Ballard, Lully, and the Books that Helped Change How We Think about Music

Abstract:In 1678, Parisian music printer Christophe Ballard departed from traditional practice by publishing Jean-Baptiste Lully’s tragédies en musique in full score. Score presents all vocal and/or instrumental parts in a single visual space, enabling users to form mental images of works, something impossible with the layout previously favored for ensemble music, part books, which distributed parts among different visual spaces. Other printers followed Ballard in publishing scores, thereby facilitating Music Criticism dealing in detail with specific pieces and passages. By providing access to music by means other than performance, score reified musical entities, encouraging the concept of musical works.