A Gift of Madrigals and Motets. Volume I: Description and Analysis.

Quarto, blue cloth (hardcover), gilt lettering, xiii, 306 pp. Fine in a Fine dust jacket. From dust jacket: Near the end of the third decade of the sixteenth century, a five-volume set of madrigal and motet partbooks was assembled in Florence and sent as a gift -- or musical embassy -- to the English court of Henry VIII. The manuscript set -- minus the missing altus part -- has been owned since 1935 by the Newberry Library in Chicago; but until H. Colin Slim's exhaustive efforts, no torough study of the history or contents of the partbooks had been undertaken. At first encounter, these partbooks yield no clues concerning their provenance, their composers' names, or the reasons for their dispatch to England. In his search for this information, Professor Slim used the musicologists' customary tools, namely, biobibliography, concordances, and textual and musical analysis. But he also used bibliographers' tools not always employed by musicologists: watermarks, bindings, script, orthography, and illuminations. As a result of his efforts, the author was able to identify nearly all of the works' composers and the manuscripts' expert illuminator. He also presents a detailed description of the binding process and the probable background of the scribe, places the political and social references in the works, and determines the route the volumes may have taken after they left Henry's library. Music, European History, European Culture aslic. …