Selling the Score: Entrepreneurs and New Markets for Printed Music in Eighteenth-Century England

Bridge, Dominic (2023) Selling the Score: Entrepreneurs and New Markets for Printed Music in Eighteenth-Century England. PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the visual presentation of eighteenth-century musical scores through an analysis of their graphic and textual features. It establishes the technological and editorial links between the music, print, and book trades, and explains how publishers developed their commercial practices in response to the religious, gendered, and political identities of their customers. Based on a broad study of the printed music collections at the British Library, the research spans bibliographic, book historical, and musicological scholarship. The theoretical foundations of the project are grounded in textual studies and use Gerard Genette’s paratextual theory to discuss how publishers made creative use of the unique printed space on the title pages, frontmatter, and around the notation of their printed editions. The first part of the thesis, Image and text, contextualises the music publishing trade within the wider commercial environment of eighteenth-century England. It presents music publishing as intertwined with the graphic print and book trades, traces the intermedial borrowings between print forms, and explains how the influence of individuals working across the print trades changed the graphic and textual presentation of printed music. It will build music publishers into Neil McKendrick’s narrative of the eighteenth-century consumer revolution, as part of the community of innovative entrepreneurs who created and developed markets for new and old forms of printed material. The second part of the thesis, New markets for printed music, traces the creativity of music publisher entrepreneurs who shaped their scores for different markets exploiting themes of religion, gender, and patriotism. Through a series of case studies, it establishes how music publishers attempted to shape the social life of scores through their editorial control of the printed page. The interactions between religion and musical print are explored through a discussion of the hymnbooks of the Foundling, Lock, and Magdalen hospital chapels and a close look at the substantial book trade activities of Baptist minister, John Rippon. The gendered expectations of musical performance are traced through the title pages and prefaces of keyboard instruction manuals and the concept of gift giving is used to explain how scores modelled expected romantic and commercial behaviours. The thesis will close with a discussion of how music publishers responded to the commercial opportunities provided by the Revolutionary wars, analysing how printed music was used to extend public expressions of patriotism and loyalist sentiment through the adoption of naval painting and the use of textual hierarchies on the title pages of battle music and commemorative editions.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Book History, Commerce, Consumer Revolution, Eighteenth Century, Marketing, Paratext, Printed Music, Publishing
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Histories, Languages and Cultures
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	06 Feb 2024 08:32
Last Modified:	06 Feb 2024 08:32
DOI:	10.17638/03176858
Supervisors:	Towsey, Mark Ridgewell, Rupert Spitzer, Michael
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3176858