¹ The Peri family tomb, once a magnificently adorned sepolcro, lies in the vicinity of the modern memorial plaque. See T. Carter and R. Goldthwaite, Orpheus in the Marketplace: Jacopo Peri and the Economy of Late Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA, 2013), pp. 325–7. All translations are mine.

² G. Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago, 1993), p. 43.

³ Ibid .

⁴ On Stefani’s three guitar-song anthologies see C. Gavito, ‘Quasi industre giardiniero: Giovanni Stefani’s Amorosi Anthologies and their Concordant Sources’, Journal of Musicology, 33 (2016), pp. 522–68.

⁵ First reported in T. Carter, ‘Le Varie Musiche’ and Other Songs (Madison, WI, 1985), pp. xxiv–xxv.

⁶ The text is printed without musical notation in R. Romano, Terza raccolta di bellissime canzoni alla romanesca (Venice, 1622), p. 63, where it is subtitled a ‘Gentilissima Canzonetta di Musica’ (Most Courteous Musical Canzonetta). On Romano’s books, see C. Gavito, ‘Quasi industre giardiniero’; S. Leopold, ‘Remigio Romano’s Collection of Lyrics for Music’, trans. K. Williams, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 110 (1983–84), pp. 43–61; and R. Miller, ‘New Information on the Chronology of Venetian Monody: The “Raccolte” of Remigio Romano’, Music & Letters, 77 (1996), pp. 22–33.

⁷ ‘la Guitarra es un instrumento el mas favorable para nuestros tiempos que jamas sebio por que si el dia de oy se busca el ahorro de la bolsa y de la pena, la Guitarra es un theatro verdadero deste ahorro’. L. Briçeño, Metodo mui facilissimo para aprender a tañer la guitarra a lo español (Paris, 1626), pp. i–ii.

⁸ The comments of the Roman essayist Vincenzo Giustiniani suffice in bearing witness to the Spanish-guitar phenomenon in Italy: ‘Tanto più che nell’istesso tempo s’introdusse la Chitarra alla spagnola per tutta Italia, massime in Napoli … pare che abbiano congiurato di sbandire affatto il Liuto; et è quasi riuscito a punto, come il modo di vestire alla spagnola in Italia prevale a tutte le altre foggie.’ (At that time [c. 1600] the Spanish guitar was introduced throughout Italy, especially in Naples … [which] appears to have exiled the lute completely, and has almost succeeded to the point that, like the fashion of dressing alla spagnola, it dominates over all other styles in Italy.) V. Giustiniani, ‘Discorso sopra la musica de’ suoi tempo [1628]’, in A. Solerti (ed.), Le origini del melodramma (Turin, 1903), p. 126.

⁹ For a comprehensive list of these materials see G. Boye, Music for the Lute, Guitar, and Vihuela (1470–1799), http://applications.library.appstate.edu/music/lute/home.html, accessed 12 May 2020.

¹⁰ J. Tyler and P. Sparks, The Guitar and its Music from the Renaissance to the Classical Era (Oxford and New York, 2002), pp. 5–11. The five-course guitar was known in Italy as the chitarra alla spagnola since at least 1571, the year in which the earliest Italian reference to this instrument appears in the inventory of a Roman luthier. See P. Barbieri, ‘Lutherie and Luthiers in Late-Renaissance and Baroque Rome: Archival Investigations’, Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society, 45 (2019), pp. 5–120, at pp. 47–50. This sobriquet distinguished the instrument from its four-course predecessors. Throughout this article all references to the ‘guitar’ or ‘Spanish guitar’ refer to this five-course instrument. For more on the distinctive qualities of the five-course guitar see Tyler and Sparks, The Guitar and its Music, pp. 5–11 and 30–45.

¹¹ F. A. Valdivia Sevilla, La guitarra rasgueada en España durante el siglo XVII (Málaga, 2015), p. 140.

¹² ‘Nuova inventione d’intavolatura per sonare li balletti sopra la chitarra spagniuola, senza numeri, e note; per mezzo della quale da se stesso ogn’uno senza maestro potrà imparare.’ G. Montesardo, Nuova inventione d’intavolatura per sonare li balletti sopra la chitarra spagniuola (Florence, 1606), title page.

¹³ See, for example, Pietro Millioni and Lodovico Monte’s Vero e facil modo d’imparare a sonare, et accordare da se medesimo la chitarra spagnola, first published in 1637 (Rome and Macerata: Heredi di Salvioni and Grisei) and reprinted regularly until 1737 (Venice: Lovisa).

