An Essay on the Historic Role
of Sheet Music Cover Art
by Bill Edwards:
Contents Copyright ©2001 by William G. Edwards
There were a number of reasons for this, many of which are discussed in a separate article about Ragtime and the Economy. In short, expansionism to the American west was still in the early stages, railroads and convenient methods of shipping were not yet a reality, and the average consumer did not own a piano. As a result, music publishing was primarily a regional business, augmented by imports from Europe. Also, printing presses were very much in demand for newspapers and magazines, and a difficult to obtain commodity in pre-industrial years. Just the same, since there was no prevalent market for printed music, there was little necessity for marketing it. Many publishers were happy to sell anything, and they believed that the demand for their music should be fueled by the music itself, not the package it was contained in.
An early edition of the Star Spangled Banner.
The first edition consisted only of music.
It was until at least the 1840s that the majority of sheet music was
identified by its unique size (approximately 11"x14") and a text-based
cover, often with highly
ornamental fonts and a simple graphic, or text incorporated into a graphic
as displayed to the left. Some pieces simply had no formal cover and the
music started right on the front page. There were the occasional colorful
lithographs for special occasion music, but these were very much the
expensive exception, with lithography largely reserved for formal artwork.
Across the ocean in England and Germany, color lithography, although still
in its infancy in the 1840s, was a still a reality. The artwork used for
both American and British sheet music was, in some cases, something
commercially available for a variety of purposes or themes, and could easily
be reused for many different titles. However, The costs involved with
printing colorful artwork often outweighed the benefits, so at best many
sheet music covers with any art at all on them presented the graphic a
single color and the text in black. The graphics were either woodcuts or
simple lithographs. The primary method for coloring was by hand, and usually
done on formal lithographic art rather than sheet music.
Shortly after the end of the Civil War, the United States started catching up with Great Britain and Europe in the quality of sheet music printing, and in cover art. Many pieces had artwork designed specifically to reflect the contents of the music, ranging from classically styled portraits to those depicting comic stereotype, as shown on the right.
 |
A leader in music publishing, distribution, and cover
design at this time was the Oliver Ditson Company, which was based in
Boston and had branches throughout the major United States cities. They were
among the first to introduce widespread uniform distribution of certain
pieces while maintaining others within their locality, and early form of
judicious marketing. The use of illustrated covers, which were in line with
other publications of the post-Civil War era, was a conscious effort to
facilitate sales.
The American buying public became more prosperous through the decades of the
1870s and 1880s. The movement of the population in the east from rural to
urban life soon took hold, as well as a large influx of immigrants into the
cities. The children of established farmers in the east were less likely to
inherit a piece of land from their parents since so much of it was already
utilized. So they became miners, bankers, storekeepers, traveling salesmen
or businessmen. Musicians remained musicians, but there was increased demand
for their services. As career paths and work patterns changed, so did the
amount of leisure time for the family. All of this meant more customers with
pianos or some other instrument, some extra spending money, and the time to
enjoy their purchases. There were an enterprising few in fledgling
leisure-based lines of work that soon found how to take advantage of this.
In the 1880s consumers in the Western world started responding to certain
pieces that had appealing cover art, something that many publishers took
note of. Over the next decade publishers would continue to increase their
efforts to create appealing covers, regardless of the contents of the piece,
often with disastrous financial consequences, and frequently with offensive
results in terms of stereotype. In essence, the sheet music industry was
slowly joining, to some extent, the advertising industry in terms of
marketing their product. But at some point publishers started to create
works of lasting value, both musically and visually. By the end of the
nineteenth century only one of those publishers would stand head and
shoulders above the rest in regards to sheet music cover art and the power
of marketing
Let us break away for a minute to discuss the printing process. Much as with computer publishing programs of the twenty-first century, there were two major elements of page composition in the nineteenth century. Those are, of course, text and graphics. In a sense, text is a graphic of sorts, since each letter is essentially a picture, one that varies from one font-face to another.
 |
The text was often assembled from leads, which were individual letters made
from the soft metal that gave them their name. Letter designers created a
variety of font faces and sizes, and many publishers employed such
designers, while others bought up letters from contractors or by mail order.
In the case of music publishing, the use of typesetting leads made less
sense because the need for frequent alteration of lettering was not the same
as for a newspaper or magazine. So many publishers opted to create plates of
wood or metal with the letters integrated permanently into the plate. In the
case of metal plates, after a run of a designated number of copies
(supposedly all that would ever be needed), the plates could be melted and
reused. This was the unfortunate disposition of many pieces of music which
were permanently lost to all but a few.
The illustrations were often integrated into the same plate, but on many
occasions they were contained on a separate wood cut or lead relief. The
artists who created illustrations in this medium were greatly skilled not
only at creating art, but in the process of working with sharp cutting
instruments and keeping them sharp. Some would even create the entire cover
plate from wood or soft metal using these processes. But the amount of time
required to create such drawings, as exquisite and detailed as they were,
often made this an expensive endeavor. Thus the process of lithography came
into being.
The etymology of lithography goes back to the Greek word for "stone drawing." It is as much science as it is art. Introduced in 1798 by Alois Senefelder as part of an attempt to mass-produce printed articles and scripts at low cost,
 |
it was an important advance in
printing for the nineteenth century. The inventor actually discovered the
process accidentally when writing, of all things, a shopping list on a
flooring stone with dried tallow ink. When the greasy ink did not come off
with water he found that it could be used to make an impression on paper,
since wet ink would not stick to the stone but would stick to the grease.
An image is initially created on a flat piece of limestone using some sort
of greasy or waxy drawing utensil, such as a pastel stick, grease pen,
graphite pencil, etc. The stone usually has varying degrees of fine grit on
it to help the grease stick to it. Then the stone is dampened with water and
ink is applied to it with a roller. The water is important in that it is
repelled by the grease or wax of the image and carries away some of the ink.
