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

This collection of seven essays is based on papers given at the 2007 Conference on Book Trade History, an annual event sponsored by the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association. The theme of the conference and this collection of well-researched articles was "the common ground in the broad area of book history between music and other forms of print" (p. vii). That this was the first time in its thirty-year history the conference has covered a musical topic is emblematic of the fact that book historians have typically overlooked music printing and its place within the book trade, treating it instead as a "self-contained area of research" (p. vii). In their introduction, the editors attribute the inattention to differences in production and distribution. At the same time, musicologists have only recently taken to studying the business side of music and its influence on the creation and dissemination of music. Both sides of this scholarly divide stand to benefit from convergent study considering the many areas of inquiry in common having to do with the production, distribution, and consumption of printed works.

The first essay is Iain Fenlon's "Music Printing and the Book Trade in Late-Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth-Century Iberia." Compared with other parts of Europe, the Iberian music printing industry developed to a much lesser degree and production rates were small; Fenlon points out that between 1535 and 1628 only forty-nine books containing polyphonic music were printed in Spain and Portugal. Most of the printed music in Spain, primarily liturgical, was imported; the same was true for books. Emphasizing the importance of international networks to the print trade, Fenlon maps the trade routes that linked Iberia with Western Europe and notes that music traveled to Spain via the same distribution routes that had long been established for books; at the same time, any music exported from the Spanish peninsula tended to go to the Spanish colonies. He concludes that the small size of the local printing industry was likely due more to economic factors and lack of local technical expertise than to Catholic repression, as has been the usual explanation. Fenlon's essay is the only one in the volume to address directly the role of music within the book trade.

The next three essays focus on individual composers in London and their primary publishers. Building on earlier work in his Thomas East and Music Publishing in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), Jeremy L. Smith clarifies the underlying politics involved in printing the music of recusant Catholic William Byrd in his "Turning a New Leaf: William Byrd, the East Music-Publishing Firm and the Jacobean Succession." In his account of the dealings between Byrd and East he explains: "At the heart of the relationship was a simple equation: East needed Byrd's protection as much as Byrd needed a press" (p. 32). Byrd was granted a royal patent for printing and marketing music, with which he had enormous power over the press; since he invited controversy by promoting a political-religious agenda in his music, the patent must have provided him with a sense of security. Smith explains that East benefitted from printing under the royal privilege: he could improve his standing in the Stationers Company and successfully gain access to the monopoly for printing the popular and lucrative Whole Booke of Psalms, an edition of which he published in 1592.

Richard Luckett expands our knowledge of the decades-long relationship between composer and publisher families in his essay "The Playfords and the Purcells." He traces the association through a close examination of Playford editions, gleaning information from their contents, dedications, prefaces, and title pages. Indeed, sorting out the myriad Playford editions and re-editions and "new" editions that aren't quite new can be...