Public evening lecture by Professor Dr. Irene Holzer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich)

In 1501, Ottaviano dei Petrucci published the world's first music printing press with movable (music) type in Fossombrone. A good fifty years after the invention of movable type printing by Johannes Gutenberg, Petrucci revolutionized the dissemination of music and inspired numerous other officinas to print music as well and to increasingly improve and embellish the elaborate technique. The lecture is dedicated to the special history of musical notation and its special recording formats on the threshold of the early modern period. Audio examples of polyphonic music from the Renaissance are also intended to give not only trained paleographers a new view and aural impression of the world of pre-modern music sources.

Irene Holzer is a professor in the Department of Musicology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After studying musicology and German language and literature at the Universities of Salzburg and Newcastle upon Tyne, she completed her doctorate on the mass compositions of the Renaissance composer Adrian Willaert. Her research interests include music of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, in particular the cultural-scientific examination of the various musical notations of the pre-modern period.