Ab­stracts for Mu­sica Mer­cata, 5 June 2024

Published 12.3.2024 | Updated 15.5.2024

Gundula Kreuzer (Yale University, USA)

Industries of Opera: Scenes from the Nineteenth Century to Today (Black Box) 

The abstract will be updated later.

Biography

Gundula Kreuzer is Professor of Music History and chair of the Department of Music at Yale University. Her publications include the multiple award-winning Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 2010), a critical edition of Verdi’s chamber music (University of Chicago Press, 2010), a co-edited issue of The Opera Quarterly on “Opera in Transition” (2011), and Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera (University of California Press, 2018). In 2019, she received the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association and launched a series of symposia (Y | Opera | Studies Today) to foster dialogues between scholars, artists, and curators about contemporary opera. Other current research interests include “indie” opera in North America; the long history of stage technologies; opera’s entanglements with digital media; and a book project on Hindemith and the role of operatic repertories in postwar German memory cultures.

Nancy November and Imogen Morris

The Economy of Musical Amateurs in Early Nineteenth-Century Vienna

We enquire into the ‘economy’ of musical amateurs and dilettantes in early nineteenth-century Vienna, where the economy is understood broadly as a socio-cultural domain of interrelated human processes and transactions. Central to the eighteenth-century definition of musical amateurs is that they engaged in music for love or enjoyment rather than money. The term ‘dilettante’ was mainly used in music contexts to signal a musician who was not employed as such. But if amateurs and dilettantes were not getting paid, what did they have to offer, and what were they getting in return? We explore the shifting economy of amateurs and dilettantes in a time and place described by Eduard Hanslick as a ‘high point of musical dilettantism’ (Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien, 1869), seeking to understand not only how it worked, but what it might have to say about musical culture today.

In the eighteenth century, the terminology took on socio-economic meaning, pointing to the newly monied middle class, with their new freedom and capacity for leisure time. But negative connotations concerning lack of expertise emerged in the theoretical and aesthetic discourse. Middle-class amateurs, dilettantes, and their blossoming economy threatened the traditional understanding of art and genius. Vienna ca. 1800 gives us a chance to take a close-up view of the activities of amateurs and the workings of their economy before negative views took over and public concert life and its emphasis on ‘professionalism’ placed amateur music-making second. In Vienna ca. 1800, there was a favourable economy for amateurs—one that at this point did not rely so much on money and music as a commodity as it did on music-making as a rewarding and valuable activity in itself, with social, educational, physical and psychological benefits.

Biography

Nancy November is a Professor of Musicology in the University of Auckland’s School of Music. She completed her MA/PhD at Cornell University in 2003, with a dissertation on the aesthetics and reception of Haydn’s string quartets. Her research radically opens up our view of Western Classical music by means of socio-cultural critique of traditional ideologies; multivalent analysis; and methodological innovation. She is an award-winning teacher with a research emphasis on culturally sustaining pedagogy.

Recorder player Imogen Morris is an instrumental teacher and post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Auckland, where she has recently completed her doctorate investigating high-pitched Baroque alto recorders and their repertoire. Fascinated by early and contemporary music alike, she is active both as a soloist and in a variety of ensemble settings, and has performed in Germany, Austria, and South Korea, as well as her native New Zealand. Imogen is especially passionate about developing New Zealand’s unique voice in recorder playing and frequently performs and premieres works by New Zealand composers. Outside of her researching and teaching commitments at the university, she teaches recorder to students of all ages and coaches recorder ensembles across Auckland.

Francis Lapointe

The necessity of importing pianos to Canada, is gone forever: The rise of the music trade in Canada, 1800-1851

While some instrument dealers were active in the province of Quebec in the late 18th century, it wasn’t until the first decades of the 19th century that a network of musical instrument makers and music specialists emerged in what was then known as Lower Canada. But even in the 1830’s, Canada was still a mercantile enclave, and the British brand was in vogue. Music master James Ryan declared in 1833 that “in this country where it is only recently such articles have been manufactured, a prejudice generally has existed against pianos which have not been made in London”. How can we explain the fact that, less than twenty years later, European imports of keyboard instruments were about to hit a dead end in Canada?

In 1851, John Leeming, secretary of the Canadian committee of the Great Exhibition in London, but also one of the most important importers and auctioneers of pianos in Montreal in the 1840s, declared at a banquet: “we also sent a Piano from the hand of Mr. Herbert […], it has received some public notice, yet nothing equal to its merits. The necessity of importing Pianos to Canada, is gone forever”. Then thirty years later, Canadian music merchant L.E.N. Pratte spoke of “the absolute impossibility of importing European pianos – English, French, German or other – to America”. This presentation will therefore focus on the main commercial aspects of the advent of the music trade in continental America, from the rarely discussed vantage point of Montreal, the first colonial city to industrialize. We’ll examine how a network of instrument makers and music merchants emerged in this part of America, where French and British traditions and cultures met to create something new.

