THE authors who have loyally stuck with this volume over a period longer than any of us care to remember will recall that the original core of these essays was intended to form one of a series of books on the history of Western music. Owing in part to the dilatory behavior of some contributors, in part to the editor's procrastination, the project got behind schedule, and the original publisher, losing confidence in it and indeed tiring of the whole series, agreed with me that it might be as well to drop it.

I did so with regret, not just for letting down the colleagues who wrote for the book but because the essays contain a lot of good stuff, very little affected by the passage of a few years. Here enters the deus ex machina of this tale : Bruce Phillips, who got me started on the original project, not only agreed that it was too good to let go but managed to interest another publisher in taking it up. The old publishers gave me free rein ; new commissions were sent out to replace the incorrigible noshows ; the long-suffering contributors were coaxed into revising and updating their essays. A new volume—what is before the reader here—was the result.

The publishing house of Boydell and Brewer is the heaven-sent means through which this was accomplished, and I know that the authors of these essays join me in expressing our gratitude to them. I hope that they and the readers of this book will agree that the project was indeed worth saving. Special thanks are owed to Jeffrey Dean for his expert copy-editing and his refined choice of elements of typographical design.

The original plan for the volume, which has survived essentially intact, was to combine a group of essays on topics relevant to the musical culture of Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with a series of chapters outlining the chronological development of this culture. The dates chosen, 1520–1640, were not and are not arbitrary : 1520 marks the establishment of the ars perfecta represented (for Glareanus) by the completed work of Josquin ; 1640 is an appropriate if approximate terminus for a late-Renaissance/early-Baroque period including the career of Claudio Monteverdi.