Music and the Book Trade, from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (review)

To the book trade, music is like Gertrude Stein's St Theresa, half in and half out of doors. It began to move out around 1700, when its printers discovered intaglio and its publishers found new markets for performers. Many of its problems, and some of its house practices, still remained those of the book world. So too its editions, which the practices of analytical bibliography need to adapt rather freely. The papers at the annual Book History conference in 2008, devoted to music, are mostly what musicologists call 'composerly'. They treat notable publishers and their dealings with the musicians who made them notable. The more prominent the composer, the more engaging the account, and the more likely the evidence will survive.

In sixteenth-century Spain, lavish patronage supported music printing mostly of conservative but stunningly beautiful folios. Was there really a book trade to talk about? Iain Fenlon, recalling his Early Music Printing and Publishing in the Iberian World (with Tess Knighton; Kassel, 2006), lays out the evidence as he focuses on Salamanca and discusses local printings as well as imports from Italy and Antwerp. The story of the emigrant Flemish typecaster/printer Artus Tavernier/Taberniel is intriguing.

The next three essays pair major English music publishers with their famous composers. William Byrd was Catholic; the printers of the Company of Stationers needed to work with Protestants. Jeremy Smith's account of Thomas East's Byrd editions thus recalls several decades of English religious politics. One asks: how often was this music, notably the Gradualia of 1605 and 1607, actually sung? Silent reading of the rich melodic lines, heightened by the religious text, was a poetic experience, apart even from imagining the vertical sonority intended in the other part-books in the set. Richard Luckett evaluates the Playfords —John with a long and famous career (like no other music publisher of his day, he saw how patronage practices were dying and marketing would be needed) —and the Purcells —Henry with a great but sadly brief lifetime. Luckett recalls the rich but largely circumstantial evidence of direct dealings: he wisely hints at but declines to cobble any grand argument of a historical synergy. His hints at the editorial hand of Frances Purcell, the composer's widow, however, will likely not go unnoticed. The Handel-Walsh relationship, in contrast, involved the marketing of engraved music to performers: a formal contract would eventually be needed. Donald Burrows recalls how, in 1710, the elder John Walsh was the main music publisher and Handel was a notable rising star: they needed each other. Around 1720 Handel looked to other firms, but in the mid 1730s returned to the younger John Walsh. In 1739 they signed a legal agreement. It is still surprising how little the overall appearance of the editions changed over nearly half a century, although Burrows and others have turned up rich bibliographical details that inform Walsh's house practices and Handel's music.

Stephen Roe's study of the 1787 sale of Carl Friedrich Abel's estate introduces the antiquarian music trade. Alec Hyatt King's Sandars Lectures, Some British Collectors of Music, c. 1600–1960 (1963) does not mention the Abel catalogue. King may not have known the surviving copy in New York, but even if he had, he probably would not have included it. Abel was not a collector, but rather a respected musician who owned nice things that came to him. Roe's wide experience in the auction rooms tells him to look at the provenance, survival, and significance of individual properties, of which the music is just as exciting but generally less pricey than the art, china, and other items.

Rupert Ridgewell ventures into a bibliographical jungle to study the shop of Artaria, the first major Viennese...