The Vienna workshop ‘Historical Perspectives on Musical Commissions’ offered a reminder of the array of rationales that have motivated individuals and organisations to commission musical works. Listening to the workshop presentations from my disciplinary perspective as a historian of late twentieth-century modernist and avant-garde music, I found it striking that aesthetic considerations – specific styles, compositional techniques, and attitudes to musical language – by no means predominated as a motivation for patrons.

That this came as a surprise to me probably reflects how the historiography of post-1945 art music has focussed upon stylistic differences. As a result, particular attention has been given to the role played by commissioners in advancing distinct aesthetic trajectories. The ‘cultural Cold War’, for instance, drove state support for sharply opposed compositional styles that reflected wider ideological and political divides on either side of the Iron Curtain. Recent studies of the role of American foundations, operating in Latin America as well as the United States, have emphasised the particular connection of private wealth and the musical avant-garde, creating a niche genre that came to be referred to as ‘foundation music’ precisely because it lacked any wider market appeal.

Yet by contrast, in the commissions discussed by speakers during the Vienna workshop, promotion of a specific compositional aesthetic was often a secondary concern. Patrons frequently had other priorities. Performers might be focused on showcasing their talents and/or the potential of their instruments – in which case, commissioning work in a diversity of musical styles would be advantageous. Individual patrons might similarly wish to demonstrate their catholic interests, or to impress different audiences, in which case it again made sense to push aside personal stylistic biases. There is also the entrepreneurial motive, which has throughout history brought investors to follow whichever trend will yield the greatest market return.

Awareness of this larger history of musical commissions helps to sharpen thinking on those cases where musical style was most certainly an issue. My own presentation at the workshop examined the commission of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Symphony no. 1 (1973) by an industrial manufacturer – Perkins Engines – based in the small English city of Peterborough. At first sight, the choice of such an unapologetically experimental composer seems baffling. Perkins had no connection whatsoever to the usual circuits of avant-garde music production and promotion, and the primary audience for the premiere – the company’s own employees, who attended the company’s annual Industrial Concerts in large numbers – were unlikely beneficiaries.

By piecing together the fragmentary surviving documentation around the commission, it becomes possible to see that aesthetic questions were nonetheless relevant. As I discuss in a forthcoming article on this commission, Perkins came to regard the cultural capital attached to Penderecki’s bracing sonic experimentation as highly advantageous in their mission to broaden markets internationally and to project an image as a high-tech manufacturer of the future. In this instance, then, support for the avant-garde was driven by strategic considerations, rather than the personal aesthetic preferences of Perkins managers themselves, who appear to have emerged from the premiere dazed and nonplussed.

The phenomenon of commissioning the musical avant-garde gives rise to a set of peculiar tensions. For composers driven by a spirit of experimentation, uninterested in considerations of everyday purpose or usefulness, and (often) openly antagonistic towards market forces, the idea of the commission has enjoyed an uneasy status. Commissions from state institutions, national broadcasters, subsidised performing groups, or (in America) expert-led foundations were generally preferred because they were seen as essentially disinterested, guaranteeing the vaunted creative freedom of the modernist artist. Patronage from other sources was seen as disreputable because it implied artistic compromise in response to specific individual or commercial demands.

For commissioners of the avant-garde these attitudes raised undoubted conundrums. A commitment to underwrite experimental art always carried the risk that the resulting work would resist or refute the terms (whether implicit or explicit) on which the commission was made. A case in point is the composition Harakiri (1971) by Nicolaus A. Huber, commissioned by Süddeutscher Rundfunk. As Beate Kutsche has discussed, the programmer Clytus Gottwald judged that the completed work did not merit the agreed commission fee on account of its extremely minimal musical content, and so withheld half of the composer’s fee. For all their apparent openmindedness, patrons of the avant-garde generally bring expectations based on work they already know and endorse; to do otherwise requires a readiness to be displeased or even shocked by the result of the commission.

As various presentations at the Vienna workshop demonstrated, composers can accrue prestige from commissions just as commissioners do – or risk losing it, if their choice of patron is regarded as suspect. An interesting case study in this regard is the British composer Peter Maxwell Davies, who raised eyebrows in the 1980s and 1990s for accepting commissions from a regional government authority in Scotland (who funded the so-called Strathclyde Concertos) and then the record label Naxos (who funded a cycle of 10 ‘Naxos quartets’). In accepting these opportunities, Maxwell Davies – an erstwhile ‘angry young man’ of the avant-garde – expressed a refusal of postwar prejudices against patronage, and a desire to reassert answerability to external demand as a positive motivation for composers. The twenty-first century has seen a relaxation in aesthetic debates, and consequently also a relaxation in attitudes towards commissions. Today, composers are preoccupied with the precarity of their chosen career, meaning that it is the dearth of funding opportunities that raises greatest concern. It is interesting to note, nonetheless, that compositional style remains a significant consideration within the new internet-based initiatives intended to plug the funding gap. The UK-based crowdfunding site Music Patron gives potential supporters the option to express a preference for different kinds of composers, amongst them ‘avant-garde noise makers’. Given the internet’s ever-more voracious appetite for tracking users’ personal tastes, this attention to stylistic predispositions is not unexpected. Within the larger history of musical commissioning, such platforms provide but the latest evidence for answering the age-old question of who will ‘pay the piper’ – and for what reasons.

---

Information on the author: Robert Adlington (Royal College of Music, London)

is Head of Research and Doctoral Programs at the Royal College of Music, London. He previously worked at the University of Sussex, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Huddersfield. He has written books on the composers Harrison Birtwistle and Louis Andriessen, and on the musical avant-garde in 1960s Amsterdam. His latest book is Musical Models of Democracy (OUP, 2023), which explores how progressive musicians of the past 60 years have engaged with varied ideas of democracy. Contact: robert.adlington@rcm.ac.uk

---

---

---

---