Introduction

The four partbooks that constitute the manuscript Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magliabechiana XIX.164–167 – Cantus, Altus, Tenor and Bassus – are anomalously and inexplicably numbered out of order: 167, 164, 166 and 165. Walter Rubsamen interpreted the manuscript’s very organisation into partbooks – relatively novel for its time (c. 1520) – as ‘illustrating the new equivalence of textually conceived voice parts that became the norm in secular Italian vocal music between 1520 and 1530’; ¹ this phenomenon is critically important to the emergence of the Cinquecento madrigal. The partbooks are described here in conventional musicians’ (rather than librarians’) order.