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"Printing has lately become an art in which many fine gentlemen have been trying to outdo each other every day, but no one has ever been able to find a way to print measured music. Yet we can neither praise God nor celebrate weddings without such music, which is indeed called for at every joyous occasion in life," Petrucci wrote in the dedication of the Harmonice musices odhecaton, published in 1501. He assured his patron Girolamo Donato that this undertaking was profitable because it helped "youths renounce ignoble pleasures, charmed by music of solid worth. . .[and] attracted by the convenient availability of songs of this kind."
The printing of polyphonic music did not immediately follow the introduction of movable type by Johann Gutenberg around 1450. Letters of the alphabet formed into words and sentences do not touch each other. Music involves intersecting staves and notes, as well as underlaid texts.
Ottaviano Petrucci, a printer working in Venice, devised an ingenious solution to this problem. By running each page through the press three times, he could print first the musical staves, secondly the notes, and finally the text. This technique required accuracy in the registration so that all three elements would line up correctly.
Petrucci published the Harmonice musices odhecaton, a collection of popular music largely drawn from Franco Flemish composers, in 1501, and this is generally accepted as the first edition of published music. The word odhecaton is a combination of two Greek words, ode, meaning "song" and hecaton, meaning "one hundred." In fact, there are ninety-six three-, four-, and five-part compositions in the collection. The typesetting is elegant, clear, and readable, and the quality of the music itself is extremely high.
The Odhecaton must have been profitable and popular; during the next twenty years, Petrucci published over fifty additional books of music, covering sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental music in all existing genres of the time.
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The Odhecaton. First page of music from a facsimile edition of Ottaviano Petrucci's Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A, reproduced by arrangement with the publisher from Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A, MMMLF I.10 (New York: Broude Brothers Limited, 1973)
