This chapter and the next examine in more detail how Morley responded to market needs through his choice of music for his customers. To support this discussion information is provided in Appendix 5 for each of his publications, comprising both a bibliographical description of the work as a whole and a table of its contents which includes sufficient analysis to place the volume in a wider context.

The spread of the madrigal and related forms

The madrigal and its lighter related forms, particularly the villanella and then the canzonetta, were the mainstays of music publishing in sixteenth-century Italy. Following Petrucci's early frottola collections, madrigal printing blossomed in the late 1530s and 1540s, as a growing interest in the genre coincided with the adoption of the single-impression printing process in Venice in 1538, significantly reducing both the labour involved and the resultant purchase price for consumers. While the development of the serious madrigal may have depended upon the Italian academies – sophisticated literary and musical societies – the mass production of madrigals in the form of printed editions predated the full establishment and spread of such artistic circles, which in any case could not have provided a sufficiently large audience to consume a print run of five hundred or more copies. A much broader market for music for amateur, domestic performance, must have been emerging in order to justify the investment made by printers and publishers.