The Mass-Produced Miniature Score and the Classical Chamber Canon

This article examines an understudied genre of music publication that gained popularity in the final decades of the nineteenth century: the mass-produced miniature score. While there had been earlier attempts at small-format publishing, it was in 1886 that the Leipzig-based firm Albert Payne started to issue its Kleine Partitur-Ausgabe—a series of cheap, pocket-sized scores of canonical chamber works sold to music lovers in Germany, Austria, and Britain. Inspired by recent scholarship on print culture, the article considers Payne’s scores as a form of print media, outlining developments in music publishing that enabled the production of these small volumes and comparing them to related musical and literary commodities such as the analytical program note, the piano duet arrangement, and the paperback book. The later sections of the article deal with the reception and use of the Kleine Partitur-Ausgabe. Sold at the Joachim Quartet concerts in Berlin and at the chamber concerts held in the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Payne’s scores were the subject of numerous newspaper reviews in both cities. In Britain a revealing example of the personal use of the Kleine Paritur-Ausgabe is provided by the annotated scores and correspondence of the teenaged Donald Francis Tovey. Collectively these explorations of Payne’s small scores offer new insights into their capacity to encourage attentive, work-focused listening practices and to enable a new kind of material connection with the Austro-German chamber canon.