In the past decade, musicology's shift from text to context has fostered a robust conversation about the musical print market. Particularly interesting questions arise when studying the period from 1785 to 1850, when arts economies transitioned from court patronage to the commercial marketplace, or what Eduard Hanslick called the ‘dilettante era’. It is the complex overlap between these two economies that motivates Emily Green's new study, Dedicating Music, 1785–1850. Green questions why formal dedications, a holdover from court relations of yore, persisted in the modern print marketplace, and she traces the symbolic and tangible work that these dedications performed for composers, publishers and consumers of the musical score. It is no small challenge to draw a web of meaning out of a type of paratext (print-industry material that surrounds the main text) that is so draped in rhetorical flourishes and formulaic decorum that, in less capable hands, it might resist deeper reading. Green compares a corpus of dedications from across the period, making that data available on her companion website, rather than probing a few examples to uncover interpersonal relationships. This comparative approach allows her to extract substantial insight from an unassuming genre, showing how publishers continued to trade in prestige even when courts were no longer the crux of Europe's musical life.

Green's study contributes to a larger scholarly project to unearth the earliest roots of marketing and celebrity, offering a prehistory to later nineteenth-century marketing, a topic that may be familiar to musicologists from the essays in Christina Bashford and Roberta Montemorra Marvin, eds, The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800–1930 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2016) or from Nicholas Vazsonyi's Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Just as Wagner adopted an affectation of material disinterest that doubled as a marketing strategy, or what Pierre Bourdieu called the ‘anti-market pose’ (cited in Vazsonyi, Wagner, 4), Green's book shows that dedications capitalized upon the gift economy. The author illustrates this with a variety of interesting examples, such as when Schumann and Liszt engaged in a dedicatory quid pro quo that opened up Parisian markets for the former and aligned the latter with a Beethovenian reputation (examined more closely in Green's 2009 article ‘Between Text and Context: Schumann, Liszt, and the Reception of Dedications’, Journal of Musicological Research 28/4, 312–339). Likewise, publishers could behave as agents who boosted the careers of lesser-known composers with celebrity endorsements. Relying on Bourdieu's broad concept of ‘symbolic capital’ from his 1986 essay ‘The Forms of Capital’ (in John Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood)), Green argues that flowery gift-rhetoric transubstantiated material gains into prestige and vice versa. In this study, we find composers who were afraid to look like sell-outs decades before anti-capitalist anxieties went mainstream (36). This is why the trappings of courtly patronage continued for so long: not only to veil a growing fear that good taste would decline along with the courts, but to insulate composers against an anti-capitalist bent in music criticism that emerged well before Schumann's crusade against the Philistines.

Green lays out her study in four chapters prefaced by a substantial Introduction. In chapter 1 the author argues that dedications performed their resistance to changes in print culture by gesturing towards an economy of tangible exchange, yet ultimately deflecting attention from the commercial in a stance that Green calls ‘gently anti-capitalist’ (42). Where chapter 1 examines these offerings as a performative act, chapter 2 pulls back the veil to show cold calculation: dedications did not just ‘[resist] the commercial’ (76), but feigned resistance as a clever sales tactic. This practice was careerism disguised as courtly humility, as exemplified by dozens of composers who rode on Haydn's coat-tails, a case study distilled from Green's 2011 article published in this journal (‘A Patron Among Peers: Dedications to Haydn and the Economy of Celebrity’, Eighteenth-Century Music 8/2, 215–237). Once the score reached the music stand, its dedication invited the consumer to emulate the tasteful judgment of the dedicatee in what Green calls ‘Bildung by association’ (106) – that is, if Haydn approves, so should you.

