I've really set myself an impossible task here, covering the whole history of painting in an hour and a half, the whole history of music in an hour and a half, but let's keep going and see how much we can cover even though we can't cover it all.
The topic of music in many ways is going to reprise the themes we saw this morning in the history of painting.
The main book I'm referring to, other than Cowan, again Cowan has an excellent chapter on music,
though towards the end his taste in music gets a little questionable in my view, but what do I know about Mongolian throat singing?
Although maybe that's in his next book, but this F.M. Shearer book, Quarter Notes and Bank Notes, is really excellent.
It specifically looks at the conflict between patronage and the market as financial support systems for classical music at its peak in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In Europe it's filled with anecdotal detail, somewhat questionable statistics and graphs at times, but still you learn a lot from reading it.
And so although I will be covering some of the same ground, it's worth looking at it from the added perspective of the history of music.
And one of the curious facts that struck me in trying to put together this day is that in many respects what we think of as the great tradition of European classical music grows out of the exact same areas geographically as the great traditions of European painting.
Just the areas we were talking about this morning, certain cities in what's now Italy, particularly Venice, but also Rome, and then the low countries, places like Antwerp, the so-called great era of Flemish polyphony.
I mean, if you want to trace the classical music tradition all the way back, it basically goes to medieval Paris and sort of about the earliest music recorded from the, I think, 11th century, Lillian and Perotin from France, the music, Notre Dame was a great center, the so-called Organa, the beginnings of medieval polyphony, Paris was one of the
Centers of Late Medieval Culture.
But to me, European music starts to get interesting in the 14th and 15th centuries, centered around
the court of Burgundy, and then in the area that's now Flanders, composers like Guillaume
Defy, and then, you know, to me the first great composer is Jusquin de Prey, and the
The whole school of, again, what's called Flemish polyphony, Johannes Ackermann, Jakob Obrecht, Heinrich Isak, and then you get developments in Italy and specifically around Venice, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrielli, who were centered in the great cathedral of San Marco in Venice.
The Baroque period starts with Claudio Monteverdi, the first operas grow out of Monteverdi in Venice and Italian noble courts like Mantua.
So it's, in a way, a curious coincidence that, you know, just as the Flemish Renaissance in painting and the Italian Renaissance in painting, we've got a Flemish Renaissance in music and then Italian Renaissance and the Baroque really begins in Italy, and is it just a coincidence?
And the answer is probably no, that music and painting flourish at roughly the same time in exactly the same places, often very specifically the same places, like Venice, like the Court of Burgundy, Maximilian I, really the start of the great Habsburg line, and then Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, patron saint of Venice.
of both art and music, so you get patronage as an issue here in these places.
But also, these were great commercial centers, and just as they could support the luxury
of painting, they could support the luxury of music.
Music requires money in a somewhat different way than painting does, because music requires
performers.
And it is true that these great composers can hear their music in their heads.
And we know that even when Beethoven was deaf, he could continue to compose great music, in fact, some of his greatest music.
Nevertheless, just about every composer wants to hear his music performed, and that takes money.
Very few composers had the money to hire an orchestra of a hundred people to get their symphonies staged,
or when you get to opera, staging becomes really expensive and Wagner had to have his
operas staged just the way he wanted them and bankrupted Bavaria as a result over it.
So again, although you'd like to say, well, a composer can just sit down and compose any
music he wants. In fact, paper was pretty expensive before the 19th century and even
that was an issue. And so there are ways in which just having a commercial society makes
The Great Achievements of Classical Music Possible
Maybe we'll talk a bit about how printing, the development of the printing industry facilitated the careers of many composers.
So again, you can say we're talking about a necessary condition here without a certain state of development of commercial society.
The whole tradition of music, as we understand it, would have been impossible.
Again, it doesn't seem to be accidental that music should have begun its flourishing in the same places where painting did,
and namely in the great commercial centers of late medieval and Renaissance Europe.
And let me carry that a bit further and say it was in the nature of these areas that they involved extremely competitive environments,
because there was so much diversity there, they were areas of extremely decentralized culture
because what you had was cultures defined by individual cities and individual aristocratic courts
which means there were a lot of sites of culture.
What's now Flanders, even let's say what's now Belgium, is pretty small in area
But at this time, we're talking about 14th, 15th, 16th centuries, it had a lot of centers of commerce and a lot of small courts.
And so painters, musicians could find lots of places of employment and the environment was very competitive as a result.
Same for Renaissance Italy and its city-states like Florence and Venice.
And let me try to make this point by saying some nasty things about France.
Anyone from France here? Okay.
Someone asked me at lunch, why haven't you been talking about French art and French music?
And time has come, and in fact I'll use it as a kind of example.
Now let me say, I mean, I do like French painting, I do like French music.
interested in something relevant on French painting, Cowan's chapter has a
wonderful discussion of how the Barbizon school and then the Impressionists broke
up the monopoly of the French salon culture but in a way France serves as a
good counter example of what I'm saying and helps me make the point I'd like to
make now about both painting and music that decentralization is a great
is a great advantage for the advance of culture, and decentralization is something that the market tends to produce, and especially produces it in opposition to national cultures, big state cultures, and France is our great example of a national big state culture.
France was really the first nation state to emerge in human history.
Modern states now occupy the globe and they projected themselves back in history and we
think they've existed for all time.
But in fact, there's nothing corresponding to a modern nation state to France beginning
in the late 16th century and really coming into existence as a nation state under Louis
the 14th and 17th century.
And we really see in France, again, there's a lot of great French culture, painting, music,
architecture, certainly medieval architecture, but we see in the case of
France what it means to have a national culture and I'll even say a kind of
national cultural policy or arts policy. It's in fact when people call
for national cultural policy they really have French institutions in mind. They'd
I'd like to Frenchify, let's say, American culture. They have in mind things like the French Academy and the French Salon.
Now, what I'm talking about here is the fact that France really is Paris.
Paris has a stranglehold over France and over its culture in a way that no city ever has in any other country.
Certainly not London in Great Britain, because places like Dublin and Edinburgh over the centuries and even places like Manchester have been alternate sites of culture.
Great Britain maybe is closest to France as a nation state, but it's an interesting point to realize, until the 19th century, there's no Germany, there's no Belgium, there's no Italy.
Again, we think, you know, because we look at a map and say there's always been in Italy,
but no, Italy is a creation of Garibaldi in the late 19th century, and the same for Germany.
Germany is not unified until 1870, and then it's unified under Prussian rule.
So for most of European cultural history, Italy is divided into seven or eight political units
and sometimes more like these city-states like Venice and Florence.
Germany is just a mess of principalities, duchies, petty kingdoms, sometimes very large
like Prussia or Bavaria, but all these little states, Saxony, Hesse, Weimar, the low countries,
what's now Belgium and Holland and Luxembourg were at times split up into 20 different entities
And we should think about the fact that these areas, which let us say were nationally challenged in those days,
were unbelievably rich culturally and arguably richer than the parts of Europe that were nationalized like France.
France. Now again, I'm not trying to put down French culture totally, but until the 19th century, you know, late 19th century impression, you really can't match the French achievement in painting with the Flemish achievement, and look how small Flanders is compared to that big France, or you can't match it against the achievement of Florence or Venice, and it's the same in music
The literature is a different issue, but what I'm saying is actually in France you see the disadvantages of a national cultural policy and cultural centralization.
