One of the things that I shared with Frank Dobbins during more than twenty years of friendship was the lute song. While his interests were mainly French, my own have always focussed more on Italy and Spain. We both loved the challenge of digging up something unknown or lost and bringing it back to life. If we could manage to upturn an apple cart or two in the process, it was even better. This article is very much for Frank. I wrote it for him, hoping he would have enjoyed it. Had I managed to finish it a few weeks earlier, he may have got to read it. I hope he still might. is a landmark year in the history of music in Italy, the year in which Giulio Caccini (‒) published Le nuove musiche in Florence. It is an emblematic work that marks the dawn of a new century and that heralds the new monodic song style, earning itself the status of an ‘epoch-making volume’ and the symbol par excellence of the new Baroque music. The same year, and only two hundred and fifty kilometres away, two similar books were printed in Venice, works that shared many features with Caccini’s. Both were issued by Giacomo Vincenti, the same printer who issued a reprint of Le nuove musiche in . One was a volume of monodies by Domenico Maria Melli, and the other was the Compositioni musicali of Heteroclito Giancarli, a book of solo songs with lute accompaniment. Ignored and forgotten by contemporary schol- arship, this present study is an initial exploration of the last of these books, a work that is one of the earliest sources of Italian lute songs composed with independent accompaniments, and therefore the first Italian book of this kind ever to appear in print. A completely unknown figure, Heteroclito Giancarli published his songs later in life, pos- sibly as a retrospective collection. Some of the pieces, in the same way as Caccini’s, may have been composed twenty or thirty years earlier and also represent an older practice. Giancarli may thus be considered a contemporary of both Caccini and the Florentine cantore al liuto Cosimo Bottegari (‒). He was also a student of Ippolito Tromboncino, the renowned . Even though Caccini’s title page gives the publication date as , the volume did not appear until July . . The description of it as ‘epoch-making’ is quoted from Tim Carter et al, ‘Caccini (): Giulio Romulo Caccini’, NG Online (accessed December ). . Domenico Maria Melli, Musiche composte sopra alcuni madrigali di diversi (Venice, Giacomo Vincenti, ), and Heteroclito Giancarli, Compositioni musicali intavolate per cantare et sonare nel liuto di Heteroclito Giancarli (Venice, Giacomo Vincenti, ). Vincenti’s publication of Melli’s solo madrigals with an unfigured bass line narrowly preceded Caccini’s Le nuove musiche, something that Caccini himself allegedly tried to suppress, and a fact that has largely been overshadowed in modern scholarship by the attention paid to the more illustrious Florentine. Heteroclito Giancarli and his Compositioni musicali of John Griffiths (Monash University & The University of Melbourne)