A Handlist of Printed Italian Secular Monody Books, 1602–1635

This list of all publications containing at least one Italian secular monody, from the first in 1602 up to 1635, is intended to supplant the balder and rather defective lists of Hugo Leichtentritt and Eugen Schmitz. It too must have its shortcomings. I would therefore be glad to receive corrections, and further information about song-books which, though they are known to have survived until the last war, I have been unable to locate but for which I have nevertheless made incomplete entries in this list. Additions and corrections (which should be sent to the secretarial address given at the front of this publication) can be included in later issues of the R.M.A. Research Chronicle. Space has been left after the entries for each year for readers to insert additions in their copies. Normally I have excluded books that seem not to have survived into this century; the only exceptions are other editions of certain existing volumes which figure in this list by virtue of at least one surviving edition. That many other volumes must have disappeared we can guess from two catalogues of the Venetian publisher Alessandro Vincenti, which alone list twenty-five books, now apparently lost, that seem from their titles to have included solo songs. The date 1635 is a convenient stopping-point on stylistic grounds; after this date, moreover, far less music was printed in Italy than in the previous 130 years. About the songs in general I have written elsewhere.