Despite the popularity of the lute in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, there was very little printed solo music for it in England, at least when compared with that printed on the continent.1 Despite the fact that Petrucci had published the first printed lute music in 1507, English lutenists did not begin publishing their music in print tablature until William Barley’s A New Booke of Tabliture in 1596, after which time the only significant publication of English lute music from before the middle of the seventeenth century was Robert Dowland’s Varietie of Lute Lessons from 1610.2
A number of excellent studies have recently shed light on the place of the lute in early modern England, including Julia Craig-McFeely’s English Lute Manuscripts and Scribes 1530–1630, Matthew Spring’s The Lute in Britain: A History of the Instrument and Its Music, and Elizabeth Kenny’s “Revealing Their Hand: Lute Tablatures in Early Seventeenth-Century England.”3 Additionally, Kirsten Gibson has undertaken a reconsideration of the lute songs of John Dowland and their place in the musical and print culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.4 The main difficulty in assessing the solo lute music of this period is its ephemeral nature. Much of it was surely transmitted aurally, and what manuscripts remain must represent only a small fraction of what was once in circulation. Yet the relationship between aurality and manuscript transmission for this repertoire has thus far been underexamined.5
There were many practical considerations that required lutenists to transmit their solo music aurally and through manuscript, such as avoiding the expense and complexity of print or because of the greater availability of popular pieces in aural and manuscript circulation. However, what if, in addition to these considerations, aural and manuscript transmission were so profoundly interwoven with the aesthetic and cognitive processes involved in the creation and transmission of lute music as to make printed editions simply unnecessary? In other words, what if both aural and manuscript transmission were so much an effective part of the working methods of both the recreational and occupational lutenist in England that lutenists were reluctant to let them go in favor of printed music because they had become a vital element of the way they worked? My contention in this chapter is that aurality and manuscript transmission were not simply practical requirements, but were also part of an organizing system that relied on these methods to achieve maximum throughput of musical material in the community of English lutenists.
Julia Craig-McFeely has determined that the extant lute music of England is distributed among eighty-five manuscript and five print sources.6 She places these into three categories: (1) fragmentary sources of ballad settings and Italian lute music from between 1530 and 1580; (2) those containing the elaborate fantasias and dances of such figures as John Dowland, Daniel Batcheler, and John Johnson from the “Golden Age” of lute music between 1580 and 1615; and (3) the predominantly French music in the sources after 1615. Within these sources, Craig-McFeely identifies four additional categories: (1) fragments that were at one time associated with a larger work; (2) teaching fragments, which were loose exemplars likely used for copying by students; (3) professional books used by waits or court musicians; and (4) pedagogical books prepared by a student learning the lute under the guidance of a tutor. In total, there are 3,330 pieces, of which 2,100 are different and 1,230 are concordances, with the vast majority appearing during the period 1580–1615.7 Of these, only five are printed books. This is despite the fact that, as John Milsom has demonstrated, music printing in England was under way by the 1520s, with the patent for music printing being granted by Elizabeth I to William Byrd and Thomas Tallis in 1575.8
Most of these manuscripts contain several scribal hands and are what are more commonly referred to as “miscellanies,” in which scribes at least once removed from the author copied music from various composers into a blank book, usually for the purposes of self-study or archival preservation.9 This is in stark contrast to the manuscript collections of other repertoires, such as for viol, which, as Harold Love describes, were often published in scribal editions written by the composers or hired scribes and sold directly to players.10 Love calls this “scribal publication,” a procedure in which the composer disseminated the music in manuscript form from which additional copies were made by music lovers and performers.11 Although the books themselves were sometimes passed around as exemplars, often only individual pages were circulated.12 Moreover, lute manuscripts usually did not originate with the composers and were often meant for private consumption.13 The varied contents of the lute manuscripts, containing works from many different composers, demonstrate that they are also commonplace books in which the scribe collected the music that either appealed to them or that their teacher thought best suited to them.14
English lute manuscripts share some features in common with literature disseminated according to the parameters of scribal publication. Much like the works of Donne and Rochester, lute music often exists in versions that differ from one another considerably. John Dowland’s Lachrimae is a good example of this, as it exists in many different versions for solo lute in addition to consort and vocal arrangements by both Dowland and his admirers. Like much of the English lute repertoire after 1580, Lachrimae is a tripartite dance consisting of three separate strophes, each of which is followed by virtuosic divisions on the previous section. While the main strophic statements tend to remain similar if not identical throughout the various sources, the divisions often show extreme variation, indicating that the compiler of the book chose to include his own divisions in place of those provided by the teacher or found in the exemplar. Lachrimae, in all its many incarnations, therefore tends to consist of the three relatively simple strophic statements composed by Dowland followed by virtuosic divisions provided by the student, teacher, or other lutenist.
