TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
9th Biennial Conference on Baroque Music
ABSTRACT
The Promotion of Italia in Print: Pierre Phalèse and the
Marketing of Madrigal Anthologies in the North
Susan G. Lewis
Central to the “success” of the madrigal in northern Europe—the genre enjoyed
great prestige outside Italy well into the seventeenth century—were the
commercial and marketing strategies adopted by the Antwerp-based printer-editor
Pierre Phalèse (c.1550-1629), the principal supplier of Italian
madrigals to northern courts, institutions, and cities. The most
important (and perhaps the most obvious) strategy of northern promoters
of the madrigal was the preference for the anthology over the single-composer
edition, a preference which gave printers more control over the market
for Italian music in the north. Taking Venetian editions as a source
base for their collections, madrigals were recombined and recontextualised
in an effort to adapt the genre to the northern marketplace. Further,
just over half of Phalèse's collections were reprints or re-editions
of his first four anthologies—Musica divina, Harmonia celeste, Symphonia
angelica, and Melodia olympica—a promotional “re-release” strategy
which (judging from Phalèse’s sales to the Officina Plantiniana)
met with some degree of success. A more direct appeal to non-Italian
consumers was made by “northernising” editions by including contributions
by regional and Antwerp-based composers in the hopes of tapping into a
pre-existing market for polyphonic music. This familiarisation process
was furthered by the “packaging” of anthologies, which aimed at drawing
the foreign genre into the representational idioms of the northern print
world. Dedications (often coupled with “dedicatory madrigals”) to
dignitaries in the region, a consistent, “house-style” title-page design,
and the titles themselves were recognised as important advertising mechanisms
for encouraging northern interest in the Italian madrigal.
Last updated on 8 June 2000 by Yo
Tomita