Introduction

In recent years, students have come to demand career-oriented training in the arts: programs that live well outside of the practice room and provide young musicians with skills ranging from marketing to grant writing, from creative programming to the composition of headshots. With the latest waves of recession and economic upheaval, it has become even more important to recognize long-standing concerns regarding how music making can remain a viable profession in the United States, a nation in which the popular discourse so often trumpets economic success. In response, flexible and entrepreneurially minded programs have appeared at many institutions: EXCEL (Excellence in Entrepreneurship, Career Empowerment & Leadership) at the University of Michigan, the Office of Entrepreneurship and Career Development at Indiana University, EM (Entrepreneurial Musicianship) at the New England Conservatory, and the 21st-Century Musician Initiative at the DePauw School of Music, to name just a few. Whether curricular, course specific, or grant based, such programs give the lie to the notion that terms like “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” are mere buzzwords. Rather, programs that address the career-building elements of an artistic field that has often imagined itself floating high above the everyday world have become central to securing funding, attracting students, and preparing young musicians for their careers.

Of course, the resistance has been strong. The translation of value from one realm to another—the economic to the aesthetic, and vice versa—is often fraught. Indeed, aesthetic decisions that stem too clearly from economic motivations can be perceived not just as an artistic fault but also as social, cultural, or even moral failings. This bias was already evident over a century ago in Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 critique of the “conspicuous consumption” of the American capitalist elite—a competitive display of wealth that resulted in what he called a “code of pecuniary beauty” in which cost determined aesthetic value.¹ Although Veblen drew his examples from excesses in the decorative arts, architecture, landscaping, and fashion, the code could also apply to the conspicuous patronage and attendance of the performing arts that marked this era. Later, Theodor Adorno’s rejection of economic and political influence on the arts would drive both his notion of musical autonomy in his studies of Beethoven and Schoenberg and his distaste for jazz and popular song. In the case of the latter, the musical qualities that made jazz morally dubious stemmed directly from the imperatives of supply and demand.² In the work of Veblen and many other critics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, capitalism and its associated forms, or any whiff of monetary influence on the act of creation, were suspect.

The four papers presented here challenge such notions. They stem from conversations begun during the fourth Frederick Loewe Symposium in American Music held at the University of Redlands in the fall of 2015. Inspired by the ingenuity of composer-in-residence Libby Larsen, who has herself built a collaborative, flexible, and highly successful career without the customary grounding of a university, the symposium posed two questions: Who pays? And who plays? Meant in both the practical and philosophical senses, these questions were selected to open discussion of how various forms of patronage and the strategies of individuals whom we might call “entrepreneurial” have shaped the creation and reception of new American music. Larsen herself names this collection of individuals, systems, and priorities the “Mediation Web,” within which composers do their work of composing and communicating. Our authors here take a closer look at the terms on which this web of relationships does its work of mediating creation and listening.

Two of our essays center on the production of works of music theater to remind us of the bewildering array of individual voices, agenda, and choices that shape a work from conception to reception. Using archives and interviews, Sasha Metcalf challenges our assumptions about late twentieth-century opera and demonstrates how impresarios and philanthropic administrators cultivated a new repertoire in the 1980s that centered around the music of Philip Glass. In her essay, Glass’s body of work becomes a focal point for competing notions of what American opera...