Lachrimae is one of the many pieces found in the collection of manuscripts from Cambridge known as the “Mathew Holmes Lutebooks.” Holmes was a singing man and precentor at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford from 1588 to 1597, after which time he took up a similar post at Westminster Abbey until 1621.15 He was therefore an individual of considerable musical knowledge, and though he likely did not play the lute for a living, there is a strong likelihood that he provided instruction in ensemble playing to the members of the choir at Christ Church.16 The technical range of the works in his manuscript collection indicate that he was a skilled lutenist, and his manuscripts are often those to which modern editors go in order to find the works most likely representative of the apex of technical and compositional accomplishment in English lute music of the period.17 This collection of four manuscripts—GB-Cu MS Dd.2.11; Dd.5.78.3; Dd.9.33; and Nn.6.36—towers above all others as the most important collection of English lute music surviving today, with over seven hundred pieces represented, of which five hundred are found only once in the manuscripts. In the case of Dowland’s Lachrimae pavane, there are three versions in Dd.2.11: one in G minor and one in A minor, each for solo lute, and one for bandora. The two versions for solo lute have quite different variations, and the fact that Holmes would have gone to the trouble to write out two drastically different versions gives us some idea of the unique existence he granted each one: less that they were variations of the same piece as much as they were unique pieces unto themselves.18
Lute music in England, therefore, remained circulating in manuscript long after it had begun to appear in print on the continent and long after the means for disseminating it in print had appeared. Lutenists seem consciously to have avoided print, opting instead to allow their music to be disseminated freely in a hybrid collaborative form in which the student or performer altered and amended the music to suit his own abilities and aesthetic tastes. So why did they not adopt print technology? To answer this question, we must look more deeply into the role of aurality and manuscript culture in sixteenth-century England.
Despite the advance of the printing press, early modern England maintained a complex interrelationship between aurality, chirography, and typography. Rising literacy rates and the steady increase in the production and consumption of print materials meant that many in England could either read and write reasonably well or had access to someone who could.19 Print and literacy therefore went hand in hand. However, both chirography and aurality continued to play an important role in the everyday lives of many people, as was the case with broadside ballad production, in which the printed ballad text would carry no musical notation but would instead contain instructions to sing it to a popular tune, thus relying on a combination of printed text and aurally transmitted music.20 Although print was making headway in English society in the sixteenth century, aural and manuscript transmission remained a vital, if not dominant, medium of communication.21
For many Protestants, Fides ex auditu, or “faith by hearing,” was a fundamental element of religious practice.22 Preachers rarely wrote down their sermons, using instead a wide assortment of rhetorical devices more commonly associated with the theater than with the pulpit, and it was only with encouragement that preachers were persuaded that there might be a market for printed sermons.23 Laurence Chaderton’s printed preface to his sermon at St. Paul’s Cross in 1578 contains a preface in which he assures his reader that “I have set downe, not in the same words I spake (for the Lord knoweth I never writ it, and therefore could not) but in other, so plainly as I could for the capacitie and understanding of all.”24 For many English Protestants, it was the word spoken that represented the word of God, while the word read represented Catholicism and, thus, idolatry.25 Many sermons survive in manuscripts transcribed by the congregation. Given the emphasis on the reception of the spoken word from the pulpit, many members of the congregation took extensive shorthand notes on the structure, argument, and scriptural proofs of the sermon for the purpose of studying it, memorizing passages of scripture, and incorporating these ideas into their lives and prayers.26 These sermons often show extreme variation among the manuscripts, as several people would often note the same sermon, and they show even greater deviation from the authorized printed versions that appeared later. Variation among these manuscripts does not necessarily represent error as much as it does the different methods and preferences of those doing the copying.27
