New Wine from Old Bottles: Re-Examining an Established Database

In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries London was fast becoming a thriving musical centre. Music was beginning to be considered a business, with regular public and commercial concerts and a flourishing music publishing industry. The Register of Music in London Newspapers 1660–1750 was devised to provide a means of examining these developments in England’s musical life, by making available an electronic edition of texts in newspapers that referred to music. This article describes two different methods of analysing the texts contained in the Register that were used to overcome the limitations of its free-text format and allow a more detailed study of commercial concert-giving in London between 1650 and 1750: textual decomposition/relational data analysis, and content analysis.