Biography

Francis Lapointe is a Master’s candidate in History at UQÀM, devoting his thesis to the emergence of the music trade in pre-industrial Montreal. His work is based on several years of research and a multidisciplinary bachelor’s degree combining history, musicology, museology and art history. He has received a prestigious research grant from the Quebec national archives and two graduate scholarships for the excellence of his work in 2022. He also received the Frederick Selch Award from the American Musical Instrument Society in 2022, for the best student paper at the conference held at the National Music Centre in Calgary. Francis has been involved in the musical instrument industry for nearly twenty-five years, and currently sits on the board of directors of the École nationale de lutherie de Québec, as well as being the project manager for the Canadian Association of Luthiers and Bow Makers.

Liliana Toledo-Guzmán

Women Musicians and Breadwinners in Mexico

This paper explores the trajectories of two middle-class Mexican women soloists, Esperanza Cruz and Celia Treviño, whose careers developed in the first half of the 20th century. I will explore the similarities of both musicians’ biographies to propose overarching ideas on how music brought them what was unusual to an average woman in Mexico at the time: full financial autonomy to become the breadwinners of their household.

Whereas women’s musical practices were widely accepted and even desired as a marker of femininity in private dominion, in public spaces, professional women musicians, like Treviño and Cruz, were what I call unintentionally disruptive, a category that can describe most of the Mexican middle-class women at the time. Of both musicians, any manifested a public position toward the feminist movement, which makes their cases more interesting because without meaning to, Cruz and Treviño broke expectations of femininity by gaining autonomy through being music workers. In what ways do Cruz and Treviño’s cases illuminate the issues middle-class women in Mexico dealt with in the political juncture characterized by local events like the Mexican Revolution and feminist movements taking place globally, all happening in the context of industrialization?

By examining both musicians’ careers, I hypothesize about the effects local and global events might have had on other females in similar circumstances who pursued a career as professional musicians in the same period. I analyze the challenges Cruz and Treviño faced to build a music professional career in a post-revolutionary patriarchal Mexican society and the strategies they created to navigate a male-dominated music environment. I also examine the way both musicians’ trajectories inform about a transnational circulation of ideas (i.e., feminism and the modern girl) and transnational circuits of music education that include Orizaba (a pre-Revolutionary industrial hub in Eastern Mexico), Monterrey (a post-Revolutionary industrial hub in Northern Mexico), Mexico City, Berlin, Paris, New York, and San Antonio, Texas. I draw from primary sources like newspapers, photographs, personal collections, and archival materials in Mexico, the U.S., and Berlin.

Biography

Liliana Toledo-Guzmán is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Arizona. Her M.A. thesis explored the integrationist politics of rural music after the Mexican Revolution. She has published related work in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Penguin Random House Mondadori. She collaborated in a US-Mexico Borderland Region Digital Humanities project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Arizona. Besides being a historian, Liliana has taken part in traditional Mexican music ensembles. She is currently a member of Colectiva Tsunami, a network of Mexican women musicians that investigates and plays primarily the music of contemporary Latin American women composers.

Rachel S. Vandagriff

Cold War Patronage and Musical Modernism: Private Foundations and Transatlantic Relationships in a Pax Americana Economy  

One less studied aspect of musical life during the Cold War is how private foundations, including the Rockefeller, Ford, and Fromm Music Foundations, subsidized American composers. Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt benefitted from the larger foundations’ global, anti-communist aims, as well as from the Fromm Music Foundation’s more personal touch. This paper will show how the Fromm Music Foundation (FMF) fostered effective partnerships that remediated the new music scene within a Cold War-era prestige economy.

Fromm, a German-Jewish émigré who fled to America 1938, was sympathetic to the challenges composers faced, and less interested in larger-scale geopolitical maneuverings. Fromm’s personal interest in their work led composers to become close with Fromm, advising him and benefitting from his Foundation’s generosity, as seen in his relationships with Carter and Babbitt.
In 1955, Fromm commissioned what became Carter’s Double Concerto for piano, harpsichord and two chamber orchestra (1961), after an exchange of intimate letters in confidence and delays requested by Carter. Fromm subsidized the premiere and additional rehearsals, allowing Carter to work out the performance considerations of his technique of tempo modulation with a large ensemble. Carter then leveraged Fromm’s initial investment by securing performances in Europe via a network of his own, which included the composer and Secretary General of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Nicolas Nabokov. By contrast, Babbitt leveraged Fromm’s support for publications and seminars, as well as commissions and performances in the US, to successfully lobby Princeton University to create the first Ph.D. degree in composition.

Unlike larger foundations, Fromm was not attempting to reconstruct the international military, economic, and cultural system, but he was working inside it, with enough money and flexibility to make things happen. His actual connections with composers and musicians, and no need for policy papers, made him highly effective in buttressing American contemporary music.

Biography

Rachel S. Vandagriff is a professor of music history and literature at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She holds a PhD in musicology from UC Berkeley and has published work in the Journal of the Royal Music Association and the Journal of Musicology. Her book, on private foundational support for American new music during the 1950s-70s, is under contract with University of California Press.

