Simone Verovio. Prints, intabulations and basso continuo

Simone Verovio, Dutch by birth but active in Rome between 1575 and 1607, was the first to produce a substantial amount of music prints using engraved copper plates, a method that had hitherto been utilised mainly for artistic prints and maps. Although Verovio is well-known nowadays, especially for the Luzzaschi (1601) and Merulo (1598 and 1604) prints, a systematic review of all thirteen surviving music prints has been lacking. A thorough investigation of most copies of the extant Verovio prints presents new conclusions on the profound differences between relief and intaglio printing-techniques, showing the implications not only for the production process and its economic consequences, but also for the circle of people involved in the production. The possibility to print any amount of prints, even only a single page of a collection, at any given time, as well as the potential to change a plate adapting it for different occasions, was unique in the music printing business at the time. Employing intaglio techniques also had the advantage of being able to combine different kinds of notation on one open page: voice parts in mensural notation with intabulations for both harpsichord and lute in choirbook layout as well as voice parts with intabulations in score. Surveying the intabulations in prints associated with Verovio has been a common method to reconstruct historical practices of concertare, when performing with lute or harpsichord accompaniment before the continuo period. Most scholars have interpreted the intabulations as intended for amateurs. However, our modern concept of an amateur is not congruent with the realities of the period and of the people composing and playing these works. By comparing the intabulations and the voice parts with theoretical treatises on intabulating and playing from a bass around 1600, it is demonstrated that the intabulations from the 1580s contain many of the characteristics usually associated with (early) baroque music and basso continuo. This insight presents us with models from the intabulations for the realization of cadences and cadential formulas, ornaments including bridge passages, octave doubling, and repercussions, to be used when playing from, for example, basso continuo notation. The prints also provide evidence that the combination of the lute and harpsichord, often with a careful division of roles, was not uncommon. In conclusion, this book shows that the study of differences between intaglio and relief printing techniques not only sheds new light on the production of sheet music around 1600, but also on how the use of intaglio techniques in the prints associated with Verovio provides ground-breaking new insights into historical performance practice.