The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800–1930 ed. by Christina Bashford and Roberta Montemorra Marvin (review)

One of the most frequently encountered ideas in Western literate culture is that art and commerce are fundamentally incompatible. Ironically, the notion gained general currency in nineteenth-century Europe precisely at a time when the old patronage system was breaking down and the consumption of art was being placed on a new commercial footing. Few seem to have noticed; if they did, they conveniently ignored it. Thus in music, Ludwig van Beethoven scorned money as the antithesis of Art even as he drove a hard bargain for his compositions and, somewhat unscrupulously, sold works to multiple publishers at once. Robert Schumann, likewise, repudiated the "philistine" public while making a living peddling ideas of artistic purity to that very same public in the pages of his newspaper, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Eventually, "art for art's sake," the default mode of the fin-de-siècle, was enshrined in the complex of ideas understood by the word modernism, as formulated by twentieth-century commentators such as Theodor W. Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus.

It is this last development—the lodging of these ideas in musical scholarship—that is the main source of the trouble. Whereas students of the Renaissance or Classical periods, say, have habitually relied on payroll accounts, employment contracts, bills of sale, and other business-related materials to help guide their critical assessments, those of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art music have generally ignored such things, in a kind of vacuum, focusing instead on the intrinsic value of the works themselves. As scholars of this repertory internalized the romantic aesthetics informing the music—notions of self-expression and artistic integrity, where money matters are seen as banal despoilers of the numinous—they made these aesthetics the basis of their own valuations. Never mind that the antimaterialist rhetoric arose as a direct response to an increased material prosperity that was itself a consequence of stupendous advancements in technology and communications under a growing industrial capitalism, or that the rising demand for "high art" emerged as a means to confer respectability and taste on the middle and upper reaches of a society eager to distance itself from the masses. Focused mainly on the form and expression of art, mainstream musicology has missed the mundane and often messy conditions that fundamentally explain it.

As a corrective to these widespread historiographical trends, The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800–1930 seeks to uncover this forgotten commercial orientation. It contains thirteen essays, touching on Italian, German, French, British, and American topics and covering approximately 130 years of cultural history, organized thematically into five parts ("Publishers," "Personalities," "Instruments," "Repertoires," "Settings"). The neatly-chosen headings provide largely accurate descriptors of each section's subject matter and angle, but what really unites the essays is a focus on materialism—not only as the root cause and simultaneous consequence of a rapidly developing nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century industrial economy, but also as the means, the actual stuff, by which art music was marketed and promoted. Newspapers, magazines, and other manifestations of the print culture so fundamental to the age naturally loom largest here, and it comes as no surprise that they are the special focus of three different essays. Foremost is Jann Pasler's examination of the sheet music published in everyday French newspapers and magazines ca. 1870–1920, a groundbreaking survey that makes striking suggestions about the role of the popular commercial press in canon formation. No less interesting is Catherine Hennessy Wolter's study of advertisements for pianos (including player pianos) in American magazines printed between 1914 and 1917, which tells us much about technological history, patterns of amateur music-making, and contemporaneous attitudes toward class, gender and family life. In contrast, Jon Solomon's mostly descriptive overview of the American response to archeological discoveries, ca. 1875...