What you see again and again in French history is the effect of Paris having imposed its will on the rest of the country.
And one of the great, French history is popping up, it's very funny to go to Paris, and here's
a monument to this guy, and there's a monument to the guy that deposed that guy, and there's
a monument to the guy that deposed that guy, and on and on, and it's a republic, and it's
a monarchy, it's a republic, it's an empire.
It keeps switching.
One thing never changes, France, Paris rules the whole country.
And whoever is in charge of Paris rules the whole country.
a tremendous centralization of culture there. So basically, all the painting is in Paris.
All the music is in Paris. And, you know, in many ways, France is the model of an enlightened
cultural policy. The French supported painting. They have this National Academy of Painting,
and they have competitions. And if you won the competition, you were sent to Rome for
and the years to study painting and France maintained this beautiful villa, I think it's the Farnese Villa, maybe it's the Villa de Medici and you know it was great to win that prize.
The problem is everything depended upon the taste of the people in Paris.
And Cowen discusses this, how this salon culture in painting in the 19th century where there was this big national show and it was this great celebration of art and promoted the careers of artists, the problem is all the paintings looked alike.
They all valued these grand historical paintings and, you know, it took a concerted effort on the part, first of the Barbizon School, people like Courbet, then the Impressionists, to break this stranglehold of the François and how did they do it through a series of commercial galleries and organizing their own exhibitions.
So, in the weak, in the areas deficient in nations, the low countries, the German areas and Italy, you had this enormous cultural flourishing, particularly in music and painting.
I mean, those areas absolutely dominate European painting and music for centuries because there's such diversity.
in Paris, you know, at roughly the same time, there are 50 small principalities in other courts in the German territories, and they're all competing for talent, competing against each other, and so actually, I think France is an eternal lesson in the dangers of government support of the arts.
and so actually I think France is an eternal lesson in the dangers of government support of the arts.
Cowen's book Creative Destruction has a wonderful chapter called Why Hollywood Rules the World
explaining how French subsidies for the movie industry killed it because they effectively was a form of protectionism
and by subsidizing movies, they took away their vitality.
Anyway, I'll let you read that.
But you see that pattern again and again in French art.
In French music, there's a lot of good French Baroque music,
and I love Marc-Antoine Charpentier, for example,
but it doesn't compare to German Baroque music,
and it doesn't compare to Italian Baroque music,
and in part because French Baroque music was absolutely dominated by one man,
Lully, who was made musical czar in Louis XIV's court
and actually suppressed the careers of other composers like Charpentier.
Now again, I love Francois Couperin, love Charpentier, some of Lully's music is good.
I do not want to deny there's some quality here, but I think one reason it doesn't compare
with Germany for that one court, everything hinged on what triumphed at Versailles, whereas
in Italy and Germany you had so many different sources of patronage and commercial sources
of support and so I think it's a very interesting lesson to see French culture has always, well,
since Louis XIV, let's say, who, you know, destroyed the feudal courts around, he essentially brought all the feudal lords to Paris and brought them under his heel, both politically and culturally.
And again, in the abstract, there are so many things about French cultural history that people praise because there does seem to be this effort to develop a national culture and to provide government support.
Louis XIV, the Sun King, this great patron of music and painting.
And again, I'm not, you know, patronage is good and a lot of great art.
In fact, you have to go to the Louvre to see how great French art was in the 16th and 17th centuries
because it's all in that one museum.
Andivid, you know, there's Philippe de Chapagnes, there's the Le Laine brothers, there's...
Here's something we go. There's a lot of great French painters. They're not as good as the Italian, Flemish and German painters or Dutch painters, I feel.
And again, they're relatively uniform in style. I mean, all the paintings from that period are either of royal courtiers or of nuns, basically.
You have the painting dominated by the Catholic Church as one patron and the French kings as another patron.
So, it's a very interesting lesson, Scherrer talks about it, the thesis that the essential breakdown of the Holy Roman Empire,
which led to this proliferation of courts in the German lands, that's one of the reasons music was so strong in Germany,
because you had all these different sources of patronage and all these petty aristocratic courts, and also you had these free cities,
like Hamburg or Frankfurt, which weren't attached to any kind of aristocratic court, and they developed a kind of middle class market for music.
So this is something worth thinking about.
We are...
Because we go to government schools in systems dominated by national governments, we are taught culture in national terms.
And again, this was started in France.
They are the great exponents of a national culture, but it's been developed around the world.
We talk about American culture now, but in fact, the level of understanding culture and of promoting culture should not be national.
In a way, it's too big. Cultures that are pursued in national terms tend to end up too centralized and don't allow for enough competition and diversity.
and that means experimentation and if we can learn something from studying all
these things historically we can see the the countries that were most deficient
in national institutions were the most productive culturally now again I'm not
you know what I'm saying the things that people look up to like the French
Academy and the French Salon and all these fabulous were the national
institutions they developed they actually had a limiting effect on French
Culture, a homogenizing effect and a kind of retarding effect on its progress.
And again, this is all relative. I'm not saying the French stamped out culture, but
I am saying that what looked like support for culture and is admired by
many people as a model, actually we should question if we look at the
historical zone. You know, if you would, if these national programs were so
If they were so successful and needed, Italian, German and Flemish culture should have been disasters
because they had no nation even and no German academy and no Flemish academy.
But they, on the contrary, I think pretty much outperformed France in every area of culture.
Maybe not literature, but that's another story, maybe not drama.
But even there, I'd say German drama starts to take over by the second half of the 18th century.
So I'm not concentrating on France in my lectures because actually I offer it as a counter example.
Okay, let's come back to music. And again, this point that Cowen makes, that Scherer makes,
that in fact when you look at the origins of the European classical tradition, they come precisely
is really out of a kind of decentralized, unnationalized world of culture, and as a result, a wide variety of composers get a chance to compose and try out different things and what we see is there are in fact many forms of support for musical culture just as we saw as in the case of painting and I'm not here to argue again that market support for music is the only way out.
In fact, we see patronage was very important in the development of Western music.
The church was one of the primary patrons, and so you get a lot of sacred music being
written.
In fact, you know, the first 250 years of musical development in the Middle Ages, basically
everything important is happening in sacred music.
That's where polyphony is developed.
That's where all the harmonic rules are developed, for a couple of hundred years the really serious
music is being written for church use, so it was never underestimated the importance
of church patronage in the history of western music, and again aristocratic patronage was
very important.
Opera as a form began in some of these petty Italian courts like the one of the Duke of
of Mantua, opera is the most expensive form of music to stage, it needs orchestras, it needs singers, and singers get paid a lot even then, and it requires scenery, and so on, so the beginnings of opera are very much tied in with aristocratic patronage, but nevertheless, as with painting, almost from the beginning, you can start to see various forms of market support
for Music.
Let me use the career of Johann Sebastian Bach as a means of illustrating really the
amazing diversity of sources of income for composers because in some ways he illustrates
almost all of them and you know my opinion Bach, J.S. Bach is the greatest composer of
them all.
It's an amazing family, as some of you may know, there were six generations of Bach composers,
three before Johann Sebastian and two after him, one of his grandchildren, I think Wilhelm
Friedrich Amtsbach was the last Bach composer and he lived to something roughly around 1850
and the Bachs date back to about 1600, I think Johann Michael Bach is the first one.