¹⁴ Thanks in large part to the pioneering research of James Tyler, which culminated in his monograph The Early Guitar, now in its second, expanded and revised edition (The Guitar and its Music, with Paul Sparks).

¹⁵ In addition to Tyler’s The Guitar and its Music, also worth mentioning is L. Eisenhardt, Italian Guitar Music of the Seventeenth Century: Battuto and Pizzicato (Rochester, NY, 2015), the first full-length monograph published on the subject of seventeenth-century Italian guitar music. Tyler addresses the Spanish guitar in Italy in only one chapter; however, it remains today a major source for research on the five-course guitar. Eisenhardt dedicates most of Italian Guitar Music to the repertory for solo guitar (mainly in printed form), leaving the subject of guitar song (an extensive repertory for guitar) to a handful of articles, book chapters and unpublished dissertations. Many of these sources are cited in this article, but for a comprehensive list see the bibliographies of Tyler and Sparks, The Guitar and its Music and Eisenhardt, Italian Guitar Music.

¹⁶ J. Tresch and E. Dolan, ‘Toward a New Organology: Instruments of Music and Science’, Osiris, 28 (2013), pp. 278–98, at p. 283.

¹⁷ E. Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2005).

¹⁸ My reference to ‘ways of doing/thinking’ draws on recent scholarship in the fields of early modern science and guild artisanship, where the Aristotelian division of technê (craft, skill) and epistêmê (knowledge) is often employed to distinguish between early modern forms of artisanal practice and theoretical knowledge. See, for example, P. Smith, A. Myers etal. (eds.), Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge (Ann Arbor, MI, 2014), and P. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2004). Ways of doing/thinking as they relate to instrumental practice have great potential for ethno-/musicological inquiry, as most recently demonstrated in R. Moseley, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2016) and J. Henriques, Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (London, 2011). I partly align my investigation with the spirit of these two studies, with their concern for instrumental logic, particularly the sum of epistemological and bodily information that accumulates between performers and the instruments they play.

¹⁹ John Griffiths sums up the situation as follows, worth quoting at length for how fittingly it applies to the state of guitar research in musicology: ‘The lutenist has been marginalised from the polyphonist for a number of reasons. Despite the sizeable surviving lute repertory, the instrument’s role was nowhere as central to the development of musical thinking as vocal polyphony, and its status was not as high as that of music conceived for ceremonial use by secular and ecclesiastical patrons … While these realities are undeniable, they only partially explain the peripheral position of the lute in modern scholarly consciousness. The principal contributing reason is much simpler. It is the alien nature of the lute’s tablature notation, marvellously practical and comprehensible to players but seemingly impenetrable to others, that creates a psychological and mechanical barrier and has inhibited many of even the finest scholars of renaissance music, despite the availability of many accessible modern editions.’ J. Griffiths, ‘The Lute and the Polyphonist’, Studi musicali, 31 (2002), pp. 89–102, at p. 90.

²⁰ Eisenhardt blames the guitar’s specialised tablature notation for the general lack of interest in performing solo music composed for the seventeenth-century Spanish guitar. See Eisenhardt, Italian Guitar Music, p. 4.

²¹ Tyler was also a professional guitarist and teacher, and Eisenhardt remains an active performer at the professional level. Alexander Dean and Daniel Zuluaga, whose dissertations and published research deal primarily with the Spanish guitar, are performers or come from performing backgrounds. Other scholar-performers with published research on the Spanish guitar include Victor Coelho, John Griffiths, Monica Hall, Craig H. Russell, Richard Strizich and Nina Treadwell.

²² On this topic see J. Griffiths, ‘Strategies for the Recovery of Guitar Music’, in G. Veneziano (ed.), Rime e suoni alla spagnola (Florence, 2003), pp. 59–81; A. Dean, ‘Ecco l’alma mia bella: Alfabeto and Oral Practices in Seventeenth-Century Italian Song’, Recercare, 22 (2011), pp. 81–109; and C. Gavito, ‘Thinking in Chords, Improvising Melodies: A New Manuscript Attribution and the Oral Recovery of 17th-Century Guitar Songs’, Early Music, 33 (2018), pp. 439–64.

