Dissemination, Ownership, and Reading of Music in early modern Europe

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This project rewrites the history of the printed musical source from the perspective of its consumption - the owners and readers of music books. Operating in the intersection of musicology, book history (in particular, the history of reading) and bibliography, it offers new ways of assessing who owned music in early modern Europe and how they read it, bringing music into the discourse around early modern literacies.It does so by bringing together a team of specialists from different fields, led by the PI with a track record of working in both musicology and book history. Together they will address questions around the dissemination and consumption of music by using the information hidden in the more than 1800 surviving copies of music books from the crucial period of 1500-1545, the 'incunabula' period for music printing. A copy-specific methodology new to music books, which has become of increasing importance for general book history, provides an entirely novel approach to questions such as the ownership, dissemination and reading of music sources in this crucial period, then leading to an understanding of musical literacy and its role in early modern Europe.A series of articles and a monograph by the PI will firmly move the research of early music books away from production towards their consumption. Beyond that, supported by a leading digital humanities agency, we will develop a database, serving first as the way to collect information and later as a tool for end-users to search the ownership and use of music books. The new taxonomy of describing and cataloguing annotations and markings in musical sources, developed for the database in consultation with advisors and colleagues from book history, musicology and research libraries, will set a new standard not only for research, but crucially also for the use in libraries and collections much beyond the time period and material covered in this project.