Abstracts for Musica Mercata, 6 June 2024

Published 11.3.2024 | Updated 23.5.2024

Alice Lee

Bookkeeping the Opera: A Financial and Quantitative-Based Analysis of the Vienna Hofoper

There is no doubt that opera has historically been one of the most multidisciplinary and capital-intensive art forms in Western classical music. In spite of financial deficits, it has survived by way of outside influences—especially in nineteenth-century Vienna, artistic expression and cultural prestige were with a goal of further perpetuating an imperial identity. Nevertheless, scrutinizing the wherewithals of the Hofoper may provide additional understanding when exploring this societal occurrence.

Although the social value of a cultural institution cannot exclusively be determined by financial capital, it would be remiss to ignore its role in the different factions that ultimately make up a musical institution. In particular, the collection and analysis of historical financial and quantitative data arguably has not been as prioritized. Such a constellation is precisely where my paper is positioned.

By way of historical archival data, my paper will mainly analyze and discuss revenue and expenditure streams of the Vienna Hofoper between the years 1858–1861. By recreating a historically fiscal picture of the institution, it intends to reconsider the position of data analysis within musicology and the importance in strengthening the connection between financial systems and opera as a monetarily-driven institution. At the same time, it will keep in sight factors such as cultural and political intentions. Accordingly, I will conclude my paper by considering such implications on a more social and aesthetic level.

Biography

Alice Lee is a PhD candidate in Music History and Theory at Stony Brook University in New York. Her research focus lies on opera in the German-speaking lands, with an emphasis on the relationship between the market economy, opera houses, and singers as well as their intermediaries. Her dissertation examines the Vienna Hofoper during the mid/late 19th century within its fiscal and institutional frameworks. She double-majored in music and economics at Columbia University (B.A. degree), where her music thesis analyzed the accrual of Verdi’s financial wealth in conjunction with political, censorship, and copyright influences. She spent the 2022–23 academic year in Austria as a Fulbright Mach Scholar, where she was affiliated with the Institute of Musicology at the University of Graz. She has presented her research throughout the US and Europe, most recently at the OBERTO conference (Oxford), University of Graz and the University of Zagreb.

Inka-Maria Nyman

Neoliberal opera? Money and cultural value in contemporary opera practices

This paper focuses on the cultural meaning of opera and examines the relationship between opera and money in contemporary society, where tensions emerge between historical aesthetical ideas and modern trends such as digitalization, mediatization, and consumer culture. While opera in the public debates is depicted as expensive and extravagant, state funding for opera is justified through ideas of national cultural heritage and democratic access. At the same time, opera producers develop marketing strategies for online social media services to broaden and diversify participation, fighting perceptions of opera as elitist. Thus, essentially, in the neoliberal age, opera producers and audiences alike face the question ‘What is it worth?’, hence seeking answers that reach beyond the most apparent issues of money and instead renegotiate cultural value.

Presenting three sub-studies that examine how meaning is created for opera, the paper sheds light on topical issues of accessibility, institutional funding, and digital media culture, while also considering how values deeply rooted in Western cultural history continue to shape the ways in which opera is discussed today. Perceptions of opera are studied in the public debates in print media, among opera producers in a language minority context, and on the social media service Instagram. The results reveal conflicting discursive understandings of opera and failing access schemes, implying that opera in the neoliberal age is, truly, just a question of money – but that question is about drawing and redrawing boundaries between art and entertainment, the ‘high’ and the ‘common’, and to ask who can define cultural value.

Biography

MA Inka-Maria Nyman is a doctoral researcher in musicology and university teacher in arts management at Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland. Before her doctoral studies, she worked as PR and marketing manager for the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra and as PR and sales manager for the Turku Music Festival. In her doctoral thesis, Nyman focuses on the cultural meaning of opera in contemporary society, combining theories from musicology, sociology, and media studies.

Mahima Macchione

The Hidden Networks behind Italian Opera’s Golden Age/Age of Gold in Rio de Janeiro, 1849-1853

Italian opera saw its heyday in Rio de Janeiro in the (early) 1850s, a fact touched on by most, but not all, scholarship on the subject. The period saw the arrival, for the first time, of the big names in the international scene, star singers such as Rosine Stoltz, Anne Charton-Demeure, Annetta Casaloni, Enrico Tamberlick, Giuseppina Medori and others. This is, to a degree, surprising, given the disasters that troubled the city – and its reputation – in those years: the biggest yellow fever epidemic in contemporary living memory (1851-1853), terrifying anybody intended to travel to the region (including sailors, who were literally “abandoning ship” at Genoa); a fire, that engulfed and completely destroyed the main and only opera house, the Imperial Theatro São Pedro d’Alcântara (1851), and finally, to make matters even worse, an unstable and at times chaotic theatre management. How, then, could they possibly attract the finest and most celebrated singers of the day?

In this paper, I reveal two hidden networks that enabled this to take place. First, a web of Brazilian diplomats stationed in multiple locations on the Italian peninsula since the 1840s, who were critical in working between the two countries to secure top engagements for Rio. Second, a circle of freemasons based in Rio, consisting of both individuals in high-level government positions and others at the heart of opera in the city. At the centre of it all, lay a “war” between the titled and financial aristocracies, competing to honour and thank singers, as I will show, with extraordinary sums, breathtaking jewels, and the conferring of distinctions… while a stunned Italian theatre press, reported on the spectacle from afar. The period had far-reaching consequences on both sides of the Atlantic, not least the creation of the first ever school of opera in Latin America: Brazil’s Ópera Nacional (1857).

Biography

Mahima Macchione is a doctoral candidate in opera studies at King’s College London. Her research investigates the ‘re-birth’ and high point of Italian opera in mid-nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro in connection with multiple cities on the Italian peninsula. She has written about the rise and consolidation of the Italian opera industry in Milan during the 1840s, with the Caffè Martini, opposite the Teatro alla Scala, at its heart, leading to the expansion of Italian opera onto Brazilian port cities such as Recife in Pernambuco and Salvador de Bahia. She is currently writing about the rich and pluridimensional relationship between opera in Rio and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the networks that enabled opera to flourish across the Atlantic. She is also a feature writer and regular contributor on opera for Limelight Magazine.

Helen Greenwald

Artistry vs. Commerce: Verdi, Attila, and the Economics of Opera in 1840s Italy

My presentation is about the seemingly banal artistic and economic symbiosis in the world of Italian opera that arose in the eighteenth century from rational ideas about Affekt, classification, and the division of labor. The system survived well into the 19th century and thrived in the 1840s, because it was designed to facilitate production both in the opera house and the publishing house and generate profits. The system catered to a public that not only craved repetition in the theater, but wanted to take the experience home with them; they had the money to make it happen. Impresarios, publishers, and the media sustained it with cunning, great perception, and even, at times, great intelligence. Using Verdi’s Attila as the centerpiece of the discussion, I will show how public and commercial insistence on the regularity of musical form and uniformity of style influenced Verdi’s compositional process, which was in turn linked to standardized approaches to rehearsal, performance, and the craft of acting. While these practices eased the work of stage directors and granted them a degree of control that was often efficient and effective, systemic failure could result in fiascos that earned the scorn of audiences and critics as well as the outrage of the composers. Critics such as Luigi Casamorata fulminated over the dominance of mercantilism over artistry, bemoaned the profits that they believed hindered artistic progress and creativity, and excoriated composers for succumbing to outside pressure.

I will also discuss the ways in which publishers competed with each other and sometimes even conspired with impresarios behind the composer’s back to produce the best results for themselves. Primary sources will illustrate the inner workings of publisher Francesco Lucca’s business and his division of Attila’s twelve numbers into seventeen parts to be sold piecemeal in order to get the best possible financial “bang” out of it. The presentation will be amply illustrated with musical and visual examples as well as historically accurate video recreations of performance practice and marketing strategies.