²³ S. Lorenzetti, Musica e identità nobiliare nell’Italia del Rinascimento: Educazione, mentalità, immaginario (Florence, 2003); K. van Orden, ‘Children’s Voices: Singing and Literacy in Sixteenth-Century France’, Early Music History, 25 (2006), pp. 209–56; van Orden, Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe (New York and Oxford, 2015); R. Wistreich, ‘Music Books and Sociability’, Saggiatore musicale, 18 (2011), pp. 230–44; M. Bane, ‘Honnêtes gens, Amateur Musicianship, and the “Easy Air” in France: The Case of Francesco Corbetta’s Royal Guitars’, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, 20 (2014), https://sscm-jscm.org/jscm-issues/volume-20-no-1/honnetes-gens-amateur-musicianship-and-the-easy-air-in-france-the-case-of-francesco-corbettas-royal-guitars/; C. Page, The Guitar in Stuart England (Cambridge, 2017); A. Eubanks Winkler, Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools (Cambridge, 2020).

²⁴ L. Monte, Vago fior di virtù dove si contiene il vero modo per sonare la chitarriglia spagnuola, con sonate facili per principianti (Venice, [n.d.]).

²⁵ M. A. B. Bacherini and G. Bartoletti etal., ‘Catalogo’, in G. Lazzi (ed.), Rime e suoni per corde spagnole: Fonti per la chitarra barocca a Firenze (Florence, 2002), p. 55. The provenance of the manuscript is not definitively known, but the significant number of Sicilian poems and prose spellings in Sicilian dialect may reflect origins in the south of Italy. I thank Paola Gibbin, director of the Music Division at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, for her assistance in accessing the manuscript and for sharing her thoughts on its importance to the collection.

²⁶ A second smaller manuscript of poetry (labelled ‘Manuscript 2’ in Table 1) is inserted inside the larger one, dividing the latter into two parts (‘Manuscript 1a’ and ‘Manuscript 1b’).

²⁷ Folio numbers refer to the manuscript’s through-pagination, marked in pencil in the lower left-hand corner of each folio (recto).

²⁸ D. Zuluaga, ‘The Five-Course Guitar and the Villanella Spagnola in Italy, ca. 1590 to 1630’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2014), pp. 55–6; Gavito, ‘Thinking in Chords’, p. 442.

²⁹ D. Fabris, ‘Le notti a Firenze i giorni a Napoli: Gli esordi della chitarra spagnola nell’Italia del Seicento’, in G. Veneziano (ed.), Rime e suoni alla spagnola (Florence, 2003), pp. 15–33, at pp. 18–19.

³⁰ See ibid .; C. Acutis, Cancioneros musicali spagnoli in Italia, 1585–1635 (Pisa, 1971); J. Baron, ‘Spanish Secular Song in Non-Spanish Sources, 1599–1640’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 30 (1977), pp. 20–42; Zuluaga, ‘The Five-Course Guitar’; S. Tomasello, ‘Aria per cantar l’ottave ceciliane nei manoscritti riccardiani’, in Veneziano (ed.), Rime e suoni alla spagnola, pp. 109–37; and Gavito, ‘Thinking in Chords’.

³¹ The other six known sources of numbered violin tablature from the seventeenth century are inventoried in M. Esses, Dance and Instrumental Diferencias in Spain during the 17th and 18th Centuries, i (Hillsdale, NY, 2003), pp. 331–4. Florence 116 and 618 are not included in Esses’s inventory. Also mentioned by Esses is an eighteenth-century compendium of instrumental treatises, P. Minguet y Yrol, Reglas, y advertencias generales para tañer todos los instrumentos (Madrid, [c. 1754]), which also includes alfabeto in the section on guitar. In addition, a manuscript in the Archivo Histórico Municipal in Torre de Juan Abad dated to c. 1715 (without shelfmark), provides another example of this violin tablature, also with guitar tablature (but no alfabeto). See A. Lombardía, F. J. Moya and F. A. Valdivia, ‘Un manuscrito para guitarra y violín de prencipios del siglo XVIII en Torre de Juan Abad’, Revista de musicología, 42 (2019), pp. 475–503.

³² Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magl. Classe VII, Codice 618; Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica, Collocazione AA.360.

³³ A. Silbiger, Italian Manuscript Sources of 17th-Century Keyboard Music (Ann Arbor, MI, 1980), pp. 94–5.

³⁴ Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Mus. M/2816.

³⁵ A. Lombardía, ‘Melodías para versos silenciosos: Bailes, danzas y canciones para violín en el Manuscrito de Salamanca (ca. 1659)’, Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review, 3 (2018), https://doi.org/10.5070/D83139679, pp. 1–39, at pp. 8–9.

³⁶ On the Italian and French systems of violin tablature see J. Wolf, Handbuch der Notationskunde, ii (Leipzig, 1919), pp. 232–40.

³⁷ As suggested by Lombardía in ‘Melodías para versos silenciosos’, p. 11. The two eighteenth-century sources mentioned earlier (n. 31) also support this suggestion.

