Seminars in Medieval and Renaissance Music: Sixteenth-Century Symbola

David Burn (University of Leuven)

Discussants: Inga Mai Groote and Christian Leitmeir

When the Passau school-master and composer Leonhard Paminger died in 1567, his sons announced a plan to publish a multi-volume edition of their father’s music. The plan included descriptions of the contents of each of the projected volumes. While most of the types of piece mentioned are self-explanatory, one category, “symbola”, was unfamiliar to me. What was intended? The projected Paminger volume was never produced, but one piece among his surviving music was identified as a “symbolum”, which was sufficient to show that they are settings of emblems or mottoes. Yet, beyond this, the type remains obscure in existing literature: only one collection, Caspar Othmayr’s Symbola of 1547, has received (limited) discussion, and this turns out to raise more questions than it answers. In an attempt to deal with the type more broadly, the present paper thus not only defines what symbola are but also addresses three further basic questions: How many are there? What are their features? And what functions did they fulfil?

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