AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts sunday morning 179
a thriving business printing books for the musical amateur. The solution Playford and his successors
found for the practical difficulties of music printing—the expense of the process and
relatively limited market—was to concentrate on repertory they were confident of selling,
predominantly producing multi-composer anthologies of popular tunes and songs for the
domestic market, in which the repertory and practical uses to which the music could be put
were more significant than the identity of the composers. Since intellectual property rights
were not recognized at the time, composers had little or no say in what appeared in print and
may have benefited little from the publication of their music in such volumes.
In this context, it is significant that some composers, including Purcell, undertook the
financial risk of self-publishing some of their music without the involvement of a stationer.
Analysis of music books of this sort produced in England in the latter half of the seventeenth
century suggests that self-publication was undertaken for a number of quite specific purposes.
The books include the only operatic scores published in England during the seventeenth century:
Locke’s The english opera of 1675, Grabu’s Albion and Albanius of 1687, and Purcell’s The
Prophetess of 1691. None of these substantial volumes had an obvious practical use, and they
all sold poorly, but it is clear that the motive for publication was not primarily commercial, at
least for Locke and Grabu: rather they used the medium of print to make a statement about
their works’ status, as the title of Locke’s score suggests. Purcell’s print of The Prophetess was
in turn intended as a response to Grabu’s score, allowing him to claim the status of England’s
national theatre composer. So why was this score singled out among the three as a renowned
commercial disaster to which reference was still being made eleven years later?
To discover why The Prophetess earned this reputation, this paper considers closely the surviving
copies of the score, Purcell’s own response to his publication, and the broader context
of his self-publishing activities, thus uncovering the extent of his very personal involvement
in the production of the print. The evidence suggests that—despite the clear links between
his score and those of Locke and Grabu—Purcell was confused about the distinct and mutually
exclusive functions of music printing in the period, which led him to misunderstand
how he might appropriate the medium for his own benefit, a failure that perhaps indicates
that his transition from traditional employment to musical entrepreneur did not run entirely
smoothly.
“AN ANTIDOTE AGAINST MELANCHOLY”:
DECODING HIDDEN ROYALIST PROPAGANDA
JoAnn Taricani
University of Washington
The well-known collection titled Wit and Mirth, or, Pills to Purge Melancholy is celebrated
as a repository of entertaining songs. Edited and published by Thomas D’Urfey in 1719–20,
its six volumes contained over 1,100 songs, the tunes of which subsequently acquired new life
in satiric ballad operas produced in 1730s London.
The roots of this massive collection are found in a 1661 poetic miscellany titled An Antidote
against Melancholy: Made up in PiLLS. The relationship of this miscellany to Wit and Mirth
has been variously interpreted, but a clear chain of editions links the two publications. However,
the original political significance of this corpus of British song has been unacknowledged
in scholarly literature. Its cheerful poetic surface hides the passionate political undertone of its
publisher, the Royalist sympathizer John Playford, who disguised his identity with a cipher.