Dedicating Music, 1785–1850 by Emily H. Green (review)

If one studies experimental method, Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman observed, the notion of a "Scientific Revolution" makes historiographical sense, for one sees a significant divergence between the aims of natural magic (to emulate and glorify nature) and experimental philosophy (to establish matters of fact about nature). But "if, on the other hand, we study instruments, we see a continuity": many of the tools of early science originated with the wonder-production of natural magic, and so a story of break with the past is inextricable from the stories of material objects that were preserved, adapted, and reinterpreted.¹

Thanks to Emily Green's book Dedicating Music, 1785–1850, we can now look similarly upon dedications as material objects that supplied continuity across the economic, social, and aesthetic "revolutions" of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. As music production shifted from patronage system to market economy, as composers transitioned from courtly servants to celebrated creators, as music became vested with different sorts of powers, dedications persisted on the title pages of printed scores. Why? What functions were such publicly personal statements of offering meant to perform? What effects did they (in fact) have?

Green provides a range of answers to such questions, in the process demonstrating that zeroing in on dedications offers a powerful means to study both broad developments in print culture, commodification, and consumerism, and particularities of music—which she urges us to understand "as an object with paratextual and epitextual packaging rather than as a text that begins and ends with barlines" (11). The study is pan–European in scope due to the international nature of the musical trade, and concentrates on the years 1785–1850—from Mozart's string quartets "op. 10" dedicated to Haydn, to the first modern complete works sets (at which point dedications largely disappeared from title pages). By the numbers, then, Dedicating Music may seem to fall largely outside the purview of eighteenth–century studies. But being about the "long, porous transition between patronage–driven and market–driven economies of music production" (2), it is essentially concerned with dedication practices aligned with eighteenth–century conditions and values, and the ways their continuance, transformation, and ultimately disappearance interacted with surrounding changes. As Green puts it, "this is not the study of a time or a place as much as it is the dissection of an act and the ways that act can participate in economic and aesthetic shifts" (34).

The book is divided into two parts, the first focused primarily on the economic implications of dedications, the second on the aesthetic. Chapter 1, "Gifting a Commodity" deploys theories of the gift (Maus, Derrida, Weiner), commodity (Marx) and symbolic capital (Bourdieu) to explain how dedications functioned as gifts to be reciprocated in tangible and symbolic ways. Building on existing research on patron–composer relationships in the early modern period, Green demonstrates the transference of dedications from patrons to fellow musicians in the late eighteenth century, and analyzes the resulting differences: tangible teaching, performance, criticism, as well as symbolic in form of public recognition, credibility. Ultimately, dedications are seen to perpetuate a vocabulary of courtly patronage that distracted from the process of commodification: they supported a "gently anti–capitalist" musical economy (42), and "Marxism in reverse" (75) by drawing attention to, rather than concealing, the composers' social history. Chapter 2, "Selling a Gift" traces changes in the advertising rhetoric of which dedications were a part. By about 1800 at least some composers and publishers, Green demonstrates through their private correspondence, thought of dedications as a means to promote sales. Green situates the promotional power of title page dedications in relation to shop displays, periodicals, and domestic performance, shining some light on the shadowy everyday of eighteenth–century music consumers. Green also newly contextualizes Mozart's well–known Op. 10 dedication to Haydn—hitherto interpreted largely through the lens of great composer biography—within the conventions and expectations of dedications, providing a more nuanced understanding...