His father, Samuel Chappell, soon after the son's birth, entered into partnership with Johann Baptist Cramer and F. T. Latour, and opened a music publishing business at 124 New Bond Street.
He projected the Musical Antiquarian Society, to publish and perform early English compositions, and established madrigal-singing by a small choir at his premises in New Bond Street.
Most of the leading English musicians joined the society, which began publishing in 1841; Chappell acted as treasurer and manager of the publications for about five years.
[2] He patiently continued his investigations into antiquarian music, and waited till 1855 before issuing an improved edition of his collection.
It suffers from Chappell's prejudices against Scotland and everything Scottish; and Dr. Burney, who did not appreciate Elizabethan madrigals, is repeatedly attacked with unjustifiable exaggeration, notably in the preface.
The celebrated double canon, Sumer is icumen in, whose existence in a thirteenth-century manuscript is the most inexplicable phenomenon in the history of music, was long studied by Chappell; a facsimile in colours served as the frontispiece of his Popular Music of the Olden Time, and he finally succeeded in identifying the handwriting as the work of Johannes de Fornsete, and in showing that the writer died on 19 January 1239 or 1240.