Eric Coutts

Patronage, commerce, and copyright: the development of the music business in eighteenth-century London  

London attracted increasing numbers of foreign composers over the course of the eighteenth century, offering independence from court and church employment and the opportunity to accumulate significantly greater wealth than at home. Concert activity in the capital rapidly accelerated from the 1750s, accompanied by important growth in a range of ancillary activities, including teaching, sales of music scores, and instrument manufacture.

Commentators generally attribute the burgeoning musical activity of the period to the influence of patrons and to the entrepreneurial skill of the more successful musicians. Close examination of concurrent economic and legal developments in the capital presents a more nuanced picture.

I argue that existing scholarship fails to recognise the urban context of musical life in the capital, in particular the impact of audiences, economics, and the law on the commodification of musical performance in the second half of the eighteenth century. Although reduced institutional support forced musicians to operate more independently, they did not work in isolation. Quite the opposite: the growth of freelance musicianship accelerated the division of labour, such that musicians became increasingly dependent upon developing commercial networks. In parallel, musical copyright recognised for the first time by Lord Mansfield in his ruling on J.C. Bach’s litigation against publishers James Longman and Charles Lukey. Scholarship typically interprets this development in aesthetic terms. I argue that Lord Mansfield’s judgement was based neither on Bach’s rights as composer, nor on any notion of the originality of a musical work. Rather the decision was directed at confining the economic monopoly of music publishers within the time limit imposed by the law of copyright.

Biography

I am in my final year of a PhD in musicology at King’s College London commenced in 2020 under the supervision of Professor Cliff Eisen. My research is focused on the impact of commercial and legal influences on eighteenth-century musical life in London. After a year as Assistant Lecturer in Law at the University of Paris II, I qualified as a solicitor in the City of London with Slaughter and May. I moved to Goldman Sachs in 1993, working in mergers and acquisitions, and in 2007 joined Citigroup, as Citi Country Officer and Head of Banking, France. I returned to London in 2014, where I was Chief Executive of Edmond de Rothschild UK until 2019. I am a Senior Harris Scholar of Downing College, Cambridge, and hold an MA Hons. (Cantab.) in Law, a BA Hons. (Open) in Humanities with Music and an MA Hons. (King’s College London) in Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Clemens Kreutzfeldt

Gottlieb Graupner (1767–1836): A Transatlantic Musical Entrepreneur in Early 19th Century Boston 

The paper focuses on the Boston based German-born Gottlieb Graupner (1767–1836), and the transatlantic music trade in early 19th century Boston. Graupner, who had come to Boston with an English theater ensemble, stands prototypically for the various fields of activity that were necessary to make an economic living as a musician in this period in the US. In the mornings he worked as a music teacher, in the afternoons he stood at the printing press in his music store, and in the evenings, he could be found as an instrumentalist in the theatre orchestra or active in the Handel and Haydn Society, which he co-founded. While these activities were all intertwined, this paper will particularly focus on his activities as a music importer. A surviving business ledger shows that he established transatlantic business partnerships, especially with English music dealers, to offer his American customers an assortment of sheet music – ranging from the newest popular songs at London’s Drury Lane Theatre to chamber music works by Joseph Haydn or Ludwig van Beethoven. In addition, music textbooks and various types of keyboard, string and wind instruments, including the necessary accessories came across the Ocean. The paper takes a close look at the specific circumstances and challenges of Graupner’s transatlantic trade in musical goods. Based on the business ledger, the needs of the Boston music market are explored, as well as the logistical, financial, but also political circumstances of his business model. Why did his invoice book remain blank for almost three years at some point of his career before it was continued as usual?

Biography

Clemens Kreutzfeldt joined the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna as a research associate in 2019, where he is currently working on his dissertation “Music Trade in Antebellum Boston: Spaces of Transatlantic Exchange”. His topic emerged from the project “Musical Crossroads: Transatlantic Cultural Exchange 1800-1950”, led by Professor Melanie Unseld and funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Additionally, in 2022, he joined the FWF-project, “Musician Families: Constellations and Conceptions”, wherein he is currently developing ideas for a post-doctoral project. Prior to this, he was a research associate at the Institute of Musicology, University of Cologne. In 2012, Clemens received his bachelor’s degree in music, art and media from the University of Oldenburg. After studies at Kingston University, London, he continued his education in Oldenburg, receiving both a Master of Arts, with a focus on cultural history of music, and a Master of Education (music and art).

