Early Music Printing in German-speaking Lands: Technical and Repertoire Development

The project is focused on printed music north of the Alps as a general phenomenon in the first four decades of the 16th century. Whereas music printing in other European countries has been intensely studied in various details, the specific cultural and political situation in German speaking lands is still waiting to be adequately explored. The specific quality of the present project is that it takes the technical challenge to print notes and staff lines together as its starting point. In contrast to other studies that focus on a specific musical genre, it will examine any kind of printed source with any kind of notation: theory books with music examples, broadsheets with music, liturgical prints, tablatures for all kinds of instruments, polyphonic music prints, pedagogical books with music examples, song books and hymnals, humanistic dramas with music sections, etc. This broad perspective should also provide a comprehensive insight into the musical world of that time and leads to a better understanding of the influence and role of early music printing in cultural history. The first task is to gather in a database the existing basic information about prints from various bibliographies. This collection of data will be enlarged considerably by checking single copies in original or in reproduction and by keeping on record specific typographical facts and detailed descriptions of individual exemplars. As soon as possible this enlarged database will be publically available. At the same time the collaborators work on their own scientific projects concerning technical and repertoire development respectively. The studies on technical questions are concentrated on the shift of different printing techniques and its consequences; the repertoire topic is strongly connected to the emerging Reformation movement and will reveal the musical relation and interaction between the various social groups involved in this typical German development. An advisory board evaluates and supports the work, a final conference guarantees international exchange. The online database with detailed information on each German music print published between 1501 and 1540 will serve as a main reference source for future research in early music printing.

This project provides the first detailed overview of all printed music produced in the German-speaking territories during the first four decades of the sixteenth century. The application for the project presupposed the existence of about three hundred titles, gathered from standard bibliographies. As a result of intensive research during the course of the project, we gathered more than twice that number. All these titles are described in a complex database, which is freely available to the public (www.vdm16.sbg.ac.at). Most of the editions listed in the database were examined in situ in at least one copy (in many case in several copies), in order to correct and amplify the information available to this point whenever required. Items in the database can be found using a universal free-text search, or according to a number of salient criteria, such as printer, place of printing, format, printing technique or notation.The methodology of the project is indebted to the field of material studies. The investigation thus focussed not on certain musical repertoires or composers, but the individual printed items, which were described in their materiality, including annotations, corrections and provenance. Another central detail of the investigation was the the technical difficulties of printing, and the challenges associated with early printing. This approach provided completely new insights and findings, including a correction of the overestimation of the role of music printing in the Reformation, the unexpectedly small proportion of titles containing polyphonic music, and the large number of printed liturgical books containing music, which dominated the market not merely in the early years of music printing, but also well into the sixteenth century. A conference, entitled Good impressions: The First Century of Music Printing and Publishing, was held towards the end of the project, and brought together seventeen international experts. A selection of papers from the conference will be published by Ashgate/Routledge, in the series Music and Material Studies. The members of the investigation team presented many papers and conferences and published a large number of peer-reviewed articles and chapters. Besides these, the most important research outcome of the project is the online database, which serves already as a central point of departure for future research in the area of early music printing, and will be further developed in a successor project.