Andro Hart

Andro Hart was a Scottish bookseller and printer active in Edinburgh in the early seventeenth century. His name matters to the history of music in Scotland because his psalm books, which included the melodies, helped to fix the musical practice of the Reformed Church in the country.

Until 1610 he was mainly occupied with importing foreign books. In 1601 his name already appears on a psalter printed in Dordrecht, in the Netherlands, intended for sale in Scotland. That same year, 1610, he became a publisher in Edinburgh, where he issued a celebrated folio Bible, numerous psalters with melodies, and works of Scottish court poetry, mathematics and theology. Among his psalters, the one of 1615 stands out, as it was the first to print the twelve common melodies together and with their own titles.

After his death, his widow carried on the publishing business under the imprint "the Heires of Andro Hart". From this later phase comes the psalter of 1635, the most important publication of Scottish religious music in the seventeenth century, containing 143 harmonisations of psalms, almost all by Scottish composers.