¿Cuánto cuesta una canción cuando hay que copiarla a mano?

We ask ourselves

• What does it mean to own a song, when owning it means owning the only written copy?
• How long does one person take to copy a whole book of music by hand?
• Who paid musicians when there were no tickets, no records and no streaming?
• Why is almost all the music of this period in four voices, and not three or seven?
• Your voice is an instrument you did not choose and cannot swap. What do you do when it changes shape on you?
• If nobody writes a piece of music down, is it lost?

Don't answer yet. We come back to these at the end.

The fragment

Before any music, we measure ourselves. Everyone sings one comfortable note and holds it. Then down to the lowest note you can hold without it breaking, then up to the highest you can hold without shouting.

What lies between those two ends is your range. The middle part, where the sound comes out easily and you could sing for a while, is your tessitura. They are not the same thing, and the one used to divide a choir is the second.

With that we draw four columns on the board: soprano, alto, tenor and bass. Names of parts, not labels for people. If you have done it honestly, yours is where singing is easy, not where you wish you could reach.

Here one thing has to be said without any drama. For several of you the tessitura is moving this year. In boys the change usually falls between eleven and fifteen, averaging around fourteen and a half, and the difference between a boy's voice and a man's is an octave. In girls it comes earlier and is smaller: roughly a third.

So today's column is not the same as the one in three months. You stand where it feels easy today, and we measure again next term. The one thing worth avoiding during those months is forcing: pushing on notes that no longer come out.

Now the duet. We sing No tienen vado mis males, by Juan del Encina, in two parts: the two low columns take the bottom line, the two high columns take the top. We learn it by ear, phrase by phrase, from the recording.

Foto: Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

That is the page we sing it from, exactly as it was sold. It was printed in Venice in 1556, and the word across the top of both pages is DVO: duet, two voices, one per page. Each singer reads their own, and a different duet starts below.

And then the whole piece with nobody talking over it: "Cucú, cucú" by Encina, four voices and four people.

What changed

Start with what came before. The Cancionero de Palacio collects the music sung at the court of the Catholic Monarchs. Its index announces 548 pieces; 469 survive, and Juan del Encina signs 63 of them.

Of that songbook there is one manuscript. One. It sits in the Real Biblioteca in Madrid under the shelfmark MS II-1335. For that music to sound anywhere else, somebody had to copy the whole thing by hand, stave by stave. One book, one court, one place.

In 1498 a printer called Ottaviano Petrucci asked the Doge of Venice for the exclusive right to print music for twenty years. Nobody asks for a twenty-year monopoly on something that makes no money. That single fact explains most of what follows.

His first book appears in 1501 and is called Harmonice Musices Odhecaton: ninety-six songs, with a dedication dated 15 May. You will often read that it was the first printed music, and it was not: Ulrich Han had already printed a Missale Romanum with movable type in 1476. Petrucci's first was something else, and harder: polyphony, several different voices sounding at once.

Hard because his method put every sheet through the press three times. Once for the staves, once for the notes, once for the words. Three passes, three chances for the sheet to come out crooked. It was slow and expensive, and it still multiplied: where a copyist made one copy, the press made a run.

Foto: Bibliothèque nationale de France, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

Look at the page and count. Petrucci printed two voices on the left-hand page and two on the right, so four people could read from the same open book. Four is also the normal number of voices in this music.

Did one cause the other? I don't know, and anyone who tells you they are sure is overreaching. What can be said is that the shape of the object and the shape of the music fit together suspiciously well.

Those four voices had names, and this is the part that matters to us. From top to bottom: Cantus or Superius, Contratenor Altus, Tenor and Contratenor Bassus. In time the Altus stayed Altus and the Bassus stayed Bassus.

The Tenor was not the one singing high and showing off. It was the voice that held the borrowed melody, the tune that already existed before the rest was written. The other three were built around it.

Those four names are the four on your board: soprano from the top line, alto from the Altus, tenor from the Tenor, bass from the Bassus. The words you use to split a choir today are the names of lines in a sixteenth-century book.

And it changed who gets paid. Josquin des Prez earned 200 ducats in the ducal chapel of Ferrara, the highest salary a member of that chapel had ever had. He was also the first Western composer to keep his fame after death, which is no coincidence: his name was printed on books that went on circulating.

Hard facts. Petrucci, Venice: privilege requested 1498, first book 1501, three passes through the press. Before that: Ulrich Han, Missale Romanum, 1476. The manuscript songbook: 548 pieces in the index, 469 surviving, a single copy. The four voices: Superius, Altus, Tenor, Bassus.

The same device elsewhere

The device is splitting several independent voices by pitch, each with its own line. The Renaissance did not invent it and printing was never required for it. These three are worth hearing back to back:

• Birds of a Feather, Billie Eilish — several voices sound at once in the chorus. Count how many you hear, then decide how many people you think are in the room. Those are not the same number, and finding out why is the point.
• O magnum mysterium, Tomás Luis de Victoria — four voices, four people, no equipment. Each one enters separately and you can follow them one at a time.
• Georgian polyphonic singing — three independent voices passed on by ear, from parents to children. It never needed printing and it is still sung.

None is better than the others. All three split voices by pitch. One solves it with a machine, one with a book and one with memory, and all three work.

And here at home?

In this century Spain is not behind: it is ahead. Tomás Luis de Victoria (c. 1548-1611) published his books in Venice in 1572 and 1576, in Rome in 1581, 1583 and 1585, and in Madrid in 1600 and 1605, the last of these on the royal press and in editions described as sumptuous.