By writing down the sermon, students created a personalized physical map of its structure for analysis, classification, and recombination into new material. Arnold Hunt describes how these physical maps made clear the structure of individual doctrines and sections in each sermon.28 These sections could then be assigned a place in a sort of mental filing system for retrieval and application, either individually or rearranged in combination with other sections, in a commonplace book. Writing the sermon heard from the pulpit therefore not only played an important role in reinforcing the structure and detail of the material but also provided a source of modular material the listener could study and incorporate into additional texts, sermons, or conversations of their own.
The metaphor of these documents as “maps” is derived, in part, from the work of Evelyn Tribble, who sees a different but complementary use for similar types of documents. In her work on the working methods of the actors of the Globe Theatre in Elizabethan England, Tribble draws our attention to the use of “plots,” which were large sheets of paper containing what was essentially a schema of the entire production: entrances, exits, props, and musical cues.29 These plots represent a step in a process that begins with capturing aurally transmitted information on paper, creating a schematic or layout of that information in a way that allows for visuospatial cognition to retrieve that information by memory, and culminates in the execution of an action that involves the use of that retrieved information either through restatement or as raw material for the creation of new texts or works.
Why can print not serve this same purpose? If this system was to be constructed simply on the organization of information, or what we might consider content management, then certainly a printed version of that information could work just as well. However, I contend that the predetermined presentation and structure of information on a printed page negates some of the most important steps in this particular system, especially that of content creation. To demonstrate this point, I point to Robert J. Glushko’s concept of the “organizing system.”30 Glushko defines the organizing system as “an intentionally arranged collection of resources and the interactions they support.” A printed document is one in which the graphical and visuospatial decisions have been made according to the organizing system of the printer or editor, not necessarily the end user. As a result, printed documents may not be designed according to the organizing principles most important to the end user, which negates the potency of the organizing system.31
To summarize, the critical value of aural transmission and manuscript transmission in scribal communities lies in their pivotal roles in a complex organizing system that incorporates both physical elements (the creation of the manuscript document) and abstract elements (the structuring and organization of the information as a schema or map that reflects the cognitive priorities of the end user). There is no suggestion here that the possibility of such a system is unique to England or to the lute community. Instead, I contend that this instance of the organizing system among English lutenists was unique as a result of the particular set of constraints within which that community operated.
This final section weaves together the previous threads to answer the following questions: (1) How does the issue of aurality and its role in an organizing system change our perceptions of the transmission of lute music in England?; (2) Why did the innovation of print not have a significant impact on lutenists in England?; and (3) Why does the system proposed here apply only to English lutenists and not to communities of other musicians both in England and on the continent?