Sonja Tröster

How much is an orchestra? Renting instruments in 19th-century Vienna  

In 1870, the new building of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, known as the Musikverein, was opened. It housed the society’s conservatoire, two concert halls, and an archive for various collections. Shortly after its inauguration, a violin maker also set up a workshop in the building to take care of the instruments of the conservatoire’s students and also the musicians performing in the concert halls. Gabriel Lemböck’s workshop became a central institution for Vienna’s musical life, particularly around the Musikverein. It sold and repaired instruments of varying qualities and properties for amateur musicians and virtuosos alike, rehaired bows, and offered a range of strings. Additionally, Lemböck supplied instruments for rehearsals and performances by orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic and ad hoc orchestras for travelling soloists. Some of Lemböck’s account books from 1870 to 1892, as well as those of his successor, Karl Haudek, have been preserved and recount the story of this business model.

In my paper I aim to address several questions: which orchestras and which occasions did Lemböck provide instruments for? What instruments were included in this rental, and what factors determined the rental cost? Was there a system to assign a specific instrument to a musicians for each occasion? Lastly, how prevalent was the practice of renting instruments to entire orchestras at this time and what did that mean for the instrumentalists?  

Biography

Sonja Tröster is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Vienna. Her research areas cover vernacular music culture as well as music and humanism in the 15th and 16th century, the reception of early music in the 19th and 20th centuries, and musical philology. Her current current work focuses on the intersection between craft, trade, and musical culture through studying violinmakers in Vienna during the 19th century.

Karl Traugott Goldbach

Supply chains in the gut trade of the 19th century  

When the German violin virtuoso Louis Spohr set off on a concert tour to Italy in 1817, his publisher Carl Friedrich Peters, who also worked as a music dealer, gave him an assignment: He was to find out where in Italy the best gut strings could be obtained. From the eating habits of the Italians, Spohr explains why the Neapolitan gut strings are better suited for musical instruments than the Roman ones: The Romans only slaughter until Easter, the Neapolitans eat lamb all year round, which means that the guts there come from older animals.

In the 1850s and 60s, string makers in France and Germany caught up and developed new techniques to compete with the Italian manufacturers. However, a problem remained: the best raw material still came from Italy, namely from Naples. Therefore, although the processed strings no longer had to be imported from Italy, the guts themselves still did. As at the beginning of the century, the purchasers of sheep guts in Germany or France had to rely on reputable middlemen in Italy.

Such partly complicated supply chains were necessary for high-quality violin strings. For mass-produced goods, on the other hand, there were unexpected synergy effects. This is why the paper concludes with a look at the zither teacher Jacob Heinrich Korter. After his college for zither playing did not last, he worked as a trader not only for guts, but also for spices and butchery supplies.

Biography

Karl Traugott Goldbach studied composition and electroacoustic composition at the Franz Liszt University of Music in Weimar, where he also received a PhD in musicology. He also holds Master’s degrees in Library and Information Science from the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and Cultural Management from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern. Since 2008, he has been the director of the Spohr Museum in Kassel, where he is publishing, among other things, the online edition of Louis Spohr’s correspondence (www.spohr-briefe.de).

Chloe Valenti

Music as merchandise? The market for nineteenth-century Garibaldi music 

Britain’s long-standing fascination for Italian culture, and financial involvement in its politics, reached a climatic point in April 1864, when the internationally-acclaimed soldier and politician Giuseppe Garibaldi made a highly controversial visit to England. Few foreigners held as much sway over the British popular imagination as Garibaldi – such was the ‘Garibaldi-mania’ surrounding his visit, historians have described him as the first celebrity of the modern political age.

His visit sparked a huge flood of Garibaldi-themed merchandise and paraphernalia in Britain, from portraits and figurines to the famous Garibaldi biscuits. This paper, however, focuses on the extensive range of music composed in his honour by British and Italian composers and poets, much of which circulated in the period surrounding the 1864 visit, and following his death in 1882. The music includes piano fantasias, arrangements for brass band and wind instruments, and a large collection of songs for choir or solo voice, such as ballads, marches, hymns, romances, men’s choruses and drinking songs.

This paper examines the music, texts, and accompanying advertising and illustrations to explore how this music was marketed. Garibaldi had broad appeal in Britain: the aristocracy was in awe of him, he was a hero for working men and a figure of romantic infatuation for women. Just as Garibaldi crossed gender and class divides, so too the music in his honour embraced musical genres from quasi-operatic scenas to military-inspired styles, and was frequently published and performed alongside extracts from operas and oratorios, national and patriotic anthems, or as souvenir pieces for domestic performance. By catering for abilities from beginners to accomplished musicians, in performance contexts including homes, schools, concerts and theatres, how do we understand the consumers of this music? To what extent can this music be labelled as celebrity merchandise, and who is the Garibaldi it presents?

Biography

A member of the Specialist Advice Network at the National Trust, Chloe Valenti is the music researcher for the Bath Assembly Rooms project. Her research will contribute to an immersive visitor experience sharing the history of the Rooms when they reopen to the public in 2026. She also supervises papers in music history of the eighteenth and long nineteenth centuries at the University of Cambridge. She has published articles on the reception of Verdi in nineteenth-century London, Victorian popular song, singers and health in nineteenth-century Britain and Victorian women composers. Her recent essay ‘Opera and British Choral Culture: Verdi’s Requiem in London’ appears in Opera Outside the Box: Notions of Opera in Nineteenth-Century Britain, published by Routledge. She is currently writing a chapter on ‘Music Criticism and the Press’ for Verdi in Context, part of Cambridge University Press’s Composers in Context series.

