Romantic cultural constructions of musical life have long shaped methodological approaches to the study of it. Due to its nineteenth-century roots, musicology was itself formed by the ways in which the period’s music and musicians were marketed. Despite its broadening approaches, scholarship is sometimes still mired in notions of individual genius and the autonomous artwork. In short, it is far too easy for scholars to succumb to the period’s self-branding rather than to examine the numerous economic and commercial factors involved in the transmission and reception of its musical works.

The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800–1930, edited by Christina Bashford and Roberta Montemorra Marvin, is thus a refreshing exploration of the long nineteenth century’s commercial life and the manner in which it influenced conceptions of music. As Bashford’s introductory essay stresses, the book deals with ‘the culture of art music as opposed to art works per se’ (p. 9). As is readily acknowledged, industrialization brought increased ease of travel for touring musicians, which contributed to the development of cults of celebrity; the music publishing industry flourished, bringing compositions into parlours as well as the public sphere. Ideas about music and performing artists were constructed through advertising, and critical reception took place in countless newspapers and periodicals. This volume’s 16 essays demonstrate that the results of such factors could be far-ranging and complex. The risk of producing a multi-authored book centered around a single topic is that some of its components will inevitably be weaker than others. Happily, all of the essays in this book will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century music. However, they differ as to the degree to which they contribute to the book’s central theme.

The volume is organized into five sections: publishers, personalities, instruments, repertoires and geographical settings. However, many themes tie essays together across these artificially imposed boundaries. David Wright’s essay on John Stainer’s The Crucifixion and its place both in the publishing output of Novello and the world of amateur and choral singing could well have been paired with Jeffrey Sposato’s study of the ways in which the sacred music performed on Leipzig’s Gewandhaus concerts influenced church programming by Thomaskantors; both reveal much about the rarely considered relationships between sacred music and commercial enterprises. Gender is likewise a theme in many of the book’s essays, most obviously in George Biddlecombe’s study of Jenny Lind’s image and role in the marketing of ballads, but also in Catherine Hennessy Wolter’s chapter on the changing gender norms in advertising for player pianos. The rise of female players figures in Bashford’s essay on late nineteenth-century British violin culture, and the large number of women composers featured in scores published in the French magazines and newspapers explored by Jann Pasler is one of her major findings. Music’s relationship to social class appears in multiple chapters as well. Several of the essays are as much reception histories of genres and works as they are studies of commercial marketing’s influence on musical transmission. Here, readers might wish for more examination of stylistic factors; yet due to the book’s focus, the proverbial ‘music itself’ is necessarily overlooked. Nonetheless, more consideration of specifically musical characteristics would have strengthened several authors’ arguments. On the other hand, when the ‘idea’ of art music somehow gets lost, as it occasionally does, primarily due to the great depth of some authors’ examination of the commercial, its omission in no way weakens the book’s numerous insights.

The strongest essays in the volume are those painting wider contexts in order to provide multi-faceted, thick descriptions of their topics. The first essay in the volume, by Denise Gallo, is a role model in this regard. Focusing on what might seemingly be a mere footnote to the study of the music of Gioachino Rossini, it describes piano arrangements of his marches issued by five publishers: three marches Rossini originally composed as ‘homages’ for Tsar Nicolas I in 1834, then repurposed for Oscar Berandotte, Crown Prince of Norway and Sweden, and Belgian King Leopold I, as well as a fourth march for Sultan Abdul-Medjid of the Ottoman Empire. Gallo provides numerous frameworks for these works: the biographical factors involved in their origins, the nature of piano arrangements during the period (both band pieces arranged for piano and repurposed as ‘Hausmusik’, and piano works imitating band music) and the publishers’ marketing techniques, including ‘celebrity’ dedications and attractive lithographed covers. She likewise supplies the related political situation: Breitkopf & Härtel deliberately issued one march to commemorate the wedding of Ferdinand Philippe d’Orléans to Helen von Mecklenburg-Schwerin, allowing the publisher to market it to German-speaking buyers. Thus publishers were successful in ‘creating their own “truth” to sell music’ (p. 34) and in suggesting that Rossini was still producing new compositions after the height of his operatic career.

