By Cory M. Gavito

The three guitar song anthologies collected by Giovanni Stefani (fl. 1618–26) open us to a world in which musical performance and music editing collide in ways that reveal much about the circulation of music in the early seventeenth century. As materials that served performers, Stefani’s anthologies carry the imprint of oral transmission; they not only document the textual circulation of the popular songs they contain but also record the performing practices and traditions of the numerous musicians who consulted them. In editing these anthologies, I was tasked with the challenge of offering a transparent and authoritative report of concordances while still acknowledging the openness, variability, orality, and anonymity that characterizes the transmission of these songs to (and from) Stefani’s books.

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