ABSTRACT
Music printing counts among the longest-standing interests of music historians, running right back to the eighteenth century, when the first grand histories of music appeared. In his General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present (4 volumes, London, 1776–89), the English historian Charles Burney helped to launch this historiographic tradition by stressing the watershed effect of the new technology in a long chapter titled “Of the State of Music, from the Invention of Printing till the Middle of the XVIth Century,” in which he discussed the work of Ottaviano Petrucci, the first printer to produce books of polyphonic music. Petrucci's work and his historical significance as a music printer were likewise well known to the first great Continental music historian, padre Giovanni Battista Martini of Bologna, who amassed a huge collection of sixteenth-century prints that fed his antiquarian passions and doubtless also served as source materials for his Storia della musica (3 of a projected 5 volumes, Bologna, 1757–81). Martini made a special effort to acquire Petrucci's work, and it may even have been during Burney's visit to Bologna that Martini called the Englishman's attention to Petrucci's prints, which—then as now—were a highlight of Martini's collection.