Biography

Helen M. Greenwald is the author of numerous scholarly articles on vocal music from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and has edited or collaborated on the critical editions of Rossini’s Zelmira (Fondazione Rossini, 2005), Verdi’s Attila (Ricordi/University of Chicago Press, 2013), which was premiered in 2010 by Ricardo Muti in his Metropolitan Opera debut, and Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (Baerenreiter, forthcoming). Other publications include the Oxford Handbook of Opera (Oxford University Press, 2014; paperback, 2022) and a monograph on Verdi’s Rigoletto she is writing for Oxford University Press. She has written program essays for an international array of arts institutions, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, La Scala (Milan), The Royal Opera House (London), the Teatro Regio (Parma), the Gran Teatre del Liceu (Barcelona), the Glyndebourne Festival, Bilbao Opera (Spain), the Maggio Musicale (Florence/Beijing), and the Metropolitan Opera (New York). Professor Greenwald teaches in the Musicology Department at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

Sarah Kirby; Jennifer Hill and Madeline Roycroft; Rachel Orzech and Kerry Murphy

Louise Hanson-Dyer (1884–1962): Publishing, patronage, promotion 

Louise Hanson-Dyer was an Australian music publisher and patron who, after spending many years cultivating knowledge and appreciation of British and French music in Australia, left Melbourne to establish herself in Paris and founded a music publishing company: Les Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre (EOL). The press rapidly gained a reputation as a highly regarded company renowned for working at the forefront of both early and contemporary French music. By the late 1930s, Dyer had branched out into recordings, and EOL continued to produce sought-after print music and recordings until its closure in 2013, many years after Dyer’s death. 
 
Throughout her professional life, in both Australia and Europe, Dyer worked tirelessly to promote new music, support young composers, disseminate knowledge about and appreciation of early music, and educate the public about musical heritage and musical futures. The establishment of EOL was a remarkable success, in large part due to Dyer’s seemingly endless enthusiasm for new projects, but also her extraordinary ability to create and leverage personal and professional networks. 
 
Dyer’s involvement in countless musical and cultural societies and organisations was also at the centre of her work and allowed her to advocate for the musical causes she believed in and make connections with significant musical figures to work with her through EOL and other projects that enhanced musical life in both Europe and Australia.  

This panel will present the following four papers addressing aspects of Louise Hanson Dyer’s activities as publisher and patron.

Sarah Kirby: Louise Dyer, patronage, and the British Music Societies of Melbourne and Sydney

In 1921, Louise Dyer established in Melbourne an Australian branch of the British Music Society—an organisation founded in London at the end of the First World War to promote British and international contemporary music. Receiving ongoing patronage from Dyer herself, the Melbourne BMS played a significant role in Melbourne musical life over the decades that followed, introducing audiences to contemporary British, Australian, and European modernist works, while providing an avenue for Australian musicians to engage with a range of European institutions. Several months earlier another BMS branch had been founded in the neighbouring Australian state capital of Sydney. Lacking a major financial patron, the Sydney BMS had to take a different approach to their operations, relying heavily on public ticket sales and subscriptions to support their aims. Through comparative analysis of the activities of the Melbourne and Sydney branches of the BMS during the 1920s and 30s, this paper examines the influence of Dyer’s taste and values on the musical activity of Melbourne, exerted in subtle ways through her role as patron, both while in Melbourne and from afar through the EOL. It contrasts this with an interrogation of the Sydney branch’s musical landscape, which, though governed by a by-musicians-for-musicians philosophy, remained influenced by the vagaries of popular market forces.

Jennifer Hill and Madeline Roycroft: Louise Hanson-Dyers Professional Network: A Data Visualisation 

Louise Hanson-Dyer’s Professional Network: A Data Visualisation Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre was founded and run, essentially single-handedly, by Louise Dyer in Paris from 1932; her only employee was her personal assistant. From 1938 she worked with the help of her second husband Jeff Hanson. This paper considers aspects of Dyer’s Editions de l’Oiseau-lyre as a business: its products, practices, purchasers and finances. Our view is that the defining feature of Dyer’s business practice, and vital to her success, was the professional network she developed – of composers, graphic artists, musicologists, performers, printers and others who each had close contact with her: Dyer’s strength was in establishing and nurturing relationships. To that end, we have devised a way to render this graphically.

Louise Hanson-Dyer’s Professional Network is an interactive map that illustrates the relationships behind the scenes at EOL from the time Dyer moved to Paris until her death in 1962. The map draws upon metadata housed in a database that documents the names of individuals that Dyer engaged for each OL publication, as well as the relationships between people who worked on each publication. In this presentation we will introduce the visualisation and demonstrate how it can be used not only to illustrate Dyer’s business practice, but also, potentially, as a tool for researchers across music publishing, women in music, and sound recordings.

Rachel Orzech: An imagined French Bayreuth: Les Semaines musicales françaises 

Plans for an annual festival of French music began to be reported in the francophone press in 1932, with the inaugural event to be held in June 1933. The organisers were ambitious: the festival was to be France’s answer to Germany’s Bayreuth festival, Austria’s Salzburg Festival and Italy’s emerging Musical May in Florence. Numerous French musical organisations and institutions were involved, tourist organisations were making plans, and a number of government representatives lent their names and their moral support to the initiative, spearheaded by the lawyer and music-lover François Hepp and organised by Louise Dyer, the Australian founder of recently established music press Les Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre. Then, just two weeks before opening, it was suddenly cancelled with little explanation.

In this paper I suggest that in spite of the high hopes and ambitions of the festival’s stakeholders, and the perceived importance of the event in terms of national identity building at a time when France’s self-image was plagued with insecurity, a basic lack of financial support put a sudden, last-minute end to all the plans. Given the widespread support for the project, why were the experienced organisers unable to prevent or predict this outcome? And what does it tell us about the role of funding in such projects in the context of national identity crisis and economic depression in 1930s France?

Kerry Murphy: Editions de l’Oiseau-lyre publishing: some unusual case studies 

As an independent self-funded publisher with no-one to answer to, Louise Hanson-Dyer had complete freedom in her business decisions. Perhaps as a result, her approach was often idiosyncratic. One thing she was consistent and particularly forthright about was paying her composers and editors outright for their intellectual property—her detailed pro forma contract clearly sets out the various rights she was purchasing.

There is an interesting section of the Editions de l’Oiseau-lyre archive, however, which contains autograph music manuscripts and some manuscripts for book publications for which, although contracts were issued and paid, no publication was issued. For instance, in 1951 Canteloube signed the standard contract and was paid 40,000 francs for a volume of music to be called Chansons de la France, but only one song of the fourteen was published. Similarly, Guy Delamorinière was also paid 5,000 francs in February 1947 for manuscripts of songs which were never published; a month previously, singer Lise Daniels received 12,000 francs for a recording of his songs, which was never released. A manuscript of a book on Albert Roussel by Charles Koechlin (1937?), met a similar fate, though here no contract seems to have been issued. This paper explores such curiosities and offers some suggestions for how they came about.

Biographies

Sarah Kirby is a research fellow at the Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne. A recent doctoral graduate of the Melbourne Conservatorium, her PhD research explored music at international exhibitions in the British Empire throughout the 1880s. She has published on Australian music history, women in music, and music and museum culture, and her first monograph, Exhibitions, Music and the British Empire, is out now with Boydell and Brewer. She is associate editor of Musicology Australia, and was the 2022 Nancy Keesing Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales. She was recently awarded the prestigious Australian Academy of Humanities’ 2023 McCredie Musicological Award, which recognises an outstanding contribution to musicology by an Australian early-to-mid-career scholar.

Jen Hill is curator of the University of Melbourne’s Rare Music Collection (Archives & Special Collections), which includes the Hanson-Dyer Music Collection of rare imprints and manuscripts and, since 2015, the Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre Archive. She is also a Faculty of Fine Arts and Music honorary fellow.

Madeline Roycroft recently completed a PhD in musicology at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne. Her thesis examined the reception of Dmitri Shostakovich’s music. Madeline currently works as research and curatorial assistant in the University of Melbourne’s Rare Music collection, and as a sessional lecturer in music history at the MCM.

