Music printing and selling in Rome: new findings on Palestrina, Kerle and Guidotti, 1554–1574

This article will present and comment on four of the earliest documents, till now unknown and unpublished, concerning the printing and marketing of music in Rome. Two of them are contracts for the printing of musical works, to be added to the only two known so far for the period in object. The first is the only contract we today know about Palestrina’s compositions, and concerns his Missarum liber primus (Dorico, 1554), his first published work. The second regards the first edition of Hymni totius anni et Magnificat (Barré, 1558) by Jacobus de Kerle. The other two documents are related to the music marketing sector: they are the oldest inventories of this kind we know so far. The first is of the bookseller Antonio Maria Guidotti (1568). Unlike the following century, this confirms that (1) in such shops secular compositions prevailed considerably over the sacred, and that (2) Venetian publishing houses still predominated over Roman ones. The inventory has also emerged of a till-now-unknown author, the Flemish Giovanni Dellimale, which, besides printed works by authors so far unknown, provides us with rare evidence of the use of erasable stone tablets by composers of the period to note down their compositions.