It was the spread of that kind of music-loving that supported the earliest music business—written music
as a commodity possessing monetary exchange value. It is no accident that the very earliest printed
publication containing polyphonic music was largely given over to textless chanson arrangements,
including some of those on J’ay pris amours with which we are now familiar. It was brought out in 1501
by Ottaviano Petrucci, the same enterprising Venetian printer who the next year brought out the volume of
Josquin Masses mentioned at the end of the chapter 12. Its highfalutin pseudo-Greeky title was
Harmonice musices odhecaton A, which means, roughly, “A Hundred Pieces of Polyphonic Music, Vol.
I.” Petrucci knew his market. The next year he issued his second volume of chamber music, called Canti
B numero cinquanta (“Songs, vol. II, numbering fifty”), and in 1504 came Canti C numero cento
cinquanta (“Songs, vol. III, numbering one hundred and fifty”), equal in size to the other two collections
combined—proof positive of successful marketing.
The production of printed music books, and the new music-economy thus ushered in, was a crucial
stage in the conceptualizing of a “piece” or “work” of music as an objectively existing thing—a tangible,
concrete entity that can be placed in one’s hands in exchange for money; that can be handled and
transported; that can be seen as well as heard; that can be, as it were, gazed upon by the ear. This
“thingifying” of music (or reification, to use the professional philosopher’s word for it), leading to its
commodification and the creation of commercial middlemen for its dissemination—this was the long-
range result of literacy, and the vehicle of its triumph.
From this point on, music would be defined, at least for the urban and the educated, as something that
was primarily written: a text. So fluff though it was, the instrumental chanson arrangement—the
commercialized, middle-class by-product of the high-purpose, high-class genres of the day, amounting to
the bastard offspring of Mass, motet, and chanson—was indirectly of decisive importance to the future of
literate music and music-making in the West.
“SONGS” WITHOUT WORDS
The word canto (“song”), as used by Petrucci in his titles, refers specifically, if paradoxically, to
something that was not sung—namely, textless, instrumental items of chamber music. The usage was in
fact common at the time; in the Glogauer Liederbuch and other German sources, the Latin equivalent of
Petrucci’s Italian word—carmen (plural carmina)—was used in the same meaning: an instrumental piece
based on, or in the style of, a song: a “song without words.”
The actual chanson arrangement was, by Petrucci’s time, only one kind of carmen (to adopt, as less
confusing, the Latin term for our descriptive purposes). Another, equally popular kind consisted of tenor
tacet subsections extracted from Masses and motets, sometimes identified as such, more often not. The
tenor tacet piece, we may recall, was the hotbed of pervading imitation—a “purely musical” sort of
patterning if ever there was one, which could sustain a “purely musical” listener’s interest. One famous
example, published in Petrucci’s Odhecaton and found in many manuscripts as well, was a Benedictus by
Isaac (Ex. 13-18). It came from a Mass based on the tenor of Busnoys’s chanson Quant j’ay au cuer
(“Since I hold in my heart...”) that was probably meant for Marian feasts and votive observances. The
tenorless Benedictus contains no hint of the cantus firmus, however. Its emphasis on pure patterning
pleasure, as well as its floridity, conspired to make it appear a very paradigm of “instrumental style” in
the opinion of modern scholars—until, that is, the Mass from which it was extracted was discovered and
notions of “instrumental” vs. “vocal” style had to be radically revised.
EX. 13-18 Henricus Isaac, Benedictus from Missa Quant j’ay au cuer, as it appears (without text) in Petrucci’s Odhecaton