Editing Music in Early Modern Germany

Editing Music in Early Modern Germany argues that editors played a critical role in the transmission and reception of Italian music outside Italy. Like their counterparts in the world of classical learning, Renaissance music editors translated texts and reworked settings from Venetian publications, adapting them to the needs of northern audiences. Their role is most evident in the emergence of the anthology as the primary vehicle for the distribution of madrigals outside Italy. As a publication type that depended upon the judicious selection and presentation of material, the anthology showcased editorial work. Anthologies offer a valuable case study for examining the impact of editorial decision-making on the cultivation of particular styles, genres, authors and audiences. The book suggests that music editors defined the appropriation of Italian music through the same processes of adaptation, transformation and domestication evident in the broader reception of Italy north of the Alps. Through these studies, Susan Lewis Hammond's work reassesses the importance of northern Europe in the history of the madrigal and its printing. This book will be the first comprehensive study of editors as a distinct group within the network of printers, publishers, musicians and composers that brought the madrigal to northern audiences. The field of Renaissance music printing has a long and venerable scholarly tradition among musicologists and music bibliographers. This study will contribute to recent efforts to infuse these studies with new approaches to print culture that address histories of reading and listening, patronage, marketing, transmission, reception, and their cultural and political consequences.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Introduction; The anthology and the birth of the professional music editor; Friedrich Lindner: working for a local clientele; Editors and the Germanization of Italian song; From pastoral to prayer: editing Italian music for Lutheran Germany; German consumers of early modern music books; Conclusion; Appendices; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author :
Dr Susan Lewis Hammond is Assistant Professor in the School of Music, University of Victoria, Canada.

Review :
Shortlisted for the AMS Lewis Lockwood Award 2008. ’ Lewis Hammond’s book contains a wealth of information and is a fine contribution to our understanding of the growing importance of the editor and his role in shaping musical tastes in German speaking lands through the early years of the seventeenth century.’ Notes ’This book is a substantial contribution to the fields of print studies and music history. There are relatively few studies that deal with music anthologists themselves, and this is the first that treats them as a specific group within the network of composers, publishers, printers, musicians and listeners.’ Renaissance Quarterly ’This excellent book combines the philologist’s method, offering up page after page of archival discovery and textual insight, with a cultural historian’s grasp of the various reception discourses of the new scholarship on early modern Europe. Hammond’s historical point of view itself is strikingly fresh for the discipline of musicology... Hammond has contributed here a sterling piece of scholarship, one that promises to become a standard book for future scholarship on music editing.’ German History ’... a fascinating book.’ Fontes Artis Musicae ’... Hammond investigates a wide range of topics... [she] considers issues that are applicable to anthologies in general, such as the importance of paratext, specifically title pages and dedications, for the editor to express his goals. ... This book will be an asset for graduate students and scholars who wish to know more about German culture in the years before the Thirty Years' War, as well as those interested in the history of the editoral process.’ German Studies Review