YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

234 SUSAN LEWIS HAMMOND
The title page of the last of the four ‘Antwerp anthologies,’Melodia olympica (1591),
names Pietro Phillippi Inglese as the volume’s compiler. Among the foremost English
musicians on the Continent, the Catholic Philips fled his native England in 1582, settling
first in Rome and making contacts at the English College with Cardinal
Alessandro Farnese (who became his patron) and Felice Anerio, who was appointed
maestro di cappella at the College in 1585. Music by Anerio later appears in two
Phalèse publications, Madrigali, 6vv (1599) and Canzonette, 4vv (1610); perhaps
Philips helped Phalèse gain access to Anerio’s music. After a brief period in Paris,
Philips settled in Antwerp and was employed as a keyboard instructor there from
1590 until 1597. During these years, he cultivated the city’s most elite patronage circles;
Cornelius Pruenen, the dedicatee of Symphonia angelica, was godfather to his
daughter Leonora. 20 Philips retained his ties to Antwerp even after moving to Brussels
to assume the post of organist at the court of Albert and Isabella. 21 Philips’s Antwerp
connections assured him longevity in the northern print world. Phalèse issued three
volumes of his madrigals: two books of six-voice settings (1598, 1603) and one for
eight voices (1598), in addition to six volumes of sacred music. 22
Besides using Pevernage, Waelrant, and Philips to build the contents of the
anthologies and enhance their prestige, Phalèse used them to build a clientele for his
editions. All of the compilers had close connections with the respective dedicatees
of the anthologies, a group that formed the immediate circle for Phalèse music books.
CREATING A TARGET MARKET: THE DEDICATEES OF THE ‘ANTWERP ANTHOLOGIES’
Dedications offer insight into the characteristics of a defined community of consumers
of early modern music books. The dedicatees of the ‘Antwerp anthologies’
are representative of both Phalèse’s existing and hoped-for target audience for Italian
music books. The dedicatees and their occupations are listed in Table 2. Three of the
dedicatees were Italians living in Antwerp. As scholars have noted, the Italian mercantile
community was an avid sponsor of the madrigal, dating back to Lassus’s Opus
1 (Antwerp, Susato, 1555), which bears a dedication to Stefano Gentile (a Genoese
20 J. STEELE, art. Philips, Peter, in S. SADIE and J. TYRRELL eds., The New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians, 2nd ed., London, 2001, 19, p. 589.
21 On Philips’s activity in Brussels, see K. PROESMANS, Het muziekleven aan het hof van Albrecht en
Isabella (1598–1621), Ph.D. diss., Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1988.
22 See Il primo libri de madrigali, 6vv (1596); Madrigali, 8vv (1598); Madrigali, 6vv... libro II (1603);
Cantiones sacrae, 5vv (1612); Cantiones sacrae, 8vv (1613); Gemmulae sacrae, 2–3vv (1613);
Deliciae sacrae, 2–3vv (1616); Litaniae Beatae Mariae Virginis, 4–9vv (1623); and Paradisus sacris
cantionibus, 1–3vv, 1a pars (1628).