Una McIlvenna

The Business of News-Singing in Europe from the Sixteenth through the Nineteenth Century  

Across early modern and 19th-century Europe, news singers were a ubiquitous sight in busy streets and marketplaces. Selling ballads printed on cheap paper about newsworthy events, singers (often male) were often accompanied by a portable oil painting which featured multiple images, to which the singer would point with a long stick in order to explain the story. Meanwhile another person (often female, sometimes accompanied by children) would sell the songsheets to the gathered crowd. These were very inexpensive products, usually selling for less than a penny. The singers would buy the sheets wholesale in bulk from printer/booksellers and then try to hawk them, eking out what was usually a precarious living. They did this by singing the songs while perched on a bench, a tradition which gave rise to their names in multiple languages: Bänkelsänger, cantimbancho, mountebank. In order to draw a crowd, most ballads opened with an incipit designed to attract potential listeners, such as ‘Come all ye maidens fair’. This paper attempts to build a picture of how this economy of street singing worked, including the bargaining between wholesaler and seller, the logistics of using a large oil painting as a prop, how the buying and selling of sheets operated (including who was involved in this transaction), and how the business of selling the news – including the sensationalism required to attract a crowd in a densely packed marketplace full of ambulant vendors – transformed the nature of the songs themselves.

Biography

Una McIlvenna is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. She has held positions at the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney, Kent and Queen Mary University of London. A literary and cultural historian, she researches the early modern and nineteenth-century pan-European tradition of singing the news, and the history of crime and punishment. Her monograph Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 (OUP, 2022) was recently shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s History Award, Australia’s most prestigious history prize. She has published articles on news-singing in Past & Present, Renaissance Studies, Media History, Parergon, and Huntington Library Quarterly, and is a co-founder of the international Song Studies Network.

Jonathan Hicks

After London Cried; or, the Noisy Character of Victorian Commerce 

The tradition of cataloguing the “cries” of street hawkers is not restricted to any one city but, owing to its size and influence, there is a uniquely rich corpus of London cries. Literary and art historian Sean Shesgreen (2002) detected a shift in London’s early-nineteenth-century publishing trade from books promising reproductions of contemporary vendors to “books about books” that anthologised existing collections. This shift corresponded with changes in the Georgian city to accommodate increasing vehicle traffic and encourage indoor shopping. In this paper I take up the question of what happened after street cries appeared to fade from earshot. First, I explore the afterlives of hawkers in Victorian aesthetics, drawing especially on the reception of Hogarth’s famously noisy eighteenth-century streetscapes, which caricatured the busy-ness of urban commerce. Second, I posit a parallel example of noisy nineteenth-century trading in the form of the “open outcry” system used by brokers in the City’s commodity exchanges. Bringing the two strands of enquiry together I show how cries were bound up—in the Victorian imagination—with both the bustle of the pre-industrial marketplace and a supposedly efficient means of negotiating financial futures. The yelling and gesticulating of the later-nineteenth-century trading floor thus recapitulated, in tightly controlled settings, a much older paradigm of economic exchange. While brokers and pedlars maintained vastly different relations to production and capital, both required skills akin to musical performance. Ultimately, I suggest that acts of crying out—whether in the streets and alleys or in the temples of finance—contributed to a Victorian fascination with character, both in the sense of “types” of traders and in claims for the strength of personality required to withstand the forces of the market.

Biography

Jonathan Hicks is lecturer in music at the University of Aberdeen, having previously held research fellowships at Lincoln College Oxford, King’s College London, and Newcastle University. His work is principally concerned with the criss-crossing of musical and urban histories in the long nineteenth century. He co-edited The Melodramatic Moment: Musical and Theatrical Culture, 1790-1820 with Katherine Hambridge and has published in journals including Nineteenth-Century Music, Journal of Musicology, and Cambridge Opera Journal. He is currently completing a book addressing music and commerce in Victorian London.

Morton Wan

Exchange Alley Ballads: Music and Financial Crisis, circa 1720  

The South Sea Bubble of 1720 imploded a swirl of paper: stock scrips, credit notes, newspapers and pamphlets—and broadside ballads. Functioning as both entertainment and journalism, “Exchange Alley ballads”—the viral songs replete with references to and commentary on the trading frenzy—burst forth in the epicenter of the world’s first modern financial crisis. While furnishing the cacophonous soundscape of London’s streets in South Sea heat, these ballads also disseminated (dis)information about the stock market, blurring the lines between music, literature, and finance.