Rachel Orzech is a Research Fellow in musicology at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, previously a Lecturer in Musicology. Her monograph, Claiming Wagner: Music and Politics in the Parisian Press, 1933–1944, was published in the University of Rochester Press’s Eastman Studies in Music series in 2022. Rachel’s current research project explores the role of transnational cultural exchange in interwar French and Australian nation-building processes through the lens of the Australian music publisher Louise Hanson-Dyer and her European-based publishing company, Les Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre.

Kerry Murphy is Professor of Musicology at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests focus chiefly on opera, nineteenth-early twentieth century French music and music criticism and colonial Australian music history and she has published widely in these areas. She is currently researching the impact of travelling virtuosi and opera troupes to Australia and the Australian music publisher and patron, Louise Hanson-Dyer.

Juliane Peetz-Ullman; Mathias Boström

Södergren’s Shop of Musical Sweets: Distribution, production and consumption of music and music-related prints in a small Swedish town in the 19th century

In 1832, Carl Gustaf Södergren (1807–1886) opened the first modern book shop in Växjö, a small provincial capital in southern Sweden. Besides books, Södergren from the very beginning advertised music prints for sale as well. Between 1851–1875 he also was active as a printer with his own workshop. What makes Södergren’s book shop especially interesting for research is the unusually well-preserved company archives found at Växjö City Library, containing, among other things, detailed and accurate records of who bought what. In this panel, we will present two studies on Södergren’s role as a distributor of music in 19th century Växjö.

Juliane Peetz-Ullman: Södergren’s sale records shedding light on private music making in 19th century Växjö

During the 19th century, private music making became more and more important, but it is notoriously difficult to know exactly what kind of music people played and sung in their homes, if their music collections were not handed down to our time. The general musical taste of the time can be estimated from program sheets or newspaper advertisements. Sometimes, letters or diaries survived that can give us a glance of what happened behind the scenes in individual cases, which is why we know that music making had an obvious place in domestic life and the educational ideal during that age.

Södergren’s sale records can give us a broader insight into the musical habits of Växjö’s inhabitants of that era, since he notated meticulously not only who his customers were and how much they paid for their purchases, but also what titles they bought and, in some cases, returned. An analysis of those sale records can grant us valuable insights into the repertoire played in the citizens’ homes and, thus, into the soundscape of 19th century Växjö.

Mathias Boström: Different sides of Södergrens broadsides  

Södergren’s book shop, from the start, sold broadsides – cheap prints with lyrics of popular songs (and sometimes tales), in Sweden usually printed on a large paper that was folded twice, thus creating an 8-page product with a title page. When Södergren set up his own printer’s workshop in 1851, broadsides were among the first products he printed in his own name and sold in his book shop. Södergren produced at least 110 broadside prints, but he also printed on commission. What can these prints tell us about Södergren’s strategies for satisfying a local demand as well as being part of a wider geographic market of musical taste?

Biographies

Juliane Peetz-Ullman finished her musicological education at Würzburg University with a Master’s thesis containing critical editions of 17th century music in 2005. Her special interest, which she has been developing further through contributing to several digitization and cataloguing projects, lies within music material like handwritten or printed sheet music, but even other archive materials concerning music. After moving to Sweden in 2015, she took an additional Master’s degree in library and information science at Borås University. Today, she is employed as a specialized music librarian at Smålands Musikarkiv.

Mathias Boström is the director of Smålands Musikarkiv, a regional music archive in Växjö, Sweden. He is also Ph.D student in musicology at Uppsala University. Boström has published several books and articles on his main research topics: traditional music, often in combination with media history.

Kaj Ahlsved

Among bicycle marches and ping pong-polkas: The publication of sports-related middle music in Sweden (1867-1939)

Towards the end of the 1800s, interest in sports and physical education increased in Sweden. One consequence of this is that music linked to sports in many different styles and by a disparate group of composers of character pieces and dance music became available for sale in the music market. The purpose of this article is to study the ‘sports music’ published in Sweden as a form of middle music and to discuss the music’s relationship and connections to sport as a programme (‘theme’) and social context for music. Thus, the article explores the dimensions of music about and for sports.

Based on material consisting of 85 pieces of sheet music for piano (marches, polkas, waltzes, popular songs [“Swedish schlager”] etc.), the article shows that the music was both intended for domestic music making and was also arranged to be played by orchestras at private and public events as part of the sports life. These musical arrangements brought the music closer to the context it purports to describe or be dedicated to. At the turn of the century, many of the composers seem to have had personal interest in sports or a connection to the sports associations. From the 1920’s onwards sports became an increasingly common theme for popular songs, while interest in the publication of instrumental piano music dedicated to sports associations declined.

Biography

PhD Kaj Ahlsved is a Finnish music researcher affiliated with Åbo Akademi University and Research association Suoni. His article dissertation (2017) focused on the ubiquitous music of everyday life, explicitly on practices related to the use of recorded music during team sporting events in Finland. Ahlsved is currently a part of Suoni’s research project “Music researchers in society: Advancing social justice through activist music research”. His ongoing post doc research focuses on musical practices of the sports movement (1875–1939).

Karin Hallgren

Military musicians in public music life – examples from Sweden during the 19th century 

Material and financial conditions for opera and concerts during the 19th century have been researched since a rather long time. The financial conditions regarding the work of the military music corps are, however, still only studied to a limited extent. The awareness of the importance of the military music corps for the spread of music, music education and the development of musician’s profession also in civilian society has increased in recent years. This paper wants to highlight military music as an important institution, which contributed to the expansion of public music life during the 19th century in Sweden.

Based on studies of archival material concerning the general funding of the military music corps, as well as through studies on special regiments and musicians, this paper discusses questions on, firstly, the financing of the military music corps during the 19th century and, secondly, the conditions for individual musicians.

The funding of military music shows a mix between state and private funding. The state paid for the direct military music activities (drummers and pipers for marches and signaling). For other musical activities within the regiment (dance music, concerts), the financing took place through collected funds from the officer corps.

For individual musicians, the military music corps offered paid work, usually for a part of the year. By combining service in the military music corps with civilian, paid engagements, the musicians could perform at public concerts. Several musicians combined their work in the military music corps with employment in the Stockholm Opera Orchestra (Hovkapellet).

This paper shows that the music activities at the regiments and the possibility of combining employment have contributed to the general development of professional musicians and public music life in Sweden during the 19th century.

Biography

I am professor in musicology at Linnaeus University. My research interest is mainly in 19th century music and musical life. For examle, I have studied the financing of the Opera in Stockholm, with comparisons to other european cities. The repertoire at the Opera during the 19th century has also been a subject for my reseach, with an interest in the circulation of repertoire between european Opera houses and Stockholm. In the project “Swedish musical heritage” (Levande musikarv) I have contributed with biographies on swedish composers and their relevance for the musical life in the 18th and 19th centuries. I am interested in perspectives regarding circulation of repertoire and musicians, and in so called “Economical cultural history” (Ekonomisk kulturhistoria).

Kyle S. Barnett

New Sounds at the Market: Music Media’s Circulating Cultures

Roughly a century ago, at the end of the First World War and the start of the Jazz Age, the U.S. recording industry expanded in ways that would redefine American popular music and media. The U.S. recording industry’s established “Big Three,” Victor, Columbia, and Edison were surprised by challenges from lesser-known upstarts. Smaller labels like Gennett, Paramount and others found they could not compete by mimicking established industry leaders, so they turned to speculative recording, scouting for new sounds in trial-and-error fashion. These record companies worked to represent and market the music they recorded to potential audiences with whom they had little previous contact.

This presentation documents popular music’s material circulation and recording companies’ cultural expansion through identifying audiences and creating new genres. Record companies worked along the circuit of culture, looking for market niches which led to the foundational twentieth-century genres of jazz, blues, and country. These new genres furthered the record business’ industrial and technological expansion by making music-as-phonography an everyday medium. Companies aggressively sought out, recorded, categorized, advertised, and sold recorded music, which reached new listeners and circulated in ever-widening patterns.

