A Librarian needs your help

Unknown print of music, pasted in front of incunable as flyleaf

Last week I suggested that Librarians might be able to help. This week, it’s time for me to ask you to help us; or, more precisely to assist one of my colleagues who is cataloguing incunabula at Cambridge University Library.

If you can help us in identifying the music and perhaps the edition from which this comes, this would be really helpful. Obviously it’s a fragment, and it was used as a flyleaf in this incunable; however, it is very likely that the music is quite a bit younger than the incunable. Even to a researcher of twentieth-century music, like me, this looks as if this leaf is the seventh part of a piece for two choruses, and this being part of the second choir.

Unknown music print, pasted in front of incunable

The recto leaf (see right) might help even more, as it bears the page number 72 – so this page should have formed part of a much bigger volume of the original edition.

A colleague of mine has suggested that this looks like an Italian print to him…. I should add that I have improved the digital images’ brightness and contrast – so what you see here is not how the original paper looks.

If you can shed any light on this, please either write a comment underneath this post (it will not appear immediately, but will be approved as soon as possible), or email me at cg474 [atsign] cam [dot] ac [dot] uk. Let’s hope that by using crowdsourcing we can help my colleague.
CG

About these ads