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By Root 1884 0

genuine article. Paper quality might differ, but in terms of legibility a piracy was typically flawless? This ability to produce practically exact copies at very low cost revolutionized piratical possibilities. The other change was the late Victorian phenomenon of "piano mania." As middle- and lower-class incomes rose, and consumer credit became an everyday experience, so money became available for leisure. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century a number of novel ways of spending it came into being, ranging from professional football and cricket to seaside holidays and the Daily Mail. Pianos were among the most successful of all. Suddenly every aspiring family wanted what one commentator called "that highly respectablising piece of furniture." By i9oo, the proportion of Britons buying pianos (generally German imports) was far greater than that of French or Germans, and was exceeded only by the rate among Americans. In i9io there was a piano to every ten or so people in the country. The boom created a completely new market for music.

Where pianos went, piano music had to follow. Middle- and lowerclass amateurs created a huge new demand for cheap sheet music. Music publishers used all the tools of late Victorian commerce-newsagent networks, railways, and telegraphy- to distribute their wares to what was becoming the first musical mass market. One of the largest even branched out into making pianos itself. At first the publishers concentrated on piano reductions of operas and symphonies-you could even buy a transcribed Tannhduser. But soon they saw the chance to create a new kind of celebrity for some of the songs they "plugged," and began fostering Grub Street composers dedicated to the rapid-fire production of pieces playable by mediocre performers in front of inattentive listeners. The social practice of music changed quite substantially as professional virtuosity diverged from, and increasingly disdained, this burgeoning realm of amateurs, who were trained by an equally burgeoning crowd of unregulated so-called professors. No wonder that at the height of the piano boom serious musicians could be heard condemning the instrument as "an evil influence upon home music."8

By the late nineteenth century, legislation had largely eliminated the kind of freedom that had made the earlier wholesale appropriations of music above board. But the new mass market threatened to make enforcement in practice virtually impossible. The new piracy began to take off in the late i89os, and really exploded at the start of the new century. At first it manifested itself mainly in metropolitan thoroughfares like the Strand and Fleet Street. But it was soon "all over the place."" It became ubiquitous, large scale, and sometimes breathtakingly insouciant. Nor was piracy solely restricted to "popular" music-hall fare and the like. Contemporary lists dating from the i88os to the Edwardian era show that alleged piracies included works by Massenet, Sullivan, Gounod, Puccini, Mascagni, and even the occasional Wagner, as well as countless marches by a reliably indignant Sousa. The pirates copied any music that would pay, and as performance was democratized and domesticated this came to mean a very great deal of music indeed.

If it was a new mass market that drove piracy, what made it almost respectable was a widespread if intermittently expressed sense of resentment at the traditional music publishing companies. Like the eighteenthcentury grandees attacked by Alexander Donaldson, they were seen as nepotistic, unimaginative, monopolistic, and secretive, and in the economic culture of the late Victorian era these were worse sins than they had been a century earlier. In 1899 composers even took the same step that authors had tried so many times, forming an association to publish music on their own behalf. It aimed to secure for its members "the full benefit of any financial reward" from their efforts. It seems to have been a failure, but its message was clear enough. Moreover, retailers too complained about the publishers. They objected to high prices,