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Art and money, culture and commerce, have long been seen as uncomfortable bedfellows. Indeed, the connections between them have tended to resist full investigation, particularly in the musical sphere.The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930, is a collection of essays that present fresh insights into the ways in which art music, i.e., classical music, functioned beyond its newly established aesthetic purpose (art for art's sake) and intersected with commercial agendas in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. Understanding how art music was portrayed and perceived in a modernizing marketplace, and how culture and commerce interacted, are the book's main goals. In this volume, international scholars from musicology and other disciplines address a rangeof unexplored topics, including the relationship of sacred music with commerce in the mid nineteenth century, the role of music in urban cultural development in the early twentieth, and the marketingof musical repertories, performers and instruments across time and place, to investigate what happened once art music began to be understood as needing to exist within the wider framework of commercially oriented culture. Historical case studies present contrasting topics and themes that not only vary geographically and ideologically but also overlap in significant ways, pushing back the boundaries of the 'music as commerce' discussion. Through diverse, multidisciplinary approaches, the volume opens up significant paths for conversation about how musical concepts, practices and products wereshaped by interrelationships between culture and commerce.
CHRISTINA BASHFORD is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Illinois.
ROBERTA MONTEMORRA MARVIN is Director of the Opera Studies Forum in the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa, where she is also on the faculty.
CONTRIBUTORS: Christina Bashford, George Biddlecombe, Denise Gallo, David Gramit, Catherine Hennessy Wolter, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, Fiona Palmer, Jann Pasler, Michela Ronzani, Jon Solomon, Jeffrey S. Sposato, Nicholas Vazsonyi, David Wright
BY the mid nineteenth century, every European household that could boast knowledge of culture owned a piano. Purposefully placed in the salons and parlours that were sites of ritual evening musicales, these instruments created an artistic environment that Thomas Christensen has described as ‘bourgeois banality’. Dedicated domestic dilettantes and their audiences quickly wearied of repeated repertoire, whether solo renditions or four-hand duets, and created a classic case of economic ‘demand’. Music publishers were only too willing to comply, generating a stream of sheet music for piano in much the same way that internet music services in the early twenty-first century inundate their markets with downloads.
At the centre of a network that included composers at one end of the production process and shop owners at the other, publishers explored approaches to increase their catalogue offerings and to promote sales. The surest strategy was to feature music that consumers had actually heard, or at the very least that they had heard of. Some of the most popular piano arrangements were excerpts from famous symphonic works and, pandering to the public's desire to be au courant, from the latest operas. Advertisements in sales catalogues and editorial puffery in publisher-owned journals heralded these new pieces, often by composers of international repute but also by well-known (but now-forgotten) local and regional personalities.
Publishers also resorted to less transparent measures that extended beyond an appeal to their customers’ musical taste and acumen. As businessmen, they acknowledged that sheet music was a ‘product’ that required ‘packaging’, so effort went into its design, particularly of the first page that would attract a buyer – the cover. Some frontispieces bore engravings, often as elaborate or colourful as the artwork hanging in one's home. Strategically left unopened on the piano, these richly decorative pieces graced both the instrument and the room in which it sat. Even covers without images could entice the eye with ornamented text set in varied fonts, types and letter cases. Beyond visual elements, sheetmusic covers might also display something with powerful subliminal appeal: a ‘celebrity’ dedication. Appearing within or near the title, such declarations either stated outright or at least implied that the very music that customers held in their hands had been written expressly for a noble or person of elevated social status; possessing a copy was proof that its owner was among the cognoscenti.
In 1946, W.H. Auden began a series of weekly lectures on Shakespeare's plays at New York's New School for Social Research. Arriving at The Merry Wives of Windsor, he pronounced it ‘a very dull play indeed’. Nevertheless, he allowed, ‘We can be grateful for its having been written, because it provided the occasion of Verdi's Falstaff, a very great operatic masterpiece’. Having nothing to say about The Merry Wives, he played a recording of the opera for the duration of the class.