Journal of the Alamire Foundation

This article outlines the principal edicts that governed the granting of printing privileges in the sixteenth-century Habsburg Low Countries, and the practical operation of the regulatory regime. It re-examines early music printing in Antwerp and Leuven in the light of the commercial constraints that the edicts and privileges imposed. In particular, the privileges for Loys and Buys reveal a more complex relationship between Susato and the other early Antwerp printers, whilst the economic conditions brought about by the 1550 Edict of Blood provide an explanation for Susato’s changes of course in the nature of his output. For Phalèse, it is argued that in the first years, his press was more productive than has previously been thought. The existence of several unrecorded editions is identified, which point towards a revised chronology. Separate consideration is given to Lassus’s relations with Low Countries printers, with brief commentary on Susato, and Waelrant and Laet. A detailed examination of the first two of Phalèse’s Lassus collections (1560 and 1564) concludes that Lassus held no comparable privileges to his later German and French grants, and, further, that these editions provide evidence against the assumed working relationship between composer and printer. Links are argued between Lassus and the court of Margaret of Parma, providing a likely route by which his music reached the Low Countries. An appendix separately comments on dual privileges, and presents extracts from key edicts.

Johannes Okeghem’s song Je n’ay dueil is transmitted in two distinct versions. Seven sources, including two manuscripts from central France in the mid to late 1480s, contain a version for four voices occupying four different ranges, with an unusually wide compass of twenty-two notes. An eighth source, a Florentine manuscript copied after Okeghem’s death and generally believed to be intended for instrumental use, transmits a version in which the two lower voices are written an octave higher, reducing the compass to seventeen notes. Rejecting the obvious explanation for the source situation—that the Italian version represents an instrumentalist’s adaptation of an extraordinary song—earlier scholars have proposed that Okeghem’s original was for three voices; that the next step was the four-voice version transmitted by the Italian manuscript; and that the version found in the French manuscripts represents Okeghem’s bold revision of that reading. A close reexamination of the musical evidence, however, shows that the story told by the sources is almost certainly correct: Okeghem conceived Je n’ay dueil for four voices, as it is transmitted by no less than seven sources, including two from his immediate orbit, while the unique version of the Florentine manuscript is most parsimoniously interpreted as exactly what it seems to be: an adaptation made by a younger musician whose style departs somewhat from Okeghem’s.