³⁸ From Zannetti’s title page of this treatise, in which all of the pieces appear in tablature: ‘Dalla quale Intavolatura qualsivoglia persona da de stesso potrà imparare a suonare di Musica con facilità per tutte le sudette parti, come amplamente si può vedere nelli Esempij della presente Opera.’ (Tablature from which any person by himself will be able to learn to play [the] music of all of the aforesaid parts with ease, as one can amply see in the examples in the present work.)

³⁹ ‘Io insieme raccolti all’autorità, & grandezza del nome suo gli consacro, & dono, mosso da certa cognitione che io tengo del non mezano compiacimento, che prende di questa nobil’ arte, che le menti nostre accen[de] nell’amore del sommo bene, & quelle dalle cure delle humane cose talvolta afflitte, et lasse consola, et ristora.’ (Together I consecrate and give unconditionally this assortment [of musical pieces] to the authority and greatness of your name, moved by a certain knowledge that I have about the not moderate enjoyment you take in this noble art, which illuminates our minds in the love of the highest good, and restores and consoles them in the sometimes afflicted and wearisome concerns of human affairs). G. Zannetti, Il scolaro di Gasparo Zannetti per imparare a suonare di violino, etaltri stromenti (Milan, 1645), p. i.

⁴⁰ The best-known of these guitar-playing dilettantes include Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte (1549–1627) and the Cardinals Antonio (1607–71) and Francesco Barberini (1597–1679). In England and France the guitar was cultivated by none other than Charles II and Louis XIV (both pupils of Francesco Corbetta). On the cultivation of instrumental music by noble amateurs, and in the particular context of music-making as advised in Il Cortegiano, see R. Cypess, ‘Biagio Marini and the Meanings of Violin Music in the Early Seicento’ (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2008), pp. 25–36, and S. Lorenzetti, ‘Per animare agli esercizi nobili: Esperienza musicale e identità nobiliare nei collegi di educazione’, Quaderni storici, 95 (1997), pp. 435–60.

⁴¹ One source worth noting is the ‘Bezón’ manuscript (Seville, private library of Rodrigo de Zayas, A.IV.8), dated to c. 1600, where there are recorded guitar lessons between a maestro (Matheo Bezón) and a pupil named ‘Anton’. As with the other guitar manuscripts with pedagogical material, however, the instruction is limited to learning alfabeto. See R. de Zayas, ‘Il canzoniere italo-castigliano di Mateo Bezón’, in D. A. D’Alessandro and A. Ziino (eds.), La musica a Napoli durante il Seicento: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi. Napoli, 11–14 aprile 1985 (Rome, 1987), pp. 93–103, and D. Zuluaga, ‘Spanish Song, Chitarra alla spagnola, and the a.bi.c: Matheo Bezón and his 1599 Alfabeto Songbook’, Resonance (Fall 2013): http://resonancejournal.org/archive/spr-2013/spanish-song-chitarra-alla-spagnola-and-the-a-bi-ci-matheo-bezon-and-his-1599-alfabeto-songbook/.

⁴² Montesardo, Nuova inventione, title page.

⁴³ See, for example, the remarks by Briçeño (n. 7), Giustiniani (n. 8) and Covarrubias (n. 103) cited in this article. For similar observations made in seventeenth-century England and France, see Page, The Guitar in Stuart England, pp. 4–6.

⁴⁴ Tyler and Sparks, The Guitar and its Music, p. 39.

⁴⁵ The earliest songbook printed with alfabeto is G. Kapsperger, Libro primo di villanelle (Rome, 1610).

⁴⁶ Valdivia Sevilla, La guitarra rasgueada, p. 140.

⁴⁷ Montesardo does not specify the pitch of his tuning system, although based on his tuning instructions and alfabeto chart we can assume the standard arrangement from low to high courses (or top to bottom if reading from the tablature): a–d′–g–b–e′. Guitar stringings were not standardized in the early seventeenth century. The transcription reflects a conventional ‘Italian’ stringing with bourdons on both lower courses, as proposed by Montesardo. As shown in the transcription, this guitar tuning and stringing produces major and minor chords mostly in inversions. The chord ‘R’ is presumably misprinted, as the resultant harmony would produce a dissonant F♯ minor chord with an added B. The corrected B major sonority appears standardised in later charts. On five-course guitar tunings and stringings see Tyler and Sparks, The Guitar and its Music, pp. 165–86, and Eisenhardt, Italian Guitar Music, pp. 124–49.