The new ubiquity of popular music in the 1920s led to broader circulations that would reshape media industries writ large as the Jazz Age gave way to the Great Depression. A series of technological changes and economic upheavals led the recording industry to increasing ties with two other media industries: radio and film. These two “lively arts” joined together with phonography via the first major U.S. entertainment media conglomeration of the twentieth century, which in turn had implications for global popular music and media culture in years to come.

Biography

Kyle S. Barnett is an associate professor of media studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. His work focuses on popular music, media history, and sound cultures across media. His publications include “Furniture Music: The Phonograph as Furniture,” in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, “The Selznick Studio, Spellbound, and the Marketing of Film Music,’ in Music, Sound and the Moving Image, and “Eat What You Hear: Gustasonic Discourses and the Material Culture of Sound Recordings” (with Shawn VanCour) in the Journal of Material Culture. He has also appeared in several book anthologies. Barnett has co-edited issues of Creative Industries Journal and the Velvet Light Trap, while also contributing media and music columns for Flow, Antenna, and In Media Res. Barnett’s first book Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020) won the 2021 Association for Recorded Sound Collections’ Award of Excellence for Best Historical Research on Record Labels.  

Francesca Fantappiè; Roberta Carpani; Aldo Roma

Economic Management of Theatre, Music and Spectacle in Early Modern Italy

The aim of this panel is to explore the economic management of the performing arts, theatre and music, in Italy the early modern period, both from a practical point of view, by studying the sources, handling, and distribution of expenditure on them, and from a theoretical one, by interrogating the social, cultural, and economic capital invested in, and gained by, ephemeral consumption.
The Italy of the Renaissance and early modern era saw the emergence of an increasingly organized system of production and consumption in the performing arts, whether for specific occasions – usually the celebration of civic and court festivals, exploited for reasons of prestige to illustrate the value of liberalitas and magnificentia – or more generally as various forms of entertainment.
On the other hand the advent of professional theater companies by way of the so-called commedia dell’arte or, later, the opening of public opera houses managed by the impresarios allowed a commodification of spectacle, which was no longer confined exclusively special occasions or to specific periods in the calendar (e.g., Carnival) but spread its reach across the year leading to the advent of ‘professional theater’ (or teatro mercenario) causing its stigmatization by religious institutions and part of the society. Indeed, the economic management of the performing arts raises a striking number of political, moral, religious and social questions for the period. What are the social and cultural motivations that made these arts worth producing? What was their legitimacy or value? Were the performing professions legitimate? At what point were the performing arts considered unworthy extravagances? Conversely, when were they considered a sign of liberality and magnificence?

The panel offers three case studies of economic management of spectacles in different cities (Florence, Rome, Milan) and contexts (court, religious and public theatre) with the aim of finding differences and similarities between them. While investigating on different strategies and models of production and consumption of ephemeral arts, it will allow to understand to what extent they all made possible the birth of more and more specialized professions in the fields of theatre and music, whose economic impact remains, to a large extent, to be studied. So, can the emergence of the many specific artistic and artisanal professions tied to performing arts be call an ‘entertainment industry’? The panel aim to shed partial light on this aspect too.

Francesca Fantappiè: Economic management of court spectacles between Florence and Paris (1590 – 1620)

The paper proposes a comparative analysis of the production and consumption of Bourbon and Medici court spectacles between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in order to offer a novel view of the phenomenon. In the case of court spectacle, the commonplace view is that early modern rulers did not stint on expense in their luxurious displays of so-called conspicuous consumption, preferring ostentation over fiscal prudence and therefore leaving themselves open to the accusation of immoderate waste. Yet such consumption still operated in economic terms, even if profit and loss need to be measured in ways beyond the merely financial. An in-depth examination of the economic context will illustrate how important prudent management of the material and human resources at hand was, highlighting the spending limits to which such productions were subjected. In reality, the actual costs incurred usually turn out to be far lower than those touted by the gossip and hearsay, so much so that ‘real expenses’ does not usually correspond to ‘fictional expenditures’. The talk will conclude with a reflection on the phenomenon of the ‘fiction of expense’, questioning whether it was the basis of a conscious communication strategy or whether it is not implicit in the medium of communication itself, namely theatre, music and spectacle, at the same time a fictious and ephemeral art, therefore subject to production costs deemed tout court extravagant and unnecessary.

Roberta Carpani: <<Fin che pagano i Lonati>>. Notes on impresarial theater in Milan in the Spanish period 

During the first half of the 17th century, music theater activity in Milan was rooted in the Teatro Ducale, entrusted to the management of an impresario, a professional figure who progressively defined his duties over the course of the century, adapting them to the needs of the political power represented by the Spanish governor, and to the expectations of the aristocratic audience, re-proposing a model that traced the practice established by the king in Madrid. In fact, the economic management of the Teatro Ducale took place under a monopoly regime, being fixed by the “grida” (cries/edicts of the governor), while the choice of the operatic repertory was a complex process which did not fall exclusively under the impresario: both nobles, but also some singers from other theater venues would compete. A characteristic feature of the Milanese case is the presence of families of impresarios, such as the Lonati, and of temporary societies among them, who bound to better cope with the risks of an economic activity strongly influenced by the interference of the Spanish court. Thanks to the comparison of administrative and epistolary sources, printed libretti and other literary sources, it is possible to reconstruct the professional strategies of some impresarios and to shed light on the economic mechanisms underlying the city’s theatrical and musical activity.

Aldo Roma: The Roman colleges as production and consumption systems of spectacle (17th-18th centuries) 

The Roman colleges as production and consumption systems of spectacle (17th-18th centuries)
In early modern and modern times, the collegi (boarding schools) managed by religious orders, embraced theatre, music, dance, and chivalry arts within their educational programs. In Rome, the centre of Christianity and the capital of the Papal States, these institutions attracted students from across Europe, primarily from noble and merchant families. Recognizing the value of performing arts in cultivating essential social and behavioural skills for life after graduation, these colleges actively promoted artistic development.

Interestingly, despite extensive scholarly attention, historiography has often neglected the fact that Roman colleges served as vibrant venues for various events, such as festivals and academic gatherings, significantly contributing to Rome’s social and cultural life. This is particularly noteworthy since Rome lacked a stable system of ‘public’ theatres at the time, making these colleges integral and influential public spaces for spectacle.

This paper delves into financial records related to theatrical and musical performances, academic assemblies, and religious ceremonies, providing insights into their impact on college budgets, expenditure rationale, and cost-saving measures. A contextual and diachronic analysis sheds light on why these ‘extraordinary expenses’ were deemed crucial and how customs surrounding the production and consumption of performing arts within Roman colleges evolved over time.

Biographies

Francesca Fantappiè is a historian of Theatre and the Performing Arts. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to theatre and music, her scholarship includes work on performers, theatre architecture, stage machinery and designs, as well as the editing of theatrical texts. She was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance with the project: Financing Festivals, Music and Theatre: Real Expenses and Fictional Expenditures in France between the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. In 2019-2020 she was a fellow at Villa I Tatti (Harvard University Center in Florence) with the project: The Economics of “Meraviglia”: Theatre, Music and Money at the Medici court. She is co-author, with Tim Carter, of the book Staging “Euridice” (1600): Theatre, Sets and Music in Late Renaissance Florence (Cambridge University press, 2021). Her book, Per i teatri non è Bergamo sito (2010), explores Bergamo society and economics through the building of theatres in the city.

