PRAETORIUS, MICHAEL. - Composer and music theorist, b. 15 February 1571 at Kreuzburg (Thuringia), d. 15 February 1621 at Wolfenbüttel (Brunswick). He was organist (from 1604), chapel master, and secretary to the Duke of Brunswick at Lüneburg, and held the title of prior of Ringelheim.
Numerous collections of his compositions were printed (especially noteworthy are the nine parts of Musae Sioniae, 1,244 songs [Wolfenbüttel 1605–10]); but his principal work is the treatise Syntagma musicum, in 3 vols. The first, in 2 parts (I, Wolfenbüttel 1614; II, Wittenberg 1615), written in Latin with German interpolations, contains a historical excursus on ancient music, with the secular instruments pertaining to it, and on ecclesiastical music. The second, likewise in 2 parts (I, Wolfenbüttel 1619; II, ibid. 1620), written in German, is the most important repertory for the history of the musical instruments of his time, also because it is enriched by 42 valuable plates depicting the instruments themselves by groups and families (it was reprinted in facsimile, with an introduction by W. Gurlitt [Kassel 1920], as vol. XIII of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung). The third (Wolfenbüttel 1619), containing theories and examples of musical composition, is valuable for the history of solmization, notation (ligatures, proportions), tactus, basso continuo, etc. (reprinted by E. Bernoulli in 1916).