But it's amazing, I have recordings of at least 26 different Bachs who are composers,
including three of Johann Sebastian's sons, Carl Faber-Emanuel, Wilhelm Friedemann, Johann
Christian, who were extraordinary composers, two of them, CP and J.C. Bach, were more successful
than their father, at least commercially, so this is one of the most, if you ever have
I have doubts that music is a genetic talent.
The Bach family will convince you.
The word Bach was more or less synonymous with musician in central Germany in those days.
People would say, let's go out and hire ourselves a Bach for the town.
Half the time, that's what they ended up doing.
If there ever was someone bred for music, it was Johann Sebastian.
He's an extraordinary composer, his output is enormous, but he ended up being supported
in virtually every way that a musician can be.
He was, for example, a performer.
He was probably the greatest organist of his day.
We don't have any recordings of him, unfortunately, but he was renowned in his day as an organist.
was an organist, thought of as one of the great performers, and it's not that he, I don't think there's any evidence that he gave organ concerts for money, but some of his jobs were essentially as the church organist in some town, and much of, probably, he worked more for churches in his career than any other institution.
He spent much of his career in Leipzig, and for a church position, he would be the cantor
of the Church of Leipzig, that was his title.
He would play organ music, and he was responsible for all the music of one of these churches,
And that meant basically producing a cantata a week.
We have over 200 cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Not all of them are authentic, but there's at least 200.
And that's because he had to organize the musicians, train the choir, evidently he played
several instruments, including the violin and viola.
And he just ran the musical life of churches at various points in his life and it's a great example of church patronage and the Protestant churches and even the Catholic Church now has embraced the music of Bach and it's at the hymns he wrote, the chorales he wrote are at the center now of our church musical tradition.
and an amazing amount of great music was produced because of Bach's affiliation with various churches like the one in Leipzig.
But evidently he hated these jobs. It was just a lot of work and a lot of pressure churning out cantata after cantata after cantata.
after Cantata. You can watch him. He recycles the music. You will hear passages from his
instrumental concerti rewritten as choral movements and the cantatas. Occasionally he
may have lifted a movement or two from somebody else, and some of his cantatas we now know
are by composers like Telemann and whether he was responsible for passing them off, we
No, no, there was no musical copyright in the 18th century, and the concept of plagiarism was very vague, and so people like Händel, for example, Händel stole from everybody, including himself, but these composers were under great pressure, and evidently there was no greater pressure than working for a church.
Sounds strange, but the market was like easygoing by comparison, and we know that Bach tried to get out of his church jobs whenever he could, and it's complicated, we don't have documentary evidence in this, we can just see what he was trying to do.
It does seem that he was happiest under patronage when he worked for Prince Amhalt Kurten.
He had some years where he was a paid court musician where he had to write music for his patrony.
That meant you got an annual salary and you were under much less pressure.
pressure, you did have to produce, you did evidently, well, you were a servant, you had to wear the livery of your lord and, you know, we'll look at, we'll watch Amadeus tonight, you'll see, you know, the way composers chafed under that regime, but many musicologists surmise that Bach was at his musical happiest in the so-called curtain years
And much of the music we most treasure from Bach evidently is from those years, and particularly his instrumental music.
It's when he wrote his concerti, it's when he wrote, for example, the unaccompanied violin music, a lot of what's now as chamber music was written there.
And maybe it's just surmise on the power of musicologist, but they feel that he was at his most ease at this time.
And I'm not sure why he had to leave that position. He was at the court of Weimar at one point.
One thing, let's take the example of his Brandenburg Concerti. Why are they called the Brandenburg Concerti?
Well, because he dedicated them to the Margrave of Brandenburg in a desperate hope that he'd get the Margrave of Brandenburg as his patron.
Now, we now know that these concerti were at least written earlier. They exist in earlier forms.
He rewrote them, but he had prepared a beautiful edition of them in score with a gorgeously engraved dedication to the Margrave of Brandenburg.
And you read between the lines and it says, hire me, please hire me.
And unfortunately, the Margrave of Brandenburg never did.
Nobody ever got a greater cultural achievement so cheaply.
I mean, we always remember this jerk, the Brandenburg Concert,
and he never gave a penny for them.
But at the end of his life, it was an interesting episode,
Bach's son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, was court composer for Frederick the Great in Potsdam and Carl Philipp Emanuel, again, a very talented composer and in some ways, well, very important historically because sonata allegro form grows out of what K.P. Bach was writing and people like Mozart and Beethoven studied his works and he's very important to the development of the high classical style
by Joseph Mises and Haydn Mozart.
Bach is, it's terrible to say, but JS Bach is a kind of musical dead end.
He's the culmination of the baroque.
His sons, K.P.E. and J.C., were the beginning of the classical.
Mozart's earliest works are piano concerti, created out of sonatas by Johann Christian Bach.
So it's amazing how important Bach's sons were.
K.P.E. was very successful, got this chord position with Frederic the Great, you know, Mr. Enlightened Despot, who had this wonderful chord, and loved playing the flute, evidently wrote flute concerti himself in some symphonies, or though we don't know if he was paying someone to write them, put his name on them, but it's a curious thing, K.P.E. Bach wrote a lot of flute concerti, and there you see the situation in patronage, you know,
Your patron is Frederic the Great. He loves the flute. You write a lot of flute sonatas and flute concertos. You get a lot of money from him. You get to live in Potsdam in the court, but there's a price you pay.
But it's interesting. Within a few years of Bach's death, K.P.E., when private, referred to his dad as that old wig, because he thought of his father really backward, you know, writing this baroque music when nobody else was anymore.
He invited his father to Potsdam to meet Frederic the Great, and Frederic had just bought some pianos, among the first pianos ever built.
The one time Bach ever saw a piano, we think, was on this occasion, and it's like a scene out of Amadeus.
Frederic had written the theme himself, what Bach went on to call the royal theme,
and he gave it to Bach and he said I hear you're a good improviser do me a
three-part fugue right now with this theme the technically was something
called a Richard Carré but it's really a fugue and Bach really was a great
improviser, sat down and he played it and then you know it's almost like
gymnastics, Frederick said okay you do the three-part how about a six-part fugue and
Bach actually said that I can't improvise a six-part fugue on a single
where the theme is played forwards, backwards, upside down, augmented, you name it.
And it's absolutely the pinnacle of Bach's genius as a writer and counterpoint.
Whereas at the same time, the trio sonata is in the style of his sons and is looking forward.
And it's like he's showing, yeah, they think they're so great, now an old wig, but I can write this stuff as well as anybody.
The work is at once incredibly backward-looking, almost to the Renaissance in its polyphony, and forward-looking, part of the Rococo style leading to the classical. It's an astounding work.
And Bach sends it to Frederic, nothing back in the mail. Not even a free piano, I think. I forget if he got a couple of Florence or something, but I think that was a dead end.
But again, it's significant to see that we think of Bach as this great spiritual composer,
he's the greatest composer of sacred music and musically the greatest servant of the church ever.
And yet, you know, when aristocratic patronage was available, he went for it and indeed seems to have coveted it at times.
Now, the other source of income that was fairly minor in this case but became significant for other composers is sheet music.
That is, it's in the 18th century that printers solved the problem of printing musical notation.
It's not that easy actually, it's a little more complicated than setting letters and so on and but once, you know, here's another case where capitalist technological developments facilitated an artistic development.
Once printers had solved the problem of how to mass produce musical notation, you could start to sell sheet music to people and Amsterdam was one of the centers of this.
