Dear All, My point about the Welde Lute Book is that some pages of the original manuscript have been repaired with the old-fashioned method of gauzing, that is covering flimsy paper with a thin sort of material (gauze) to strengthen and protect it. The trouble is that reading anything on a gauzed page is like looking through thick mist, and it is not always easy to make out what is written on the page beneath the gauze. There are some notes in the Welde Lute Book which are now quite invisible, yet they are clearly there on my rather poor photocopy. Now, notes may vanish from the manuscript, but they will continue to exist in microfilms or tatty old photocopies such as mine. These modern copies have now become extremely important, since they supercede the original manuscript at least as far as those lost notes are concerned.
Similar things have happened to the Holmes manuscripts at Cambridge. I remember Robert Spencer showing me some of his photocopies of the Holmes manuscripts. He pointed out where there were notes present in his photocopy, which are no longer present in the manuscript. Perhaps they had been near the edge of the page, and just flaked off. Perhaps there was the sort of damage I have described resulting from attempts to preserve the manuscripts. I can't remember what he said, but his photocopies have now become a source in their own right. If you have a Boethius facsimile of the Hirsch Lute Book, you will know from the introduction that the British Library have not looked after it awfully well. The manuscript has suffered from damp so badly, that Boethius resorted to using a microfilm (not the original manuscript) for some pages of the facsimile. Again, the modern source supercedes the old one, at least for those damaged pages. Such damage in recent years is not confined to lute music. If I remember right, the Trent Codices - important manuscripts of late 15th-century polyphony - have become damaged in some way, so that microfilms and photographs have now become primary sources in their own right. Needless to say, as far as preserving music from damaged sources is concerned, a microfilm or a photograph is going to be more use for future generations than some modern edition or a copy written out by hand by someone today, because there will always be the doubt at the back of one's mind that the publisher or copyist made mistakes. However, any copy is better than nothing. A book may get damaged, be lost in a fire, stolen, or sold to an anonymous buyer who keeps it to himself. The more copies we have, the safer is the content of the original source, i.e. the music. Best wishes, Stewart McCoy.
