catholic
Church and secular forms (CHANSON, MADRIGAL, instru-
mental music, etc.). Beginning in the late 1530s, the firms
of Antonio Gardano and Girolamo Scotto in Venice made33330 0 mmuussiicc pprriinnttiinngg aanndd ppuubblliisshhiinngg