And so it's in the 18th century that you start to get composers writing music now for the print market, and that's an entirely new development.
Some early examples of the Italian Baroque are Corelli's Opus 6 and Vivaldi's Opus 3.
Vivaldi's Opus 3, Lestro Armonico, which is one of the great set of Baroque concerti, beloved by Bach.
He loved it so he took the Opus 3 No. 8 and turned it into an organ concerto and the same with the Opus 3 No. 11 by Vivaldi. Bach loved Vivaldi. In fact, you can actually see the point in Bach's career when he discovers Vivaldi and Bach's music gets much better, much tighter. It's hard to believe that Bach had to learn from anybody, but you can see the point where he discovers Vivaldi and suddenly his music becomes more dramatic and more intense. Anyway, Vivaldi was one of the first successors
in getting his music published, again, in Amsterdam, it's interesting how international it is, this Venetian composer getting his music published in Amsterdam, again, Corelli's Opus 6 of Conceri, these were very popular, other composers would buy them and steal from them, but you can see this is a new development, a composer used to be restricted basically to the town he lived in, and he had to make his money from the local court or the local
in the local church. Now you could actually sell your music. Now there's a great deal of box music was printed in his lifetime. He didn't have any best sellers, the way people like Mozart were soon to do, but a lot of his keyboard music was printed in his lifetime.
It seems as if he saw it as educational, that, you know, to this day, when you're taking piano lessons, you know, you play the English suites of Bach, and they're still selling that cheap music for that reason.
And he does seem to have, I'm not sure, the very last thing he was working on was his Art of the Fugue, which he was having prepared in a printed edition, but evidently died before it could be completed.
There's a big dispute now among musicologists who claim he stopped working on it several years before his death.
Anyway, but we do see in Bach this encounter with printed music.
Now, one other way that composers earned money was as teachers, as music teachers.
Now, I guess Bach took pupils, but he had so many children that homeschooling was enough for J.S. Bach.
Again, he had over 20 children with two different wives, and at least three of them became major composers.
And I think there were a couple more. I think maybe a total of six of his children became composers.
So I don't know if you had time, but to take on other people's...
But like, you know, one of the first things you learn to play
when you're taking piano lessons are pieces from what's called the
Anna Magdalena Notebook, the little Bach minuets and things like that.
And they were written for his second wife and for his
eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann. These are pieces that he wrote
to teach them music. So he was a bit of a
Musical Pedagogue. Anyway, what I say, if you look at Bach's career, you know, there's no simple economic basis for it. It really covers all the bases and you see, in a way, how fortunate 18th century composers were that they had so many different sources of income. And again, a lot of them involved still aristocratic patronage and churches and
There were reasons why, particularly in the German lands and central Europe in general,
you had a lot of sources of patronage because you had so many petty principalities, and
of course the Protestant Reformation led to a proliferation of the churches and different
sects, all of whom thought that music was important, such a role in the Protestant church,
in a congregation, singing hymns, having chorales played on the organ.
So again, there's no way of explaining the genius of a J.S. Bach.
As I said, there seems to be almost something genetic about it when you look at this extraordinary
history of the Bach family over six generations.
But still you can see aspects of the environment, the economic environment that were conducive
to a diversity of achievement and a little hint of the commercial element that is important
and you see Bach really was one of the least commercially successful and one of the least
I'm not pushing the commercial basis of art to the exclusion of all else, but if you look at some of the other composers, they were much more commercially minded.
I gave the example of Vivaldi. Again, Vivaldi published 14 opi.
We have opus 1 through 14 of his works. About half of them are sets of violin and cello sonatas. About half of them are sets of concerti.
And these were being marketed for what we would say amateur performance.
This is one of the great, hard things for us to recapture in the world where when we want to hear music, we just pop in a CD or an MP3 or an iPod, but believe it or not, in the 18th century, they didn't even have radios, and if you wanted to hear music, you had to play it yourself.
And so, people who wanted to enjoy music had to learn how to play instruments, and you start to get instrument industries.
Let's say the first piano was developed in the 18th century. By the 19th century, piano making was quite an industry, and the Steinway firm was founded in the early 19th century in Germany, for example.
And so you start to get first harpsichords and clavichords and people like Bach start writing keyboard music by the 19th century.
All the great composers are making money by selling piano sheet music.
Beethoven wrote 32 piano sonatas because he could make money selling the sheet music.
Music. And here you see the importance of a publisher. Beethoven didn't stand around
the streets of Vienna saying, buy my sonatas. No, he had to operate through a publisher
who actually, you know, did the editing and printing and the distribution. It's actually
amazing to see how commercialized the piano industry was already by the 19th century.
You had celebrity endorsements. It's absolutely hilarious. Every piano firm wanted a famous pianist.
You know, just as to say now, you know, I play a Steinway piano or I play a Yamaha piano.
You know, Sviatoslav Richter plays Yamaha pianos. It was Franz Liszt plays Broadwood pianos.
If you go to Budapest, there's a wonderful museum of Franz Lis's apartment, and he has all the gimmick pianos that piano manufacturers sent him.
Pianos that stand upside down, pianos combined with organs, pianos that have desks in them, so he could write music while playing the piano.
It's really hilarious, and you see all these efforts to get Lis to endorse your, Lis, you're the greatest concert pianist of the 19th century, to endorse your brand of piano.
The world of classical music was so commercialized, especially by the 19th century, you already see this pattern of writing music that people can play at home.
So it's melodic, it's pleasant, they're going to enjoy it, and maybe it's not too difficult to play either.
You see other composers, basically by the 18th century, all the modes of commercially making money in music are in place.
Georg Frederick Handel, or George Frederick Handel, as the British call him, was enormously successful, actually went bankrupt a couple of times, but overall, he died a wealthy man because he was great at organizing subscription series, again, something we think was very modern, the subscription series at the Med or something like that, this was thought up by 18th century entrepreneurs,
It costs money to mount an opera, or in Hendo's case these oratorios, which take the same resources as an opera.
You need singers, big chorus and an orchestra. And so what he would do is announce a series of concerts and get people to pay for them ahead of time.
I mean, if you're a classical music fan like me, you have to do this.
and, you know, you put up sometimes hundreds of dollars at a time, and what a crazy thing to do.
Well, now, actually, it's pretty routine, and you pretty much know if you put up the money, the concert will take place.
18th century, things are a little wilder than that, and it took a while to regularize this, but people like Endel came up with the idea.
Mozart was big on this. He would give, Mozart would give piano, concerti, series of concerts.
You know, the aim was to sell them out before the concert, and really the aim was to get the money and figure out if it was worth giving the concert.
And sometimes the problematic aspect was people would put out their money and there wasn't enough of it and the artist would disappear.
But, you know, this very commercial idea of subscription concert already develops here.
You've got a lot of success in that respect. Let's look at Mozart as an example, because we're going to see Amadeus tonight.
Mozart's a figure who's been romanticized in some ways. Amadeus, as a movie itself, does it.
He's been assimilated to this archetype of the lonely, misunderstood genius.
and, you know, the legend is he died poor and was buried in a pauper's grave.
That's absolutely untrue, as it turns out.
He had a normal burial and he was enormously successful commercially during his lifetime.
His problem wasn't on the income side.
It was on the expense side.
He made a fortune during his lifetime.
Unfortunately, he spent a larger fortune.
If you go to Vienna, they've got a wonderful house museum for Mozart. Mozart had an apartment, I mean, it would cost 4,000 euros a month now, probably, in Vienna.
