Les papiers à musique imprimés en France au XVIIe siècle : Un nouveau critère d'analyse des manuscrits musicaux

Abstract

About 10 to 15 % of the seventeenth-century French music manuscripts are written on printed music paper, i.e. paper on which staves were printed or engraved beforehand. Such papers appear to be more and more common in France as they become an usual stationery product, available in more than 20 combinations of formats and stavings. A few printing centres and workshops can be identified: Paris (mostly a Ballard production, and Bonnard), Strasbourg and Lyon, while marketing trend oscillates between music printing, stationery and print trade. The A. describes 65 different papers and lists manuscripts using them in 33 European or American libraries. Describing these papers in music manuscripts can add new scientific clues in addition to the study of watermarks, handwriting, binding or provenances. The main sources where printed music paper can be found are student/master manuscripts, Lully's opera scores and large corpuses as the collection of the Petit-Peres des Victoires or the famous Charpentier's Melanges.