2 - Publishing Music Theory in Early Cinquecento Venice and Bologna: Friends and Foes

Summary

“Regarding the Diffinitorio by Tinctoris that you say you have, I don't care, because the copy I have is sufficient. And what you say about the retratatione of this Diffinitorio is news to me.” Thus wrote the Bolognese music theorist Giovanni Spataro to the Venetian musician Marc'Antonio Cavazzoni on August 1, 1517, in answer to a lost letter. This is the earliest known reference to the printing of Johannes Tinctoris's Terminorum musicae diffinitorium, which appeared without name of printer or place of publication, but on typographical evidence is believed to come from the press of Gerardus de Lisa in Treviso circa 1495. Considering the date of Cavazzoni's letter and Spataro's reaction, the incunabulum was not well known at the time, although thirteen copies survive today. It may seem surprising to us that Spataro was not interested in obtaining the printed edition of Tinctoris's dictionary, even if it was a revised edition, but I suspect that he did not find the Diffinitorium very interesting, since it did not discuss problems of music theory. In fact, it annoyed him, as we see from another of his letters, in which he took umbrage at Tinctoris's definition of color. “Tinctoris was crazy, and thought he knew a lot more than he did, as his works demonstrate.”

Printing music theory meant that books could be widely disseminated, and, as I will show elsewhere, led to the first book reviews, amply attested in the Spataro Correspondence.