Two-part didactic music in printed Italian collections of the ...

2. THE EARLY DUO
Most of the sources of duos prior to the publishing of Eustachio Romano’s Musica
duorum (1521) are manuscripts. Only a couple of two-part compositions had previously been
published, in the anthology of two- to four-part textless fantasias Canti C: N° cento cinquanta
(Venice: Ottaviano Petrucci, 1504). In these two duos an original lower line is added to the
upper line of the three-voice chanson ‘Le serviteur hault guerdonné’. 1 One of these duos is
attributed to [Martin] Hanart and had already been included in some earlier manuscripts, in
particular Bologna Q16; 2 the other duo is attributed to Jacob Tadinghen and, so far as I know,
is a unicum. 3 It may be that Petrucci included these compositions in his anthology simply as
instrumental compositions without any didactic purpose.
In fact, though, these, and even Eustachio Romano’s collection (1521) do not strictly
belong to the mainstream of Italian didactic music: in Rome, the publication of Eustachio
Romano’s work was followed by no other similar publications, mainly because of the crisis that
the Roman printing and publishing industry faced after the sack in 1527. 4 It was only eighteen
years later, in 1539, that another duo collection was issued in Venice by Antonio Gardane,
Canzoni francese a due voce; it contains several pieces already published in France the previous
year by Jacques Moderne in his anthology Le Parangon des Chansons: Quart livre. 5 The series
of Italian duo collections which shows a certain amount of stylistic consistency and unity of
intention started a year later, in 1540, when the collection by Jhan Gero, Il primo libro de’
madrigali italiani et canzoni francese a due voci was issued.
On the other hand, it is possible to identify in a few manuscripts of the late fifteenth and
early sixteenth centuries consistent series of duos composed or at least copied for didactic
purposes; their structure, though – and perhaps the reason why they were included in those
manuscripts – seems in most cases to be different from that of the typical Italian Renaissance
duo.
1 This song has been attributed to Dufay, although Besseler rejected this attribution in Dufay’s Opera Omnia.
Cf. Sarah Fuller, ‘Additional Notes on the 15th-Century Chansonnier Bologna Q16’, MD, 23 (1969), 81-103 (p.
94).
2 I Bc MS Q16 (c. 1487: cf. Call, MsCensus, I, pp. 70-71).
3 Modern edition by Arnold Schering in Geschichte der Musik in Beispielen (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel,
1931), pp. 67-68.
4 Cf. Fenlon, Music, Print and Culture, pp. 38-39.
5 The first issue of Parangon: Quart livre, published in 1538, is missing; the first known reprint was issued
in 1539.