⁴⁸ The ‘passacaglia’ theory, in which the opening chords of the chart progress through I–IV–V sequences in G major and A minor, was first suggested in A. Dean, ‘The Five-Course Guitar and Seventeenth-Century Harmony: Alfabeto and Italian Song’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 2009), p. 112.

⁴⁹ The lone example is B. Marini, Per ogni sorte di stromento musicale … Op. 22 (Venice, 1655). The title page notes that the basso continuo part is printed ‘Con l’Alfabeto alle più proprie, per la Chitarra alla Spagnola a beneplacito’ (With alfabeto for the [pieces] more fitting for Spanish guitar as one wishes).

⁵⁰ That alfabeto was understood as the cultural production of Italy is noted by Mersenne in Book II of the Harmonie universelle (Part II), where he is careful to distinguish between alfabeto ‘à l’Italienne’ (chords indicated by letters) and cifras ‘à l’Espagnole’ (chords indicated by numbers). M. Mersenne, Seconde partie de Harmonie universelle. Livre second: Des instruments à chordes (Paris, 1637), fol. 95^r.

⁵¹ In Montesardo’s guitar tutor, whose instructional plan was replicated in guitar tutors published throughout the century, memorising alfabeto was the first ‘rule’ in the order of steps for learning to play the guitar: ‘La prima, e principal Regola, che deve tenere quello, il quale vuol saper toccare bene questo istrumento gliè, che mandi in memoria ben’ il sottoscritto Alfabetto.’ (The first and principal rule that whoever wants to know how to play this instrument well should commit to memory is the Alfabetto noted below.) Below this is an alfabeto chart printed with the caption: ‘Alfabetto È FONDAMENTALE del sonare la chitarra alla spagnuola’ (Alfabetto is FUNDAMENTAL for playing the Spanish guitar). Montesardo, Nuova inventione, p. iv (Montesardo’s emphasis).

⁵² Reading from top to bottom, the tablature reflects the tuning g–d′–a′–e″. This violin tablature is diatonic, with numbers 0–4 representing diatonic hand positions on the fingerboard (0 = open string, 1 = first position, etc.). Thus, as shown in the first ‘bar’ in Figure 2, the open position on the G string, the third position on the D string, and the second position on the E string all produce Gs in various octaves. For more on this tablature system see Wolf, Handbuch, ii, pp. 232–4, and D. Plamenac, ‘An Unknown Violin Tablature of the Early 17th Century’, Papers of the American Musicological Society (1941), pp. 144–57, at pp. 148–50.

⁵³ J. C. Amat, Guitarra española de cinco ordenes (Lerida, 1626 [1596]). The 1596 first edition is no longer extant. For more on the tables of Amat’s treatise see M. Hall, ‘The “Guitarra española” of Joan Carlos Amat’, Early Music, 7 (1978), pp. 362–73, at pp. 364–7.

⁵⁴ Dean, ‘The Five-Course Guitar’, pp. 280–2 and 293–8; Gavito, ‘Thinking in Chords’, pp. 450–1.

⁵⁵ T. Christensen, ‘The Spanish Baroque Guitar and Seventeenth-Century Triadic Theory’, Journal of Music Theory, 36 (1992), pp. 1–42. C. Russell, ‘Radical Innovations, Social Revolution, and the Baroque Guitar’, in V. Coelho (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 153–81, at pp. 153–5.

⁵⁶ Two articles by John Griffiths are illuminating on this topic: ‘Improvisation and Composition in the Vihuela Songs of Luis Milán and Alonso Mudarra’, in N. Schwindt (ed.), Gesäng zur Laute (Kassel, 2003), pp. 111–32, esp. 123–9, and ‘Juan Bermudo, Self Instruction and the Amateur Instrumentalist’, in R. Murray, Jr., S. Weiss and C. Cyrus (eds.), Music Education in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Bloomington, IN, 2010), pp. 126–37, esp. pp. 132–3.

⁵⁷ Written in the manuscript folio reproduced in Figure 3 (fol. 66^r) is a single passacaglia pattern transposed to different keys, each corresponding to its own line of musical notation: ‘a’ (G major), ‘b’ (C major), ‘c’ (D major), ‘d’ (A minor) and ‘e’ (D minor). The sources also use lower-case and upper-case alfabeto interchangeably. This format is common in many other printed and manuscript guitar tutors.

⁵⁸ In the guitar transcriptions (Examples 2 and 3), stems pointing upward correspond to upward strums, and stems pointing downward correspond to downward strums.

