Opens up significant paths for conversation about how musical concepts,
practices and products were shaped by interrelationships between culture
and commerce.
Art and money, culture and commerce, have long been seen as
uncomfortable bedfellows. Indeed, the connections between them have
tended to resist full investigation, particularly in the musical sphere.
The Idea of Art Music in aCommercial World, 1800-1930, is a collection
of essays that present fresh insights into the ways in which art music,
i.e., classical music, functioned beyond its newly established aesthetic
purpose (art for art's sake) and intersected with commercial agendas in
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. Understanding how art
music was portrayed and perceived in a modernizing marketplace, and how
culture and commerce interacted, are the book's main goals.
In this volume, international scholars from musicology and other
disciplines address a range of unexplored topics, including the
relationship of sacred music with commerce in the mid nineteenth
century, the roleof music in urban cultural development in the early
twentieth, and the marketing of musical repertories, performers and
instruments across time and place, to investigate what happened once art
music began to be understood as needing to exist within the wider
framework of commercially oriented culture. Historical case studies
present contrasting topics and themes that not only vary geographically
and ideologically but also overlap in significant ways, pushing back the
boundaries of the 'music as commerce' discussion. Through diverse,
multidisciplinary approaches, the volume opens up significant paths for
conversation about how musical concepts, practices and products were
shaped byinterrelationships between culture and commerce.
CHRISTINA BASHFORD is Associate Professor of Musicology at the
University of Illinois.
ROBERTA MONTEMORRA MARVIN is Director of the Opera Studies Forum in the
Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa, where
she is also on the faculty.
CONTRIBUTORS: Christina Bashford, George Biddlecombe, Denise Gallo,
David Gramit, Catherine Hennessy Wolter, Roberta Montemorra Marvin,
Fiona Palmer, Jann Pasler, Michela Ronzani, Jon Solomon, Jeffrey S.
Sposato, Nicholas Vazsonyi, David Wright
