Pedagogy and Authority in Sixteenth-Century German Music Theory Textbooks

This article addresses one of the most significant impacts which the printing press has had on music theory: the emergence of the genre of the textbook. It examines that genre from three different angles. First, it investigates the nature of sixteenth-century textbooks by examining the characteristics of a representative group, a family of texts related to Wollick and Schanppecher’s Opus aureum musice, which was first published in Cologne in 1501. Thereafter, the article explores some of the unique features of these early textbooks, such as the pedagogically motivated revisions which the printing process enabled, and the curious attitudes towards authorship and authority which these texts display. Finally, it considers how textbooks from the later sixteenth century, such as Faber’s Compendiolum musicae (1548), continued and departed from the patterns established by that earlier family of treatises, such as the greater specialization of texts and the increased manipulation of typographical space.