When directing his workshop from 1672 to 1715, Christophe Ballard worked during a period when institutional music was highly concentrated in Paris and Versailles. Supported by the king, its significant development is notably reflected in the splendors of the court, both at festivities and in the royal chapel, and by the arrival of Lully at the head of the Royal Academy of Music in 1672, who took all the functions over.

At the same time, Christophe Ballard was granted the position of "the king's sole printer for music", which provided him an exclusive monopoly for musical typography throughout the kingdom, so that, unless a composer had his music engraved, it could only be published by him.

Although music flourished under the reign of Louis XIV, one cannot claim that musicians of that time enjoyed all the facilities to be interpreted, published and thus becoming famous. This situation, blocked by both Lully and Ballard, has obviously discouraged many of them.

Laurent Guillo, a researcher at the CMBV, has published a new volume with Brepols devoted to the Ballard dynasty, the king's printers of music, this time focusing on the generation of Christophe and Pierre III. It sets out the technical and regulatory conditions under which music publishing was practised at the time, with developments on competition and copyists, based on an analysis of 400 archive documents. The bibliography describes almost 1300 editions produced by Christophe, Pierre III and Jean-Baptiste Christophe Ballard between 1672 and 1715.

The work follows the bibliography of Pierre I and Robert III Ballard, published in 2003.