Claudoio Merulo.

Claudio Merulo (1533-1604) might well have been one of those legendary organist-composers, like Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Francesco Cavalli, George Frideric Handel, or Anton Bruckner, whose exceptional skin as a performer we can only imagine. Fortunately, Merulo's contributions to the art of keyboard music were not confined to his duties at the organs of St. Mark's, Venice (1557-84) or at the court of Parma (1586-1604). Rather, he seems to have taken a keen interest in the dissemination of both his music and his idiosyncratic style of playing. Merulo's foray into the business of music publishing (1566-70) may have resulted from his desire to see his keyboard music in print. Far from regarding his methods of composition and improvisation as trade secrets, he championed the attempt of Girolamo Diruta to summarize them in the treatise Il Transilvano.

The canzoni d'intavolatura d'organo that form the major portion of this new edition are crucial to an understanding of what sets Merulo's style apart from that of his contemporaries. Originally appearing in three books (1592, 1606, 1611), they present his virtuoso transcriptions of chansons and of his own unpublished canzonas for instrumental ensemble. Walker Cunningham and Charles McDermott have designed their edition around the double function of these canzoni d'intavolatura: not only as display pieces but also as didactic examples of the art of ornamentation. The additional material presented here makes this volume a welcome acquisition, which represents a significant advance in our access to Merulo's works, replacing only Pierre Pidoux's long-unavailable edition of Book 1 of the canzonas (Canzonen, 1592, fur Orgel und andere Tasteninstrumente [Kassel: Barenreiter, 1954]). Let us hope that it will find its way into the hands of many scholars and performers of early music.

Merulo's ornamentation is very different from that of most keyboard arrangers down to the present day. He generally avoids any kind of steady divisions, instead decorating his model with capricious runs, trills, and elaborate cadential ornaments. Three notes of a theme will appear unadorned then dissolve into a cascade of figuration. The effect is a constantly varied, always animated texture, in which the square, catchy rhythms of an underlying chanson or canzona alternate with unpredictable bursts of dazzling virtuoso display. Such works are intended for advanced players, but a Modern Organist or harpsichordist with a solid technique and some knowledge of early ornamentation will find many of the works in Book 2 quite accessible. Book 1 is more elaborate, demanding real virtuosity at the keyboard; moreover, these pieces often obscure their underlying counterpoint, so that the player can barely distinguish underlying melody from ornament. Fortunately, models have survived for most of Book 1 and for about a third of Book 2. Cunningham and McDermott have had the happy inspiration to include them in their appendix 1. Besides a group of eight ensemble canzonas from the Verona partbooks (I-VEcap ms. 1128), this appendix includes two other models, one ingeniously reconstructed by the editors from a book of parody motets. It is hard to understand why the editors did not follow a similar reasoning for the chanson transcriptions of Book 3, in which Merulo practically buries his models under an avalanche of imaginative figuration that makes Girolamo Frescobaldi's keyboard music look sparse. The four chanson models are essential to making sense of these pieces and should have been included here.

Appendix 2 expands the volume to include all keyboard canzonas attributed to Merulo in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources. These pieces are simpler, probably transmitted to these mainly German sources by students, amateurs, patrons, and collectors. Six of thirteen are completely unornamented and may represent transcriptions of ensemble canzonas. The other seven, all from the Turin tablatures (I-Tn, Foa 3), are decorated in a style that seems more mechanical and limited than that of even the simplest pieces in the Merulo prints. In their preface, Cunningham and McDermott question Merulo's involvement in the final form of these works. They argue that he may have written their models-three are found in Verona 1128, two attributed to him-but that he was certainly not responsible for "the amateur style of ornamentation" they exhibit. They consider them the work of miscellaneous arrangers and scribes and include them here as "points of contrast with Merulo's authentic, artful style" (p. viii). There may be another explanation for this simpler mode of ornamentation, one that does not automatically exclude Merulo as its source. These works may originally have been used for pedagogical purposes, as has been suggested recently for the toccatas in the Turin tablatures by Vincent J. Panetta ("Hans Leo Hassler and the Keyboard Toccata: Antecedents, Sources, Style" [Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1991], 22-24). Merulo himself seems to offer some support for this contention by recommending Diruta's Il Transilvano as a guide for students to the performance of his canzonas; Diruta intabulates a canzona by Antonio Mortaro in a style close to that of the Turin pieces.

At any rate, these canzonas from Turin would have been more useful as examples of an alternative manner of ornamentation if their three extent models from Verona 1128 had been included. Some space for these, and for the chanson models of Book 3, could have been gained by dropping several works in appendix 2 that are less pertinent to the main function of this edition as a study of Merulo's technique of ornamentation. Canzonas 5 and 13 also appear in the Raverii collection of 1608 for instrumental ensemble (Canzoni per sonare con ogni sorte di stromenti ... ) and thus in modern editions. Canzona no. 4 has been published in two versions, in articles by Robert Judd ("Repeat Problems in Keyboard Settings of canzoni alla francese," Early Musk 17 [19891: 198-214) and Richard Charteris ("Another Keyboard Canzona by Giovanni Gabrieti?," Early Music 15 [1987): 480-86). Canzonas 9 to 12 are of slight musical interest and are from sources less reliable than Turin. And it is not dear, if the editors question Merulo's role in some of these works, why they chose a "complete canzonas" format in the first place, which tends to enshrine everything within its covers as an authentic composition.

This opera omnia approach, assembling a collection of manuscript canzonas solely on the basis of attributions to a single composer, also glosses over questions of authorship inherent in the genre itself. For instance, for canzona no. 5 in appendix 2 Cunningham and McDermott list attributions to two composers, Merulo and Hans Leo Hassler. This work is also found in Giovanni Terzi's lute collection of 1599 (Il secondo libro de intavolatura di liuto) where it is attributed to Vincenzo Bell'haver, Andrea Gabrieli's successor at St. Mark's. (Cunningham and McDermott mention the Terzi edition in the text of their preface, omitting the conflicting attribution, but leave it out of their editorial report.) Beyond this, thematic transfer and sharing between this piece and other canzonas cast doubt on how "original" it can really be. Most striking is the appearance of mm. 15 to 18, almost note-for-note, in Giovanni Gabrieli's Canzon terza from the Raverii collection. Cunningham and McDermott attempt neither to weigh conflicting attributions nor to explain such sharing of material.

No review of this edition would be complete without acknowledging the superb work of A-R's computer typesetters in realizing such a complex musical text. The challenges of Merulo's long measures, fined to the brim with notes, are met with minimal distortions of musical sense. Only the margins suffer, making the book hard to hold flat. Otherwise, this is a volume that might please Merulo, himself a pioneer in the publishing of keyboard music. Cunningham and McDermott have given us a worthy addition to the growing list of long-awaited Merulo editions, providing another pathway into the art of this versatile and fascinating musician.