During the decades surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century, unprecedented developments in the importance of public patronage, the publication and circulation of printed music and the construction and distribution of musical instruments radically altered the musical marketplace. On 5 and 6 October 2012 Emily H. Green and Erin Johnson-Hill (both of Yale University) convened the conference ‘Consuming Music, Commodifying Sound, 1750–1850’ to investigate these developments from a variety of perspectives. The conference was sponsored by Yale University's Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund, MacMillan Center, Center for British Art, Whitney Humanities Center and the Departments of Music, History and History of Art.
As Green noted in her opening remarks, the conference was the first ever to be devoted to musical consumerism, a broad subject that the speakers explored using varied approaches and invoking many disciplines beyond the traditional boundaries of musicology, including art history, anthropology and sociology. Indeed, the interdisciplinary nature of the conference was evident from the outset: the speakers in the first session, chaired by Tim Barringer (Yale University), considered the intersection of music and visual cultures. Alan Davison (University of New England) discussed the role of a series of printed portraits of famous musicians published by John Bland in London in the 1790s in developing the public's appreciation for entrepreneurial musicians and in establishing the presence of these musicians in the public sphere. The intersection of music and gender in the private sphere, in contrast, was taken up by Erin Johnson-Hill, who argued that Dickens's depictions of his male musical characters as either seductive or effeminate – often highlighted by accompanying illustrations – underscore a widespread discomfort within Victorian society about male musicians participating in domestic music-making. Deirdre Loughridge (University of California, Berkeley) explored the facsimile of a waltz in Rossini's hand adorning the title page of an album of piano pieces published in 1841 in light of the meanings read into facsimiles of musical autographs in the nineteenth century: the Rossini facsimile not only revealed the composer's character to his public but bore witness to the friendship between Rossini and the album's publisher amidst a battle over publication rights to his Stabat mater. Finally, through a creative enactment of an ‘It-narrative’, Emily H. Green concluded the session by examining the parallels between title pages of eighteenth-century printed music and this popular literary genre, in which consumer objects become storytelling subjects detailing their own circulation; she argued that the extensive information typically presented on a musical title page similarly recounts the score's journey through the marketplace.
The second panel, chaired by Leon Plantinga (Yale University), offered equally varied investigations, focusing specifically on objects of consumption. Roger Mathew Grant (University of Oregon) spoke about the elaborate taxonomies of tempo giusto in the eighteenth century, which were marketed in part as pedagogical solutions to the problem of tempo specification in music, alongside contemporary timekeeping devices. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theories of capital, Erin Helyard (New Zealand School of Music, Wellington) examined Clementi's strategic marketing of technically difficult keyboard music in London at the turn of the nineteenth century, first identifying a niche market among female amateurs in which he could then create and fulfil a demand for music, didactic material and instruments. Peter Mondelli (University of North Texas) explored the commodification of grand opera in 1830s Paris through the agency of the impresario Louis Véron and the music publisher Maurice Schlesinger, who altered the genre's consumption by catering explicitly to public desires. Finally, Mark C. Samples (University of Oregon) positioned Jenny Lind as one of the earliest examples of modern branding; created by P. T. Barnum, Lind's brand during her American tour in the early 1850s was unified through textual and visual elements, specific values and consumer products, all of which seem also to have helped Barnum rebrand himself in a more favourable light.
The opening day of the conference culminated with the first keynote address, delivered by Thomas Tolley (University of Edinburgh). Using the print of Haydn's humble birthplace that comforted Beethoven on his deathbed as his starting-point, Tolley explored how images contributed to the business of music. Portraits of composers and musicians, decorated title pages on printed scores, engraved tickets and a range of prints representing various aspects of the world of music all not only helped to widen music's reach within European culture, but also reaped substantial financial rewards for artists, publishers and composers. Tolley argued that Haydn's engagement with the industry of printed images, and his full realization of its lucrativeness, only came about through his dealings with entrepreneurs, artists and publishers in London, which ultimately earned him the financial success that later touched the dying Beethoven.
