Music Entries at Stationers' Hall, 1710-1818.(Book Review)

Music Entries at Stationers' Hall 1710-1818. Compiled by Michael Kassler from lists prepared for William Hawes, D.W. Krummel and Alan Tyson and from other sources. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. [xxviii, 735 p. ISBN 0-7546-3458-2. $119.95.] Indexes.

Twenty years ago I would have welcomed Music Entries at Stationers' Hall, 1710-1818. Its detailed list of the musical works for which publishers and composers in Britain attempted to secure legal protection once the first copyright act came into effect in April 1710 ought to be of interest beyond the coterie of specialists in publishing history. Today, I'm not so sure that devoting 700 pages between hard covers to such information is a wise use of resources in terms of money, trees, or shelf space.

The intellectual pedigree of the material is strong, having passed through the hands and minds of an early nineteenth-century music entrepreneur and two of the most notable bibliographical scholars of the twentieth century. The initial transcription of the records from the original registers was done for William Hawes in 1819. The transcript's initial role and its subsequent whereabouts can only be a matter of speculation, for it was not until 1957 that the document resurfaced. In that year D. W. Krummel purchased the transcript from Hans Schneider, the Munich dealer. He donated it to the Newberry Library in Chicago in 1969, having made a photocopy. In the early 1970s Krummel worked with Alan Tyson on comparing the transcribed entries with the deposit copies of the music at what was then the Library of the British Museum in order to create a descriptive bibliography. It was a copy of the annotated version that Michael Kassler found in Tyson's Nachlass that prompted him to undertake the completion.

Kassler wisely accepted the abandonment of the goal initially set by Krummel and Tyson to give full details of each publication. Instead he provides fairly long titles with statements of responsibility but gives only a brief indication of the publisher, in bold type, at the head of each record. The entries are arranged in chronological order. Indexes are provided for authors (i.e., composers), writers of verbal text, performers, and dedicatees. There are no indexes of publishers or titles (to each publication or to larger works from which pieces were extracted), so it is impossible to find all entries for Longman & Broderip, for example, or to find specific operas or songs, without leafing through the whole book.

With 4,295 pieces of music listed in the book during the period 1710-1810, and an additional 1,164 from 1811-1818 that are given briefer attention, we have a clear idea of what was registered and can see that on average music publications were about 25 percent of all registrations with the Stationers' Company. But we are not any closer to understanding why these particular pieces of music were registered and others were not. For example, musical ...