The Revival of Music Publishing in Late Seventeenth-Century Naples: The Case of Novello De Bonis

Neapolitan music printing collapsed in the 1630s, following the global financial crisis; activity was further hit by the ‘revolt of Masaniello’ (1647) and the devastating plague of 1656. This difficult situation led to a halt in production lasting twenty-five years, from Giuseppe Ricci’s 1654 reprint of Arcadelt’s Primo libro de’ madrigali to Cataldo Amodei’s Primo libro de mottetti, published in 1679 by Novello De Bonis. De Bonis had never before produced printed music, and his debut thus represented more a revival than a resumption of local activities. On the basis of the 21 surviving editions published in Naples between 1679 and 1715 (including two otherwise unknown collections of motets by Alessandro Scarlatti and Francesco Provenzale respectively), the present study investigates the peculiarities of local production, contributes new data on the De Bonis family of printers, and examines the various types used by Neapolitan music publishers