Music Printing in Renaissance Venice: The Scotto Press (1539-1572) & Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice.

Jane A. Bernstein. Music Printing in Renaissance Venice: The Scotto Press (1539-1572).

New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. xix + 1,175 pp. index. illus. $175.

ISBN: 0-19-510231-2.

Jane A. Bernstein. Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice.

New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xiv + 233 pp. index, append. illus. bibl. $35. ISBN: 0-19-514108-3.

Jane Bernstein's Music Printing in Renaissance Venice: The Scotto Press (1539-1572) is a masterly work that furnishes at last a comprehensive study of one the most significant music printers in Renaissance Venice, Girolamo Scotro. Divided into two main parts, the book includes in part one an Historical Study of 214 pages in nine chapters detailing the workings and wider context of Scotto's press, followed by a comprehensive catalogue in part two of all of the music prints produced by the Scotto house between 1539 and 1572: polyphonic vocal music, lute tablarures, missals, and a music treatise. The 409 bibliographical entries for these prints follow the general form used for traditional literary bibliography (albeit with modifications, see 217), each entry being given generous commentary plus a full transcription of the print's title page, dedication, and incipits. In addition, the scholar of Venetian printing and bibliography is treated to five appendices in part three: a table of Venetian Music Editions (153 8-72), a table of Dedicatees of Italian Music Editions (1536-72), a list of Binder's and Collector's Volumes Containing Scotto Editions, a Short-Title Catalogue (organized by holding institution) of Non-Music Editions printed by Scotto (totaling 404, with emphasis on Latin editions and translations from Greek, especially Aristotle), and a list of Lost Editions Printed by Scotto (43 in all). The volume is also copiously indexed by editions' short titles, libraries, and first lines of individual works (vocal and instrumental), in addition to its meticulous general index and bibliography.

In part one Bernstein shows that by the 1540s Scotto was building on his ancestry in an old printing dynasty to expand the family business, taking advantage of the heightened possibilities for capitalistic enterprise offered in Venice and the fast production pace allowed by the new process of single-impression music printing. At the same time, Scotto carefully accommodated his business image to images of Venetian patriotism and civic ideals. The latter he deployed iconically in title pages, printer's marks, and decorated initials using such motifs as the dolphin, which symbolized Venetian swiftness at sea, and the anchor, symbolizing Venice's maritime stability; and he deployed similar motifs textually in mottoes and dedications. Both repertories of symbolic motifs are illustrated in the book through a wealth of plates.

Bernstein is at her finest when utilizing a hands-on approach, as in chapter three, "Inside the Scotto Print Shop." Reading archival finds against known evidence about other presses, Bernstein treats us to a walking tour of Scotto's print shop, showing its organization into two labor forces operating simultaneously two presses, each supervised by a head compositor and including an apprentice or journeyman, two compositors, and two pressmen, whose work was reviewed by a proofreader (the highest-ranking person in the shop). We are taken step-by-step through the process of preparing a manuscript for print, typesetting the music and text using a composing stick, sliding it into a galley, maldng the pages into a forme on a marble imposing stone, and placing it into a wooden or metal chase. This is the next best thing to giving the reader a guided tour of Scotto's shop. And Bernstein is uniquely able to show how, and often why, text underlay was retained, how the sequencing of gatherings into formes was dealt with, how paper, paginations, signatures, and other details were decided, and, most interestingly, how and when decisions were made to emend mistakes, or (as often in Scotto's case) not.

At every turn, Bernstein's book shows a delightful zeal for empirical observation, careful argumentation, painstaking standards of scholarship, and a detective's eye in revisiting existing evidence. One of the rewards here is her reevaluation of Ester Pastorello's 1924 unpublished catalogue of sixteenth-century Venetian printers (now in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana), which scholars have been refining for a long time. The sheer numbers of prints issued by the Scotto house turns out to be about four and a half times greater than Pastorello had thought. Through a combination of sleuthing and accounting for nonextant editions, Bernstein is able to project a total number of prints produced by sixteenth-century Venetian presses at about double that of previous estimates.

Perhaps the most innovative work in Bernstein's historical study comes in chapter four, "The Financing of Venetian Books." Here the bookmen studied in earlier chapters, who had begun to form themselves into dynasties and networks by the early sixteenth century, are followed into the full lather of capitalist enterprise. Backers, patrons, partners, campagnie, underwriters, commissioners, editors, composers, and ad hoc publishers are among the protagonists in the tale, forming and re-forming themselves into seemingly endless arrangements of finance and production. The entrepreneur emerges as the hero of Bernstein's study--that individual who exploits well the innumerable new possibilities for financing and making books.

Yet when it comes to her main protagonists, Scotto and secondarily the other major music printer of the time, Antonio Gardano, Bernstein has in mind "exploitation" in the more innocent sense. At various points throughout her study, she suggests that this new marketplace was little marred by cutthroat competition even when it most bustled with capitalist initiative. Her polemic aims to counter previous assumptions that Scotto and Gardano were fierce rivals: at the beginning of his career, Bernstein reminds us, Gardano apprenticed with Scotto, collaborating on at least one notable printing project in 1541, and the two cultivated different markets abroad as their businesses developed. The polemic of cooperation over competition may be a bit overplayed, given that few other Scotto/Gardano collaborations can be documented, but it is a well-grounded corrective to the shoddy speculations produced around the mid-twentieth century and since often repeated. Moreover, Bernstein offers up a wealth of evidence with infect ious curiosity and vivacity.

Music Printing in Renaissance Venice won a richly deserved Kinkeldey award from the American Musicological Society for the best book published in musicology in the year 1998, and it should get a standing ovation from her readers for its sheer quality and quantity of research. Since its publication Bernstein has brought out a paperback entitled Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice, a slightly broader and less technical reworking of the Historical Introduction from the original tome with added material on other music presses, especially that of Gardano, followed by two appendices, one a Table of Venetian Music Editions (1538-72), the other a Table of Dedicatees of Italian Music Editions (1536-72). To those familiar with a field most famously associated with Roger Chartier, the term "print culture" might seem something of a misnomer. For Print Culture and Music is not so much about the culture of print -- either in the broad sense that Chartier has characterized as "the profound transformations th at the discovery and ... extended use of the new technique ... brought to all domains of life, public and private, spiritual and material" and how those "modified practices of devotion, of entertainment... [and] of knowledge, and ... redefined men's and women's relations with the sacred, with power, and with their community," or in the narrower sense of "the set of new acts arising out of the production" of texts and how those acts changed "festive, ritual, cultic, civic, and pedagogic uses [that] were by definition collective and postulated decipherment in common" (The Culture of Print: Power and Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989], 1). Rather it is fundamentally about the various practices of music printing itself and the entanglements of printers and editors with composers, patrons, booksellers, and so on. But no matter, the paperback is a wonderful tool for classes and individual scholars' libraries in cases where the weighty catalogue in Music Printing in Re naissance Venice would be superfluous. Both books should be greeted with cheers and hoorays. Bernstein has carried off a gigantic feat of scholarship with precision, intelligence, and spirit.