Look at whom they are dedicated to, because that is the answer to who paid: a cardinal, a duke, a pope, Philip II, Philip III, Princess Margaret. A printed book needed a name on the front page willing to put up the money.

Victoria also handed books out. In 1573 he gave Ávila cathedral six bound volumes of music, and did it again in 1577, 1584, 1587 and 1593. A composer giving his own output to the institutions that could perform it: that is distribution, even if nobody called it that.

Francisco Guerrero, chapel master at Seville from 1574 to 1599, travelled to Venice in 1581 and stayed until 1582 preparing his own editions. His music ended up being sung in the cathedrals of Puebla and Cuzco. Printed music crossed the Atlantic ahead of almost anything Spanish that was not an order or a tax.

The most awkward case is the Cancionero de Upsala, the book our duet comes from. They are villancicos in Spanish, printed in Venice in 1556 by Girolamo Scotto: seventy pieces, of which 54 are villancicos for two, three, four and five voices.

The title page says who it is for: "para que puedan aprovechar los que a cantar comenzaren" — so that beginners at singing may profit from it. A book of Spanish songs, manufactured in Italy, sold to people who were still learning. That is an industry, with its customer named on the cover.

One single copy survives anywhere in the world. The musicologist Rafael Mitjana found it around 1907 in the university library of Uppsala, in Sweden, which is where the name comes from. Spanish music, printed abroad and preserved abroad: the price of having no press of your own.

In Zaragoza the question of who pays is answered by looking at two buildings. La Seo and the Pilar each had their own musical chapel and had been at odds for centuries. The Pilar had an organ in 1463, built by Enrique de Colonia, and in 1537 Martín de Córdoba built it a new one to compete with the cathedral's. Paying for music was a way of winning the argument.

Melchor Robledo (c. 1510-1586) was chapel master at the Pilar and, from 2 July 1569 until his death, at La Seo. His work survives scattered across the cathedrals of Ávila, Huesca, Palencia, Tarazona, Toledo and Valladolid and the collegiate churches of Calatayud and Alquézar. Scattered and copied: it travelled the way everything travelled before Petrucci, by hand and from cathedral to cathedral.

Pedro Ruimonte went the other way: he left. He was born in Zaragoza on 16 May 1565 and from 1601 was music master to the chapel of the archdukes Albert and Isabella Clara Eugenia in Brussels. There he did get printed: Missae Sex in Antwerp in 1604, Cantiones sex vocum in 1607 and the Parnaso español de madrigales y villancicos in 1614, from the Phalesius press. He returned to Zaragoza that same year and died here in 1627.

That is the fact that sums up the century in Aragón. To get printed, you had to leave. The one who stayed travelled as a hand copy; the one who went to Flanders came back with books.

And it ends well. Sebastián Aguilera de Heredia, baptised in Zaragoza on 15 August 1561, organist of Huesca cathedral from 1585 and of La Seo from 29 September 1603, published his Canticum Beatissimae Virginis in Zaragoza, on Pedro Cabarte's press, in 1618. A hundred and seventeen years after Petrucci, music was being printed here. Late, but printed.

Classroom activities

• While "Cucú, cucú" plays: follow only the person singing your part and raise a hand every time that voice stops. Afterwards we compare: the bottom one hardly ever rests.

• While the vocal cords video plays: watch how far they open and close on the superius and on the bassus. Same gesture, different speeds. That is tessitura seen from the inside.

• While the duet plays: half the class sings the low line and half the high one; halfway through, you swap. The second half does not come out the same, and that is the lesson.

• While Chain of Fools plays: point every time the backing voices answer the lead. Different people with different tessituras, exactly like the four columns on the board.

• Play: we build Birds of a Feather with the band, splitting the chorus voices by real tessitura instead of everyone singing in unison. The chart and the tab are attached to its own article.

• Copy: take the 1556 page and copy it out by hand with a fine pen, taking your time. Time yourself on one system. Multiply by the pages of a whole book. There is your answer to the title of this unit, and no fact gave it to you.

Key vocabulary

• Range — extensión: todas las notas que tu voz puede producir, aunque cuesten
• Tessitura — tesitura: la parte cómoda de tu extensión, la que decide tu cuerda
• Voice change — muda de la voz: el cambio de la pubertad, una octava en ellos y una tercera en ellas
• Polyphony — polifonía: varias voces independientes a la vez, cada una con su línea
• Tenor — la voz que sostenía la melodía prestada, y de ahí el nombre de la cuerda

Resources

The songs in this unit are in the library, each with its own article, full-band chart and tab: Birds of a Feather, Chain of Fools.

The piece of the unit — "Cucú, cucú", Juan del Encina, from the Cancionero de Palacio. Four voices and four people, sung by Cantoría.

The duet from the fragment — "No tienen vado mis males", Juan del Encina, exactly as printed in the Cancionero de Upsala.

The four voices from the inside — the vocal cords of a superius, an altus, a tenor and a bassus singing the Kyrie of Victoria's Mass "O magnum mysterium".

Four voices, four people — "O magnum mysterium", Tomás Luis de Victoria, by Voices of Music.

The name that sold books — "El grillo", Josquin des Prez, the composer Petrucci gave most space to, reissued again and again.

Polyphony without printing — polyphonies of Georgia by Ensemble Basiani, at the Fundación Juan March. Three voices passed on by ear.

Why your voice changes — an explanation of the voice change, from the UNAM.

• The whole book, digitised — the Bibliothèque nationale de France copy of the Odhecaton can be turned page by page on Gallica.