Printing and Publishing of Music

This article covers the dissemination of musical scores by technical means. The function of both printing and publication is to produce multiple copies of a work or a group of works and to arrange for the distribution of those copies to many purchasers. This requires diverse skills: on the one hand, the ability to print, involving preparing a copy of the music in a form suitable for the printing press, and then producing the copies; on the other, to make marketing decisions, to handle advertising and distribution of copies to individuals or to music shops, and to budget and plan for profits. Since the first printed music produced by Ottaviano Petrucci at the beginning of the 16th century, printing has been developed in Europe on a broad scale. Its technical requirements have changed from movable type to engraving, lithography, and, most recently, the computer. Entries are arranged to cover these activities separately, and then provide an introduction to bibliography, the scholarly study of both activities. Descriptive bibliography and analytic bibliography are recent in the field of music; they have been primarily devoted to the study of the printers and publishers from the 16th to the 18th centuries established in the main centers in Europe, including Venice, Paris, Antwerp, Frankfurt, London, and Vienna. Specific topics have become of increasing interest in recent years, including patterns of distributing copies and reaching markets and music appearing in general cultural periodicals and magazines. In addition, two subjects have risen to importance, the first, the paratext, or matters of design, which is sparsely discussed in connection with music; and the second, the place of music and its editions in cultural and intellectual history. Use of printed music has changed during the 20th century. Employed as a mean for performing and circulating music among musicians, professionals, and amateurs during four centuries, printed music became a support to produce performing rights when audiovisual media became the main access to music. Another important evolution has been the production of different kind of editions. During a long period, publishers sold the music written day by day for the entertainment of specific groups in society and for a specific purpose—liturgy, concert life, house music. Following a growing interest in the music of the past, they began to produce collected works and critical editions that reconcile mass production to the quality of the publishing.

The 500th anniversary of the first music printing: a history of patronage and taste in the early years

Ottaviano Petrucci published his first book of music, the Odhecaton A, sometime in the summer of 1501, 500 years ago. Since it was the first, Petrucci faced a number of special problems. Some were financial, for he could not know how many people would buy printed music, or how many books they would want. Consequently, there was a danger that he might not sell as many books as he needed to cover his costs. A related set of problems concerned the choice of music to print: would his books be bought by professional musicians and their institutions, or by dilettantes, courtiers and amateurs? Could chansons be expected to sell better than church music? Petrucci's answers to these problems would depend on whether he had to finance his editions himself, or whether some patron or musician would offer to underwrite an edition for him. Using bibliographical and biographical data, this paper argues that some of Petrucci's earliest editions were speculative ventures on the part of his partners and himself, while others were probably commissioned from Petrucci by an outside patron. Petrucci seems to have had to balance speculative with commissioned editions throughout his career: the market may not have been big enough to support only speculative editions. It was certainly not big enough to support more than one publisher of music. This situation seems to have continued well into the 1530s arguing that the big expansion in amateur musicians did not occur until then.