Introduction

This chapter explores the use of a similar computational method to trace the origins of keyboard compositions from the early seventeenth century by composers from England who were active in the Spanish Netherlands. This music circulated in manuscripts rather than in print, travelling along networks of composers, players and scribes in such a way that attributions sometimes become questionable. Pattern recognition algorithms are able to infer a model of the authorship of a certain composer from a collection of undisputed example compositions represented as feature values. An anonymous and untitled piece in Lg has been considered a 'Sweelinckian emulation by some student or an admirer who was well acquainted with Sweelinck's mature keyboard music' by Pieter Dirksen and, accordingly, by Jean Ferrard. Diminutions provide a good starting point for computational analysis of this repertoire because the amount of data is manageable.