Contrary to a prevailing musicological wisdom, which views these ballads as mere trifles, dismissed as lowbrow and slipshod musical consumables, I argue for a reassessment of these musical-financial ephemera as valuable early modern media artifacts. Subjecting the ballads to combined hermeneutic and media-material analyses, I bring music to bear on the recent historiographic turn towards a behavioral understanding of the nature of the South Sea crisis, seen as a public mania shaped by evolving economic narratives and their contagious spread. I contend that the ballads, acting as vectors of market narratives, exerted an active hand in inflating, sustaining and ultimately puncturing the speculative bubble. More specifically, I examine the Exchange Alley ballads in juxtaposition with contemporary financial documents by bringing our attention to their shared medium—paper. This reorientation towards the primary sources’ media attributes allows us to consider how musical meaning and asset value, of which these market artifacts were bearers, as forms of “paper knowledge,” thus imbued with an aura of imagination veering between permanence and change. I propose these ballads offer deeper insights into the underlying value mechanisms of the South Sea Company’s financial scheme, particularly the rampant development of derivatives finance it fostered, thereby shedding light on the epistemic fragility underlying the market maelstrom.

Biography

Morton Wan is a PhD student in musicology at Cornell University. His research broadly concerns the entwinement of music and political economy in history. He is currently finishing his dissertation, which is intended as a musical history of the South Sea Bubble of 1720—the world’s first modern financial crisis. Morton holds a BA in economics and philosophy and an MPhil in musicology from the University of Hong Kong. He also earned an MSt in music with distinction from Oxford University. His research work has been supported by fellowships and grants including from the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies at UCLA, and the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University. Morton is an active pianist and harpsichordist, having received his training at the Royal Academy of Music in London and McGill University in Montreal.

Patrick Zuk

Soviet music publishing in the 1920s and early 1930s: perspectives from the correspondence of Nikolay Myaskovsky  

Nikolay Myaskovsky (1881-1950) became one of the most prominent figures in Russian musical life after the October Revolution—and not merely on account of his reputation as a highly-regarded composer and composition teacher, but also through his services as a consultant to various government bodies. For many years, he acted as a reader for the Soviet state music publisher, assessing the suitability of scores and writings on music for publication. A retiring man who held himself aloof from politics and shunned publicity, Myaskovsky won wide respect in this role for his conscientiousness and his efforts to support his colleagues professionally. His extensive correspondence, much of which remains unpublished, sheds fascinating light on his experiences and the difficulties that beset music publication in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s—the chronic shortages of materials and skilled personnel; the disruption caused by periodic government attempts to overhaul the press’s management structure and reorganise its activities; and the constraints imposed by increasingly invasive censorship and the imperatives of state ideology. In letters to trusted associates such as Maximillian Steinberg, Myaskovsky gave vivid accounts of the obstacles that confronted composers in trying to secure publication of their work—most dramatically, during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ of 1928-32, when the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians gained control of the state music publisher and other notable musical institutions, and sought to subordinate composers’ creativity to propagandistic ends. These materials are of significant importance in documenting circumstances that would otherwise have gone unrecorded, and afford invaluable glimpses into the interior workings of the Soviet state music publisher during a particularly eventful phase in its history.

Biography

Patrick Zuk is the Director (Arts and Humanities) of the Institute of Advanced Study and Professor of Russian cultural studies and music at Durham University (United Kingdom). His monograph Nikolay Myaskovsky: A Composer and His Times was published by the Boydell Press in 2021.

Julia Bungardt-Eckhart

From the Witches Kitchen: Publishing Avant-garde Music in the Golden Twenties  Economic Strategies of the Viennese Music Publisher Universal-Edition  

The music publisher Universal-Edition was established in 1901 in Vienna as a stock company – an exceptional case in the publishing landscape of that place and time, since major traditional publishing houses (like Breitkopf & Härtel, Artaria, Boosey, and Ricordi) were as a rule privately or family owned. This is even more remarkable when one takes into account the fact that only a few years later Universal-Edition became the original publisher of the who’s who of modern and “ultra-modern” composers, such as Franz Schreker, Anton Webern, and Béla Bartók while retaining its corporate form. The cultural practice of publishing ‘serious’ music was never based solely on commercial considerations, since it posed an entrepreneurial risk and usually did not – with few exceptions – generate much revenue. Therefore, this quite unusual situation deserves a closer look: how did an essentially profit-oriented enterprise succeed in a business field in which the ‘economy of symbolic goods’ (Bourdieu) has a major role to play?

In my paper I will present and discuss UE’s publishing policy and strategies under these premises. I will focus in particular on the 1920s, which in retrospect are often viewed as the “golden era” of UE, since during these years it continued to expand and published many works now considered part of the canon (‘classics’). How was UE able to maintain and develop its market position and become the leading publisher of avant-garde composers from all over Europe during economically challenging times (hyperinflation, world economic crisis)? In consulting archival documents including annual reports, balance sheets, contracts, catalogues, UE’s comprehensive business correspondence as well as its public communication, I will examine the methodology and strategies UE employed in order to achieve its status.

