Andrew Stiller wrote:
Many wealthy people over the centuries have padded their "libraries"
with books they've never read and had no intention of reading, so my
first thought is that wealthy people of Petrucci's time bought them
just so they could appear more erudite than they really were.
Most such books were not published *for that purpose* and those that
were/are have a look about them that clearly declares that purpose. Even
music MSS are like that: the Squarcialupi Codex, commissioned as a sort
of musical coffee-table book, is full of gorgeous illuminations that
take space away from the music and would merely get in the way of a
performance. Petrucci's pubns, though beautifully rendered, contain
music and virtually nothing but, and are not visually dazzling. It seems
to me that for any music on paper, the assumption must be that it was
intended for performance unless there is specific evidence to the
contrary. Any other assumption is simply not parsimonious.
Surely the fact that Petrucci part-books are completely different to the
layout of known contemporary performance sources is in itself evidence
that these may not have been used as such?
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