Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

the scrupulous reverence our contemporary practice sanctions and enforces; and this, too, is evidence that
despite the burgeoning availability of music books and the academization of certain composerly
techniques in the sixteenth century, oral performance practices remained alive and well.

We have very specific evidence of what we would call freedom even in the performance of Buus’s
ricercari. Less skilled organists, or lazy ones, liked to copy the music they played into keyboard
tablatures rather than go through the brainy effort of mentally “scoring” a set of partbooks. Music
publishers catered to this set with publications containing transcriptions of favorite organ pieces into the
kind of notation that simply tells you at a glance, like a modern keyboard score, where all your fingers
have to go. One of Buus’s ricercari was published both ways (Ex. 15-9, Fig. 15-7).

EX. 15-9A   Jacques Buus,   Ricercare   no. 1   from    Il  secondo libro   di  recercari   (Venice:    Gardane,    1549),  opening point,  scored  from

partbooks

EX. 15-9B   Jacques Buus,   Ricercare   no. 1,  opening point,  as  it  appears in  Intabolatura    d’organo    di  recercari   (Venice:    Gardane,

1549)