We reconvened the following morning to begin the day with a session considering periodical consumers, chaired by William Weber (California State University, Long Beach). Using the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung as case studies, Patrick Wood Uribe (Boston University) brought to light how publishers of journals in the nineteenth century not only influenced readers to buy the music they also published by including advertisements for it in their periodicals, but also guided their public's taste and honed its critical sensibilities through reviews of these same compositions. Richard Leppert (University of Minnesota) adopted a broad perspective on the conference's theme and addressed the fundamental question of what one actually consumes when one consumes music by focusing on the implications of the changing designs of keyboard instruments in the nineteenth century as well as on visual representations of music-making. Finally, Steven Zohn (Temple University) interpreted Telemann's promotion of a ‘mixed taste’ and an accessible secular style in music, as well as his inclusion of music attributed to women, in his journal Der getreue Music-Meister in the context of other popular German moral weeklies, which aimed to foster a unified German national culture and language, a project in which women could play an instrumental role.
The morning concluded with a panel devoted to national tastes, chaired by Richard Leppert. Through the lens of Mary Wrighten Pownall's career as a successful singer and actor in Philadelphia and New York in the 1790s, Glenda Goodman (Colburn Conservatory) placed American musical taste at the turn of the nineteenth century within the broader context of transatlantic trends, demonstrating that although Americans were newly politically and economically sovereign, they continued to consume European music. Andrew Greenwood (Southern Methodist University) argued that the commercial circulation of Allan Ramsay's and Robert Burns's Scots songs was crucial to the emergence of the Scottish Enlightenment discourse of societal improvement and progress, in which musical references were common. In my own talk (Catherine Mayes, University of Utah) I explored the divergence between national music as an ideal and as a commodity at the turn of the nineteenth century, arguing that representation of the ideology of folkloristic simplicity and naturalness was extremely marketable and thus was typically favoured over the imitation of the characteristics of specific national musics in published scores, even though these attributes were praised in aesthetic and critical discourses.
After lunch we were treated to a concert performed by several of the conference speakers (Emily H. Green, Erin Helyard and Erin Johnson-Hill) along with numerous graduate students from Yale's Department of Music and its School of Music. Along with selections of Mary Wrighten Pownall's songs, we enjoyed a trio by Ries for violin, cello and piano, two of Haydn's part-songs and a rousing rendition of Koczwara's Battle of Prague.
The lectures constituting the final session of the conference, chaired by James Hepokoski (Yale University), were linked by their focus on Haydn. Melanie Lowe (Vanderbilt University) probed the relationship between commercial success and musical style, with particular reference to topics in the late eighteenth century; through an analysis of differences in the density, enrichment, coding, function and articulation of the chasse topic in Pleyel's Opp. 1 and 2, Haydn's Op. 33 and Mozart's Op. 10 quartets, she suggested how these distinctions may have accounted for the relative success of these works in the musical marketplace. Karen Hiles (Muhlenberg College) interpreted Haydn himself as a kind of collectible, drawing on evidence from Franz II's large collection of music, known as the Kaisersammlung, which contains copies of nearly all of Haydn's string quartets. That the emperor collected the quartets in manuscript part-sets suggests that their value in his eyes depended on their function as music from which he could perform as well as on their unique appearance. Finally, the paper from Nicholas Mathew (University of California, Berkeley), which was read by James Hepokoski, construed negative contemporary reactions to the trio and chorus ‘In Praise of Industry’ (‘O Fleiß, o edler Fleiß’) from The Seasons as emblematic of a broader conceptual shift around the turn of the nineteenth century, through which the realm of the aesthetic came to be understood as antithetical to the realm of the economic.
The second keynote address, delivered by William Weber, brought the conference to a close. Drawing on documents from the Archives nationales, he illustrated the tension between economic interests, artistic ideals and the desires of partisan groups through an investigation of the process by which repertoire decisions were made at the Paris Opéra in the late 1810s and 1820s. Although new works were valued aesthetically, economic realities demanded that popular canonic operas remain in the repertoire; complicating the situation further, opposing interest groups championed the relative merits of French and Italian operas. The interplay of factors within and outside the sphere of music shaping the consumption of music and the commodification of sound were highlighted in this and every other contribution to the conference. The points of intersection between the topics explored by the speakers and the simultaneous diversity of repertoires, subjects and approaches should help to establish musical consumerism at once as a coherent and burgeoning area of inquiry.