Biography

Julia Bungardt-Eckhart studied musicology, German language and literature, and phonetics at the University of Cologne. 2003–14 research assistant for the Critical Complete Edition of the Writings of Arnold Schönberg. PhD 2014. 2015–17 research associate at the Alban Berg Gesamtausgabe. 2015-20 Associate in the Musicology Department of the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Vienna office of the Anton Webern Complete Edition). Since 2011 also freelance work as an editor.

Michele Calella

Publishing the music, selling the virtuoso: Franz Liszt and the music market in Vienna (1838–1846)

In the late 1840s, Franz Liszt, having retired from his career as a virtuoso, undertook an inventory of his compositional repertoire, which included an impressive corpus of printed compositions, distributed among no less than a dozen European publishers. An examination of the repertoire printed in Germany and Austria from the late 1830s, when Liszt embarked on a long series of international tours, reveals a striking panorama of publishing centres. These included Vienna (Spina, Haslinger, and Mechetti), Berlin (Haslinger), Hamburg (Schuberth), Cologne (Eck & Comp.), Leipzig (Breitkopf & Härtel and Hofmeister), and Mainz (Schott).

In my paper, I’ll try to shed light on the complex and multifaceted commercial aspects underlying this dissemination, which seems to have lacked a conscious effort to forge a coherent compositional profile. I will argue that the music prints in question served different purposes: they were promotional tools and often tangible, visual souvenirs of Liszt‘s concert performances. Conversely, the commercial imperatives of the involved publishers played also a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of Liszt’s works.

These establishments, which specialised in particular genres or composers, may have influenced the course of Liszt’s publications. For example, Liszt’s transcriptions of Schubert’s songs found a natural home with Diabelli and Haslinger, two preeminent promoters and ‘owners’ of Schubert’s oeuvre at that time. Similarly, Liszt’s transcriptions of Beethoven‘s and Mendelssohn‘s works published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1839-1840 were in keeping with the publishing house’s aspiration to establish itself as a prominent representant of the ›classic‹ canonical repertoire.

In my paper, I will attempt to analyse the complex commercial relationship between concert life and music publishing by focusing in Liszt’s performance activities and the publication of his works in Vienna between 1838 and 1846.

Biography

He pursued musicology studies at the Scuola di Paleografia e Filologia Musicale at the University of Pavia-Cremona and at the University of Regensburg. In 1993, he completed his Tesi di Laurea at the University of Pavia-Cremona.Dr. Calella obtained his doctorate in 1997 from the University of Münster with a dissertation on ensemble performance in the Tragédie lyrique during the late Ancien régime. He subsequently held positions as an assistant at Philipps-Universität Marburg from 1997 to 2001 and as an assistant and later senior assistant at the University of Zurich’s Musicology Institute from 2001 to 2005. He was professor of Musicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, and since 2010 is professor of Historical Musicogy at the University of Vienna. In 2020, he received the Westrup Prize from the journal Music & Letters. Research focus: Italian opera in the 18th centuty, instrumental music in the 19th century (with focus on Franz Liszt), History of musicology.

Helena Tyrväinen

Chauvinism, shared values, business? Association française d’expansion et d’échanges artistiques as a sponsor of the Finnish Opera  

In the 1920s, severe financial difficulties cast doubt on the capacity of the Finnish Opera, managed by a joint-stock company, to operate. The support during the first decade of Finnish national independence provided by the Association française d’expansion et d’échanges artistiques, based in Paris, for performances of French opera, popular in Finland, has been largely overlooked.

My paper analyses the material conditions of the international relations and their development in the musical domain at an historical turning point. It focuses on the measures and delimitations of state authorities, the business world, the art world, and of individuals at a moment of increasing financial unrest.

The AFEEA (later AFAA) was founded in 1922 in the nationalistic climate following World War I with the aim of strengthening the worldwide influence of French art. It operated under the ministries of Foreign affairs and of Public Education, thus under state protection, and gathered a representative swathe of French society, from bankers to heads of art institutions, from artists to tycoons, from patrons to diplomats. (Bernard Piniau.)

The correspondence with the Finnish Opera in the archives of the French Foreign ministry and the Music department of the National library of France casts light on the allegedly chauvinistic motives of the French and on why in the 1930s the association started to concentrate on the unilateral promotion of French art.

The AFEEA’s bilateral cooperation extended to over fifty countries. Its activities regarding musicians’ mobility, concertising and foreigners’ music studies in France have already received attention (Kerry Murphy, Renata Suchowiejko, Marie Thégarid, Helena Tyrväinen). My paper, however, deals with a topic that has remained virtually unresearched: the profitable renting out and provision of the music materials of French operas to the Finnish Opera by the AFEEA in cooperation with French music publishers and insurers.