Michaela Ronzani’s study of the ‘innovative publicity campaign’ for Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème is similar to Gallo’s in that it focuses on the ways in which Ricordi’s production of consumer goods associated with the opera helped to shape Puccini’s image as that of the leading Italian composer. The publishing company used its design and printing division to generate visual operatic representations through posters, postcards, envelope seals, costume designs, sheet music covers and porcelain plates. While the rejection of this strategy voiced by some of Puccini’s contemporaries clearly resulted from their competitiveness, Ronzani’s suggestion that critics complained that the publisher’s marketing was ‘imposing a repertoire’ on audiences through shaping their responses could have received further elucidation.

The final essay in the section about publishers, David Wright’s on composer John Stainer’s relationship with the firm of Novello, is one of the book’s strongest due to its far-reaching historical implications. Wright’s initial question is why Stainer’s The Crucifixion remained in the choral repertory, selling over a million scores despite its middle-brow status and lack of artistic acclaim. More than a mere case study, however, the chapter uncovers the economic factors inherent in British musical life through archival study of Novello’s records, revealing the degree to which amateur singing and church choirs shaped the marketplace. Since there was no economic incentive for selling the parts for orchestral music, Novello focused on choral works, not charging performance fees and paying low copyright fees to composers of orchestral and chamber music. Thus, instrumental composers found it impossible to make money. In contrast, churches purchased multiple copies of anthems for choirs, and their ongoing ownership led to multiple performances and local canonization of particular works. Wright concludes, ‘Boldly stated, Stainer composed art music of low aesthetic quality but high economic value’ (p. 81). Ultimately, commercial factors had a significant influence on the legacy of genres and styles produced by British composers.

The ‘personality’ chapters, while well worth reading, sometimes lack the broader revelations of the publishing studies; they are occasionally unable to transcend the ‘case study’ approach. When focusing on an individual performer’s image it can be difficult to determine who or what most controlled it: professional management, the individual themselves, the press, the public or some combination thereof. The large number of possible factors involved is best demonstrated by Fiona Palmer’s comparison of the careers of British conductors Julius Benedict and Frederic Cowen, which necessarily takes into account their national origins, degree of specialization as a conductor, association with continental composers, publication of writings on music and, in the case of Cowen, advocacy for British music and personal sense of being ‘at odds with the status quo’ (p. 148). George Biddlecombe’s essay focuses on the manipulation of the persona of Jenny Lind through visual imagery that made her appear more stereotypically feminine; her association with popular ballads, both sung in performance and marketed for the domestic sphere, enhanced her ‘modesty’, ‘meekness’, and ‘moral superiority’. Biddlecombe finds Lind’s use of ballads to have been an overlooked yet crucial component of her British and American reputations, allowing her to couple her performances with audiences’ nationalistic pride. Nicholas Zazsonyi explores Richard Wagner’s representation of his Paris experiences and the ways in which he ‘marketed himself as a celebrity’, branding his own works as unique while criticizing his contemporaries who did the same thing for being part of commercial industry (p. 115). Zazsonyi’s succinct, elegantly written essay is the contribution that best represents the book’s stated focus.

The copious pictorial examples that accompany the two chapters about musical instruments are helpful to support their arguments. The imagery and language of the advertising for player pianos in the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post show how manufacturers’ marketing aimed at new male consumers, beyond the women traditionally associated with domestic music making. While the player piano assisted in the transformation of Americans from players to musical consumers, Wolter describes how the untrained player was courted through a continuing paradigm that stressed the intuitive personal expression still possible in the instrument.

The richly detailed context Bashford provides in her study of the rise of British violin culture at the turn of the twentieth century provides the breadth and depth that is characteristic of her scholarship. The author outlines the multiple factors involved: the rise of women as both teachers and players (sometimes in female string ensembles), the inclusion of lessons in the curricula of public (i.e., private) schools and the prevalence of cheap concert tickets and group lessons for the lower classes, all supplemented by published scores, method books, violin periodicals and materials for the exams organized by commercially run boards. While the movement was made possible by industrialization and the cheaper factory manufacture of instruments, the reaction against these changes, related to the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, included the fetishization of rare instruments by collectors and emphasis on the techniques of individual craftsmen. The commercial and technological aspects of violin making were thus downplayed in favour of the ‘triangle of art, craft, and nostalgic pastness that commerce around the violin family perpetrated’ (p. 198).