In prime location, right next to St. Stephen's Cathedral, it's about eight or nine rooms. It has a billiard room. I mean, it's a spectacularly beautiful apartment.
You'd kill for it now. Absolute downtown of Vienna. Two blocks from the St. Stephen's subway station.
Quadruple exposure. It's around an atrium. It's a beautiful apartment.
It was the most expensive one he ever rented. It's called the Figaro House because this is what he rented at the time he was writing Marriage of Figaro.
So he wasn't living in some little attic somewhere, you know, and it had rooms for his servants, even had room for his father to stay there a while, so he was living very well, and I mean at the, they actually have figures on this, at this peak, this is in the 1780s, he was making, I think they, it was, I don't know, I don't know, I don't
He was making three times as much as Haydn and something like six times as much as a government bureaucratic official of a decent rank.
Again, it's silly to quote it in Tollers or whatever it means, but he was making a lot more money than a solid middle-class government official would at the time.
Really embarrassing they compare it to a provincial school teacher and Mozart blows that speaker away completely.
So, in fact, he was very successful commercially in part because he was, you know, he was a wonderful performer at the piano and other instruments
and he would organize these concerts, but he's one of the people who made a lot of money selling his music in the form of sheet music.
sheet music, share a quote, a wonderful letter, from his father on the subject when he writes to little Virgil.
When you have no students around, for God sakes, go out of your way a bit to compose something that will enhance your fame.
But short, easy, popular, talk to a publisher and see what he would most like to have.
Perhaps easy quartets for two violins, viola and cello.
Do you think you demean yourself writing such things?
No way!
If you think that's a mistranslation, it probably is kind of spades in the German.
The little piece is big when it is light and flows naturally and is well rooted in fundamentals.
Composing in that way is harder than composing most incomprehensible artificial harmonic
and songs that are difficult to sing. Take that, Arnold Schoenberg.
This is amazing. Leopold Mozart giving his son very good advice, actually.
And, you know, again, here you could say, oh, commercial debasement.
His father is telling his son, dumb it down. You've got to sell the sheet music.
But the result of this was the Haydn quartets.
You know, some of the greatest string quartets ever written. They are playable by 18th century home musicians, but they're fabulous music.
And so, I mean, the thing that Leopold realized was his son could be commercial and be a great artist.
And that's true of, you know, so much. I mean, it's the genius of Mozart that he can write music that average people can play.
I'm talking about his piano sonatas now, certainly the piano trios, all of his chords are attached really, and certainly the ones up to about 19, and his flute sonatas, violin sonatas, I mean, this is often sublime music, but, you know, amateurs can play them, you know, not as well as great performers, but we must understand that we have this notion that classical music is written
performed in concert halls by these incredibly well-trained, perfect artists.
Up through 1850, there weren't things like chamber music recitals and very few piano recitals.
You were writing this music so you could sell the sheet music to average households in Vienna
where everybody had a piano and, you know, you formed a quartet out of your family, mom,
dad and the two kids, you know, there's a string quartet for you right there.
And composers earn substantial amount of their income and these people like Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven composing the kind of music that could be played at home.
Now, it gets complicated. In Beethoven's case, Beethoven pushed the limits, and it's true that his late piano sonatas, especially No. 29, the Hammerklavier, even the greatest piano virtuosos can barely play it.
I mean, it really takes someone like Sviatoslav Richter or Emil Gilels to play the Hammerklavier comfortably.
There are great artists like Arthur Schnabel whose recordings, the Hammer Clavier is a mess
because he can't really handle it.
And Beethoven's publisher starts, what are you doing Ludwig?
Nobody can play this thing.
And he said, what did you say?
No, it is possible, one aspect, that he's deaf at this point and maybe not thinking
so much about how it's going to sound.
But it is true that you see, and again, Beethoven is fed up with this system.
Again, going back to the point we made about Goya, I don't want to say that all these composers
were thrilled with this commercial system.
Most of them exploited, made money off it.
What you do see is them pushing the limits, and late Beethoven is famous for pushing the
limits.
Late string quartets were considered unplayable until well into the 20th century.
It's the great Arnold Rosé quartet that I think was the first that started playing them in public.
And it's really not until after World War II that you start getting recordings of Beethoven late string quartets
where people can handle them with relative ease. The violin parts are so difficult.
So, you know, what you can see in late Beethoven, and that's in these late piano sonatas, really, chiefly 29, but the last four as well,
and in these late string quartets, that's from the 12th string quartet, to the 16th, you can see he's not following Leopold Mozart's advice anymore.
The stuff is very difficult to play and it's very difficult to comprehend.
I mean, we are used to them now and it's sublime music, but it sounded very weird to people then.
I mean, I'm just trying to picture, you know, I could play the Pathetique Sonata with these tiny little hands
when I was 11 years old, terribly mind you, but I could play, I could get through this, you know,
you know that was like the culmination of my piano lesson that I got through the
eight you know the path to the opening movement the opening movement of the
moon lights not anybody can play and I'm trying to think the poor people who oh
the latest Beethoven sonatas are out oh it'd be so thrilling to run through and
say oh let's get this one the 29th it sounds oh went home so you know again we
I can see that the commercial system didn't always work and people, composers like Beethoven became upset with it.
But there's this odd thing that musicologists have celebrated Beethoven precisely for this.
Really, what happened in 20th century music some ways begins with the cult of late Beethoven
I want to say that this music is great in spite of being difficult, but the 20th century myth has been that this music is great because it is difficult.
I want to go back to the greatest music teacher ever, Leopold Mozart and his line that composing that way is harder
and composing most incomprehensible artificial harmonic progressions and songs that are difficult to sing.
The genius of Mozart was that he could write music that looks simple but that's deeply profound.
Again, I don't want to criticize late Beethoven because I love the late piano sonatas and the late quartets.
I think they've been over-praised and are the origin of this Schoenberg idea that only difficult and incomprehensible music is good.
In that sense, they've had a bad effect, but again, I don't want to be put in a position of saying I don't like that music,
particularly like the Opus 135 quartet and the opening movement of the Opus 131, the 14.
But, you know, the middle quartets, they ain't so bad, especially the Opus 59 No. 1.
So we shouldn't forget that a lot of Beethoven's music fit into his day.
You know, Haydn thought of him as the next Mozart, and much of Beethoven's early career was modeled on Mozart.
He gave public concerts. He was an improviser like Mozart.
Mozart. This is something we forget, the great art of 18th century improvisation. Mentioned
in Bach, to the end of his life, people thought of him as an improviser. He really was, you
know, like one of these comedy troupes, you know, in the second scene. He'd say, give
me a theme, and someone would give him a theme, and then he'd say, you know, how do you want
it played, crab cannon or not? And then he'd just come up with, this is Bach, and then
Mozart and Beethoven were the same way. The Beethoven choral fantasia for piano and chorus,
they think that's the closest we have, the opening piano part to that, to what Beethoven
sounded like as an improviser. It's absolutely spectacular. And their ability to do variations,
we'll see it in Amadeus, the great scene when Mozart takes the theme from Salieri and transforms
and then transforms it into a theme from what became the marriage of Figaro.
So, you know, Beethoven in many ways was a performer, just like Mozart performed.
He cultivated a market and was very successful.
Again, he sought out patronage, some aristocratic patronage just as Mozart did.
But much of his career was market-based.
