ABSTRACT
Corroborating evidence comes from the preliminary pages of anthologies—the dedications, prefaces, indices, and tables of contents—where the ordering of material imparted meaning to the music within. This chapter focuses on attribution practices during the first century of music printing, arguably the most important phase in the transformation of music into a commercial product or commodity for circulation. The Antwerp music printer Pierre Phalese the Younger was the first to issue anthologies devoted to Italian secular song north of the Alps. The analysis of dedications and prefaces is especially important for the study of anthologies since it can shed light on an editor's attitude toward his work, his perception of its reception, how an editor acquired his sources, and how he thought they should be performed. The most significant structural difference between Italian and German anthologies is the number of performance parts they contained.
