At 11:26 AM +0000 1/30/06, Owain Sutton wrote:
John Howell wrote:
At 10:53 AM +0000 1/29/06, Owain Sutton wrote:
Some good points, perhaps, although I think you need a bit more
evidence before making such claims about Dufay or Josquin with
such certainty!
In DuFay's lifetime the popularity of one's music can be measured
by the number of manuscripts containing that music, and his is in
lots of them. And Ottaviano Petrucci in Venice was one of the
first printers of polyphonic music, a successful businessman, and
therefore a shrewd judge of his own marketplace, and he chose to
print and publish much of Josquin's sacred music.
The survival in manuscripts can be used as an *indicator* of such
popularity, but it most certainly does not tell us about the reasons
composers wrote the music they did. And survival in, for example,
the Trent Codices tells us nothing at all about how frequently or
widely the music was heard or performed.
Quite correct, but somewhat irrelevant. There was no ASCAP tracking
performances, and no Billboard Manuscript listing the Top 40 or Hot
100. The essence of historical musicology is to try to learn what
CAN be known and extrapolate from that. There's a scholar at one of
the California universities, who is a DuFay expert and can tell you
all about his waffle iron!!!
Petrucci was a shrewd (or very lucky) businessman. But, we do not
know who he sold books to, or even how many he sold. And it's most
likely that he chose pre-existing music which he knew would sell
well, and therefore is irrelevant in the context of how composers
work.
Which I think was my point. He knew or judged that Josquin would
sell, and it did. And who bought the books would be very nice to
know, but just the fact that they sold suggests (IMHO) that they sold
to people who fully intended to perform the music. But I don't
recall that this thread was about "how composers work" (my apologies
if my memory is faulty), just whether they wrote what people enjoyed
hearing.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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