The two-part organization of Bashford’s article, first a description of the rise of violin culture followed by her insightful explanations of the reasons it took place, could also have also been utilized in Jon Solomon’s chapter in the ‘repertoire’ section. Using primarily digitized newspapers from 1870s to the 1930s, Solomon traces the spread of ideas about ancient Greek music in America. The article’s purely chronological organization begins with nineteenth-century compositions which attempted, to various degrees, to imitate or evoke a Greek style, starting with the incidental music by Felix Mendelssohn for Antigone. However, after noting the discovery of the Hymn to Apollo, announced in the American press in 1893, and the publicity concerning further emerging musical artefacts, the essay also lists performances of Greek music in concerts, stage productions and lecture-recitals, as well as on radio and recordings, indicating how it was arranged in modern settings. The conclusion that the available commercialism made such works publicly accessible, but that they were modified for contemporary tastes, is unfortunately not supported by more specific discussion of the modern arrangements.

Roberta Marvin’s ‘Selling a “False Verdi” in Victorian London’ is more successful in establishing both the musical and cultural contexts for her comparison of the receptions of Don Carlos and Aida in London in the 1860s and 1870s. Marvin finds that the mere 12 weeks after Don Carlos’s premiere left British audiences unprepared for hearing the composer’s stylistic turn toward French Grand opera. In contrast, the four years of delay before Aida’s London production allowed for reports in the press and the publication of score excerpts to help develop an audience for its spectacle and German-influenced style; Londoners embraced Aida, in the terms of Pierre Bourdieu, as ‘a “valuable” cultural object to be “acquired”’ (p. 239), if not an unqualified artistic success.

The final studies are grounded in three locations: Leipzig, Paris and Edmonton, Alberta. Jeffrey Sposato’s illuminating chapter focuses on two figures who served as Leipzig’s Thomaskantor early in the century: Johann Gottfried Schicht and Moritz Hauptmann. Drawing on the legacy of Gewandhaus concerts held during penitential seasons, Schicht transferred his increasingly sacred programming into the setting of the Thomaskirche, advertising mini-festivals of multiple compositions by one composer or large-scale works to be heard over multiple services, all in the effort to increase church attendance. Hauptmann, a close friend of Gewandhaus conductor Felix Mendelssohn, continued the process, programming more deceased composers of ‘serious’ music and Renaissance and Baroque works, and reintegrating J.S. Bach’s cantatas into the service. In doing so, he assisted with Mendelssohn’s aesthetic goals and contributed to the canonization of sacred repertoire.

Jann Pasler’s study of musical scores published in French magazines and newspapers from the 1870s to the 1920s, with heavy emphasis on Le Figaro, is typical of her detailed and comprehensive scholarly approach. Pasler finds that such scores could serve as subtle forms of publicity for upcoming musical premieres. In addition to noting the female composers represented and the inclusion of earlier music to evoke the ancien régime, Pasler briefly links particular musical publications to France’s interactions with foreign countries, an idea that could have been further developed. The appearance of both older and avant-garde music, and art music and popular monophonic songs, suggests to her that music crossed class barriers, and she concludes that art music was not purely for the professional musician and popular music was not only for the amateur (p. 303). Perhaps the divisions of highbrow and lowbrow (as famously delineated for America by Lawrence Levine) were not as firmly established as we might assume from our own historical vantage point.

David Gramit’s case study of music and commerce using the city directories of Edmonton, Alberta, likewise concentrates on the ways in which ‘cultured’ music helped make the colonial city representative of the explosion of an urban area where cultural practices are rapidly created. His chapter covers music teachers and performers, the dominance of church and choral music, voice and piano instruction and the commercial struggles of brass bands and dance orchestras coming into being without civic support. Art music provided ‘cultural legitimacy’ for Edmonton, separating the town from the music of its original settlers and indigenous peoples. Music both supported the development of music stores, piano dealers and gramophone companies, but also allowed the town to distinguish itself from these commercial activities, defining its status through its offerings of ‘good music’, an ‘optimistic and civilized soundtrack’ typical of emerging cities (p. 296).

While Gramit’s chapter perhaps has few overt surprises, he reminds us that what he describes was part of ‘an enormous worldwide phenomenon’ and notes that musicology will ‘fail to understand this process until we acknowledge the value of the familiar – both aesthetic and commercial’ (p. 296) – as its musical practitioners did. Well researched, thoughtful, and highly recommended, The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World rises to this challenge by placing the commercial aspects of nineteenth-century musical life at its centre. In doing so, it provides a wealth of new understandings about how economic realities shaped performance and musical consumption.