The remainder of the ink adheres or is absorbed into the drawing material.
In many cases there are chemical treatments which further etch into the bare
stone without affecting the grease, providing more relief for the drawing.
The stone is then readied for press. Early lithograph transfer meant
overlaying the paper on top of the stone with more layers of paper on top if
it to act as a cushion. The layers are covered with metal, and pressure is
applied to the metal by a large scraper, designed to press down on only one
thin line as it moves across the plate, minimizing ink bleeding. The ink is
then transferred from the grease to the paper. The end result is a negative
of the original drawing.
Color lithography, introduced around 1837, uses the same process, but in a more complex manner. The artist need to be able to create color separations, where there was one stone that contained the outline of a drawing, and two or more stones that applied the color inks where appropriate. The color inks were somewhat transparent, allowing the possibility of creating varying hues through overlay. Since it was difficult to mix the inks from different plates while still wet, the order in which the colors were applied made a significant difference in some cases. For example, blue ink applied over yellow ink would become blue with a hint of green because it was more opaque due to the color density. Yellow ink applied over blue ink would create a very satisfying green since it was more transparent. The quality and whiteness of the paper also strongly affected the final ink color. There were also issues of how to maintain alignment between each stone to minimize color bleeding. So the process of creating anywhere from two to thirty stones to match and create effective color combinations with minimal offset error could prove to be a daunting task.
 |
Among the most effective artists
using lithography in the nineteenth century were the famed Currier and
Ives, who chronicled many facets of American life in a long series of
well-designed drawings. Contrary to what many people realize is that most of
their drawings from the 1850s to the 1880s were actually black lithographs
containing the lines and the shading. The colors were manually applied by
contract workers, introducing variances between otherwise identical
drawings. When color lithography became more refined in the 1880s, many
companies specialized only in this process, such as the A. Hoen Company
of Richmond, Virginia, which would eventually play a major role in sheet
music cover art. Publishers would contract these companies to print and
often design artwork to their specifications, and then the publisher would
complete the process of adding text advertisements and the music plates in
their own facilities. As this became somewhat of a corporate effort by the
early twentieth century, many fine artists who were also "company men" had
their efforts live on while their names slipped into obscurity as their work
was often not signed. Aside from sheet music and advertising, some of the
most colorful lithographs ever produced appeared on highly collectible cigar
boxes.
Later lithographic advances in from the late nineteenth on led to photographic lithography processes and offset printing. They still use the same basic principles as stone lithography, but the amount of effort was reduced while the speed and quantity of output was proportionately increased. But for fine artworks, limited edition stone lithographs are still preferred as they present the best color vibrancy and finest detail for large prints. Many of the best sheet music covers from the 1890s through the 1920s reflect this very fact as they retain those qualities a century or more after their creation.
of this early E.T. Paull composition.
It
was inevitable that sheet music, a product printed on paper with a need
for self-advertising, would meet up with both lithography and commercial
artists. While custom-designed art started appearing with more frequency on
covers of the 1880s, color art a bit less frequently, there is one
composer/publisher who is acknowledged as the composer and publisher of
music with some of the most eye-catching cover art ever printed. Edward
Taylor Paull (1857-1924) had earlier failed in a piano and organ
business in his native Virginia, but by 1890 had established himself as
manager of a similar business in Richmond. Paull had some compositional
skills and had published a couple of songs by 1893. Likely inspired by the
recently published novel Ben Hur - A Tale of the Christ by General
Lew Wallace, he composed a descriptive piano march depicting what
remains as one of the most exciting chapters of the story, the chariot race.
Not content to let the composition stand simply on its own merit, he took
the extra step of commissioning a colorful lithograph for the cover from
A. Hoen & Company in Richmond. Thus it was that The Chariot Race
or Ben Hur March was released by the Richmond Music Company,
launching a series of more than 200 pieces with instantly collectible
artwork advertising its presence. Both the topic and the cover appealed to
the music-buying public and this piece remained in the Paull catalog through
many company moves and varying incarnations of the Paull logo at the bottom.
The success of Ben Hur led to a number of other marches in a similar
vein, the most famous of them being The Burning of Rome in 1903, many
with even more impressive covers. Most of them were produced with a four
color process on high quality paper, and the images are still vibrant a
century or more later.
 |
Much of E.T. Paull's 30 years of
success had less to do with the content of his pieces than it did with the
topics he chose and the covers designed for them. For the most part his
marches were similar in style and well within range of the average pianist's
capabilities. Many included descriptive text both to describe what is
depicted on the cover and for certain cues within the music. Many other
composers benefited from inclusion in this catalog with the
highly-recognizable E.T. Paull logo at the bottom, as he established his own
company late in 1894. After a permanent move to New York City Paull
continued to rely primarily on the Hoen company for cover lithography.
As a testament to the difficulties encountered by lithography shops in terms
of consistency over a number of years, there are many variations on some of
the covers that include some differences in the pictures themselves, varying
color schemes, monochrome representations printed in black or another color,
and even items that were redesigned, cropped or reduced for smaller sheet
sizes. It was also Paull's flair for anticipating the public's taste that
helped decide which topics to write a march for, and many of them, including
wars, disasters, historical figures and the like, also suggested art that
often transcended the well-described pieces inside. Unfortunately through
the passage of time many of the individual artists who contributed to this
series of worthy illustrations has been lost as they were simply employees
of the lithography shop. As a whole their significant contribution to sheet
music sales and the artistic trends that followed should not be
underestimated.
Continue on next page
Information supplied by: http://www.perfessorbill.com