Biography

Helena Tyrväinen PhD studied musicology at Columbia University, École Pratique des Hautes études (François Lesure), and the University of Helsinki (PhD directors Alfonso Padilla and Jim Samson, Towards the Kalevala Suite: Identity, Eclecticism and French Trace in the Music of Uuno Klami, diss. in Finnish, Finnish Musicological Society & IAML Finland, 2013). Researcher in Musicology at the University of Helsinki, she specialises in transcultural questions, Finnish-French and Franco-Nordic music relations, the role of cultural capitals, and the music of Uuno Klami (1900–61), on which subjects she has published articles in Finnish, French and English. She has received grants from many foundations, edited anthologies, been a Board member of the Finnish Musicological Society, organised conferences in Helsinki, St. Petersburg and Paris, and presented papers in Australia, Europe, Japan, Northern Africa, Russia and the USA. In 1994–98 she participated in the Nordic research project ‘France in Nordic Music 1900–39’.

Asier Odriozola Otamendi

A Wagnerian Risk: R.M. Azkue’s “Ortzuri” (1911) and “Urlo” (1914), or the Economics of Basque Opera  

During the 1910s, Basque linguist, folklore researcher and fervent Wagnerite Resurrección María Azkue (1864-1951) tried to accomplish one of his biggest ambitions: a Basque national opera. “Ortzuri” (1911) and “Urlo” (1914) were the perfect example of his nationalist aspirations, but the artistic result was ambivalent if not disappointing. Critics applauded his pretension, but questioned his lack of composing talent and the poor theatrical production for their premieres in Bilbao. Moreover, the operatic failure had serious economic consequences: Azkue himself, who financed his second opera, had to assume part of the expenses. Almost ruined and dejected, he eventually abandoned his composing career.

His musical productions showcase the hazardous milieu of Basque opera, at least concerning the financial side. Regarded as one of the cornerstones of the local nationalist movement, Basque opera was an artistic venture that sought to demonstrate the prestige of “Basque Art”. Nevertheless, although it received the economic and political support of both local institutions and the growing bourgeoisie, several limitations affected the artistic quality of Basque opera, and even composers’ professional careers – who had to leave for Madrid, Europe or America. Perhaps Azkue’s case was the most tragic one, but the economic management of his operas poses relevant questions about the material potentials of Basque opera, allegedly in its heyday during the 1910s.

Focusing on two case-studies (the operas “Ortzuri” and “Urlo”), I try to offer an overview of the economic background of Basque opera: its financial possibilities and limitations, the dichotomy between market logic and self-serving funding, as well as between amateurism and the degree of professionalization of local opera agents. In short, I intend to unveil the basic limitations of an artistic project nurtured and embellished by nationalist narratives, but which concealed economic difficulties that contradicted such discourses.

Biography

Since 2023, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain). In 2021, I obtained my PhD from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona with a thesis on the relationship between Basque opera and Spanish music between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 2022, my thesis was awarded the XXI Orfeón Donostiarra-University of the Basque Country Prize for the best musical research, and has been published in Spanish: “El vals de Amaya. Regionalismo, ópera vasca y música española (1879-1920)”. In 2019, I completed a research stay at the CRIMIC (Université Paris IV-Sorbonne), and I am currently a visiting researcher at the Centre des Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage (EHESS, Paris), where I am conducting a research on musical and political relations between the Basque Country and Paris between 1880 and 1930.

Metoda Kokole

The Rise and Fall of an Opera Impresario: Amalia Mascheks Financial Enterprise in the Estates Theatre in Ljubljana (1833–1835)  

In 1833 the impresa of the Estates Theatre in Ljubljana, the capital of the Austrian province of Carniola, now Slovenia, was trusted to Amalia Maschek (née Horny; 1792–1836), who by this time was already an established soprano, and an active member of local cultural and musical life. She managed to organise a high-quality opera season in 1833/34 with the popular repertoire of the time, but then encountered various problems that eventually led to her insolvency and final bankruptcy in the spring of 1835, after which she died prematurely a year later.

Although the opera business of past centuries is a fairly well researched subject, this particular case is for a number of reasons especially interesting. First, it is a testament to the ambition and courage of a forty-one-year-old singer to run the business in a local environment of a small Austrian town with a specific opera clientele. And secondly, it is very well documented, through contemporary press reports, official records of the Estate theatre with various printed materials, contracts, also Amalia’s manupropria supplications for financial help, loans, etc., describing the general existential problems of running the theatre in Ljubljana. In addition to these ‘official’ records, another valuable contemporary documentation has been preserved in the Archives of Slovenia – a personal correspondence – letters or rather regular reports about daily life in Ljubljana during the period under consideration. These give an outside view of her impresa, the initial enthusiasm for her productions with detailed information about her first steps as director of the expected new season, the list of engaged musicians, etc., to only brief mentions towards the end of her first season and little about her dwindling business in late 1834 and early 1835.

Biography

Metoda Kokole, PhD in musicology, is Research Advisor at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Musicology. She is general editor of the music series Monumenta artis musicae Sloveniae and leader of the Slovenian national research programme Researches in the history of music in Slovenia. Her research focuses on the history of music on the territory of today’s Slovenia from the 16th to the early 19th century with special regard to the migration of the Italian opera in the 18th century.