Thomas Morley: Elizabethan Music Publisher by Tessa Murray (review)

Scholarly interest in the early history of music printing and publishing in England has grown considerably since the publication in 1975 of Donald Krummel’s seminal bibliographical study, English Music Printing, 1553–1700. During the past twenty years in particular new research has informed our knowledge of the way in which music printing both reflected and influenced sixteenth-century musical culture, while detailed bibliographical analysis of the surviving editions has revealed much about the practical challenges posed by the application of print technology to music as well as the interactions between makers, users, and disseminators of printed music. Nevertheless, as Tessa Murray herself makes clear, the notion that the first full-length study of one of the major English composers of the sixteenth century should focus primarily on his music-publishing business rather than on his music is still remarkable, and it invites us to consider Morley in a very different light from that which might have been cast by a more traditional ‘life and works’ study.

That said, the first two chapters of Murray’s book are, in fact, entirely biographical, meticulously tracing what is known about Morley’s early training and employment at Norwich Cathedral, the likelihood that he was a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, his later Chapel Royal appointment, and—crucially—the European travels that Murray believes inspired his entrepreneurial turn towards the publishing industry in the early 1590s (to which I return below). In addition, Chapters 8 and 9 also fit to some extent into the traditional mould of a ‘works’ survey—focusing first on the genre of the madrigal and then on the instrumental works Morley published, together with his famous instruction manual, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practical Musicke—although the emphasis here is on the publications themselves rather than exclusively on Morley’s own compositional output. However, the book’s central focus emerges in Chapters 3–7. Here Murray traces Morley’s career as a publisher, printer, and holder of the royal monopoly, and seeks to put these activities into the context of music publishing in late-sixteenth-century London. Chapters 10 and 11 additionally consider the impact he had on subsequent music printing and publishing in England, and there are five extensive Appendices that provide supporting data for these chapters.

Murray’s book is closely derived from her 2010 PhD thesis from the University of Birmingham, and its origins are often betrayed not only by occasional presentational glitches—the graphs on pp. 164 and 166 being of notably unprofessional appearance—but also by the sometimes pedantic attention paid to peripheral issues, such as the dispute over Chapel-Royal appointments that took place in 1592 (pp. 38–43), Susan Morley’s second marriage (pp. 95–6), and the passing of the printing patent to Edward Allde in 1612 (pp. 95–7). Familiar background material is sometimes presented in excessive detail—at least for an academic readership likely to be thoroughly familiar with (for example) Elizabeth I’s 1559 proclamation on the use of music in church (p. 14), or the essentially honorary nature of the MusB from Oxford in this period (p. 29). Indeed, on the whole there is very little about Morley to be found in Murray’s book that is entirely new or surprising, and for the most part Murray is strongly inclined to follow the traditionally accepted views both of Morley’s biography and of the demographic and social changes that took place in the latter half of the sixteenth century that allowed the new market for printed music to develop. Nevertheless, it is clearly in the field of data analysis that she feels most comfortable, and her study involves careful and close assessment of an exceptionally wide range of documentary materials, through which she is able to add a good deal of colour to the existing largely monochrome portrait of Morley’s life and career as well as aspects of the early history of music printing...