CHAPTER 17

Commercial and Literary Music

VERNACULAR SONG GENRES IN ITALY, GERMANY, AND FRANCE; LASSO’S COSMOPOLITAN CAREER

MUSIC PRINTERS AND THEIR AUDIENCE

Alongside the Masses, motets and instrumentalized chansons for which Ottaviano Petrucci is best

remembered, the enterprising Venetian printer also issued Italian songbooks for the local trade. That trade
was exceedingly brisk. The first such book, Frottole libro primo, came out in 1504, the fourth year of
Petrucci’s business activity. It was his seventh publication. A scant decade later, in 1514, Petrucci issued
his eleventh Italian songbook, in addition to two volumes of laude, Italian part-songs of a similar style but
with sacred texts, and two volumes of previously published songs arranged for a single voice with lute
accompaniment.

The fifteen volumes described thus far, each containing about fifty or sixty songs, accounted for more
than half of the printer’s total output as of 1514. Four books were issued in the year 1505 alone, and by
1508 three of the four had sold out and been reissued. When Petrucci’s first competitor, the Roman printer
Andrea Antico, set up operations in 1510, his cautious maiden outing was yet another book of Italian
songs. Canzoni nove, it was called: “New songs.” But most of them were not new. They were pirated
from Petrucci, whose copyright was good only in Venice. Clearly we are dealing with a craze that was
created by the music printing business and that in turn sustained it. It was the first great instance in the
history of European music of commodification: the turning of artworks, through mass reproduction, into
tangible articles of trade—items that could be bought, stockpiled, and sold for profit.

Although books of Latin church music and Franco-Flemish court music were Petrucci’s and Antico’s
prestige items, the humble vernacular songs were their moneymakers. The same held true in every other
country to which music printing, and with it the music business, spread. The first music book printed in
Germany, by the Augsburg printer Erhard Öglin, was a prestige item: Latin odes by Horace set by a
humanist schoolmaster, Peter Treybenreif (alias Petrus Tritonius), to illustrate the classical meters. The
moneymakers began appearing a little later with part books issued by Öglin (1512), Peter Schöffer in
Mainz (1513), and Arnt von Aich (Arnt of Aachen) in Cologne (1519), all with flowery sales puffs in
place of titles.

Arnt von Aich’s title page, for example, says In dissem Buechlyn fynt man LXXV. hubscher Lieder
myt Discant. Alt. Bas. und Tenor. lustick zu syngen (“In this little book you will find seventy-five pretty
songs with superius, altus, bass and tenor [parts] to sing for fun”). The first musical incunabulum to
appear in England (London, 1530) was similar. A gorgeously appointed effort in the Petrucci style, its
title page read, “In this boke ar conteynd. XX. songes. ix. of iiii. partes, and xi. of thre partes” (twenty
partsongs, nine for four voices, and eleven for three). It contained vernacular settings by many of the
famous composers of Henry VIII’s chapel royal (Cornysh, Taverner, etc.) but it survives, alas, only in
fragments.

In France, music printing got under way when Pierre Attaingnant set up shop in Paris in the mid-1520s
and secured for himself a royal patent or monopoly (a necessary protection for such a risky undertaking).
His first book was a breviary, a book of Mass texts, issued in 1526. His first music publication followed
two years later: Chansons nouvelles en musique, “New Songs with Music,” imprinted 1527 but actually