Italian Music Venice

[Klacee Sawatzky]

OttavianoPetrucci's twenty-year patent for the double-impression technique of printing polyphonic music for voices, organ, and lute by using moveable types is the first known record of a privilege granted for music printing. It is also one of the early records of patents for invention and improvement in the mechanism of printing, showing that there was no legal distinction between books and printed music or other works of art produced through the press. The commentary argues that while Petrucci was not the first to print music, his claim to a pioneering role in the history of printing is supported by the fact that he was the first to print polyphonic music on a large scale and establish a market for printed music as a distinct niche of the printing and publishing trade. The commentary describes sixteenth-century relations between composers, performers, and publishers in the context of a developing printed music market and discusses contemporary attitudes towards the legal protection of music.

The position of music in the emergence of copyright has been problematic and the formal legal recognition of music as an intellectual product came later than the laws concerning literary property. In England, for example, it came sixty-five years after the enactment of the Statute of Anne (uk_1710), which granted protection to "books and other writings". It was not until 1777, when Johann Christian Bach successfully sued his publisher James Longman for breach of contract, that the High Court held that music could be protected by copyright (see uk_1777). For a long time, music was considered as something different than literature and other products of creative industries and relegated to the margins of publishing, like maps, engravings, occasional printed matter, and newspapers. Why was this so?

In the first place, it has always been difficult to place music in one category of creative production and define the concept of a musical work. What exactly is a musical work? Is it a sound-event (performance) or a mere artefact such as a musical score? What should be protected: a composition or a musical score (a composition fixed through musical notation), or the system of musical notation itself? How do we account for improvised or live performances which are intended to be unique events; or a limitless number of new interpretations and arrangements of the same musical piece? Some of these questions trouble music scholars and copyright lawyers to this day.

As Michael Talbot argues, in order to ensure that a musical work is recognised both as property and as artistic expression, the work's existence has to incorporate some form of blueprint or template for performance which allows a composition to be reproduced.[1] It was not until the arrival of printing that music could be fixed into such an identifiable object - a printed score. Printing captured a composition permanently on the printed page and therefore led to the assumption that the musical work was complete in a written, reproducible and attributable form. The notated form of a composition became a documentary record of a finished product for which a copyright could be claimed.

As in the case of books, printing profoundly altered the world of music. It not only made huge differences to the accessibility, dissemination and transmission of music but it also encouraged the preservation of current and old repertories and encouraged development of a musical style, form, genres and tradition.[2] It is not surprising therefore that Ottaviano Petrucci (1466-1539), who is traditionally credited with the invention of the art of printing music from moveable type, has often been compared to Gutenberg in terms of what he achieved for music printing. An impoverished but resourceful nobleman from Fossombrone in the Papal States, Petrucci moved to Venice in about 1490 to study the techniques of music printing.[3] In 1498 he obtained an exclusive twenty-year privilege for printing and selling music for voices, organ and lute throughout the Venetian Republic. This is the first known record of a privilege granted for music printing. In his petition to the Venetian Senate, Petrucci claimed to have invented the most convenient way to print canto figurato - polyphonic music for voices, organ, and lute by using moveable types, "what many, not only in Italy but also outside of Italy, have long attempted in vain."

Despite Petrucci's claim that he was the inventor of the art of printing music, he was not the first to print music. The earliest known printed work containing music was the Psalterium which appeared at Mainz in 1457, from the press of Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer.[4] Nor was Petrucci the first to use the technique of double impression. Opinion today gives much more credit to the fifteenth-century printers for preparing the way. Figured music (canto figurato), that is, music in florid counterpoint (which employs many time-values and therefore demands a notation capable of indicating them) as distinguished from plainsong (which does not need or use a notation representing them), required several different graphic elements of music (staves, notes and text) to be produced by multiple impression. For example, the first would be an impression of the lines or music stave; the second would add the notes; and the third the text. This technique of printing from two or more impressions was well known in Italy, including Venice, where it was used by fifteenth-century printers to produce the black and red sections of liturgical incunabula or legal texts.[5]

In Venice, with several professional type designers and punchcutters at work, experimenting with different type designs to transform complex scripts into moveable type had been an established industry.[6] Francesco Griffo of Bologna, for example, designed cursive Greek and Latin types for the presses of Aldus Manutius and Giunti (see i_1501). Another Venetian typefounder, Jacomo Ungaro had been experimenting with music type design in Venice for forty years. In fact, Jacomo Ungaro was very likely the creator of the mensural types used by Petrucci.[7] And in 1513, four years after Petrucci had left Venice to return to his native Fossombrone, Ungaro himself requested a fifteen-year privilege to protect the printing and sale of mensural music books in Venice:

"Jacomo Ungaro, cutter of letters and inhabitant of this most excellent city for forty years, having discovered the way to print measured music, and fearing that others, as happens, may reap the fruit of his labours, begs your Excellency that you be pleased to grant him the favour that no one else may print or have printed the said measured music either in this city or in its provinces for the next fifteenth years, nor bring books printed elsewhere to sell in this city or subordinate lands, under penalty of losing all the books and 100 ducats for every time that it occurs."[8]

Ungaro's privilege was conceded with the provision that it should not be prejudicial to any earlier privilege (Hoc ne praejudicetur concessionibus, si quae forte factae fuissent antehac), as indeed was the case; for Petrucci already held a patent for the same invention since 1498. Possibly because of this condition or maybe because of complaints made by Petrucci, Ungaro never proceeded to print any musical editions. However, as early as March 1505, yet another entrepreneur and "a renown lute player", Marco Dall'Aquila, obtained a privilege for music printing in disregard of Petrucci's privilege. In his petition to the Venetian Collegio, Marco claimed to "have invented, with great effort and expense, a method of printing tablature and metre for those who take pleasure in playing the lute, a noble instrument very appropriate for true gentlemen, - something which has never been printed before" and asked for an exclusive privilege to print "tablatures for the lute or any other sort."[9]

The existence of these two privileges further undermines the authenticity of Petrucci's claim that he was the first inventor. Petrucci may have been genuinely unaware of the precedents, or perhaps was thinking only in terms of complete volumes of mensural polyphony when he asserted that he was the first to print music from moveable types. Perhaps the best way to assess Petrucci's contribution to music printing is in terms of refinement rather than innovation. While his music printing did not involve any innovative technology, nevertheless, he did achieve new levels of artistry in the design, layout and press-work of music. He introduced smaller and lighter type-designs and a more precise superimposition of different settings of type than earlier incunabula music works.[10] Last but not least, he was the first to produce whole books of music in this way. Rather than a few pages of incidental diagrams of musical notation, his Harmonice Musices Odhecaton was the first volume of printed music to appear twenty years after the first European book printed from moveable type (the forty-two line Bible produced in Mainz about 1454). The multiple impression of musical notation posed special problems and it was a lengthy and costly process which still remained subject to much experimentation. It is no surprise that three years elapsed between the date of Petrucci's petition and the appearance of the first work under the new patent: the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A, issued from Petrucci's press in 1501. The following year Petrucci published Canti B numero Cinquanta.

Both the church and the court were long experienced in devoting financial resources to the arts to dramatise their social and political status quo. Churches needed choir-masters, organists and singers in order to celebrate the liturgy; courts needed musicians for the necessary public pomp and for private entertainment. Music was also central to the courtly ethos, as Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), a courtier, diplomat and a prominent Renaissance author emphasised in The Book of the Courtier (Il Cortegiano):

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