Confliction Attributions in the continental Repartory from ca. 1500 to ca. 1550
This paper surveys conflicting attributions from ca. 1350 to 1600. There emerge from this brief survey of conflicting attributions three "themes," so to speak, the last two of which run through the entire span of periods covered: (1) conflicting attributions--that is, situations in which the musical or other documentary sources unequivocally attribute one work to two or more different composers--are an ever-present phenomenon from at least the beginning of the fifteenth century to ca. 1550 (with a much smaller number of conflicts appering in both the late fourteenth and late sixteenth centuries), (2) from the fifteenth century on, there seems to be a correlation between the number of conflicting attributions and the means by which music was generally transmitted; that is, the number of conflicts during the second half of the sixteenth century-- small in comparison with the periods before and after--ould seem to be related to the preponderance of printed or manuscript anthologies; and (3) ifone finds a relatively large number of total conflicts for a given composer, the vast majority of those conflicts tends to occur with only one or two other authors with whom the composer has had some biographical intersections, while a larger group of composers will share the rest, each of whom has a smaller number.