The Career of Thomas East, Elizabethan Music Printer and Publisher

In his twenty-year career as London's premier specialist in music printing, Thomas East (d. 1608) advanced the careers of new composers, introduced several musical genres (especially the English madrigal), and produced many individual prints vital to an understanding of the Renaissance musical world. Before East entered the field in 1588, music printing was a notoriously weak enterprise, with the exception of psalm-tune printing for domestic use. In 1575 a royal patent for music printing was established, but the inaugural work by composers William Byrd and Thomas Tallis lacked general appeal and was a notorious financial failure despite its high aesthetic quality and splendid production values. From the bookseller's point of view, success in the music printing industry required attention to the market, to popular tastes. This insight affected East's career as composers William Byrd and Thomas Morley successively held the royal patent. They determined what music would be printed in England, and expected an unusually high standard of editing at East's press. Byrd's staunch Catholicism also caused East to be drawn into dangerous markets of the illegal recusant community. Despite such constraints, East soon established his own entrepreneurial strategies as a publisher. He found ways to print the lucrative editions of the collected psalms under the auspices of the music patent. During gaps in the grant, he registered his rights to many musical titles, and followed this with surreptitious reprintings of the more popular editions he had premiered for other publishers. His personal stake in the music industry increased in the final stages of his career. When a non-musician acquired the patent in 1606, East used his registrations to effectively parry the monopolist's efforts at control and thereby maintained the markets he had established in the music trade. East's influence over the dissemination of his musical product, as seen in his constant search for profitable opportunities, placed him in a pivotal role within a dynamic musical community. This dissertation places East firmly within this context and illuminates thereby economic and other issues of English music history involved in musical dissemination.