Theoria, Volume 26, 2020 Page: 25

                                
Pedagogy and Authority in Sixteenth-Century German
Music Theory Textbooks
Caleb Mutch
Grosse Pointe, Michigan
ABSTRACT
This article addresses one of the most significant impacts which the printing press has
had on music theory: the emergence of the genre of the textbook. It examines that
genre from three different angles. First, it investigates the nature of sixteenth-century
textbooks by examining the characteristics of a representative group, a family of texts
related to Wollick and Schanppecher's Opus aureum musice, which was first published
in Cologne in 1501. Thereafter, the article explores some of the unique features
of these early textbooks, such as the pedagogically motivated revisions which the
printing process enabled, and the curious attitudes towards authorship and authority
which these texts display. Finally, it considers how textbooks from the later sixteenth
century, such as Faber's Compendiolum musicae (1548), continued and departed
from the patterns established by that earlier family of treatises, such as the greater
specialization of texts and the increased manipulation of typographical space.
In this age of rapid technological development and societal fracturing, it is tempting to
believe that digitization is transforming Western culture in an unprecedented manner.
While the pace of change may be faster than ever, scholars in print and media studies,
like Marshall McLuhan, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Adrian Johns, have demonstrated
that the introduction of the printing press catalyzed societal changes that are arguably
just as profound.' The intellectual and commercial developments that the printing
press enabled also extended to music theory: at the turn of the sixteenth century
mass production made it newly economical for students to acquire personal copies of

1 See McLuhan 1962, Eisenstein 1979, and Johns 1998, for example.