great training center for musicians in the literate tradition.
The other important Fleming whom Willaert trained, or at least decisively affected, was the Ghent-
born Jacques (or Jachet, or Jakob) Buus (ca. 1500–65), who in the 1540s worked under Willaert as
second organist at St. Mark’s and published three books of music for his instrument. The fact that Buus
was the first distinguished musician in the literate tradition to be chiefly concerned with instrumental
music gives him considerable historical significance, and a place in this narrative a little out of
proportion, perhaps, to his actual musical achievement. But he, too, played a role of some consequence in
the perfecting of the ars perfecta and its further cleansing, so to speak, by dint of transference to a
wordless medium.
FIG. 15-5 Francesco Spinacino’s Recercare de tous biens as it appears in his Intabolatura de Lauto (Venice: Ottaviano Petrucci,
1507).
That medium was the ricercare. The word, etymologically related to our word “research,” connotes
seeking and finding. That is an old metaphor for what we now think of as artistic “creation,” familiar to us
at least since the days of the troubadours, the “finders” of courtly love songs. Terminology based on the
seeking rather than the finding end of the process may go all the way back to the Vulgate, the standard
(fourth century) Latin translation of the Bible, where the term “composer” is rendered in one place
(Ecclesiasticus 44:5) as requirentes modos musicos, “seekers of tunes.”
As a musical term, the word ricercare goes back to the beginning of the sixteenth century and is first
encountered in early printed lute tablatures. A tablature or intabulation is a form of notation, still used to
indicate guitar or ukulele chords in popular sheet music, that prescribes not the sounds to be produced but
the hand placements or other actions that go into producing them. The Intabolatura de lauto by Francesco
Spinacino, published in Venice by Petrucci in 1507, contains the very first known use of the term (in a
variant spelling, recercare) and also illustrates the use of tablature (Fig. 15-5). What looks like a staff in
this source is actually a stylized picture of the neck and fingerboard of the lute, each line representing a
string. The numbers superimposed on the lines represent the frets behind which the player’s fingers are to
be placed, and the headless stems above show the rhythm.
Early lute tablatures like this one are only marginally a part of the literate tradition. What they really
contain are recordings, as it were, of the kind of performances virtuoso instrumentalists gave of vocal
music. Practically all the pieces in Spinacino’s collection are arrangements of currently fashionable
motets and chansons. The book opens, in a manner that will hardly surprise us, with an Ave Maria by
Josquin (not the famous piece discussed in the previous chapter but a short setting of the traditional
prayer), and goes on to provide intabulations of the most popular songs of the day, including both J’ay
pris amours and De tous biens playne.
The only original compositions in the collection are the ricercari, and they are minimal, consisting
mainly of finger-flexing scale segments and flourishes. The first one, shown in Fig. 15-5, suggests by its
title, Recercare de tous biens, that it was intended as a prelude before playing the intabulation of the song