Much of the iconography of lute performance shows lutenists performing without music, even in consort, suggesting that much of their repertoire was improvised over memorized structures familiar to the musical community. Many of the lute manuscripts support this idea. Perhaps the best example of this would be the Ballet lutebook dating from ca. 1593–1603.32 Ballet contains approximately thirty simple and unadorned ballad tunes, many of which are the earliest examples of tunes that later found their way into the publications of folksong scholars like William Chappell.33 Tunes such as these would have served as a familiar basis for improvisation by the lute player, perhaps in a social or theatrical setting in which the audience would be familiar with the tune.34 Variations and improvisations on well-known ballad tunes were an important aspect of the English lute repertoire, and manuscripts such as Ballet represent a collection of maps or plots that served as the basis for these improvisations. They are therefore not the finished product but simply a framework for the execution of complex variations and improvisations.35
The aural nature of lute performance provides us a different perspective on the workflows and practices of lutenists in England, especially concerning pedagogy. Traditional assumptions about English lute pedagogy have focused on the idea, summarized by Craig-McFeely, that lute teachers provided students with loose leaves containing musical examples from which the students would make copies into their own books, or that the teachers wrote down the music themselves for the student to learn.36 This is the case with the Board lutebook, in which John Dowland made a number of additions to the work of his student Margaret Board.37 By placing greater emphasis on the importance of aurality in the transmission of lute music, I am suggesting that perhaps this music was not transmitted, at least not entirely, in writing during the pedagogical process but was, in fact, transmitted aurally by the teacher and transcribed by the student either during the lesson or at a later time. Elizabeth Kenny has noted that the Mynshall lutebook is an example of a book that was created for the express purpose of recording the pedagogical procedure Craig-McFeely describes. Kenny points to the “Flat Pavan” by John Johnson as a piece in the manuscript that has many concordances. She notes that it demonstrates elements of both attention and carelessness in the inscribing of the music on the page, and a change of ink and rhythmic signs as indications that the piece was copied from an exemplar during at least two different sittings. She suggests that the errors would probably have been of secondary consideration to the beautiful presentation of the music and that the performer would likely have known the music and would have been able to improvise on it well enough to play it from memory without needing to refer to the book. As Kenny writes, the work is “a stimulus to a performing text, not a representation of one.”38 Yet we should not discount a third possibility: that it is an imperfect transcription of one. John Ward suggests this possibility when he writes, in reference to amateurs’ miscellanies: “Lack of skill in notation, not in playing, is what the manuscripts record; the one skill is independent of the other . . . [scribes] must have known how most, probably all, of the music was supposed to sound, may first have learned the pieces ‘by ear’ and later written them down as best they could. The Folger MS . . . is full of what look like aides-mémoire.”39 In place of the concept of the aide-mémoire, however, I would substitute instead the concept of the map or schema that provides a visual representation of the path the lutenist will follow and a repository of the modular musical material they will vary and recombine as they improvise. Though the music in many manuscripts might suggest careless copying from an exemplar, such errors are typical of ethnographic field transcriptions, in which the transcription is done with paper and pencil as the performance takes place or perhaps later from memory. Such transcriptions usually require repeated performances in the field, and until the advent of recording technology in the early part of the twentieth-century, many tunes were preserved using only this imperfect method.40 In this sense, lute manuscripts may represent what ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger referred to as “prescriptive” music writing, in which only the broad outline of the music is provided before a formal and detailed “descriptive” transcription can be provided after repeated listening and study.41 In the case of the lute manuscripts, however, the descriptive notation never arrived and was likely realized only through the improvisation of each performance.42 This sort of aural transmission is a common practice in many non-Western musical cultures and is often a required part of their musical pedagogy regardless of the complexity of the music.43 As we have seen in other media, such as the noting of sermons, one was not considered to have embraced and mastered the material until one had heard it delivered and noted the structure and detail in one’s own hand. If one wanted to be truly able to absorb and reapply the material, one needed to hear it, write it, analyze its structure, and repeat and recombine it without any access to a written intermediary.
