CLAUDIO MERULO, Toccate d’Intavolatura d’Organo. Libro Primo, Libro Secondo (2 vols.). Fondazione Accademia di Musica Italiana per Organo di Pistoia. To some, the keyboard music of Claudio Merulo (1533–1604) is an unenlightened succession of formula-ridden harmonies and uninspired runs and trills, yet Merulo was an esteemed performer and transcriber in his time, and these works continue to occupy a certain pride of place as some of the oldest legitimate repertory in many an organ library. Moreover, as the original cover-titles indicate, they were specifically designated for the organ, rather than as generic keyboard music. The two books of Toccate d’intavolatura (so named, presumably, because they are written on a great staff and not in open score) comprise a single opus, insofar as the first book traverses the first four church modes, while the second book traverses the fifth through the tenth church modes. The present edition contains 19 toccatas, in vertical format, with facsimile title-pages and diplomatic renditions of the dedication-pages. It purports to preserve the original distributions between the hands, the character of the part-writing (by not adding rests), and the character of the harmony (by not adding too many accidentals), but Merulo’s original staves, clefs, and accidentals are modernized, and multiple single-direction note-stems are not preserved. The result is yet another credible “urtext” that is still all-too-far removed from the original 16th and 17th-century editions.