Preface

Summary

In 1975 Donald Krummel expressed the view that there was no money to be made at the end of the sixteenth century from publishing music other than psalters, and that it required the emergence of John Playford, fifty years later, to ‘understand the basic problem of music publishing in his day: his major task was one, not of printing music, but of finding purchasers who would buy the music he printed’. If this were truly the case, why did Thomas Morley persist in issuing new music publications nearly every year from 1593 until the year before his death in 1602? Was money no object to Morley, was someone else taking the financial risk, or was Krummel's interpretation of the situation incorrect? After completing a business career lasting nearly thirty years, I was poised to return to musicology, and it seemed to me that the challenge of attempting to answer these questions would be an ideal project. I found that there was a growing middle-class market in Elizabethan England with an appetite for recreational music-making, and with the potential and means to purchase music rather than relying solely on the circulation of manuscript copies. By applying simple, but sound, business evaluation techniques to the evidence of contemporary documents and the music prints themselves, it became clear that money could be made from music publishing, provided the music published appealed to its audience.