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Ever since Western music began being written down, it has been able to overcome the barriers of time and space. Any piece of music, given fixed form by notation, has been able to outlive its time and travel to other environments, which have understood and interpreted it in ways specific to the time, place and context of use. In parallel with the rise of copying and printing, music began to circulate over wider areas, which led to the creation of typical pathways by which musical works were disseminated, and eventually to a pan-European music market. Libraries abound in musical sources, handwritten or printed, that bear the visible signs of journeys – often long and tortuous – that they have made in order to reach their present location. Books containing music also have their histories, either generic or specific: any one of them may throw up questions about its place of origin, its purpose, its destination, its use (or non-use), its ownership (and the reasons behind it), and, finally, the route by which it reached its present location.
Questions of this kind will be the focus of the international scholarly conference Itineraries of Musical Manuscripts and Prints in Modern Europe. Central to the conference’s interest will be the modalities of disseminating music manuscripts and prints during the period running from the invention of printing to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The conference’s aim is to identify typical ways in which music manuscripts and prints were disseminated, and to demarcate the most important European routes via which newly copied or printed music circulated during the period in question. |