Roberta Carpani is Associate Professor of Performing Arts at Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Milan. Her research interests span the theatre and festivals during the Ancient Regime and theatre performance during 20th- and 21 th centuries. Her publications include Le feste e la città in età moderna. Culture, drammaturgie e società a Milano nel primo Seicento, Milano, EDUCatt, 2020 and Scritture in festa. Studi sul teatro tra Seicento e Settecento, Pisa – Rome 2008. She co-edited Playing Inclusion. The Performing Arts in the Time of Migrations: Thinking, Creating and Acting Inclusion, with Giulia Innocenti Malini. She has participated in numerous conferences internationally and in Italy (Venice, Fondazione Levi; Milan, Accademia Ambrosiana; Milan, Teatro alla Scala; Rome, Academia Belgica; University of Reading, UK; Queluz, Lisboa, Coloquio Internacional; South Bend, US, University of Notre Dame; Cambridge, Trinity College, UK; Belgrade, IFTR World Congress). She has been invited to lecture and teach in Paris (INHA; Université de Paris – Vincennes) , in New York (Italian Cultural Institute of New York) , in Sevilla, Universidad de Sevilla.

Aldo Roma is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Liège and Adjunct Professor of Theatre Studies at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he also completed a PhD in Music and Performance Studies. He has held post-doctoral positions at the University of Amsterdam, the Sapienza University of Rome, and the École française de Rome (in the context of the ERC project PerformArt, led by Anne-Madeleine Goulet). His research interests include early modern theatre and performing arts, theatre historiography, and opera librettos. He is currently studying the practice of performance at the Roman colleges and its material history. He has published various chapters, articles, and the monograph ‘San Bonifazio’ di Giulio Rospigliosi (1638): Un melodramma nella Roma barberiniana (Bulzoni, 2020).

Simon Crab

Post-Human Music Production: Rationalisation and Automation in Weimar electronic music  

This presentation will examine the early history of the automation of music production in Weimar Germany (1918-1933) and its relation to theories of rationalisation. I will argue that Ford and Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ and rationalisation ideas that aimed for efficiency through technology, spread from the industrial sector to society (i.e. ‘social rationalisation’ ) and to art and music. These new concepts of rationalised culture precipitated techno-utopian attempts to rethink how music was conceived, produced and distributed – a tendency that was accelerated with the advent of low-cost recording technologies, in particular; sound-film, vacuum tube and the gramophone.
To illustrate this argument I will use the examples of Moholy-Nagy’s concept of a ‘groove-script alphabet’ (1922) later developed by H. H. Stuckenschmidt in the proposed practice of Grammophonmusik (1925), Rudolf Pfenninger’s optical audio synthesis, composition and commercial production platform Tönende Handschrift (‘Sonic handwriting’ 1931), Emerich Spielmann’s light-synthesis based Superpiano (1932) and Friedrich Trautwein’s attempt at creating a mass market domestic electronic musical instrument with the Telefunken Volkstrautonium (1933).
Using these examples I will trace the connections between industrial, commercial and social rationalisation theories of the 1920s and their impact on the development of music technology during the Weimar period. I will focus specifically on the attempts to streamline the music production process by removing the potential of human error in the pursuit of a perfect music and draw comparisons between Weimar era music technology and current debates around automation and artificial intelligence.

Biography

Simon Crab is an academic, researcher and an audio-visual sound artist. He has been working with digital audio and video since the mid 1980s. He has made numerous performances around the world over the last 3 decades and has released over 25 published works. He is the author of the online resource for the study of the history of electronic musical instruments “120 years of Electronic Music’ (www.120years.net), and received a PhD for “Instruments of Division: The Role of Audio Technology in the Transition From the Weimar Republic to the Nazi State” (Huddersfield School of Music -CenReNem 2022).

David Thyrén and Jan-Olof Gullö

Creative leadership for achieving success: a case study – Mariann Record

Our research project, “Searching for Sophia [Wisdom] in Music Production”, aims to discover the critical factors contributing to successful music production. We seek to gain a comprehensive understanding of Sweden’s music industry and music exports by exploring music production in the academic fields of music education, musicology, and sociology. Our goal is to gain a deeper understanding of what leads to success in the music industry. In this paper, we focus on the significance of creative leadership for achieving success in the music industry. We emphasize the importance of promoting and publishing music that reaches a large audience. During our research, we discovered a group of influential individuals in the Swedish music industry known as “icebreakers”. These individuals have a talent for straying away from traditional norms and following their instincts, leading them to new and uncharted paths. Their actions create opportunities for others to follow and build successful teams, known as “clusters”. The Swedish music industry and its exports have greatly benefited from these clusters. In this presentation, we focus on Bert Karlsson, a successful entrepreneur who established Mariann Records during the 1970s. The label repeatedly held about a third of the record market in Sweden. In this study we aim to determine the significance of Bert Karlsson’s leadership in the success of Mariann Records. Our analysis highlights the crucial success criteria that contributed to Mariann Records’ success and its significance for Swedish Music Wonder. We analyze the crucial personnel, infrastructure, entrepreneurship, marketing, artistic and technical qualities, and overall musical qualities that played a vital role in the success of Mariann Records. The empirical data includes an examination of various media materials and interviews with key personnel who were actively involved in Mariann Records.

Biographies

David Thyrén is a senior lecturer in musicology at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. His research focus on music history in relation to music production, health, arts, aesthetics and sustainability.

Jan-Olof Gullö is a professor in music production at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. In their collaborative research projects, they search for Sophia [Wisdom] in music production.

Patrick Mertens

The Megamusical of the Eighties between Art and Economy. The Exploitation Techniques in the Megamusical Field Discussed Using the Example of Chess 

The genre of the musical has always been particularly associated with economic aspects – this is evident in particular when looking at definitions of the genre in (academic) reference works. Especially the megamusicals of the 1980s with blockbuster shows such as “Phantom of the Opera”, “Les Misérables” or “Cats” introduced a previously unknown marketing to the genre, which uses distinctive logos, a wide range of merchandise, but above all a sophisticated advertising concept that turned the musicals into (pop)cultural mass phenomena beyond their presentation in the theatre.

The example of “Chess” by Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus and Tim Rice shows the calculation and differentiated methods used to market a megamusical in the 1980s: Even before a single note of “Chess” was written, considerations were made about how to exploit the artistic product as profitably as possible in as many different submarkets as possible. Due to Andersson’s and Ulvaeus’ experience with ABBA on the recording market, it is not surprising that this submarket was used particularly intensively. The artistic product was divided into marketable individual elements that were published in different versions (singles, remixes, dance arrangements, etc.) and were intended to appeal to very different target groups (radio stations and listeners, discos, record buyers).

Such a versatile use of the musical or parts of it is made possible by the modular artistic structure of the work and deliberately pushed by the authors at an early stage of the creative process. A similar balancing of artistic and economic considerations in the production of the work can also be seen in the theatre and licensing markets. By analysing the exploitation network of “Chess” and taking a closer look at the compositional structure, the negotiation processes between economy and art that take place here and that are typical for the entire megamusical of the 1980s (and beyond) will be shown, historically classified and contextualised.

Biography

Patrick Mertens studied Musicology and German at the University of Heidelberg, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on London music theatre. Since 2019, he has been teaching at the Mannheim University for Music and the Performing Arts. His essay “The Interrelationship of Art and Economy in Kurt Weill’s How Can You Tell an American? from the musical comedy Knickerbocker Holiday” was awarded the 2019 Tonkunst-Prize. In May 2023, he completed his PhD with “summa cum laude”. His research focuses on the music of the 19th and 20th century, in particular musicals and film music – topics on which he also publishes and teaches. In addition, Mertens is regularly active as a dramaturge in the field of musical theatre.

Stephanie Shon

Culture Follows Economy:  the Australian art music market 1960s–1990s 

The Australian government established a federal arts council in 1968 – symbolising a period of unprecedented cultural growth in Australia. Remembered as the nation’s “cultural renaissance”, the sudden flowering of Australian arts subsidies was facilitated by concentrated nation building efforts in the 1960s and 70s. As successive governments reconsidered Australia’s trade and geopolitical relations, they instrumentalised local cultural production to symbolise progress and create international connections. However, this was not a one-way exchange. Rather, composers, arts advocates, and administrators identified the nation-building project as an opportunity to cultivate a national community in their desired image. Indeed, Australian composers capitalised on music’s centrality to the Australian nation building project to achieve professional and artistic ascendancy over one another.

