Marketing a Misprint

Abstract

In 1553, the Chapel Royal composer Christopher Tye published a volume containing polyphonic settings of the first fourteen chapters of the biblical book of Acts in metrical verse. This chapter analyses extant copies — the earliest of which includes a significant typographical lacuna — in order to shed light on the early practices and difficulties of printing polyphonic music in England. A comparison with contemporary English music prints reveals that English music printers were often hampered by their lack of musical literacy. Examining the extant copies of Tye’s Actes offers an opportunity to examine a range of possible errors in the process of printing musical notation in the sixteenth century, revealing the categories of musical mistakes printers and the public were willing to overlook in mid-Tudor England, and demonstrates that the level of functionality required by contemporary amateur audiences was considerably lower than that which professionalstypically expected from music manuscripts.