⁵⁹ Summarised in R. Hudson, The Folia, the Sarabande, the Passacaglia, and the Chaconne: The Historical Evolution of Four Forms that Originated in Music for the Five-Course Spanish Guitar, iii (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1982), pp. xiv–xxiv.

⁶⁰ B. Sanseverino, Il primo libro d’intavolatura per la Chitarra alla Spagnuola (Milan, 1622), p. 13.

⁶¹ For similar approaches to the reconstruction of other seventeenth-century violin tablature melodies, see Lombardía, ‘Melodías para versos silenciosos’ and Plamenac, ‘An Unknown Violin Tablature’.

⁶² Most evident in the stile moderno violin writing of Marini, Castello and Farina. While double and triple stops comprise part of the stile moderno idiom, the focus (as immediately apparent in the scores) is primarily on virtuoso passage work and melodic invention. The violin parts printed in the scores of Monteverdi’s Orfeo and 1610 Vespers also come to mind in this regard. For more on the stile moderno idiom and its connection to ‘monodic’ vocal practice, see R. Cypess, ‘Esprimere la voce humana: Connections between Vocal and Instrumental Music by Italian Composers of the Early Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Musicology, 27 (2010), pp. 181–223.

⁶³ Piotr Wilk has surveyed the ‘chordal’ Italian solo violin repertory of the seventeenth century (mainly printed music with double, triple and quadruple stops), but concludes: ‘The most effective obstacle keeping Italian violinists from using multiple stops seems to have been their desire to match the art of the best opera singers.’ P. Wilk, ‘Chordal Playing in the 17th-Century Violin Repertoire’, Musica Iagellonica, 3 (2004), pp. 155–70, at p. 165.

⁶⁴ These authors include Zarlino, Zenobi, G. B. Doni and Geminiani. For their commentaries see ibid ., pp. 165–7.

⁶⁵ ‘Come ornamento sono quelli, che scherzando e contrapontegiando, rendono più aggradevole, e sonora l’armonia: cioè Leuto, Arpa, Lirone, Cetera, Spinetto, Chitarrina, Violino, Pandora, etaltri simili’ (Ornamental are those [instruments] that playfully and contrapuntally render the harmony more agreeable and sonorous; that is the Lute, Harp, Lirone, Cetera, Spinetto, Guitar, Violin, Pandora, and other similar kinds). Agazzari distinguishes these instruments from the ‘Organo, Gravicembalo, &c.’, which ‘guide’ (guidono) and ‘support’ (sostengono) larger bodies of voices. A. Agazzari, Del sonare sopra ’l basso con tutti li stromenti (Siena, 1607), p. 3.

⁶⁶ N. Matteis, Le false consonanse della musica (London, c. 1680), published in an English-language edition (The False Consonances of Music) in 1682.

⁶⁷ Most bluntly stated by Nigel Fortune in 1953: ‘The Spanish guitar was becoming more and more popular in Italy, and this led to a new practice favoured by music-publishers, especially the commercially-minded [Alessandro] Vincenti: the practice of providing every song with letters for the guitar, even when, as in more serious songs, they were wildly inappropriate.’ N. Fortune, ‘Italian Secular Song from 1600 to 1635: The Origins and Development of Accompanied Monody’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1953), pp. 136–7.

⁶⁸ Thus Roark Miller’s claim that the sudden appearance of alfabeto in songbook publications starting around 1618 ‘seems due more to the insistence of printers than the example of the composers’. R. Miller, ‘The Composers of San Marco and Santo Stefano and the Development of Venetian Monody (to 1630)’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1993), p. 188.

⁶⁹ L. Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. D. Bryant (Cambridge, 1987, repr. 1996), pp. 73–81.

⁷⁰ T. Carter, ‘Printing the “New Music”’, in K. van Orden (ed.), Music and the Cultures of Print (New York, 2000), pp. 3–38; Leopold, ‘Remigio Romano’s Collection’, p. 57; M. Markham, ‘Caccini’s Two Bodies: Problems of Text and Space in Early-Baroque Monody’, Gli spazi della musica, 2 (2013), pp. 33–54; and N. Pirrotta and N. Fortune, ‘Temperaments and Tendencies in the Florentine Camerata’, Musical Quarterly, 40 (1954), pp. 166–89, at p. 182. Leopold (p. 57) boldly summarises the sentiment: ‘It is true that the sophisticated monodies of this period appeared in print, and could therefore be read, but in practice they were little used.’

⁷¹ T. Carter, Music in Late Renaissance and Early Baroque Italy (London, 1991), pp. 241, 248–9.

⁷² Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, p. 74.

