On May 17, 2024, we welcomed colleagues from Austria, Germany, Hungary, the UK, and the US at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw) for focused exchange on the often neglected aspect of musical commissions. The speakers presented topics ranging from the early eighteenth century to the present and from Europe to North America. We discussed questions of hierarchy and power, the interaction of economic, political, and cultural agents, as well as the creative possibilities of the individual in collaborative constellations.

Producing musical works by order is a widespread phenomenon that can be traced far back in music history. It is a concept that is familiar to those who compose, those who perform, and those who facilitate and consume music. However, the question of how to capture it in a concise and differentiated way remains largely unanswered. Commissioners of music have been subject to skepticism and distrust from critics and researchers alike. Their achievements are often at least relativized, if not devalued. In his recent monograph, The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France, Louis K. Epstein has elaborated on this bias [EPSTEIN:2022, 18–41: “The Patronage Problem”]. Such issues of valuation and a lack of theoretical foundation are the reasons why we invited discussion and exchange on this topic.

In his short article “Commission” in Grove Music Online, William Weber provides a definition of a commission as a contract or an agreement by which a musician agrees to produce a composition for a person or an organization. This agreement is usually written, specifying the genre, the date of completion, the remuneration, and the legal terms. Moreover, Weber associates a commission with one specific work, distinguishing it from more long-term forms of funding and employment. Epstein argues for commissions as a specific form of patronage and as “premeditated collaborations between patrons and composers to produce new music,” resulting from “formal solicitations, often written, sometimes legally binding” [EPSTEIN: 2022, 8]. Based on this, we may understand a commission not only as a formalized framework for the negotiation of diverse social, economic, and artistic positions but also for innovation and the creation of musical repertoires of significant scale – and therefore, indeed worth a closer look.

You can download the workshop program and the abstracts here:

In his keynote address, Louis K. Epstein built on his aforementioned book to raise fundamental questions about the perceptions and impact of early twentieth-century commissioners. Using the examples of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, Winaretta Singer Princesse de Polignac, and Ida Rubinstein, he revisited and challenged common assumptions about the relationship between patronage and power and argued for caution about a seemingly obvious causal link between the two that may turn out to be a rather superficial or biased observation.

With the first two speakers, we moved a little away from the singular musical composition as the outcome of a commission: Carola Bebermeier took us into the world the visual arts by reconstructing the genesis of the painting Chez Arensberg by André Raffray (1984), commissioned by Francis Naumann. Thomas Wozonig presented his research on the backgrounds of Herbert von Karajan’s recordings of the music of Jean Sibelius and placed the curation of records in circumstances comparable to commissions, which he so aptly summarized in his abstract as “a discursive net of historical-institutional fundaments, personal-aesthetical autonomy, social and audience-related functionality, and economic necessities.” What connected these two presentations was the introduction of additional gatekeepers in this “discursive net:” the art historian on the one hand and the record companies on the other.

In the second session, we looked at a cross-section of a period of approximately 200 years of commissioned musical projects that emerged in specific political and economic contexts, starting with Robert Adlington’s account of Krzysztof Penderecki’s work for a British engine manufacturer in the 1970s. Then, we moved to Vienna, with Stephanie Franklin introducing us to a composition by Johanna Müller-Hermann commissioned for the 1921 congress of the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom. Constanze Marie Köhn examined a group of cultural-political agents who pursued their goals with joint musical projects in the late eighteenth century, including very specific commissions. Commissionsing music as part of political and economic strategies, targeting specific audiences was the thread running through this session.

We then shifted our focus even further away from composers and toward performers in very specific roles. In the course of her research on singers at the Viennese Court in the early eighteenth century, Emilia Pelliccia uncovered the remarkable case of two singers who were commissioned by an aristocrat to compose for him – dynamically changing and redefining their artistic roles. Alexander Flor also put one singer’s agency in the foreground, focusing on our present and the intersections between historical performance practice and pop culture in the context of music albums. In my own contribution, I took up this perspective on performers and presented my approach of methodologically conceptualizing my case studies of performers as commissioners in the twentieth century through a triangulation between concepts of patronage, activism, and entrepreneurship.

Eventually, we circled back to the perspective of those who fulfilled the commissions and to the question of how creative processes were realized in this constellation. Zsombor Németh and Ilona Kovács addressed this by the examples of specific composers: Béla Bartók and Ernst von Dohnányi. Konstantin Hondros provided insight into a field where it is not truly about outstanding individuality but about similarity and recognizability. This brought us full circle to the connections between economy, industry, and music that we had been thinking about in the discussions of the first presentations.

This event would not have been possible without the support and commitment of my colleagues at mdw – many thanks to all of them, especially Johanna Stacher.

To get a sense of the musical diversity covered in the workshop, check out this playlist:

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• Epstein, Louis K.: The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2022
• Weber, William: “Commission,” in: Grove Music Online, 2001 (retrieved 14 Jun. 2024, from https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000041518)

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