The History Of Music Publishing

The printing press was invented in 1450, and prints of liturgical chants from 1465 are the earliest known
examples of sheet music in existence. Before around 1600 almost all printed music was religious in nature and owned by the Catholic Church, apart from a few collections of secular music that was commissioned and owned by wealthy noblemen. Before this time, monks and priests who wanted to preserve sacred music for the church would undertake the labour-intensive and time-consuming task of copying out the music by hand.

Ottaviano Petrucci was an Italian printmaker, considered the father of modern music printing, who although not the first music printer in Europe, was the first to print polyphonic music and to print in quantity. The quality of his prints were also renown. In 1498 he petitioned the Doge of Venice for the exclusive right to print music for the next 20 years, and which was granted. He shortly thereafter produced the aforementioned collection of polyphonic music which he called the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton. The collection contained 96 polyphonic compositions, mainly by Josquin des Prez and Heinrich Isaac. The high quality of his prints was assured do to his 'triple impression' method of printing, whereby the first press printed the staff lines, the second press the words and the third the notes themselves. This process was expensive and time-consuming, but produced very clean work.

A single-impression method for printing music was developed in England in around 1520 by John Rastell. This made sheet music much easier to produce, albeit not as clean and tidy as Petrucci's method as staff lines would often be out of alignment. This more time and cost efficient way eventually became the dominant method of printing until being surpassed by copper-plate engraving in the 1600's.


Sheet Music Printing in the Classical Era

Germany is widely hailed as the birthplace of modern music publishing, mainly due to the work of two major German music publish houses, Breitkopf & Härtel and Schott.

The world's oldest music publishing house is Breitkopf & Härtel which was founded in Leipzig in 1719 by Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf . Originally devoted exclusively to printing books, in 1736 the company produced Schemellis Gesangbuch, a collection of songs and arias by J.S. Bach, printed during the composer's lifetime. The printing of these works gave an indication of the firm's future music printing activities. Shortly after Bach's death, Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf, son of the founder of the company, made improvements to the printing method in the form of his 'mosaic' type. He broke each character up into several parts, two for a clef, three or four for a note, and this produced a much more pleasing appearance. He also later invented a type-face that is still known and valued today, called Breitkopf Fraktur. In 1795 Gottfried Christoph Härtel took over the company, which in turn was then named Breitkopf & Härtel. Thereafter the firm became the original publishers for many great German composers, including Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and Wagner.

Bernhard Schott, copperplate engraver and clarinettist founded the Schott Publishing House in Mainz in 1770. The company was one of the first to use the printing technique of lithography, invented in 1796 by actor and playwright Alois Senefelder, where a flat stone plate would be treated with a mixture of acid, gum arabic and water, attracting ink to only the desired areas to produce an image. Using this method allowed Schott's publications to be produced cheaply and on a wide scale. Throughout the 1800's, the company expanded outside of Germany, opening branches in Antwerp, Paris, London and Brussells. Notable publications of the Schott publishing house include the works of the Mannheim school, piano reductions of Mozart’s operas Don Giovanni and Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and the late masterworks of Beethoven, including the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis and the String Quartets Op. 127 and Op. 131.