Francisco Guerrero and music printing in Seville, Rome and Venice

The arrival of Francisco Guerrero as vicemaestro de capilla of Seville Cathedral coincided with attempts to establish music printing as an aspect of the book trade in the city. The first to enter the market, Juan de León, produced one vihuela book there, Alonso Mudarra’s Tres libros de música (1545), before being appointed as the official printer to the newly-founded University of Osuna. There he printed the three important treatises by Juan Bermudo, the most important music theorist of sixteenth-century Spain, as well as the first set of partbooks to be produced in the peninsular. Although Juan de León printed only two books of music, these secured music printing in Seville. Following the appearance of Juan de León’s last book, his place in the music trade was occupied by Martin de Montesdoca, who printed Miguel Fuenllana’s technically complicated vihuela tablature Orphenica lyra in 1554, followed by the partbooks of Guerrero’s Sacrae cantiones. With the closure of Montesdoca’s press in 1559, and his departure for the New World, his typographical material including his music types was acquired by Juan Guttiérez, who used them to print the Recopilación de sonetos y villancicos by Juan Vásquez (1560). This was the last book of polyphonic music to be printed in Seville. For the rest of his career, Guerrero was obliged to a succession of music printers working abroad, firstly in Leuven in Flanders and Paris, and then in Italy. Between 1570 and his final publication in 1597, just two years before his death, printers working in Venice (notably the heirs of Antonio Gardano and Giacomo Vincenti), together with a number of Roman presses, issued a total of eight substantial volumes of music in a number of formats ranging from sets of partbooks to choirbooks. These contain a significant body of compositions in a variety of liturgical genres, including books of magnificats, masses, motets, vespers, and settings of the Passion according to Saints Matthew and John. Details of Guerrero’s relationship to printers in Seville, Rome and Venice reveal him to have been of a conscientious composer, concerned not only with the accuracy of the texts that they printed, but also with a process of constant.