⁷³ Carter, ‘Printing the “New Music”’.

⁷⁴ Fortune, ‘Italian Secular Song’, pp. 136–7; Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 20, 80; Carter, Music in Late Renaissance and Early Baroque Italy, p. 241; and Carter, ‘Printing the “New Music”’, p. 6.

⁷⁵ Washington, DC, Library of Congress, shelfmark M1490.C2 (RISM A/I/2, C6; RISM B/VI, p. 196). Printed in Florence by the ‘Herede di Giorgio Marescotti’ in June 1602 (according to the colophon), following the death of Giorgio Marescotti in April of that year.

⁷⁶ Excerpts from the preface and those from Il Rapimento di Cefalo, which appear midway through Le nuove musiche, are not considered here. All of these pieces lack alfabeto annotations in the Library of Congress copy (hereafter LC copy).

⁷⁷ The authoritative critical edition of Le nuove musiche, now in its third revised version and second edition, is Le Nuove Musiche, ed. H. W. Hitchcock (Middleton, WI, 2009), originally published by A-R Editions in 1970. While it is clear that Hitchcock was aware of the multiple exemplars of the 1602 edition (see p. xi) his commentary does not indicate which were consulted for the edition. None of the settings with alfabeto in the LC exemplar are described as such in Hitchcock’s editions.

⁷⁸ John Walter Hill has argued that the ‘Florentine’ monody and recitative styles are indebted to the ‘Roman-Neapolitan’ improvised singing traditions of the sixteenth century, for which the guitar served as the primary accompaniment instrument. See J. W. Hill, Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto, i (Oxford, 1997), pp. 66–120. The presence of alfabeto in the Library of Congress copy of Le nuove musiche might add further support to Hill’s argument.

⁷⁹ See Table 3 below. The texts of ‘Amarilli mia bella’ and ‘Fillide mia’ are found with alfabeto chords that concord harmonically with Caccini’s settings (with some variants) in the ‘Canconiero de Matheo Bezón’, dated 4 September 1599 (Seville, Private library of Rodrigo de Zayas, A.IV.8). See Zayas, ‘Il canzoniere italo-castigliano’, and Zuluaga, ‘Spanish Song’.

⁸⁰ G. Caccini, Le nuove musiche (Florence, 1602), p. ix. Caccini was not alone in this preference, a point to be revisited at the conclusion of this article.

⁸¹ T. Carter, ‘Music-Printing in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, Cristofano Marescotti and Zanobi Pignoni’, Early Music History, 9 (1990), pp. 27–72, at pp. 63–4 and 66.

⁸² The fact that this copy exists in the first place is rather remarkable given the fate of most printed music in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. On the dismal survival rates of printed music from this era see van Orden, Materialities, pp. 88–107.

⁸³ T. Carter, ‘On the Composition and Performance of Caccini’s Le nuove musiche (1602)’, Early Music, 12 (1984), pp. 208–17, at p. 211.

⁸⁴ The left-hand illustrations are taken from the alfabeto diagrams in G. Sanz, Instruccion de musica sobre la guitarra española (Zaragoza, 1697).

⁸⁵ In Ex. 6, modern chord symbol equivalents are given for reference; minor chords are indicated with a lowercase ‘m’ (e.g. ‘Cm’).

⁸⁶ b–e″.

⁸⁷ Dean, ‘The Five-Course Guitar’, p. 108.

⁸⁸ See the discussion in Markham, ‘Caccini’s Two Bodies’. Scholars have noted the lack of stylistic distinction between Caccini’s ‘madrigals’ and ‘arias’ in Le nuove musiche. See Le Nuove Musiche, ed. Hitchcock, 2nd edn, p. ix, and T. Carter, ‘Caccini Family; Giulio Romolo Caccini [Giulio Romano]’, Oxford Music Online, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040146 (accessed 12 May 2020).

⁸⁹ The concordances were compiled from Hitchcock, the works list from Carter, ‘Caccini family’, and the new sources presented in this article (see below, nn. 91, 92). For the other miscellaneous variants of ‘Amarilli, mia bella’ not in these lists, see T. Carter, ‘Caccini’s “Amarilli, mia bella”: Some Questions (and a Few Answers)’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 113 (1988), pp. 250–73.

⁹⁰ London, British Library, Add. MS 36877; Seville, Private library of Rodrigo de Zayas, MS A.IV.8. ‘Cancionero de Matheo Bezón’; Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, MS 1506/1 (olim MS 371); Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Vmc. 59. Only London Add. 36877 appears in the concordant lists of Le Nuove Musiche, ed. Hitchcock, and Carter, ‘Caccini family’.

