3 - Novello, John Stainer and Commercial Opportunities in the Nineteenth- Century British Amateur Music Market

Summary

When the present writer was in his teens, the price of music was more than twenty times what it now is. The first guinea that he recollects having been given to him, in 1837, was expended in a pianoforte score of The Messiah which is now published at a shilling.

George Grove, 1887

JAMES Raven concludes his historical survey of the cultural, social and commercial development of the English book trade by stating, ‘For many it is no longer sufficient to study literature without considering larger publishing strategies, professional networks, and the manner in which booksellers put the work of writers into print and created a literary market.’ Raven argues that the factors which determine a book's availability (i.e. the motivation of the publisher) and its acquisition (i.e. the motivation of the purchaser and/or reader) cast their own interpretative light on the way these texts were consumed and received by those who encountered them. Raven's historiography of books and other printed sources has considerable relevance for the distribution and acquisition of music's materials. The present chapter focuses on aspects of the output of the London music publisher Novello in the late nineteenth century, using the case of the composer John Stainer and his oratorio The Crucifixion, to illustrate how a strategic approach to culture and commerce could be calculated to profitable effect by composer and publisher alike.

The chapter shows that Novello's publishing decisions were strongly determined by the commercial realities of the markets it supplied. Nineteenthcentury British music publishers enjoyed relatively little latitude because income was so sales dependent, trading on the number of copies of works in their catalogues that were purchased by consumers. Thus, profitability for Novello was effectively no different from commercial success in most other tradable commodities: it resulted from the ability to stimulate and satisfy customer demand at acceptable prices. Novello used market-savvy to encourage its most successful composers to produce more of what its musical consumers wanted and would continue to buy. And what is striking about the huge Novello catalogue (yet inevitable, given the scale of the firm's profitability) is that so much of what it published was simply utilitarian, whether sacred or secular in purpose.