We share some marvelous quotes from a number of composers to show that, let me put it delicately, they were not indifferent to monetary considerations.
Here's something Beethoven wrote to a friend.
My compositions are bringing a goodly sum. Also, for every work I have six, seven publishers, and if I choose even more, they do not bargain with me. I demand and they pay.
And there it is. As I was saying in painting, music became a seller's market if you were Beethoven, if you were Mozart, if you were Haydn.
There's a sufficient market out there that they could name their terms. Now here's a beautiful quote from Chopin.
Poor consumptive Chopin, the delicate flower of the piano salon, everyone's image of the frail, ethereal artist.
and he was and you know his nocturnes are the most sublime delicate piano music
ever written and here he is giving instructions to his agent dealing with the
publisher and this is Pléel, the famous French firm of Pléel. If Pléel makes any
difficulties go to Schlesinger and tell him I'll give him the blob for France and
England for 800 francs and the Polynesus for France England Germany for 1500. If
that frightens him to just 1,400, 1,300 or even 1,200, Chopin saying that, and then Verdi
with his operatic flair, utterly unashamed of anything, writing about his love for England.
And they pay so much money! Oh, if I could stay here a couple of years, I should like
to carry off a sackful of this blessed money.
Rossini made even more money off his operas, but opera composing was a huge commercial
enterprise in the 19th century.
So this is all from Schera, he documents this very well, the interest of composers in the
the financial aspect of the work and you see it in the development of performing careers now it's interesting that then is now the big money was in performing and the artists made more than the composers you see it even in rock music now the big money is in the stage shows it's just unbelievable how much money they take in on their road shows
I mean right now it's grotesque. There's no opera composer that makes anything comparable to what an opera star makes.
The opera stars are pulling in $100,000 of performance. Most opera composers don't earn that in a year.
It has something to do with the kind of operas they write. But it's interesting.
The opera stars in the 18th century made much more money than the composers.
Again, they could make more for one night's performance than a composer could make in a year.
The performer makes the real contact with the audience, and people really pay to see great performers, and it was true even then.
So, people like Mozart and Beethoven courted careers as performers and were reasonably successful.
Haydn, I don't think ever, he wasn't a virtuoso, I don't think he performed public, but he, in his case, for example, much of his career,
he worked for Prince Esterhazy, one of the great families of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
and he was quite successful, wrote many, many symphonies. That's interesting. Prince Esterhazy liked an instrument called the baritone, which is a kind of weird stringed instrument with frets on it. It actually has a very distinctive sound. Haydn, I think, wrote 101 trios for this instrument because, again, the prince liked it and he eventually got fed up with working in the Esterhazy court and he linked up
with a concert impresario named Salomon in London who set up concerts that Haydn would write symphonies for London and Haydn made a fortune at that.
They're called the London symphonies or as I, were often called the Salomon symphonies and I think it's a nice tribute to this impresario who made them possible that we should call them the Salomon symphonies.
Symphony, and the London Symphony is good too because it suggests this commercial market
of London is what it made possible.
These are in many respects Hayek's greatest symphonies.
These are the last 12, 98, no, 92 through 104, the London symphonies and their nice sets
and recordings of them.
And really it's the high point of the pre-Beethoven Symphony, are those symphonies really was
pushing the form in remarkable ways.
Something that's all due to a smart entrepreneur who saw an opportunity and linked up London
with Haydn, you know, if Salomon doesn't work here, serve as a cultural middleman, there's
no meeting and there's no last twelve symphonies of Haydn and also they saw that Haydn could
cash in on the market, Kendall had created for oratorios and so Haydn wrote his seasons
for the English audience.
Cherub points out that again, composers, yeah, they wanted to compose their own music
and follow the inner logic of their musical destiny,
but every once in a while, they saw a commercial opportunity.
Beethoven set Scottish folk songs to music.
I mean, it's one of the weirdest things in his body of work,
because there was a market for it, and some publishers said,
You can make some quick money if you'll set these songs to music. We'll sell them to the Scottish and we'll package them with kilts and it'll be a great deal.
And he did it. Brahms, who actually is personally my favorite composer, Bach's the greatest composer, but I love Brahms' music more than anybody.
And, you know, a man who didn't feel comfortable performing in public, even though he was probably the greatest pianist of his day, gave up a concert career, and really, you know, destroyed evidently about three chorus of the music he wrote, even though it probably was very good, but he had such high standards and felt in such competition with Beethoven.
in the 19th century that we get the first superstar performers among instrumentalists.
There are superstar singers in the 18th century.
Some of them were these castrati and there was that film made about Farinelli, a good
illustration of the power and the wealth and fame of some of the 18th century opera singers.
But it's Paganini on the violin and Liszt on the piano who become really the first superstar
are, concert performers, Liszt especially, I mean Liszt was a, I don't use the word
superstar lightly, but he was a pan-European phenomenon. And I mean, it's just, you know,
just like Elvis, people fainted at his concerts, women threw themselves at him, Liszt at all
these groups. Actually there's a very bizarre film by Ken Russell, well, all films by Ken
and Russell Brizard, but called Listomania, where Roger Daltrey of the Who plays Franz
Liszt is quite accurate in spirit, I think, to the truth about Liszt.
And he made a fortune concertizing around Europe.
To his credit, he gave much of it away.
He was a very philanthropic man and helped young composers.
He became religious in his later life and gave a lot of his money to the church, so the commercial-mindedness of these composers doesn't preclude their being charitable at time and often supporting other composers.
But, you know, it's in the 19th century that the sort of concert infrastructure, as we know it, reaches full development.
It begins in the 18th century, when you first start getting these subscriptions, a concert.
It takes a great deal to make a career in music possible. It takes businessmen.
Now, there's a...Shera has a very weird, in some ways ominous quote from Beethoven that I want to read to you.
Beethoven writes, I do not understand any other money than Viennese ducats. How many tolerant gulden that makes is no fair of mine for I'm a bad businessman and reckoner.
Kind of sad, you know, it's like he's longing for the days of the euro. He's having trouble as a businessman dealing with the fact that people are more offering fees and different currencies and he's saying I can't work it out.
This is true that I work with a concert series in Charlottesville and often when we're dealing with European artists, especially when we get a lot of Russian artists in,
at some point they say, how much is that in rubles? And then when we give them the answer, they sign immediately.
But I do not understand any other money than being these ducats, how many tolerance and gold that makes is no affair of mine.
There ought to be an artistic despot where the artist needs only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for.
As things are, one must be half a businessman. And how can one understand? Good heavens!
That's what I really call troublesome. It's a very sad and ominous moment.
And it really points to something I've been talking about. There ought to be an artistic despot.
and the second is Desperate, there ought to be an artistic depot, excuse me, where the artists need only hand in his artwork,
or even worse there ought to be a kind of bureaucratic, there ought to be an artistic depot where the artists need only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for.
You see the impetus behind artists, they are troubled by the commercial aspect of their art and they'd like to have someone else handle it.
It's like saying, let the government handle it, can I just write the music I want, and then I hand it in, and they'll give me a check, envy these ducats for it.
You know, the obvious problem with that is how will Depot know how to tell Beethoven from Hummel?
Let it known from Cantor or somebody who can't compose whatsoever, any good at all.
So, by and large, artists don't go into art because they're businessmen, and so they are uncomfortable with it.
And this is why, increasingly in the 19th century, artists began to call for various forms of government support of the arts.
