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Niveau Nische Nimbus. Die Anfänge des Musikdrucks nördlich der Alpen. Edited by Birgit Lodes. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2010. (Wiener Forum für ältere Musik - geschichte, Band 3) [446 p. ISBN 978-3-86296- 004-0. i69]
While the early music printing of Italy, France, England and the Netherlands has received much scholarly attention in the second half of the twentieth century, this has not been the case for German-speaking countries. Only in the last decade have some scholars started to undertake projects investigating the work of selected music printers or even specific publications-as a result there is still a great need for further, comprehensive studies. Thus, the recently-published volume Niveau Nische Nimbus: Die Anfänge des Musikdrucks nördlich der Alpen, is a very welcome and highly anticipated contribution, and an excellent starting point for anyone with an interest in this area. The book is a collection of extended and reworked papers, the proceedings of a conference held in Vienna in 2007, on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the first music books printed north of the Alps.
Three publications, the Melopoiae and Harmonie printed by Erhard Oeglin in Augs - burg, and the Concentus harmonici brought out by the Basel printer Gregor Mewes (all printed in 1507), therefore stood at the centre of the conference, but the seventeen contributions of the proceedings go far beyond them. In her opening article, the conference organiser and editor of the volume, Birgit Lodes, describes the three publications drawing on the buzzwords in the title of the volume: their technical niveau, their status as a niche product and their particular nimbus. It becomes...