This paper explores the inner workings of the Australian art music ‘economy’ between the late-1960s and early-1990s. I explain how the establishment of Australian federal arts funding in the late-1960s created an internal ‘market’ within which composers and publishers jostled for government subsidies. Sensitive to political currents, Australian composers strategically framed their compositions in relation to poignant social and political issues to secure funding and artistic opportunities. A new form of ‘industrial’ nationalism, based primarily on claims to economic strength but sensitive to cultural prestige, inflected the claims composers made for government subsidies. Combining analyses of archival correspondence and oral history with government policy papers, I parse the relations between the ‘arm’s-length’ government patron and the artist. In doing so, I reveal the inherent paradox of protectionist arts funding: in sheltering the arts from conventional market forces, government arts subsidies allowed a new type of market – wherein politicians and public officials supplant the customer. This paper then proposes a reconsideration and expansion of historical conceptions of government patronage and “protection” from market forces.

Biography

Stephanie Shon is a Doctor of Philosophy candidate in Music at the University of Oxford. Her research examines the cultural politics of Australian art-music composition post-1960. The recipient of the Seymour Scholarship, she was a 2023 National Library of Australia PhD Scholar. Stephanie’s DPhil research is supported by a Ramsay Postgraduate Scholarship.

Johan Larson Lindal

Collecting the Modern Music: Lay Record Collectors and Expert Knowledge on Recorded Music in 1920s Europe and U.S.  

Record collecting, be it as a social, cultural, or commercial activity, has been a significant aspect of the music industry in the 20th century. Collecting encompasses not only the assembling of a number of musical objects into one unit, but also the assembling of various forms of knowledge connected to those objects and what they are believed to represent. The rise of a market of recorded music, itself an emblem of musical ‘modernisation,’ coincided with an emerging and contested discussion on the fundamental nature and problems of ‘modern’ music, both in terms of popular styles such as Jazz as well as new movements within the Western art music tradition. This paper explores ecologies of record collecting in 1920s Europe and U.S. and how collecting procedures created narratives of ‘modern’ music. Although musical ‘modernism’ has long been studied in relation to the record industry, the contribution of this paper concerns how definitions and conceptualisations of ‘modern’ music were materially supported through record collecting in networks of knowledge circulation.
My study focuses on specialized phonographic journals as well as discussions on recordings in the music press, with special emphasis on the emerging communication between individual collectors and listeners vis-à-vis appointed ‘experts’ on recorded music. On the one hand, the paper shows that narratives of ‘modern’ recorded music circulated via commercial collection-making, for example in the form of proposed ‘budget packages’ within the music press. This was primarily a one-way communication pattern targeting collectors as consumers. However, the collecting of recorded ‘modern’ music could also be an object of discussion and negotiation which helped constitute subjectivities of ‘experts’ and ‘lay’ collectors on what the concept encompassed. The paper seeks to stimulate further discussion on the historical importance of collecting as part of knowledge circulation.

Biography

Johan Larson Lindal is a PhD candidate at Tema Q, Linköping University (Department of Culture & Society), with European 20th century music history as his main topic. He has delivered conference papers to the Creative IPR project, ISHTIP, and contributed to a DeGruyter book volume on modernism and crisis. His dissertation discusses the musical work concept through a microstudy of Ernst Krenek’s String Quartet no. 3 in the interwar period.

Mark Mahoney

Bill Dixon, Cecil Taylor and the Political Economy of Black Experimentalism in the 1970s  

This talk examines shifting funding structures for experimental jazz and Black improvised music after 1968, focusing on two early experiments: Cecil Taylor’s time leading a program in Black Music at Antioch College from 1971-73 and Bill Dixon’s founding of a Black Music Division at Bennington College, which operated from 1974-84. These artists’ commitment to the basic tenets of the avant-garde—its critique of the marketplace, its valorization of the vanguard genius ahead of his (the discourse was pointedly masculinist) time—helped pave the way for their entry into the academy, an institution nominally ‘outside’ of the capitalist marketplace (which was in fact becoming ever more marketized in the period after 1968). These artists pushed at the limits of these institutions, even as they also adapted their practices to the new affordances of their positions. Their engagement with academia gave rise to new tensions and possibilities, reshaping discourses of jazz, music education, Blackness, and the avant-garde in ways that continue to reverberate today. In each case, the artists’ structural precarity made them and their programs especially vulnerable to the financial instability of the 1970s. Administrative appeals to both race-blindness and the logic of austerity were employed to marginalize Black music and to contest its existence as such. Nevertheless, the period after 1968 when Black experimental music entered the academy represented a moment when music education was thought otherwise, a moment that was increasingly marginalized and vitiated as the triumph of neoliberalism was accomplished piecemeal over the course of the 1970s.

Biography

Mark Mahoney is a Ph.D. student in Musicology at Cornell University. His scholarly interests revolve around experimental music, broadly conceived, and its intersection with critical theory, sound studies, and a range of interdisciplinary approaches. His research has explored the contested legacies of high modernism, the relationship between political and aesthetic transgression in various 20th-century avant-gardes, and the institutional history of ethno/musicology and music studies more generally. Mark is an avid student of jazz, improvised and creative music, and has presented on the music and reception histories of Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk. He has contributed music criticism to numerous publications, including Cacophony Magazine, Dusted Magazine, and The Walker Art Center Reader.

Mark comes to Cornell from Chicago, where he immersed himself in that city’s vital music scene as a presenter, composer and performer, and as Assistant Director of the Elastic Arts Foundation, a nonprofit, artist-run performance space. As a performer, he has dedicated himself to a broad spectrum of improvised music and to the works of both established and emerging living composers, among them Laura Adkins, Herbert Brun, Mark Hardy, Eva-Maria Houben, Jeff Kowalkowski, Jack Langdon, Terry Riley, Adam Shead, and Scott Wollschleger. While in Chicago, he also served as an instructor with the non-profit Access Contemporary Music.

Manuel Lafarga Marques, Teresa Chafer Bixquert and Penelope Sanz Gonzalez

Iconography and fame in the Italian Renaissance: The Diego Ortiz case

Diego Ortiz (1510?-1576?), arises as viola tutor in the environment of baron of Reisi, Pedro de Urríes, and served as chapel master of the viceregal court of Naples (1553 -1570) under the Duke de Alba and Pedro Afán de Ribera. In 1553 he published in Rome his “Tratatto de glosse”, devoted to Urríes, with great circulation, that earned him the protection of Pope Julius III who granted his “beloved son” the privilege of printing for a period of ten years. His portrait has attracted the attention of researchers. It heads the “Trattato” and represents Ortiz with attributes of the high intellectual models of his time. In 1565 he published in Venice “Musices liber primus”, with the printer Antonio Gardano, dedicated to Pedro Afán de Ribera in whose service he continued a few years. Ortiz was thought to be deceased when Francisco Jiménez de Loscos succeeded him at the head of the viceregal chapel, although now we have proofs that he went to roman Colonnas’s Court as “famigliare” (1572 – 1576). A recent study identifies Ortiz as one of the characters in Paolo Caliari’s canvas “The Wedding at Cana” completed in 1563 for the Benedectine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. We propose to explore here the links between self-promotion strategies, social status sought, achieved fame and patronage links that could lead him to the Colonna’s court at the maturity of his career and compare his fate with that of other spaniard musicians in the Italian courts of his time.

Manuel Lafarga Marques: Renaissance musical careers: Italian Spaniards in the midle 1500 

Diego Ortiz’s fortune and fame is an example of his self-promotion campaign. A position, not yet unraveled, at the court of the Baron de Reisi, led him to become the director of the Neapolitan Chapel as teacher. What relationship could there be between the publication of his Trattato and the fortune that awaited him? What relates his possible position as part of the Famiglia Colonna to his later musical releases? 

Teresa Chafer Bixquert: The famigliari as an investment: cultural and economic prestige in the Colonna family of the Italian Renaissance 

Spanish Renaissance musicians found extensive avenues for professional advancement in Renaissance Italy. Cristobal de Morales is an example of this, however, there were many musical careers that found shelter among the most notable and wealthy Italian families. What parallels can we establish between these musicians and what was their fortune in Italy? What family relationships could have led many of them to the Roman Courts? These are some of the questions that this intervention raises. 