The remainder of the book shifts from examining the gift economy to discussing the composerly persona. In chapter 3 Green shows that when composers’ dedications were intimate gifts ‘to my friend’, they interfaced with biographical anecdotes that made sociability a token of virtue. This chapter recreates the consumer imagination in compelling ways, and its arguments are persuasive in all cases except for Beethoven, whose sociability is less straightforward in light of his infamous misbehaviour. A more nuanced reading of the case of Beethoven's student Ferdinand Ries, for instance, would support Green's existing arguments about self-promotion: while Beethoven lived, Ries used dedications to boost his career, but after his teacher's death, he fashioned himself as an insider of a different sort by recounting Beethoven's social gaffes in his Notizen. This same chapter points out some intriguing ambiguities in the meaning of the word ‘friend’ that render this category of dedication ‘a clear signpost for euphemism’ (133). Green's interpretation of this ambiguity might have been further strengthened by examining the linguistic neighbour term Kunstfreund, an emerging category denoting an arts patron who could be of aristocratic or middle-class stock, and which reflected the changing rapport between artists and the Enlightened nobility.

Green's final chapter and epilogue grapple with a paradox: romantic solitary authorship versus polyvocal collaboration. In the same period that coveted the hermetic genius at work, the musical print market was inundated with collaborations, notably arrangements, which were admired as an alternative form of artistry. After demonstrating the prevalence of both models of authorship in print culture, Green explains that dedications both ‘conscript others into [the composer's] authority’ (168) while also ‘[redoubling] the strength of that singular voice’ (173), as it is a messy business to market Romanticism. As the author puts it, ‘to present their participants as authentic and thereby ensure a work's financial success, [dedications] must maintain an artist's social relations without upsetting the image of her independence and commercial disengagement’ (174).

Green's topic requires an eye for subtlety, and she uncovers many complex relationships hiding behind a decorative façade. Her textured inventory of dedications reveals nuances in professional relationships – such as patron–teacher, patron–student or publisher–speculator – as well as artists’ changing relationship with noble patrons, such as Mozart's epistle that, quite atypically, recalled fond hours making music with the Princess Henriette of Nassau-Weilburg. Green's study enriches the existing picture of eighteenth-century music publishing, a continuation of her work as co-editor, with Catherine Mayes, of Consuming Music: Individuals, Institutions, Communities, 1730–1830 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2017). In chapter 4, for instance, she finds unspoken anxieties about commercialism in the many dedications ‘to the ladies’ found in Hausmusik, most likely to forestall slights from the press, and her section on arrangements demonstrates how multiple authorship existed on a spectrum. The author's comparative treatment of data yields valuable observations, such as the fact that dedications clustered early in composers’ careers, which lays the groundwork for a new history of juvenilia. It should be noted here that the book could have benefited from more careful editing, as information is sometimes repeated beyond what is necessary, and the large number of multi-page tables in the text distract from the book's many strengths.

Dedicating Music takes on an admirable task: to draw meaning from a practice that is highly visible and yet invisible, boldfaced on the title-page yet overlooked. At times, Green's study can come across as unnecessarily limited in scope, because the book's diachronic approach does not always serve its synchronic goals. Green's stated aim is to reconstruct the networks that make music an object rather than a ‘text that begins and ends with barlines’ (11), which suggests that she will examine a wide range of cultural practices of the time in addition to tracing dedicatory formulae through the ages. Moving beyond the text is a familiar intervention for musicologists engaged with material studies, Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, the history of the book and related approaches that require a fisheye lens. In examining the grey area between gift and commodity, Green might have taken the opportunity to engage with contemporary practices that also existed in this liminal space: the Victorian annual (James Q. Davies, ‘Julia's Gift: The Social Life of Scores, c1830’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 131/2 (2006), 287–309); the affective marketplace of eighteenth-century literature where books could ‘assume the properties of flesh and blood’, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it (Deidre Shauna Lynch, Loving Literature: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 39); and the poetry albums, autograph books, commonplace books and binder's volumes that at once personalized the marketplace and mass-produced sentiment. What all these cultural products show – dedications among them – is that eighteenth-century scholarship has long been dominated by a Habermasian separation of private and public spheres, of the intimate and the outward-facing, that breaks down when the commercial profits from the personal.