Having proposed the pivotal importance of aurality to the manuscript culture of English lutenists, it is worth further speculating on a scenario that represents the end-to-end workflow for the typical English consumer of lute music. In this scenario, the lute student is possessed of some musical talent but is not an occupational musician. A lute teacher visits the student once a week to provide instruction on the fundamentals of playing the lute. During the course of this lesson, the teacher performs a number of pieces that the student must copy into her workbook either during the performance or to the best of her ability after the conclusion of the lesson. The purpose of copying down the music in her own hand is for the student to create her own personalized cognitive map of the music, which means that the visuospatial representation of the music is memorized and becomes a schema that can be used for further composition or improvisation. Further, the music on the page, particularly the improvised variations, becomes raw modular material that can be mentally accessed and applied to new musical situations. Essentially, therefore, each piece in manuscript is a map containing modular musical material, and this map both contains musical material that can be accessed according to the student’s personal preferences and also represents a schematic vessel into which musical material from other maps can be placed to create new pieces of music. This entire process represents the student’s organizing system, a system that is intentionally designed by the student to be an efficient and practical manifestation of her musical abilities and preferences. While these manuscripts still contained entire pieces that could be performed verbatim, they also served as vessels that provided access to organized musical materials and maps to which musical materials from other maps could be applied.
Why, then, could this system not accommodate printed music? Building on the organizing system described above in relation to aural and manuscript culture, I propose that lute culture in England was largely process-driven and not product-driven. The goal of this process was not simply to have a piece of music on paper from which the musician could play—a goal that could easily have been satisfied by printed music—but to engage in the entire process from beginning to end. This process was an organizing system in which the lack of printed music essentially operated as a constraint that generated the innovative communication channels that supported England’s extensive aural and manuscript cultures.44 Lutenists effectively broke the constraint by working around it with this organization system.
Does this, then, mean that the system simply could not accommodate print or that the lute community was hostile to print? No, but it does highlight three significant reasons that printed lute tablature was slower to catch on in England than it was on the continent. First, as suggested above, lutenists had an innovative process for capturing and assimilating aural performances of lute music that was supported by extensive communication channels, making the initial forays into print potentially redundant. The second reason may be best explained by the idea in which the nature of an innovation such as print, the communication channels by which that innovation travels, the amount of time it takes for an innovation to travel such channels, and the constitution of the social system in which the innovation is planted all represent constraints that can inhibit and retard the diffusion of even the most vital innovations in a society.45 Those such as innovators, early adopters, and change agents must contend with various constraints on innovation such as those that inhibited printed lute music in England, including printing technology that cannot readily adapt to the demands of lute tablature, small addressable markets, and competing processes that would have to be displaced by the innovation, such as the organizing system defined above. Finally, if time were required to allow the innovation of printed music to diffuse through the community of English lutenists, that was something that the lute in England simply did not have on its side. While by the seventeenth century the most fashionable lute music in England was French, by 1660 the lute in general, even in France, was beginning to cede territory to the harpsichord, and between 1610 and 1676, there are only three sources of lute music printed in England: Robert Dowland’s Varietie of Lute Lessons (1610), Richard Mathew’s The Lutes Apology for Her Excellency (1652), and Thomas Mace’s Musick’s Monument (1676).46 After the Restoration in 1660, while the theorbo continued to be a popular continuo instrument, the influence of the lute in England diminished, thus further decreasing the size of any addressable market for printed lute music.47
My proposal that English lute manuscripts are components of a process-driven organizing system does little to disrupt our notions of manuscript culture or the aural tradition in England. What it does do, however, is cast it in a somewhat different light, as it provides some insight into a particularly inventive way in which the community of lutenists in England selected resources according to the needs of their communications channels and organizing system. It also shows us that while innovations like print can produce seemingly miraculous changes in some social systems, they can flounder in others that have already created competing and effective systems of communication and invention.48
1. The term solo used here is not meant to be exclusive to music for a single lute but merely to exclude songs and other ensemble music in which the lute might have played a role. Lute duets, of which there are several in the manuscripts, are included in the category defined here.
