Looking at Old Books, Part I

A word of warning: this post will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about looking at Old Books. Old Books and their mysteries are on my mind today, as I spent the first half of the day at the Strahov Monastery, and the second half in the reading room of the National Library at the former Jesuit College, the Clementinum.

This post comes in two parts. The first part is unapologetically rambling; it's my stream-of-consciousness musings on the exciting world of Prague music-printing and that sort of thing. I must note that I do (also unapologetically) fetishize text, or rather, the books that texts come in. The second part, TBA, will be a walk-through of what you might want to do when YOU look at your (first?) Old Book.

At the Monastery today, I looked at a bunch of Graduals --- these are large manuscript books containing all the music (just texted music, no plain old texts) for Masses throughout the year. The music is plainsong (also known as "Gregorian" chant), and for my purposes the main interest in these manuscripts lies in their potential to provide context for the multi-voice (polyphonic) music I'm interested in. So, today I looked at Graduals commissioned for use at Strahov between about 1580 and 1615 (the topic of my dissertation is Catholic music in Prague 1580-1612).

While Graduals are interesting, I want to write a bit about the kinds of books I was looking at at the Clementinum: sacred printed music that appeared in Prague around this time. Printed music fascinates me because it can tell an interesting story of its creation, marketing, and use. I'm particarly interested in marketing and what that might tell us about the composer's and printer's assumptions about the intended audience. This intended audience may be localized (i.e. just the Emperor and noblemen at his court, or it may be very broad (i.e. all of Christendom! Or at any rate that part of Christendom that has at its service choirs capable of singing 8-part polyphony...).

A bit about Prague's place (or lack thereof) in music historiography of this period...

Around 1600, the music-printing centres that had been around for a while were Paris, Strasbourg, Nuremberg, Antwerp, and, above all, Venice. Prague isn't usually considered to have been all that active. It's been grossly underestimated, I think, because the composers who chose to work there or have their music printed there didn't have the benefit of large personality cults after they died. Philippe de Monte (of which more later), for instance, is not a name that rolls off anyone's tongue, yet for a time his fame, and that of his colleague Jacobus Gallus, came close to that of contemporaries like Palestrina in Rome and Lassus in Munich.

I think that as inheritors of twentieth-century history we regard Prague as a relatively isolated place in "eastern" Europe. Never mind that it's actually farther west than Vienna... To get an idea of its place in 16th-century Europe you have to really zealously try and dig out a map of 16th-century central Europe. This I do not recommend. Most maps will look like ugly jig-saw puzzles, and will insist on labeling every little principality and duchy in the Holy Roman Empire. Skip it. Just picture Prague as a centre, and imagine a big circle around it. That'll give you an idea of its sphere of influence...in the top part of the circle, you'd have Saxony and Brandenburg, and in the bottom half, Vienna, the Tyrol, and what's now Slovenia (It was then known as Carniola, with the capital, Ljubljana also know as Laibach).

Prague was at the time capital of the largest existing contiguous Empire (in Europe, certainly, and possibly in the world, although I'm talking out of my hat here). So, it was at the heart of an agglomeration of states with a lot of people, more specifically a lot of Christians, and more specific yet, a lot of Christians who went to churches that wanted polyphonic music. Prague, in the middle of the Kingdom of Bohemia, was smack-dab in the middle of all this. A composer could do a lot worse than print music there: he had markets within relatively easy reach at Leipzig, Dresden, Breslau, Vienna, Strasbourg, Speyer, the list goes on.

Music historiography of this period is Italo-philic (not that I blame anyone for being Italo-philic), and occasionally it seems that if a print wasn't printed in Italy, or purchased in Italy, or sung in Italy, it wasn't really significant. This is where intended audience comes in. Why should Joe Bloe Composer, born and raised north of the Alps, living and working in Prague, want to print in Italy? And would he be able to even if he wanted?

Anyway, having without any subtlety made the point that this stuff's not studied, let's get back to actual Old Books printed and copied in Prague. Why is it so interesting to look at the original versions, rather than rely on modern transcriptions, or microfilms?

Well, my main interest is usage. I feel that focusing on usage humanizes these objects. Unlike paintings, in which human creativity is (almost) always palpable, notated music has a way of appearing lifeless. If it is not sung, it is nothing but text on a page. Paintings also give you an immediate window, however murky, into the culture that produced them. It is hard to fully grasp this when looking at a modern transcription of music, or even just hearing a recording.

When you hold an old book, though, leafing through its pages, feeling the bumps on the binding, seeing the places where it's stained and where someone has doodled in the margins, seeing the markings of the clasp that used to hold it together but is broken after 500 years of use...

...when you sneeze from 500 years worth of dust wafting up and gently tickling your sinuses every time you turn the page...then, and only then do you begin to sense what that music in that book meant to the people who sang it...