‘SOME favour a perfect 4th; I a major 2nd.’ Thus Roger Bowers, embarking on a recent second attempt to promote a rather idiosyncratic hypothesis of downward transposition for Monteverdi's highclef writing, notably in the 1610 Magnificat a7 (see Bowers, ‘“The high and lowe keyes come both to one pitch”: Reconciling Inconsistent Clef- Systems in Monteverdi's Vocal Music for Mantua’, Early Music 39/4 (2011), 531–46). Undeterred by the fact that in similar contexts the composer's contemporaries appear invariably to have avoided the smaller interval of transposition (↓2nd), Bowers elaborates a theory manifestly born of a strong personal aversion to the conventional larger interval (↓4th) when applied to these particular works: ‘the entire tessitura is dragged bodily downwards … and the overall sound is effectively decapitated’, all of which ‘traduces the music without appearing to make any compensatory rational sense’.

Readers who may not wish to revisit the byways of opposing thinking on this issue1 will perhaps do well to rest content with the testimony of a man who knew more about early 17th-century Italian music and its workings than most of us today: Monteverdi's contemporary, the eminent and versatile German composer, theorist, organist and Capellmeister, Michael Praetorius (1571–1621):

This is neither second-hand dogma nor casual oversimplification. Unanimous confirmation of these clear principles comes from copious Italian sources, emphatically answering Bowers's question: ‘what did north Italian musicians of c. 1600–10 expect to be told by the clefs of the music they were performing?’ As a sample, Table 8.1 lists almost 100 documented cases of the explicit link between high-clef notation and transposition ↓4th (and ↓5th). By contrast, not a single contemporary example of downward transposition by as little as a tone (↓2nd) has thus far been identified in association with high clefs. Arguing nevertheless for a ‘fluidity’ of transposition practice that would allow this smaller interval, Bowers cites the organ book of a motet collection by Giovanni Croce, where a variety of options is given.