2. Printed music in England had a less-than-glorious beginning, something that Joseph Kerman has attributed to the oppressive and chaotic printing monopoly Elizabeth I granted to William Byrd and Thomas Tallis in 1575. D. W. Krummel has suggested that the lack of printed lute music in England could be attributed to Byrd himself, and that his lack of sympathy for the lute led him to avoid printing any music for it. See Krummel, English Music Printing, 103 and Kerman, The Elizabethan Madrigal, 267. For more on English printed music, see Smith, Thomas East and Music Publishing, 19–37.
3. Craig-McFeely, “English Lute Manuscripts and Scribes,” 70–102; Spring, The Lute in Britain, 96–148; Kenny, “Revealing Their Hand,” 112–137.
4. Gibson, “‘How Hard an Enterprise It Is,’” 43–89; “‘So to the Wood Went I,’” 221–251; “‘The Order of the Book,’” 13–33.
5. Kenny, for example, asserts that lutenists frequently memorized both complete pieces and harmonic patterns for the purpose of improvisation or creating a unique version of the piece suited to the technique and tastes of the player, but the possibility of aural transmission remains conspicuously absent in such accounts (“Revealing Their Hand,” 201).
6. Craig-McFeely, “English Lute Manuscripts and Scribes,” 35.
7. Ibid., 35–36.
8. Milsom, “Songs and Society in Early Tudor London,” 235–293 and Krummel, English Music Printing, 15. Elizabeth I granted the printing privilege to Tallis and Byrd on January 22, 1575. The Elizabethan monopolies were devised as a means of encouraging the English economy by providing protectionist measures that would prevent English markets from being colonized by foreign producers and would promote English ones. As far as this strategy went with printed music, it must be considered a dismal failure. When the patent expired in 1596, there was a brief period during which there was no printing patent in force before Thomas Morley renewed it in 1598. Krummel asserts that the period during which there was no patent was one of the most lucrative for printed music, as it allowed printers such as William Barley, Peter Short, and Thomas East to publish music at will, thus making 1597 a high point in the history of English music publishing. Unfortunately, that success did not translate into any significant publications for the lute. The sole publication of music for solo lute was Barley’s A New Booke of Tabliture from 1596. Subsequent to this, the only significant publication of music for solo lute came in 1610 with Robert Dowland’s Varietie of Lute Lessons.
9. Personal miscellanies could contain any number of items, regardless of genre. Many miscellanies include transcriptions of music and lyric from print literature, recipes, lists of prominent public figures, transcriptions of ideas about theology and history, or family histories. If it was worth preserving, it could be found in a personal miscellany. See Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, 17–22.
10. Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts, 27–28.
11. Ibid., 36.
12. Ibid., 79–83.
13. Love describes such sources as “weak user” scribal publications. Ibid., 36.
14. Ward, “The Osborn Commonplace-Book,” 22–36.
15. Harwood, “‘A Lecture in Musick,’” 19–20.
16. Ibid., 19.
17. Poulton (John Dowland, 97), for example, considers them the most important of the English lute manuscripts.
18. Gale, “John Dowland,” 213–216. Perhaps one of the most intriguing examples of the personal anthology is the Brogyntyn lutebook (GB-AB Brogyntyn MS 27), which contains ornate decorations and was copied with obvious care. These are qualities that Craig-McFeely describes as those that set these sources apart from the hurried and practical presentations of professional and pedagogical lute books. Curiously, Brogyntyn features the titles of each piece in a ciphertext, an additional element that testifies to the obvious private or limited circulation of the manuscript. See Craig-McFeely, “English Lute Manuscripts and Scribes,” 99.
19. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 19.
20. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 39–73.
21. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, 128.
22. Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 22.
23. Crockett, “‘Holy Cozenage’ and the Renaissance Cult of the Ear,” 50. For a parallel musical scenario involving the lute ayre, see Wilson, this volume.
24. Chaderton, An Excellent and Godly Sermon, Aiii.
25. The debates concerning the merits of preaching over reading were widespread in England, even among Protestants, with many believing that the written word of the Bible was simply the foundation upon which oral transmission and preaching rested. For a more thorough examination, see Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 19–59.
26. Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 72.
27. Marotti suggests that the dissemination of poetry by means of memorization and oral transmission, followed later by its inscription into various manuscripts, was not only an integral aspect of literary life in early modern England but also an explanation for the incredible diversity of texts, with variants representing not errors of transmission but emendations and expressions of creativity on the part of the persons copying them down. Readers during this period therefore had a much more dialogical relationship with the text than we might imagine today, and our modern idea of the “work” is anachronistic compared to this very different idea of each manifestation or performance of the text being a unique event. See Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, 143–144. For a discussion of this idea in relation to a slightly later period of English music, see Herissone, Musical Creativity in Restoration England, particularly chapter 4, 209–260; and Herissone, this volume.
28. Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 99.
29. Tribble, “Distributing Cognition in the Globe,” 144–147.
30. Glushko, The Discipline of Organizing, 47–93.
31. Walter Ong’s theory of “presence” offers some alternative insight into the importance of the manuscript and its relation to orality/aurality. Presence is the concept of the human subject behind the medium of communication. Oral communication is rich with the concept of presence because it is an ephemeral means of communication, one that cannot exist without a vocal subject and a hearing recipient. Manuscript retains the presence of orality/aurality by virtue of being the product of direct human agency. For an excellent summary, see Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts, 142.
32. Spring, The Lute in Britain, 126.
33. Ibid.
34. This was, of course, not unique to England. For anecdotes about the improvisation of Francesco da Milano, see Coelho, “The Reputation of Francesco da Milano,” 49–72.
35. Bailey explores a similar issue in relation to manuscript collections of keyboard music in Restoration England in this volume.
36. Craig-McFeely, “English Lute Manuscripts and Scribes,” 78.
37. Ibid., 214.
38. Kenny, “Revealing Their Hand,” 125–127.
39. Ward, “The Osborn Commonplace-Book,” 24.
40. For more on folk transcription, see Ellingson, “Transcription,” 110–152.
41. Seeger, “Prescriptive and Descriptive Music-Writing,” 184–195.
42. For an examination of the importance of prescriptive transcription of aurally transmitted material later in the seventeenth century, see Herissone, this volume.
43. Daniel Neuman (The Life of Music in North India, 49, n7) provides an excellent example from his study of Indian music: “The medium for the guru’s message is not a written system (notations are considered ineffective for any but the most rudimentary lessons) but his own disciples, their message and remembrance . . . ustads typically feel that notations are either harmful or at best useful only as mnemonic devices for learning basic structures, and that real learning must be received orally.” See also Haynes, The End of Early Music, 204–205.
44. The most famous exploration of the ways in which organizing systems find innovative ways around constraints is the Theory of Constraints of Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox in their book The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. Although designed for large-scale business organizations, they effectively identify the important roles that constraints play in forcing innovation in the creation of ways of working around and breaking those constraints.
45. This idea is based on the theory given in Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations. As an example of his assertion that “innovations do not sell themselves,” Rogers relates how a preventative method against scurvy was not officially instituted in the British Royal Navy until 1795 despite having been identified and documented in 1601. See Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 7–8.
46. Spring, The Lute in Britain, 343.
47. For a thorough examination of the decline of the lute in England, see Spring, The Lute in Britain, 400–450.
48. This also provides a speculative contribution to the questions concerning John Dowland’s ventures into printed music. Dowland must correctly have determined that lutenists, at least those of the English variety, were not yet sympathetic to the idea of “authoring” lute music in print, despite the fact that his considerable reputation rested on his skill in this area. Through the creation and promotion of the genre of the lute song, a genre that would appeal to musicians beyond simply lutenists, Dowland found a way to access a more extensive network of communal domestic music making in his quest for self-promotion. For more, see Gibson, “‘How Hard an Enterprise It Is,’” 52, and Wilson, this volume.