The Need for Latin Textual Scholarship in Renaissance Musicology

Focusing on the need for a more thoughtful treatment of textual material in the study of music, this article pleads for a closer collaboration between Latinists and musicologists studying Renaissance music and literature. Familiarity with musical sources would introduce Latinists to new aspects of the classical tradition and a largely unknown corpus of Neo-Latin texts. Musicologists would benefit greatly from philological and literary competence when editing and interpreting Latin sources that pertain to the biography of Renaissance composers or the publication history of Renaissance music. The need for Latin textual scholarship is demonstrated through numerous examples taken from articles and monographs on sixteenth-century motet collections and from modern critical editions of the same collections. These examples argue for a more careful use of Latin sources, as well as for a change in editorial practice when preparing a critical edition of Renaissance music.