Here's an even more ominous quotation from Richard Wagner, the most ominous artist of the 19th century.
Wagner, greatest opera composer ever, but began in the commercial world of opera, decided he had to stage operas in a way that no one had ever done before
and it would require more money than ever before.
Fortunately, there was Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria who was willing to support Wagner
and made his dreams come true in 1876 at Bayreuth in the theater Wagner had specially built for him.
You see here the impulse of the artist to have things exactly the way he wants them.
You know, I'm thinking, you know, when Wagner's first opera in his ring cycle is Das Rheingold and, you know, it's got to be real gold.
You know, I can just see him saying, oh, we can't just paint it gold.
That's got to be, you know, I want ten million dollars worth of gold on the stage there.
You know, that's why opera tickets are so expensive and why they ask for government subsidy, because we got to have real gold.
We couldn't just paint it gold.
And here's Wagner writing to a friend after he had just started getting money from King Ludwig II.
How can you speak to me of the future? My manuscripts are locked away in some cabinet.
He was so worried that no one would ever produce his operas because they seemed unproducible.
Who will produce the works of art that I, only I, with the help of friendly spirits can create?
I am differently constituted. I have sensitive nerves. I must have beauty, splendor and light.
The world owes me what I need. There it is. He says it.
I can't live in a miserable, organist position like your master Bach.
Is it an unreasonable demand, therefore, when I ask for that bit of luxury which I may crave?
I will prepare for the world a thousand pleasures.
Think back to my caveman. He said, you go out and kill a mammoth, I'll sit in a warm cave.
I mean, here's Wagner. Wagner had to be dressed in silk at all times.
He could not compose if he was not dressed in silk and sitting on silk.
The finest silk, I might add. The world owes me what I need.
Now, this is the prelude to the 20th century here.
You know, just think, we travel a long distance since two o'clock, I mean, artists began, musicians began as servants, servants in the court, Bach working for a church, and a humble position as an organist, Mozart and Haydn working for aristocratic patrons, you know, they had to use the servants entrance, quite literally.
There's the famous moment, emblematic moment of the 19th century, Goethe, who was no mean artist himself, is standing with Beethoven and some petty German prince comes by and Goethe bows and Beethoven stands defiant.
You know, I don't bow to anyone. And Goethe, who was as great an artist as Beethoven, he can still bow to a German prince, but Beethoven can't.
and the logical consequence of that now is Wagner saying the world owes me a living and we'll see what consequences that has for the 20th century.
So this very brief history of music really gives some sense of the full range and complexity of the interrelation between economics and cultural production, in this case music.
And again, the market economy can't claim all the credit, but as shared documents, it deserves roughly 50% of the credit between 1750 and 1850.
We think of patronage from aristocrats in the church as so crucial to the development of music, but it turns out that a lot of the support came from commercial methods.
Opera was aristocratic in many areas but quite middle class in others.
The free cities in Germany, which had no aristocratic courts, places like Hamburg and Frankfurt,
developed opera already in the middle of the 18th century.
Someone like Telemann was writing operas in Hamburg in what was largely a middle class environment
where middle class merchants got together, financed the building of the opera house,
Opera House, Finance the Season helped run it, much as opera has run some ways in the
United States now, though with government subsidies.
But again, I think both Cowan and Scherrer are very good at pointing to the institution
of music publishing, which we tend to neglect because, you know, playing music at home from
from sheet music, it's almost become an extinct institution, unfortunately.
But it was very widespread, particularly in the German speaking world, particularly in
the Austrian lands.
Schubert, for example, did not write his songs for great artistes to sing on the stage.
They were written to be sung at home, people to enjoy these songs at home.
The piano accompaniments to Schubert's songs are very beautiful, but they are, by and large,
very easy to play.
And I was really surprised when somebody once asked me to accompany her in some of the songs
from Vinterreise.
And again, I am just absolutely awful as a pianist, but I could hack out some of, you
know, a little practice, I could hack out the piano parts to most of the Schubert songs.
And evidently, you know, he was big on performance at home, would debut the songs himself in
his own rather weak voice.
So that aspect of the commercialization of music was really crucial at this time.
And there was an extremely widespread publishing industry beginning in Amsterdam, eventually
is centered in Paris and London, but also Vienna, and the great additions throughout the 19th century of the Beethoven sonatas of the quartets and so on, and there was a lot of money to be made in that, and many of the composers were able to derive a substantial portion of their income from that aspect, and again, there are frustrating aspects of that, and we see someone like Beethoven rebelling against that, we see, as in any publishing field, quarrels
between the composers and their publishers, but the publishers were not simply negative.
Often they performed the key role of entrepreneurial middleman and they were able to link the composers
up with a potential audience and, you know, say to Brahms, you know, I think there's a
market for some Hungarian dances or to say to Beethoven, I think there's a market for
some Scottish dances.
I know you really want to write that Ninth Symphony, but, you know, write the Scottish
These were actually at two very different places in his career. But you see the point that in many cases these composers were able to write music that was popular in their day and saleable, because it was easily comprehended and easily playable, and that financed the careers that went on, you know, like Beethoven going on to write his incredibly profound late piano sonatas and late string quartets.
in Quartets. So again, what I'm saying is that the composers paid a price for this commercialization
in some ways chafed under the system, and yet it did free them up in new ways. Bach,
in an earlier system, had to churn out a cantata a week for his church job, and so maybe Beethoven
had to churn out some Scottish songs, and Brahms had to churn out some Hungarian dances.
But it allowed them to have probably overall careers that were freer than Bach, even though
he was ultimately the greater composer in that respect.
So again, these commercial pressures were not always negative, and in some cases, they
produced some very wonderful works of art that, again, when you realize that Mozart's
Piano Concerti and Beethoven's Piano Concerti were written for themselves as performers.
You know, they're some of the greatest Piano Concerti ever written.
Even Brahms' piano concertos were written for himself, and they were unplayable for
a lot of other pianists.
Brahms had extremely strong fingers, extremely independent fingers, and his piano writing
is some of the densest ever.
It requires all ten fingers.
I mean, all piano writing does, but every finger has to be intelligent and working.
And to this day, Brahms' Second Piano Concerto is one of the hardest piano concertos, and the first for that matter, and he could do it.
And so, you know, a lot of these great works we have were written for showmanship to encourage the public performing career of these artists.
The commercial pressures often produce exactly the highest forms of music that we appreciate today.
So, I'll stop here, take a few questions, I hope. Yes.
Yes.
I have two questions, one on Brahms and the other on Whitney, but first on Brahms.
I recall reading a correspondence between Brahms and Hesse-Humann, where he sort of
was drawing attention to the irony that she was able to make a great living as a concentration
and was in command all over Europe and wealthy for it and other things, and that he was not
just kind of a spokesperson at all.
Yeah, Sherrod discusses that and if you want to go into in detail, it's in his book. I started it and then there's just so much to cover. But yeah, one of the ways composers earn money was as piano teachers and vocal teachers and so on.
and it's a complicated matter because it becomes a combination of commerce and
patronage again because in many cases the best teaching jobs was like the tutor to
the crown prince of wherever or the crown princess and you'll see that in
the Amadeus as one of the aspects of Mozart's career that he earned a lot of
money giving various kinds of musical lessons, composition lessons, performance
lessons. He was always hoping to get the big paying jobs which were tutoring, you know, children from the the royal family, little
Habsburg, princes and princesses. And so it was actually a substantial part of his income came from that. It was very
The most frustrating aspect, the most frustrating way to earn a living would be piano teaching, and especially to royal families, where you can't slap the Habsburg princess.
