Working with Early Modern (Music) Prints

4 The importance of paratexts and design

4.1 What can we learn from paratexts?

When it comes to early music printing, the design of the prints plays a major role in the scholarly assessment: elaborately crafted magnificent prints were intended for a completely different audience than simple, small songbooks.

Most prints are provided with a title page, the design of which can already tell us something about the context of use of the print. Possibly coats of arms are depicted on it, referring to certain court chapels or the dedicatee. The wording of the title also gives an indication of the context in which the print was made. It is often no longer possible to find out who exactly gave the impetus for the composition and realisation of the print, but in most cases there is a reference to the composer, publisher and of course the printer. In addition, the year of printing is usually indicated. A table of contents can usually be found either on the title page, the page after the title page or in the end of a music book.




Furthermore, on the title pages of prints there is often a reference to a so-called printing privilege. Printing privileges could be granted by secular and ecclesiastical authorities - depending on who ruled the region in which the print was made - they represent a kind of legal protection of the printer against unauthorised reprinting. Printing privileges were even deliberately used as an ‘advertising tool’, as a kind of promise of quality to potential buyers.

Most printing privileges use wordings such as 'Cum gratia et privilegio' (Latin), 'Con privilegio' (Italian), 'Avec privilege [de sa majesté]' (French), sometimes also indicating the authority that granted the privilege.

And: Some printers wanted to make it extra fancy (and trustworthy), so they added the text (in full or in selected passages) from the original certificate of the privilege on a page of the print.



The title page is often followed by a page with a dedication or an ‘ad lectores’. These texts could be written by the composer himself, by the printer, by an editor or even by third parties not directly involved in the printing; there are also dedications in the form of poems. Admittedly, many dedications are rather generic - they refer to the mythological history of music and praise the dedicatee’s enthusiasm for music. Some dedications, however, can be explicit about the historical background of the respective print and are often the only source for this information. So it is definitely worth slogging through the translation of these texts!

In sets of partbooks, the dedication can mostly be found exclusively in the Tenor partbook - so you just have to hope that the set is complete or, at least, that the Tenor partbook is still existant.



The entirety of the texts in a print that are not directly the actual content of the book (in music printing: the musical score) are called paratexts. In addition to the title page and dedication, this also includes the table of contents. The French literary theorist Gérard Genette also counts the visual design of the print among the paratexts: Are splendid initials used at the beginning of the sections, for example? How neat is the type set?



An examination of the paratexts - especially in the extended sense according to Genette - is vital when dealing with a print. In this way, the print becomes not only a source for the music or text it contains, but also a witness to the historical circumstances of its time of origin.