Description
My paper looks at the world's very first music periodicals from an editorial point of view. To do this, I will look at three major players in music publishing in France at the end of the 17th century: the printer Ballard, the ‘Mercure galant’ - the first musical periodical - and the composer Bertrand de Bacilly, who used the ‘Mercure galant’ as a forum to defend his interests against Ballard, who was publishing counterfeits of his vocal and theoretical works. The ‘war’ between Bacilly and Ballard lasted until Bacilly's death, with enlarged reprints, unauthorized editions and acerbic texts on both sides. While these facts are well known to specialists, there are two new aspects to the study:
1. It was because of competition from Ballard that Bacilly collaborated with the ‘Mercure’ and determined the musical style that marked the identity of the periodical which spread throughout the salons, as it was much better distributed than the musical editions.
2. Bacilly was the real inventor of the musical journals, creating the ‘Journal de musique’. The ‘Mercure galant’ and Bacilly's journal published in parallel for two years, and Bacilly published several airs in both journals before Ballard's attacks forced him to abandon his journal. Years of study of the Mercure galant have enabled me to establish that the diversity of subject matter in this well-known cultural periodical was based on the systematic borrowing of editorial models. A close analysis of the texts on music shows that the protection afforded by the Mercure, was in fact a means of stifling any competition in the field of music periodicals. This opened the door to a whole trend of publishing songs, arias and then instrumental pieces in the cultural press in France, England and, in the 18th century, in many European countries.
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