The Printing Press as an Agent of Change... In Musical Culture
Just as Elizabeth Eisenstein suggests that the invention of the printing press was a springboard for humanism and the scientific revolution, the same can be said for the printing press’ impact on the accessibility of written music and as a result of this, the spread of musical literacy among the newly formed European middle class. I argue that without the invention of the printing press or an invention that could produce a similar product, the spread of musical literacy, as well as the popularization of secular polyphonic music, would not have happened as fast as it did.
However, the trajectory to the eventual universal adoption of moveable type notation wasn’t immediate or simple. Early print music culture went through several major changes during the course of the sixteenth century following the introduction of the printing press. To illustrate the diversity of printing techniques as well as the aesthetic changes over the course of the century, I have chosen three rare books from the CRRS which all use different printing techniques to varying ends. The goal of contrasting these three works is to demonstrate the varied and chaotic nature of music printing in its first century.
Overview
The earliest work I have selected is the Opening from an antiphonary which is dated to c.1510, with unspecified German origin which is printed using the double impression method. The second work is Johannes Reuchlin’s Scenica Progymnasmata which is a 1540 reprint of his popular 1498 Latin school drama. It employs woodcut prints instead of moveable type in its polyphonic musical interludes. Finally, my last selected work is a 1567 Italian translation of Vitruvius’ I dieci libri dell'architettura, wherein the editor uses single-impression printed musical examples to illustrate Vitruvius’ acoustical theories.
Historical Context
Early Music Printing
The first known pieces of music to be printed using moveable type notation are religious works. These were most in demand, and largely the most expensive types of music to produce, as it was the custom for psalters and antiphonaries to be elaborately and meticulously hand-copied using fine materials. The Constance gradual, printed in 1473, is the first known music book printed using moveable type. The technique used to produce it is double-impression printing, meaning that that the staves were printed first, and the notes were added later, with the elaborate red initials drawn by hand.
Like early book culture, music printing culture strove to imitate the aesthetics of manuscript culture as closely as possible. And in the case of music, the choice to imitate manuscript was not only fueled by scholarly bias against the printed book, but by practicality. Religious music books like antiphonaries were physically large and used contrasting colours of ink because choirs usually only had one book to sing from. The text had to be easy to read from a distance, and while printed antiphonaries were cheaper to produce, cultural change happens slowly, and individual religious music books did not become common until later in the sixteenth century. This German antiphonary from the CRRS collection printed c. 1510, uses the double-impression printing technique used in the earliest print music. Looking closer at the print, it’s possible to see the breaks in the bar lines, indicating sections of moveable type laid next to one another to form longer bar lines.
Alternate Techniques
There wasn’t one single method of printing music in use during the sixteenth century and in some cases, moveable type printing didn’t make sense. Especially early in the century, moveable type notation was an expensive investment that required specialized printers. Unlike the printed word, music had an added dimension that increased the complexity of printing. The overlaying of notes over the staff is complicated and musically illiterate printers were very liable to make mistakes. Therefore, when possible, it was a better idea to commission wood-blocks to be made instead of using moveable type. A book in which this was the case is in this 1540 reprint of Johannes Reuchlin’s 1498 drama, Scenica Progymnasmata. This work contains four choruses, one between each act of the play, and in addition to this, the music is polyphonic and not monophonic, like the chant from the antiphonary. Polyphonic music is much more complex to print because it requires different note values, specialized symbols, and sophisticated knowledge of music to catch mistakes. Acquiring these specialized symbols as well as highly skilled labour would have been much more costly than simply asking a woodcarver to carve a woodblock with handwritten music as a reference. Woodblock for music printing had already been in use since the early fifteenth century, before the printing press had been invented, and much like the manuscript tradition which continued long after printed books had become more accessible, woodblock printing continued to be used quite frequently in situations where a full book of music was not needed or the music was too complex to print.
Later Innovations in Music Printing
While the techniques used in double and even triple impression printing had been mastered by many different skilled printers over the course of the century after the printing press was first introduced, the process was still labour-intensive and expensive. The technique of single impression printing was first used by Pierre Attaingnant of Paris in 1528 in his first book of chansons. This technique allows for notes, symbols, and staff to be represented on one piece of type and does not need separate impressions. The example we have here from the CRRS collection is a 1567 translation of Vitruvius’ I dieci libri dell’architettura which shows the use of single impression type at its most elegant. Single impression type, while much cheaper and more convenient, often appeared messy and disjointed if the pieces of type were not precisely lined up with one another. But, despite this messiness, this type was adaptable and complex enough to keep up with the needs of the day. Music became gradually more florid and varied as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries went on and musical tastes changed, and single impression type was able to adapt alongside it.
In Conclusion
By the end of the seventeenth century, moveable type music printing was fighting a losing battle against copper engraving, which had been gradually introduced as a music printing technique beginning in the late sixteenth century. This was the death knell for moveable type music as copper engraving, a technique already very much in use for other visual mediums such as maps, was far easier to use, store for reprinting, and produced clearer results. Despite the new obsolescence of the printing press in music printing, the actual invention of the press was extremely important in the dissemination of musical materials across Europe. Even in cases where the actual music was not printed using a press, the medium of the personal printed book was what allowed people to gain access to affordable music of increasing complexity and specialization. Before the invention of the press, music was expensive and hard to come by and was mostly learned and taught orally. This only allowed for so much complexity, as there is a limit to what a human can memorize. For this reason, I believe that moveable type not only allowed for the spread of increasingly complex music but actually partly catalyzed the explosion of Baroque music in the early seventeenth century.
Bibliography
Bernstein, Jane A. Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2001.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Fenlon, Ian. Music, Print, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy. The British Library: London, 1995.
King, A. Hyatt. Four Hundred Years of Music Printing. Trustees of the British Museum: London, 1964.
Lindmayr-Brandl, Andrea, Elizabeth Griselbrecht, and Grantley McDonald. Early Music Printing in German-Speaking Lands. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Van Orden, Kate. Music, Authorship, and the Book in the First Century of Print. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2014.