Suzanne G. Cusick, Ph.D. 1975

Advisor: Thomas Warburton

Dissertation Title: Valerio Dorico, Music Printer in Sixteenth-Century Rome

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Dissertation Abstract:

There can be little doubt that the enormous impact of the printing press affected the musical history of the late Renaissance. Diverse styles of music, once restricted to particular geographic or political spheres, became readily available to a broad and growing musical audience. While leading to a greater homogeneity of style than Europe had perhaps ever known, the wider diffusion of all kinds of music permitted by the press reinforced the less exalted preferences of the merging middle class, the class upon which the entire printing industry depended. This class, lacking the education in mathematical and literary subtleties that had always been available to the elite, formed the perfect audience for those who sought, in the sixteenth century, to transform music from a vehicle of speculation in sounds and proportions to one of emotional expression. Thus, the early history of music printing as both an influence on and a reflection of contemporary taste may contribute to our understanding of the forces at work in the critical middle and late years of the sixteenth century.

This study attempts to trace the career of the most important music printer active in Rome before 1580, Valerio Dorico. Unlike the major Renaissance printing centers, Paris, Antwerp and Venice, for example, Rome had never been a commercially powerful city, and the city’s economy seems to have lacked the requisite elasticity to support the often dubious investments to an industry dependent on new, unexplored markets. Thus, most of her printers lived in the constant shadow of bankruptcy, and cautiously evolved a standard practice of dividing risk and labor among several parties: editori, the financiers of publishing, and tipografi, the technicians who executed the publishers’ initiatives, formed temporary partnerships for individual projects. Most Roman printers restricted their careers to one or the other role in the publishing trade.

Dorico’s entire professional career was spent in Rome. From March 1526 to April 1527, he collaborated with Giovanni Giacomo Pasoti on a series of reprint editions of Petrucci motet and mass anthologies financed by Giacomo Giunta. By 1531, having survived the Sack of Rome in May 1527, Dorico was established as an independent printer and bookseller, producing at least five collections of music and one treatise over the next six years, all executed with the double-impression method invented by Petrucci. After a musical hiatus of seven years, Dorico adopted the single-impression method for his edition of masses by Cristobal de Morales in 1544. Until his death in 1565, Dorico and his brother Luigi printed twenty-seven music books, nearly one percent of all the music printed on the Italian peninsula in the century, and about sixty percent of that printed at Rome. There is no evidence that Dorico was a musician himself, nor that he had a regular editor; the quality of his music books varies widely from print to print, although they are all attractive and well-organized. While printing madrigals, motets, laude, lute intabulations, polyphonic masses and instrumental ricercars, Dorico did not print many anthologies, but rather concentrated on collections of music by a single composer. Such evidence as has been found suggests that Dorico worked at the request of the composers in question, and that these composers contributed part of the financial support required for publication. Such a situation prevailed for Dorico’s edition of the masses of Morales, according to a surviving printing contract. Throughout his career, Dorico seems to have been a musical tipografo rather than an editore; as he worked at the behest of composers themselves, the rather parochial repertory contained in his prints is valuable for its reflection of music that may not have been considered the best of time, although produced in the same shop as the early works of Palestrina, Lasso, and Animuccia.

The text of this study attempts to explain the context of Roman printing and to place the music printing industry, with its peculiarities, within that context. Dorico’s biography is briefly sketched, followed by a detailed examination of the technical and editorial features of his music books, including a comparison of his musical editing with that of Antoine Gardane, Girolamo Scotto, and Dorico’s own heirs. The final chapter draws on the implications of the contract for Morales’ masses and the existence of analogous situations in Rome to posit reasons for Dorico’s relative success and longevity in the music business. A Bibliographical Catalogue lists all known prints with which the Dorico name is associated, in chronological order, followed by an index to the first lines of Italian texted pieces, a composer index to Dorico’s music books, and an edition of the contract for Morales’ masses.

Dr. Cusick has been one of the most distinguished musicologists of recent years. Her primary research focus has been on gendered, eroticized, and political modes of hearing in Medicean Florence, but she has also done influential work on music and torture in the US “war on terror.” She has also been an influential voice in musicology’s intradisciplinary discussion, where she has advocated for feminist and queer perspectives and approaches in the field.