John Eccles’s Collection of Songs (1704) and John Walsh’s Publishing Model in the Early Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Reviewing Eric Harbeson’s edition of John Eccles’s Judgment of Paris (1702)—part of the ongoing Works of John Eccles published by A-R Editions—Bryan White recently called for a careful appraisal of the composer’s anthology A Collection of Songs for One Two and Three Voices (1704) in order to understand better its relationship with other sources. This article takes up White’s challenge through close analysis of the 1704 Songs, focusing on the songs Walsh had published prior to Eccles’s collection. It is this aspect that makes the Songs fundamentally different from Purcell’s Orpheus Britannicus (1698) and Blow’s Amphion Anglicus (1700), both of which were typeset ex nihilo. By contrast, about one-third of the 1704 Songs not only had been previously published by Walsh but were also reprinted from the very same plates, although with frequent corrections, compositional revisions, and standardized peritextual materials (page numbering, titles and attributions, etc.). As such, the Songs offers a unique window into the editorial process in the latter stages of its preparation. After detailing the publication history of the Songs, I show that Eccles must have taken a proactive role in preparing the publication, and I examine the evidence for his musical input. The conclusions drawn from this analysis have broader implications for Walsh’s working methods, in particular the relationship between his separate songsheets of ca. 1700 and the composite publications that increasingly dominated his catalog in the first two decades of the new century.