Music printing before 1590

In September 1591, when Thomas Morley was in the Low Countries, he could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of publications of music of a not entirely devotional nature that had been printed in England during the previous decade, all of them in the last four years. To these could be added Byrd's two new volumes of motets. If he visited the Phalèse and Plantin shops in the Kammenstraat in Antwerp, he would have seen volumes of chansons and motets produced by Phalèse, lute books, anthologies of Italian madrigals, some single-composer volumes of music by Italians, and music for smaller ensembles, such as Jean de Castro's reduced-force arrangements of well-known works. He may well have been struck by the number of local composers whose music appeared in print. As well as recent publications, Phalèse also had a large back-catalogue, and it is likely that some of Susato's prints from the 1540s and 1550s were still available, too. If he met Peter Philips, his ex-colleague would surely have shown him his own anthology of Italian madrigals, Melodia olympica, published by Phalèse that year, within months of Philips's arrival in Antwerp. Even a visit to a bookseller in Brussels, particularly one supplied by Plantin with his own and others' publications, would have given Morley a taste of a more developed music publishing business than existed in London. On this evidence Morley could reasonably have concluded that there must be a market in London for music by English composers, straightforward enough for amateur performance and with a hint of the Italian about it.