The Two Books on Verbal Music

Gaspar Stoquerus's treatise, De musica verbali (ca. 1570), is the only Renaissance treatise as yet discovered that is devoted entirely to the problem of text placement in vocal polyphony. Salient portions of Stoquerus's treatise were first discussed in 1961 by Edward E. Lowinsky, and a more detailed synthesis of Stoquerus's treatise is contained in one chapter of Don Harran's Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (1986). The present volume of Greek and Latin Music Theory offers the first critical edition of Stoquerus's entire treatise, proceeded by an extensive introduction and accompanied by a translation and annotations facing the Latin text. Indexes of terms, names, and subjects are also included.

The critical edition of the text provides a precise reading and comprehension of its contents, while the translation enables readers to examine more closely the contents of the entire treatise, especially Stoquerus's contextual arguments justifying his subject in general and his fifteen rules for text placement in particular. The introduction and annotations reveal Stoquerus's immersion in his historical milieu as a scholar, humanist, and pedagogue. As a pedagogue in particular, Stoquerus is deeply immersed in the scholastic method of argumentation and advances his thought with precision and logic, culminating in his closely reasoned set of fifteen rules for text placement and a simplification of the Guidonian method of solmization already in progress in Renaissance choir-instruction books.

This volume offers the first critical edition of Stoquerus's entire treatise, the only Renaissance treatise as yet discovered that is devoted entirely to the problem of text placement in vocal polyphony. Also included are an extensive introduction, a translation and annotations facing the Latin text, and indexes of terms, names, and subjects.