Who bought the early printers’ wares? Petrucci’s early volumes, with their cumbersome production
methods and handsome appearance, were luxury items. We know something about their prices because of
the meticulous purchase records kept by Ferdinand Columbus, the explorer’s son and one of the great
early bibliophiles. (His collection, more or less intact, became the basis of the famous Biblioteca
Colombina in Seville, Spain.) No musician, Columbus nevertheless acquired several Petrucci items on a
buying expedition to Rome in 1512; and in the words of Daniel Heartz, whose study of Attaingnant
remains virtually the only investigation of early music printing from the consumption as well as the
production standpoint, “for the price of any one of them he might have acquired several literary works of
equivalent size.”^1
Thus the practical utility of the early Petrucci volumes was at least matched, and probably exceeded,
by their value as “collectibles,” items of conspicuous consumption—and in this they did not differ
appreciably from the twelfth-to fifteenth-century presentation manuscripts of polyphonic music with
which we are familiar. The very fact that Petrucci’s volumes, particularly of court and church music,
survive today in greater quantities than those of his eventual competitors shows that their primary
destination was not the music stand but the library shelf.
The trend, however, was toward economy and utility, which is why Attaingnant was so successful.
Even before the Paris printer revolutionized the trade, Antico experimented in Rome with smaller, less
decorative formats, single woodblock impressions, and (consequently) lower prices, to meet the needs
“especially of students of music,” as he stated in his application for a permit. He managed to undersell
Petrucci by more than fifty percent, forced down the price level of the whole industry, and eventually
squeezed Petrucci, the immortal founder, out of the music trade altogether.
Few surviving music books testify to their household use, partly because such use itself led to
deterioration: Heartz, lamenting the large number of lost Attaingnant prints, has rather pessimistically
suggested that, as a rule, “an inverse ratio exists between the popularity of music prints and their chance
of survival.” Nevertheless, we know from literary accounts that household entertainment—both
aristocratic and bourgeois, both as provided by professional entertainers and by convivial amateurs—
was the chief use to which vernacular songbooks were put, increasingly so as the sixteenth century wore
on and printed music became less a bibliophile’s novelty or prestige purchase and more a normal
household item.
Diaries, prefaces, and treatises make reference to the ritual of passing out part books at social
functions or around the table after meals. The ability to sing at sight and play an instrument increasingly
became a vital social grace on a par with dancing. Self-tutors, like the Plaine and Easie Introduction to
Practicall Musicke (London, 1597) by Thomas Morley, the musician-entrepreneur who inherited William
Byrd’s monopoly on the British music trade, were a favorite sales item in and of themselves—the
sixteenth century’s popular and commercial answer, so to speak, to the learned theoretical treatise of old.
Morley’s book opens with a preface in the form of a dialogue in which one gentleman confides to
another his social embarrassment when “supper being ended and the music books (according to the
custom) being brought to the table, the mistress of the house presented me with a part earnestly requesting
me to sing; but when, after many excuses, I protested unfeignedly that I could not, every one began to
wonder; yea, some whispered to others demanding how I was brought up.”^2 Conversation manuals,
etiquette books in which upwardly mobile burghers were trained in the manners of genteel society, often
contained model dialogues to teach their readers how to take part in such a musical party: how in polite
company, each member with a part book in hand, one inquires who is taking which part, who begins the
song, on what pitch, and so on (for an example from a Flemish etiquette book of around 1540, see Weiss
and Taruskin, Music in the Western World, 2nd ed., pp. 126–127).
Finally, one of the main consequences of the music trade and its commodifying practices was that