(Lat.).
A word for improvised counterpoint, and especially for florid melodies added to a cantus prius factus, used in Germany from c1500 to the middle of the 17th century. The word first appeared in a German MS of c1476 (D-Rp 98 th.4°) and shortly afterwards in Nicolaus Wollick’s Opus aureum (1501) and Enchiridion musices (1509), where sortisare (‘the improvised joining of various melodies to some chant’) was contrasted with componere, the premeditated combination of melodies interrelated by consonances but not necessarily with any reference to a cantus firmus.
The concept was described in varying degrees of detail by many 16th- and 17th-century theorists, including Andreas Ornithoparchus (1517); Heinrich Faber (1548), who divided musica poetica into sortisatio and compositio, but who rather disdained the former as more fit for the vulgar than the learned; Gallus Dressler (1563); Claudius Sebastiani (1563); Johannes Nucius (1613), who pointed out that good musicians practise the craft as well as simple people; Joachim Thuringus (1625), who cited villanelle of Regnart and even Josquin’s Stabat mater as examples of sortisatio, or at least imitations of sortisatio; and so on down to J.G. Walther (1732), in whose dictionary the term still occurs.
C. Sebastiani: Bellum musicale (Strasbourg, 1563; Ger. trans., 1876)
W. Gurlitt: ‘Der Begriff der sortisatio in der deutschen Kompositionslehre des 16. Jahrhunderts’, TVNM, xvi (1942), 194–211 [repr. in Gurlitt: Musikgeschichte und Gegenwart, i (Wiesbaden, 1966), 93ff)
E.T. Ferand: ‘Improvised Vocal Counterpoint in the Late Renaissance and Early Baroque’, AnnM, iv (1956), 129–74
C. Meyer: “‘Sortisatio”: de l'improvisation collective dans les pays germaniques vers 1500’, Polyphonies de tradition orale: Royaumont 1990, 183–200
HOWARD MAYER BROWN