⁹¹ Seconda raccolta di bellissime canzonette musicali, et moderne, ed. R. Romano (Vicenza, 1620) and Nuova raccolta di bellissime canzonette musicali, et moderne, ed. Romano (Venice, 1625). These do not appear in the concordant lists of Le Nuove Musiche, ed. Hitchcock and Carter, ‘Caccini Family’. As mentioned, Romano’s books are poetry collections of ‘musical’ canzonettas without staff notation, indicating that the songs were well known to readers. Some of them appear printed with alfabeto.

⁹² Scelta di laud[e/i], ed. A. Guiducci (Florence, [three volumes published in series many times in 1614–70]) and Laudi e canzoni spirituali (Rome, 1654). Column 3 does not factor in reprinted appearances of songs from Guiducci’s series. Although the Column 3 concordances do not appear in the concordant lists of Hitchcock, Le Nuove Musiche, ed. Hitchcock and Carter, ‘Caccini Family’, they are mentioned in G. Rostirolla, ‘La musica negli istituti religiosi della Compagnia di Gesù nel XVI e XVII secolo: Le tradizioni laudistiche fiorentina e romana’, in F. Iappelli and U. Parente (eds.), Alle origini dell’Università dell’Aquila (Rome, 2000), pp. 261–357, at pp. 324–6.

⁹³ On this repertory see Rostirolla, ‘La musica negli istituti religiosi’.

⁹⁴ All five are found in both Guiducci’s Scielta di laude and Laudi e canzoni spirituali.

⁹⁵ C. Gavito, ‘Oral Transmission and the Production of Guitar Tablature Books in Seventeenth-Century Italy’, Recercare, 27 (2015), pp. 185–208.

⁹⁶ Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Vmc. 59; Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magl. Classe XIX. 143; Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Landau-Finaly Mus. 252; and Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Classe VII. 1222bis.

⁹⁷ Stylistic considerations, pace Fortune, ‘Italian Secular Song’, notwithstanding.

⁹⁸ van Orden, Materialities, p. 33.

⁹⁹ Ibid .

¹⁰⁰ Thus Briçeño: ‘Pero la Guitarra Señora mia, sea bien tañida, o mal tañida, bien encordada o mal encordada, se haçe estimar oyr y escuchar, atirando con la brevedad de su çiença y façilidad, los mas ocupados injenios, y los haçe dexar otros exerçiçios mas subidos por ten ella entre sus manos.’ (But the Guitar, my Lady, whether well or badly played, well or poorly strung, makes itself heard and listened to, tempting the minds of the busiest with the brevity and ease of learning it, and making them leave higher exercises in order to hold it in their hands.) Briçeño, Metodo mui facilissimo, p. ii.

¹⁰¹ Perhaps most strongly voiced in Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611): ‘Este instrumento [vihuela] ha sido hasta nuestros tiempos muy estimado, y ha avido excelentissimos musicos: pero despues que se inventaron las guitarras, son muy pocos los que se dan al estudio de la viguela. Ha sido una gran perdida, porque en ella se ponia todo genero de musica puntada, y aora la guitarra no es mas que un cencerro, tan facil de tañer, especialmente en lo rasgado, que no ay moço de cavallos que no sea musico de guitarra.’ (This instrument [the vihuela], until our times, has been highly regarded, and has attracted excellent musicians; but since guitars were invented, there are very few who dedicate themselves to the study of the vihuela. This has been a great loss, because on it was played all kinds of plucked music; and now the guitar is no more than a cowbell, so easy to play, especially in the strummed manner, that there isn’t a stable boy who is not a guitar player.) Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española [second part, R–Z] (Madrid, 1611), fol. 74^r.

¹⁰² ‘Il quale digratia non si torca, perchè l’Autore, come benissimo sa fare, non habbia messo l’A.B.C. della Chitarra Spagnolissima sopra ciascheduna di quest’ Arie che si faria pur anch’egli lasciato portare a seconda dal uso moderno, s’ei non si fosse accorto che poco serve simil Pedanteria a chi non sa se non scartazzare, per mille spropositi che ne le cadenze occorrono mediante il geroglifico sudetto.’ B. Castaldi, Primo mazzetto di fiori (Venice, 1623), p. 63.

¹⁰³ Echoing Caccini, Castaldi preferred the chitarrone to accompany his songs, going to such lengths as writing out with meticulous care the accompaniment parts to his songs from the Capricci a 2 stromenti cioè tiorba e tiorbino (Modena, 1622) in chitarrone fretboard tablature.