What sort of music is there? 5 of 5

There are a few odd part-books of 16th-century sacred songs and secular Lieder, but none complete. Göteborg has fragments of eight pages of frottole from around 1500, which have recently been reconstructed and turn out to be very fine.

The list of composers represented in the collections, and their apparent popularity relative to each other, shows a very different picture from that which applies today. The 'great names' are almost entirely missing - Monteverdi, Corelli, Vivaldi, J.S. Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven - and instead one finds a whole lot of names which are nowadays quite unknown (from E.G. Ablates to Frances Kappa, by way of GAG. Ferrari and Johann Schnapps), and many others which are perhaps known but whose music is seldom heard nowadays - Band, Braun, Heinichen, Johnsen, Locatelli, Rosenmüller, Stamitz, Wagenseil, and many, many more.

German is the most common language - it was indeed the normal 'cultural' language amongst upper-class Swedes in earlier times - although Sven Tiliander in Växjö wrote in Latin, with bits of Swedish here and there. French occurs from time to time, too: Salomon Eklin wrote at the beginning of one of his collections of dance-music, "La musique charme les oreilles & ravit les esprits." One title-page has a quite characteristic mixture of Swedish, German and French, "Komika Balletten pour Deux Violons..." At the foot of one ms. page, part of a sinfonia by Roman, appear the words 'Coffee, cream, Cream' in Swedish - a copyist's cry of desperation, perhaps?

There are many more manuscripts than printed works, perhaps a proportion of 5:1.

Books about music are really a separate area, although it's very important to find out just how different were the concepts and assumptions about music in earlier times - they affect very much how one performs and listens to earlier music. Växjö has a little exposition of the basic principles, from the 17th century, but otherwise there seems to be nothing in Swedish until the later 18th century (Abraham Hülphers); Johnsen wrote two pages on good performance, and a few rather patchy 'short and necessary rules for thorough-bass', in his 24 Oden (1754).