Penelope Sanz Gonzalez: Self-publication as self-promotion in the Renaissance musical career: Spaniards in Renaissance Italy 

Famiglia and Famigliare were very different concepts during the Renaissance than what we consider today. The extension of these covered all areas of the “indispensable” or “trusted” service of lord of the court. How did Diego Ortiz achieve this consideration at the end of his professional career? What were the merits that led him to end up at the Roman court of the Colonna? What relationships can be established between his own career and those of other hispaniard in the Italian courts? 

Biographies

Manuel Lafarga Marques, Phd: History & Aesthecis of Music Professor at the Valencia Conservatory of Music “Joaquin Rodrigo” and for 20 years Music History professor at the University of Valencia. From 2016 He leads a research group on musical iconography of the Spanish-Italian Renaissance period and its cultural and social implications. 
 
Teresa Chafer Bixquert, Phd, is a Professor of Sculpture at the Polytechnic University of Valencia , plastic artist and curator in numerous exhibitions. She has also been Vice Dean of Culture and Research FBBAA (UPV). 
 
Penelope Sanz González is a Master’s degree in Educational Technology and Knowledge Management, PhD student at the UPV, and is part of the research group led by Prof. Manuel Lafarga and has numerous publications related. 

Katherine Fry

The Victorian Poetess and the Musical Marketplace 

This paper explores how the phenomenon of the mass-market woman composer emerged in conjunction with the mythology of the poetess in nineteenth-century Britain. The concept of the poetess has always been contested as a patriarchal construct that both legitimised and curtailed the scope of women’s writing and professionalisation. While critics have done much to recover the strategies and subversions of popular women poets within the literary marketplace, the implications of this work for music history have yet to be fully realised. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the much-maligned genre of drawing room song, this paper explores how Romantic-era and Victorian women authors operated across literary and musical economies during a transitional period of print media innovation. My point of departure is the hit ballad ‘Come back to Erin’ (1866) by the poet-composer Charlotte Alington Barnard (who published under the pseudonym ‘Claribel’). As a malleable song that migrated across folk and commercial contexts, I initially relate ‘Come back to Erin’ to the gendered reception of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies before turning to the musical activities of two celebrity poets: Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) and Caroline Norton (1808-1877). Following the example of Moore, Hemans and Norton combined the production of popular poetry for literary annuals and periodicals with the publication of national airs and sentimental songs for the amateur drawing room. In doing so, they gave tangible form to an idealised image of the spontaneous and mellifluous improvising poet-musician, an image that routinely evoked the ancient model of Sappho. By tracing the legacy of this myth in the realm of ‘domestic’ song production, the final part of the paper returns to the case of ‘Claribel’ to explore how an idealised image of female creativity shifted amidst the growth of the mass-market sheet music industry in the second half of the century.

Biography

Katherine Fry is a Marie Skłodowska–Curie Global Research Fellow in the department of music at King’s College London. During the academic year 2022-23 she was a visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and was previously a lecturer in musicology at KCL and a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded project ‘Music in London 1800-1851’. Her latest project addresses women songwriters, urban culture and media history in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. She is also completing her first monograph, which is entitled Wagner and Victorian Modernity. Recent work is published and forthcoming in venues including Journal of the Royal Musical Association and Cambridge Opera Journal, as well as in the edited volumes Music and Victorian Liberalism (Cambridge, 2019) and Sound and Sense in British Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Remi Chiu

Selling Music and Quack Medicine in Victorian Britain 

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, two of the most successful British quack medicine companies–Holloway’s Pills and Beecham’s Pills–began to publish and sell sheet music of popular songs and dances aimed at the middle-class market as part of their advertising strategies. As a commodity with a use value, this music, which carried the companies’ ads on the back, had a far greater chance of being retained than the ubiquitous handbills and circulars that inundated Victorian streets and homes.

This paper explores how these two companies used music publishing to help consolidate their target market. It firstly examines the connections between music and medicine in the Victorian era that allowed the musical commodity to shape the perceived value and quality of the dubious medicines. Concomitantly, the difference in the production, the choice of repertoire, and the pricing strategies of the sheet between the two pill companies (Holloway’s pursued roughly the same course as traditional music publishers publishing original music, while Beecham’s produced cheap prints that were sold extraordinarily cheaply) conveyed different branding messages with different degrees of success. The second part of the paper is an examination of Beecham’s use of one of its published songs–“What are the Wild Waves Saying” by Stephen Glover–as the starting point for a multi-medial ad “campaign” that leveraged the semiotics of health and leisure associated with the English seaside holiday.

This investigation reveals the ways by which these medicine companies tapped into the music market to construct a notion of health based on commodity consumption during a time when medicine companies, free from virtually all legal regulation, conducted wild and extravagant experiments in advertising.

Biography

Remi Chiu is a professor and chair of musicology at the Peabody Institute. He specializes in Renaissance music and the history of medicine. He is the author of Plague and Music in the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press), which examines the role of music and music-making in the medical, spiritual, and civic strategies for combating pestilence. A companion volume of Renaissance plague songs, Songs in Times of Plague, was published by A-R Editions. He has published on the use of music during COVID. One of his latest projects focuses on the role of music in popular (quasi-) scientific entertainments.

Fiona M. Palmer

Commodifying Orchestral Conductors in 1920s Britain: Conductor Medleys as a Marketplace Microcosm?

This paper uses the conductor medley format as a lens through which to evaluate the commodification of orchestral conductors in 1920s Britain. The recognition of conducting as an autonomous branch of the music profession solidified during this decade. The aftermath of the First World War continued to influence attitudes towards the inclusion of Austro-German conductors and to drive the progress of conductors of British and allied nationalities in a competitive marketplace. The provision of a range of conductors across an orchestral concert season has not previously been explored in relation to its infrastructural, career, and repertoire related impacts. By probing evidence of approaches to promotion and self-promotion by conductors and orchestral institutions this paper sheds light on the extent to which an increasingly agent-driven profession was adopting generic or individualized ways of marketing native and foreign conductors. The paper contextualizes and evaluates the patterns and practical realities surrounding the adoption of conductor medleys by orchestras such as the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra and Scottish National Orchestra. It discusses the economics surrounding the medley construction and explores contractual processes including selection, fee negotiation, and levels of managerial and musical autonomy. It analyses marketing methods and probes the language and benchmarks adopted by critics in relation to individual conductors viz a viz nationality, experience, interpretative approaches, and public profiles. As a result, conductor medleys can be more fully understood in the context of the battle to achieve box office profits and as a microcosm of the British marketplace for orchestral conductors in post-war Britain.

Biography

Fiona M. Palmer is Professor of Music at Maynooth University, Ireland, where she served as Head of Department (2007–14). Her research expertise lies in the socio-economic history of music in Britain (1780s–1930s) and draws on her background as a professional performer. She is currently writing a contracted monograph on orchestral conducting in Britain (1914–1930s) which builds on her published work on the conducting profession including a monograph, Conductors in Britain, 1870–1914: Wielding the Baton at the Height of Empire (Boydell Press, 2017); co-edited volume of Music Performance Research (Winter 2020) focused on conducting studies https://doi.org/10.14439/mpr.10.1; and her peer-reviewed article, ‘The Musical Conductors Association: Collective Podium Power in Wartime Britain?’, Music and Letters, 102/3 (August 2021), 559–598) https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcab031.

