Benjamin Ory

Few figures were as consequential for the study of early music in the twentieth century as Armen Carapetyan. In 1944 he founded the American Institute of Musicology, an organization that has since published a wealth of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century music. But the full impact of AIM has not yet been acknowledged—above all, how Carapetyan changed the course of musicological research by offering scholars significant financial incentives to produce editions of repertoire he deemed worthy of publication. This article is based on a corpus of more than nine hundred letters to and from Carapetyan, along with AIM-related correspondence between other early-music scholars. Carapetyan offered prospective editors unprecedented royalties from his personal funds that incentivized them to participate in AIM, using cheap European academic labor to produce editions that were sold in the United States. He directly impacted postwar historiographical priorities by centering music from mid- to late fifteenth-century Italy, thereby shaping scholarly discourse by encouraging European scholars to continue their research on early music in a postwar environment that had started prioritizing other repertoires. This research shows how economic factors can impinge on the history and reception of scholarship—in this case, how one man’s financial resources and aesthetic proclivities shaped and continue to shape the stories we tell about Renaissance music.

With its elegant presentation and unprecedentedly rich critical-commentary volumes, the New Josquin Edition of 1987–2017 set the standard for early-music edition making. But notwithstanding the heights for which the publication reached, its genesis was anything but straightforward. A tumultuous origin story beginning in the 1960s centers on the hugely influential Edward Lowinsky, then a towering figure in the field of musicology. Lowinsky set plans for a new edition in motion in the course of organizing the 1971 International Josquin Festival-Conference, an event that in Paula Higgins’s words marked the composer’s “apotheosis.” Newly uncovered archival documents reveal how Lowinsky endeavored to segue his opulent conference into a new, international edition of Josquin’s music under his control. Up to a point he was successful: the conference led directly to the establishment of the first Josquin Committee (active 1973–78), which aimed to provide a foundation for the edition. But he soon became embroiled in dramatic conflicts that strained the institutional relationship between the Dutch Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis and the American Musicological Society. A reexamination of ideological and interpersonal dynamics at play during these formative decades can bring to the fore the successes, limitations, and enduring legacy of arguably the most important edition of early music still in use today, while illuminating Lowinsky’s lasting influence on the discipline of musicology.

Although the motet Nigra sum in the Libro primo de la fortuna (Rome, c. 1526) has long been attributed to Adrian Willaert, he is not its composer. No sixteenth-century source ascribes the piece to him. Rather, the attribution stems from a modern practice that this study terms the tacit attribution fallacy: the construal of apparent groupings of pieces in tables of contents as evidence of attributions. Two concordances for Nigra sum are found in manuscripts from the Veneto: the choirbook Verona 760, and the tenor partbook Bologna R142. Together, these indicate that the motet was originally composed for three voices, with two si placet voices added later. Implausible attributions for pieces such as Nigra sum illustrate the need for more careful attention to sixteenth-century composers’ work-lists. Avoiding the tacit attribution fallacy reveals how central sources such as the Libro primo evince a robust musical transmission.

This dissertation takes as its point of departure a problematic historiographical tradition. Even while recognizing that the death of the famous composer Josquin des Prez (1450–1521) marked a stylistic turning point, scholars working in Germany in the early twentieth century characterized the decades that followed, ca. 1520–50, as an aesthetic retrenchment, overstating Josquin’s influence and unwittingly lumping into the same generation sixteenth-century musicians who in fact worked at different times and in different stylistic idioms.

Relying on research in approximately thirty archives, this study reveals how a problematic narrative arose owing to nationalism, religious politics, interpersonal politics, the state of the field at the time, and the inaccessibility of primary source materials. The dissertation revisits composer biographies and the datings of central musical sources. And it uses comparative stylistic analyses of sacred polyphony to pinpoint how, when, and where a new style emerged ca. 1520. Placing writings that launched the modern historiographical tradition in dialogue with musical repertories central to the early history of musicology, the dissertation aims to give appropriate weight to a decisive shift in the history of music while also revealing the enduring influence of early German scholarship on the discipline as a whole.