Musical Philology

This book is the English version of the first volume of La Filologia musicale. Istituzioni, storia, strumenti critici, edited in Italian in three volumes (LIM, Lucca, respectively 2005, 2009 and 2013).
The objective of the work, generally speaking, was that of providing a graded service to different categories of possible readers: musicians who have to deal on a daily basis with textual problems concerning the repertoires they perform; musicologists and students of musicology, for whom this subject plays a crucial role; philologists working in other fields, but who wish to keep abreast of the ways in which textual problems are dealt with in the field of music; and scholars and people interested in the subject or curious about one of its many aspects.

The purpose of this first volume is that of providing the critical means useful to gaining an understanding of the critical nature of the work of philology and acquiring the correct lexis of the discipline as well as offering a basic outline of the subject, both from a systematic point of view and a historical one. The book does not set out to teach how to solve individual difficulties or apply a passe-partout method (which, of course, does not exist); rather, the aim is that of providing useful instruments for dealing with music texts in a critical manner through the responsible elaboration of solutions on the basis of the requirements of each situation. For the students and scholars using this book, it seemed besides worthwhile to trace, for the first time, the historical outline of the discipline, from its remotest and most embryonic manifestations up to an outline of methods and schools, attempting in this way to establish the most important moments of contact – or indeed loss of contact – with philology in other disciplinary areas along with the most significant cultural movements.

Maria Caraci Vela is Full Professor of Music Philology, History of Renaissance Music and History and Criticism of Medieval and Renaissance Musical Texts at the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage in Cremona, University of Pavia, where she is also member of the board of the Sciences of the Literary and Musical Text PhD Program. She is member of several scientific committees, including the Department series “Diverse voci…” and the critical editions of Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa (Opera Omnia, Kassel, Bärenreiter) and of the Italian Ars nova (Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage, Cremona/Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, Florence). She is editor of «Philomusica on-line», and coordinator of the international project The Notation of Polyphonic Music in the IX-XVII Centuries.