issued in 1528. That same year he issued five more sets of part books, averaging thirty songs apiece, and
one set of dance music, plus one volume of motets. That would remain Attaingnant’s effective ratio
between the universal sacred and the local secular repertory for the duration of his career as printer,
which lasted until 1557.
Attaingnant was more than a printer, and had an impact on the music trade that far exceeded his
activities as publisher. For he was the inventor of a new laborsaving and cost-cutting method for music
typography that swept Europe in the 1530s and completely transformed the business, making real mass
production and high-volume distribution possible. The method employed by Petrucci and the other early
Italians had required a triple impression. A page was fed to the presses once for the staves, again for the
notes, and yet again for the titles and texts. The result was stunning, and Petrucci’s early books were never
surpassed as models of printerly art, but the process wasted time and was overly exacting: a great deal of
spoilage took place due to “misregistration” (failure of the impressions to line up exactly with one
another).
FIG. 17-1 Above: Specimens of Pierre Attaingnant’s movable music type (Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp). Opposite:
Superius and tenor parts from Claudin de Sermisy’s Tant que vivray, in Chansons musicales, esleus de plusieurs livres par ci-
divant imprimés, les tous dans un seul livre ... réimprimées par P. Attaignant [sic], imprimeur et libraire de musicque (Paris, 1536).
The typically wordy title translates as “Songs with Music, Chosen from Several Books Printed by the Above-Named, All in One
Book Reprinted by P. Attaingnant, Printer and Seller of Musical Books.”
Attaingnant’s method was much more like alphabetic typography. Every possible note-and rest-shape
was cast along with a short vertical fragment of the staff on a single piece of type. When these were
placed in a row by the compositor like bits of letter type and printed, the staff-lines joined together, or
nearly so. The result was far less elegant than Petrucci’s, but so much more practical and economical that
the older typographical method could not stand a chance against the new. Attaingnant’s method remained
standard as long as typography was the print medium of choice for music—until the eighteenth century,
that is, when copperplate engraving came into widespread use.