ABSTRACT
Assuming broadly the idea of a 'circle' of composers or musicians, the present study reconsiders a number of problem pieces by Philips, Sweelinck and their contemporaries. Most people, including musicians, may have thought of keyboard music primarily as something performed, identifying it with the performer, not with a written text created by a composer. One can imagine, on the contrary, that Philips conceived only a single piece, notating it originally in a score that could equally well be played at the keyboard, with unwritten decorations, or copied into parts for performance on viols. Attribution is inherently ambiguous in the case of arrangements. Some players, such as Philips, might have specialized in such genres and the keyboard versions of madrigals and chansons that are reliably attributed to him are brilliant showpieces. In most cases the rhetoric of Philips's intabulations has nothing to do with text painting of individual words, which is relatively rare in the works that Philips sets.