But it's interesting that with all these, pupil relations were very important to these 18th and even the 19th century composers,
but many of them gave lessons for free when they saw talent. Mozart gave Hummel, I made a snide remark about Hummel,
but it's only by the standards of Mozart and Beethoven that his music appears to be second rate.
But if you've never heard Hummel's piano concerti, for example, you're in for a surprise, they really in some ways sound like the Beethoven concerti. They're a little lighter, but anyway, Mozart took in Hummel for free. He actually had him live in his house for a couple of years because he thought he was such a talent and he wanted to encourage him. And that's of course true with Haydn and Mozart and then Haydn and Beethoven. Liszt gave lessons for free for most of his life and there's an incredible, I mean, most of the great pianists from the late
in the late 19th and early 20th century were list pupils or pupils of lists and so I mean it's again an aspect I've been trying to stress that there is a commercial aspect to these artists so we get away from this over idealized romantic notion that they're unconcerned about money but let me equally stress that as I was starting to say about lists many of them were very generous with their time and especially generous as teachers so it was a major component
for Mozart and for some other composers that you could earn money teaching and then of course by the 19th century you start to get musical conservatories and people getting a steady job as a professor of music composition or music performance and by the late 19th century you're starting to get the link between the academy
and Classical Music, which has played out in some negative ways, I think, in this century.
Let me ask you a question.
Sometimes when you hear something wonderful like that,
you wonder if the music has been on and studied for hundreds of years.
And your point that it's pre-commercial is interesting.
And it makes you wonder about a kind of mental experiment,
if the technology has permitted it,
and Rulophon Slythne has been able to be marketed through comparisons around the world.
Would it have changed it? Would it have been different?
You got me there. I mean, why would it have changed?
Well, I'm wondering if it would have changed.
It seems like there's a global marketplace available for these guys.
There's a global marketplace.
and of course the irony and now they have access to it I mean these these guys
Palestrina because of the support of the Catholic Church there's a continuity is
always being performed in the Sistine Chapel and so on but a guy like Juscan
de Prey who is just a staggeringly great composer you know one of the greatest
composer of all time I'm guessing even some of you haven't heard of him and he
and completely disappeared and was resurrected in the 1950s by one of my heroes, Noah Greenberg,
a pioneer in the original instruments movement and recorded the Misa Panjalingua in the 60s,
still the best recording I've ever made.
And so, yeah, Just Can has had the last laugh now.
He's heard all over the world and that Talos Scholar's recording of the Panjalingua, you
is a Grammy winner, so more people have heard Just Can in the past 50 years than in all of human history and certainly than in his own day.
It is a kind of strange footnote to his career and other careers from the period that this capitalist development, recorded music and the ways of spreading it
have rescued these figures in the past. Something that seemed inconceivable in 1900, when I venture to say that many of the great musicologists in the world had never heard a piece by, they had heard of Juscan, but they'd never heard it, and now, you know, there's 50 titles of Juscan that are available, readily available. Misa Panja-Lingua, his greatest work. Yes?
That is a very complicated question, even the shears. I know the British situation with regard to literary copyright, and that really is a creature of the late 18th century, around I think the 1760s.
There's no music copyright in the 18th century. I suspect it's quite late and it really probably isn't well into the 20th century that you start to get international music copyright.
You know, the issue of copyright is incredibly complicated, and there's much to be said for it, and there's much to be said against it.
And of course, the real problem in talking about it is you can't talk about it in the abstract, you really have to talk about how long.
And that's where the great disputes are, how long does a copyright last, and is it renewable, and so on.
And I've listened to arguments on both sides and I've not made up my mind on what's the ideal state of copyright.
Having said that, 21st century technology has simply made copyright obsolete.
And we can argue about this all we want legally, but the cat is out of the bag.
And once you have digital reproduction and things like that,
We have not had copyright for the vast stretch of human history.
It's basically an institution of about 200 years.
You notice, by the way, it was incorporated into the U.S. Constitution.
I mean, it's so serious that these founding fathers took it.
But, you know, when I look around me today at iPods and sampling and whatever,
Copyright simply cannot survive the current technological state of humanity.
It is a creature of the book, of the printed world. It is copyright.
And it took a long time, even after printing, for it to be established as a principle.
You know, for most of the English tradition, the common law tradition, publishers held in effect the copyright.
It was a right. It was interesting when parliament established what basically the principles of what we think of as copyright.
English common law judges tried to overrule it for years. So anyway, copyright is one of those things that we think of as eternal.
You know, it's part of the Ten Commandments, you know, it goes back, it has a rather brief history, and I think it's going to be very brief from now on.
I just don't see how, with current technologies, people can continue to enforce copyright.
But don't tell ASCAP that I said that.
And they're probably listening to this, even now.
I'm not a legal scholar and I really don't know enough about copyright law, but my gut feeling is how can it survive the infinite and perfect reproducibility of the digital world and the internet and things like that.
We'll see. There's going to be lots of legal battles over this, and I hope not to be involved in any of them.
But I'll just say it's interesting. The book Economy of Literary Form, that I said, that has some very good stuff on the history of copyright.
And Mark Rose has a very good book called Authors and Owners on it. It's very interesting. You know, I'm an author. I've published Gilligan on Bound, some other books and articles.
You know, my attitude, I don't want copyright. I make so little off my books that I don't care.
And what I want is publicity. I want people to read my books. Let them have them for free.
I mean, you know, it's odd. Most authors actually don't have an interest in copyright.
They don't realize it. They're going to make a pittance off their copyright.
And, you know, I would be glad if people just stole my books off the internet or whatever.
So it is odd.
The issue of copyright is much more complicated than people think.
And Lee Eric said, yeah, that book, he actually has a brilliant discussion of which authors
supported copyright legislation in Britain and who opposed it and for what reason.
And he really shows that authors have mixed interest on the issue of copyright.
Yeah, plagiarize my work. I just want to get it out there. Not so much that I want credit for it or money. I just like people to hear my stuff.
So it's why I've ended up feeling conflicted about the issue of copyright.
Q. Piracy and that half a million dollar movie is detrimental to the market in terms of just that movie, although it creates a new market place.
I found some of his oratorios, you see this stuff is taken from all over, but it was an accepted product, it was called pastiche, pasticio, that was named for it, Vivaldi wrote these pasticio operas, where he just took arias from other operas strung together around another story and gave it a new name, and that was his opera, so piracy was quite serious then and found upon, that's what led to copyright legislation, was artists complained about this, but it's interesting, you know,
If Vivaldi had had a copyright in perpetuity, no one would have heard of him today.
Because, of course, you know, with the Vivaldi revival in the 50s, people were just stealing all this music.
And, you know, no royalties to the surviving Vivaldis in New Jersey.
And so, you know, if I were Vivaldi, I would prefer that situation that, you know, he's ended up being one of the great composers that everybody knows now, because he never had copyright and it would have lapsed by this time anyway.
So, I mean, let's say your financial interest isn't sometimes in tension with your interest in fame.
Erickson is very good on discussing that in that book, The Economy of Literary Form, really made me rethink the whole issue. I recommend that.
And he shows how short-sighted he feels some of the authors who argued for copyright turned out to be.
Anyway, didn't expect that.
Very much like that.