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17 results

The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930
  • Edited by Christina Bashford, Roberta Montemorra Marvin
  • With contributions by George Biddlecombe , Hilary J. Grainger , Denise Gallo , Catherine Hennessy Wolter , Roberta Montemorra Marvin , Jann Pasler , Michela Ronzani , Jon Solomon , Jeffrey S. Sposato , Nicholas Vazsonyi and David C. H. Wright
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 May 2021
    Print publication:
    19 May 2016
  • 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

  • 11 - Schicht, Hauptmann, Mendelssohn and the Consumption of Sacred Music in Leipzig

  • Edited by Christina Bashford, Associate Professor of Musicology, School of Music, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign., Roberta Montemorra Marvin
  • With contributions by George Biddlecombe , Hilary J. Grainger , Denise Gallo , Catherine Hennessy Wolter , Roberta Montemorra Marvin , Jann Pasler , Michela Ronzani , Jon Solomon , Jeffrey S. Sposato , Nicholas Vazsonyi and David C. H. Wright
  • Book:
    The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 May 2021
    Print publication:
    19 May 2016, pp 250-273

  • Summary

    IN autumn 1778, Johann Adam Hiller, music director (Kapellmeister) of Leipzig's leading subscription concert series since 1763, published a booklet to accompany the forthcoming Concerts Spirituels – the biannual set of sacred music programmes performed during the penitential seasons of Advent and Lent – that were to be presented by his Musikübende Gesellschaft (Music- Practising Society). The booklet is part of a very small group of documents that describe the city's public, commercial concert programming before the construction of the Gewandhaus concert hall and the founding of the Gewandhauskonzerte (Gewandhaus Concerts) in 1781. What makes it stand out, however, is Hiller's introductory essay on the texts of the works to be performed – mostly traditional Latin liturgical texts such as the mass ordinarium, Magnificat and Te Deum – in which he reflected on the role of sacred music in the concert season. These remarks were structured around an exegesis of the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca's twenty-third epistle to Lucilius, in which he comments, ‘res severa est verum gaudium’ (‘a serious thing is a true joy’). Hiller printed the maxim on the cover of the booklet and used a slight variant (‘Res severa verum gaudium’; ‘Serious thing – True joy’) as the motto for the Gewandhaus, one that was emblazoned over its stage immediately after the hall's construction and has appeared in eponymous halls ever since.

    Although Hiller's booklet is recognized as the moment this adage first became associated with the Gewandhaus, less notice has been taken of Hiller's essay itself, and particularly of Hiller's choice to discuss Seneca's words in connection to sacred, rather than secular, music. And while a spectator in the Gewandhaus might interpret the motto as a declaration that the music performed in the space is – and should be – something more than mere entertainment, Hiller's original intent was more closely related to sacred music's role in public concert life:

    True joy is a very serious matter, says Seneca. The conviction of the truth of this statement, and the confidence in the right-thinking of our Leipzig residents, who exceed [those of] so many German cities in their love of music, have called for the newly established Musikübende Gesellschaft to perform so-called Concerts Spirituels during Advent and Lent, in which not only serious operas and oratorios would be performed, but also other large pieces of sacred music.