Wouter Verschuren

Landgrave Moritz of Hessen and his Protégé Heinrich Schütz  

Heinrich Schütz is undoubtably the most celebrated composer of the German-speaking lands in the seventeenth century. However, his career started by chance when Landgrave Moritz of Hessen heard him sing as a boy in his parent’s inn Zum Güldene Ring in Weissenfels, a small town near Leipzig. His talent might have never been recognized if Landgrave Moritz had not taken him under his protection.
Moritz enjoyed an extensive knowledge of science and had a great love for art. He supposedly spoke eleven languages and was celebrated in the field of theology, philosophy, medicine, and mathematics; he also composed and played various string and keyboard instruments. Moritz was highly committed to cultivating the members at his court. The Collegium Mauritanium, founded in 1598 was not only intended to teach the sons of the Hessian aristocracy but also the gifted choir boys and the children of his court servants. Music, alongside other subjects, played an important role. Moritz personally monitored the students’ progress and established incentives for exemplary achievements. Promising students, among them the young Heinrich Schütz, were sent on educational journeys to learn the Venetian style from local masters and implement their newly acquired skills at court after their return. During his time in Venice, Schütz was given the opportunity to study with Giovanni Gabrieli. In 1627 Moritz was forced to abdicate because of his spending habits and was succeeded by his son Wilhelm V.

This presentation will focus on Landgrave Moritz and his role as a benefactor to promising students at his court, especially the fundamental role he played in Schütz’s life and career.

Biography

Historical bassoonist Wouter Verschuren, PhD, performs as a soloist throughout Europe, the USA, and Asia and is at home with repertoire ranging from the Renaissance to the Romantic and the present. He is principal bassoonist of The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra conducted by Ton Koopman. Wouter can be heard on countless CDs on labels such as Sony, Globe, Alpha, Erato, and Antoine Marchand. Wouter participated in the recording of the complete Bach and Buxtehude Cantatas with The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra.

Besides his teaching positions at both the Royal Conservatoire, The Hague, and The Royal College of Music, London, Wouter regularly gives masterclasses in Europe, the USA, and the Middle East and coaches for such festivals as the Amherst Early Music Festival, San Francisco Early Music Society (USA) and Tage der alte Musik in Hof (Germany), and the Ton Koopman Academy (Netherlands).
Recently, Wouter was awarded a PhD at the Royal College of Music, London, on the topic “Giants of the Dulcian Family; An exploration of the Doppelfagott and the Fagotcontra in music of the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries.

Maximilian Rosenthal

Navigating the line between economic and symbolic. A model for 19th century music publishers as actors 

Since the invention of music printing, music publishers have been important actors in the music business, functioning as gatekeepers to the print market, but also as intermediaries in numerous contexts. Arguably, their role became even more crucial in the course of the 19th century, when music business finally became music industry, and markets and production exploded.

The Leipzig and Dresden based DFG-research project “Geschmacksbildung und Verlagspolitik” has been investigating the role of 19th century publishers as mediators of taste and canon formation. To this end, we have transcribed printing records of three German publishers (Hofmeister, Peters, Rieter-Biedermann) into a research database (https://musikverlage.slub-dresden.de). The database allows tracking the printed volumes, and in effect the changes in popularity of ca 15,000 printed editions 1808–1945. This provides an empiric foundation to evaluate the success of publishers’ publishing strategies, marketing and publicity measures. After having successfully presented our theories on the behaviour of the music market at the Cultural intermediaries conference in Bristol in June 2023 (https://www.19cmusicmarket.com/), we now hope to expand on this by presenting a general model of music publishers as actors.

Building on the works of Axel Beer and other musicological researchers, combined with modern music marketing handbooks and historical sources, we have constructed a model that assumes the navigation between economic and symbolic capitals (Bourdieu) as the base agenda of music publishers. In the presentation, we aim to demonstrate the numerous ways by which publishers balanced cultural and economic goals, from assessment of work success over cost calculation to publishing strategies. We will relate this model to the success of individual editions as documented in our music publisher’s database and our theories on the music market. The ultimate goal of the model is to understand the role of publishers’ ‘speculation’ on canon formation and the course of music history.

Biography

Maximilian Rosenthal is a Postdoctoral researcher and the project manager of the DFG-research project “Geschmacksbildung und Verlagspolitik”. He obtained his PhD at the University of Music in Weimar in 2021 with a thesis on the music dedicated to Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. His forthcoming publications include his PhD-Thesis “Rezeption, Reflektion und Dialog in den Felix Mendelssohn gewidmeten Werken” and a complementary paper on memorial compositions to Mendelssohn. He is currently working on his second monography and an edited volume, both resulting from his current research (both presumably 2024). Recently, he has also developed a reserach focus on music and games.

Niccolò Galliano

Puccini`s Tunes: Casa Ricordi, American Popular Music and the Commodification of Italian Opera in the 1920s  

In October 1923 Giacomo Puccini, still in the process of composing Turandot and one year before his death, filed a lawsuit against Casa Ricordi, the Milanese publishing house he had worked with for almost forty years and that brought him to worldwide success. The dispute originated from two foxtrots, based on themes from Puccini’s operas, that were spreading across the United States: on the one hand, the composer sued Ricordi due to ‘Avalon’, a song published by J. H. Remick that apparently plagiarized the Tosca aria ‘E lucevan le stelle’, and for which Ricordi was awarded monetary damages that never intended to share with him; on the other, Puccini addressed the firm on a moral ground, accusing its New York branch to have published without his consent the foxtrot ‘Cho-Cho-San’, which repurposed Madama Butterfly’s ‘Humming Chorus’ and ‘Un bel dí vedremo’.
Rather than downplaying the episode as an anecdote in Puccini’s biography, this paper aims to present the ‘Puccini vs. Ricordi’ lawsuit in light of the evolution of the music publishing business in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing from an ongoing research on previously unread sources held at the Archivio Storico Ricordi, I will discuss the composer and publisher’s opposing roles and their respective economic/artistic interests: what may appear as a strictly monetary dispute actually reveals insights into how emerging practices of musical borrowing and remediation forced Ricordi to partly question its traditional activity. Moreover, this case study will shed light on the commodification of the operatic repertoire within the production culture of early American popular music, as well as its changing status under new markets and audiences.

Biography

Niccolò Galliano is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the University of Milan. He is currently conducting research on the industry network of Casa Ricordi (Italy’s leading music publishing house) during the fascist years, through the mapping of its epistolary exchange. He is interested in the history of twentieth-century music publishing and the production and consumption of recorded artifacts, and has written on topics such as the Italian library music industry of the 1970s and the experimental music record production. He is part of the editorial staff of the journal Sound Stage Screen.

Pierluigi Ledda

Casa Ricordi and the rise of the publisher-impresario: the entrepreneurial side of Italian opera through the collections of the Archivio Storico Ricordi  

The key element of the path towards the reformation of Italian opera in XIX century is the radical transformation of opera as a work of art into a product for the market, understood as the action of protecting and guaranteeing the specific and irreducible nature of the artistic act.
The participation of musical publishers in copyright debates and the positions held by Ricordi clearly indicate that the reformation of art was conceived in terms of the protection of the inventive and artistic act, of a quality control in the sequences of its reproduction, and of a clear and secure economic return based on the market. The intrinsic quality of art and its close dependence on public opinion have not been experienced as elements of mutual contradiction, but rather as a kind of unrepeatable, reciprocal guarantee. Art is a product for a market, “good art” is guaranteed by its success. The work of the artist introjects the culture of value, namely quantifiable recognition, and claims its consequences. The work of art is not “also” a product for the market, it becomes it in its essence. It being a product is the condition for its reliability, the element that makes it recognisable and acceptable, and therefore this condition extends to its creation, to the dynamics of its intimate design.

Artists and publishers, as Bellini, and Verdi and Puccini after him, substantially shared this perspective. It was a vision that promised them —successful authors and powerful mediators— a far higher income than those guaranteed by the previous system of seasonal commissions and thus, at least apparently, a greater independence.

Biography

Cultural manager and music collector, he lives and works in Milan. Since 2011 he is the managing director of the Archivio Storico Ricordi, music archive and cultural institution that is implementing a program of cultural development based on the digitization of the heritage for its open access, the creation of an international network with institutions and the scientific community, and the artistic re-use of collections. He is a lecturer in Music Management at the IULM University in Milan. Over the years he has curated conferences on sound archives and musical events.