Patronage and Power | by L. K. Epstein

In my book, The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France, I argued that “Music patronage is ultimately an exercise in power: through their wealth, influence, or prestige, patrons engineer opportunities to exercise their creative vision in tandem with the artists they support.”[1] While I still think patronage studies must contend with the application and effects of power, I worry that my initial statement was too one-sided. If patrons exercise power through patronage, then so too do those on the other side of the patronage dyad: composers, performers, scholars, and other musicians all exercise their own power in the dance of patronage. On both sides, agents exert what Joseph Nye described as soft power: that is, cooptation through attraction or appeal rather than through violence or coercion.[2] And attempts to exert even soft power by patrons or by the musicians with whom they collaborate are not always successful.

One of the issues I have struggled with most in my work is proving that a patron’s influence was decisive in determining how a commission sounds, whether through attraction or appeal or mere opportunity. I really want to show that patrons had power and influence, and I make claims to that effect routinely in my book. But I also know how hard that influence is to prove, and I’m not the only one who has struggled. Take Sylvia Kahan’s claim in the introduction to her fabulous biography of Winaretta Singer, the Princesse de Polignac, that “her artistic preferences… led directly to the rise of what is broadly called ‘neoclassicism’ in music.”[3] The neoclassical thread that runs through so many of the pieces that Polignac commissioned is incontrovertible, from Satie’s Socrate to Germaine Tailleferre’s Concerto for Piano and 12 Instruments to Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Darius Milhaud’s Malheurs d’Orphée:

Erik Satie, Socrate, mvt. 3, “La Mort de Socrate” (1918)

Darius Milhaud, Les Malheurs d’Orphée (1926)

But composers who had nothing to do with Polignac wrote neoclassical music starting decades before her commissions, and other major neoclassical figures such as Stravinsky turned to the style for complex reasons, as Scott Messing and Richard Taruskin have shown.[4] Were Polignac’s commissions the cause or the result of a neoclassical wave? I would argue the latter is more true. I’m not sure a patron can cause a broad musical style to come into existence, although a patron can certainly reinforce a style, as Polignac’s support for neoclassicism demonstrates.

I feel conflicted between wanting patronage to be understood as a form of power and recognizing, as I wrote in my introduction, that “we ought to be wary of attempts to establish a causal relationship between musical style and patronage” (12). In what follows I’m going to lean into that wariness to make a counterintuitive argument: patrons may have power, but they don’t need to be powerful to matter. And acknowledging the ways in which patrons lacked power, particularly when it came to commissions, actually helps counter a longstanding historiographical bias rooted in fear of the power that so many critics, composers, and scholars perceive patrons to wield. The composers I study were not employees; they had their own power to make choices and to resist patrons’ entreaties. Likewise, the patrons I study were not interested in treating composers as employees, or as poor, desperate objects conducive to manipulation. This is one reason I argue that patronage is nearly always a collaborative process, and in the case of commissions, a process characterized by mutually beneficial creative labor.

A particularly clear articulation of the romantic ideal of the patron-composer relationship comes from Igor Stravinsky. Acknowledging that “commissions influence and even predetermine to a certain extent the majority of new music,” Stravinsky nevertheless railed against patrons who impose on composers and fantasized about a paradigm in which patrons would provide maximal support with  minimal interference:

I had my own little run-in with a patron: a skirmish with the Antipatron in person – heir to a chain of groceries, a so-called specialist in “modern art” who would have gladly commissioned The Rake’s Progress, if I had accepted the condition that he wanted to impose on me to sit in judgment while I played him the score on the piano. Do you remember the letter that Sigismondo Malatesta wrote to Giovanni de Medici to ask for an artist to beautify the newly daubed walls of the Tempio Malatesta with frescoes? He promised to the painter, whoever he might be, “that he could work as he liked, or waste his time as he liked, without ever lacking for what he needed.” There’s something that should be read by whoever proposes to commission a work.[5]

Stravinsky’s run-in with the Antipatron was truly the exception to the rule, as he seems to acknowledge with his allusion to the Antichrist. In reality, private commissions nearly always illustrate a push and pull between patron and composer, with bidirectional rather than unilateral influence. Patrons and composers have also tended to choose one another, thus reinforcing mutual stylistic preferences. Most details of commissions centered on logistics rather than aesthetics, and I am not aware of another case in which a private patron asked to “sit in judgment” of a composer’s work. Numerous letters by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and the Princesse de Polignac, for example, demonstrate that it was common for patrons to stipulate instrumentation, length, and genre; the amount the patron was willing to pay; the expectation that the original manuscript would belong to the patron; the work’s dedicatee; performance and sometimes publication rights; and plans for the work’s premiere. Beyond these somewhat prosaic constraints, little to no ink was spilled instructing the composer on what the piece should sound like.

I only identified one occasion when Polignac may have imposed any stylistic requirements, and even then it wasn’t so much an imposition as a confirmation of the composer’s own preferences. After hearing Germaine Tailleferre’s 1923 ballet, Le Marchand d’oiseaux, Polignac decided to commission a piano concerto from Tailleferre. According to Michel de Cossart, Polignac asked Tailleferre to write the concerto in the same neo-baroque style as Le Marchand d’oiseaux, and you can hear the similarity in style between the two pieces.[6]

Germaine Tailleferre, Le Marchand d’oiseaux (1923)

Germaine Tailleferre, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1924)

It’s not clear to me where Cossart learned of this request, and I can just as easily imagine Tailleferre composing the Piano Concerto in a neo-Baroque style without Polignac’s asking. No one asked Tailleferre to pick that style for the Marchand d’Oiseaux (it was commissioned by Rolf de Maré without any stylistic constraints) and, after all, the two works were composed within a year of each other. But if Polignac did in fact add a stylistic condition to her commission, that would have been the exception that proves the rule.

Another example of a patron whose commissions largely affirmed the preferences of their target composers is that of Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge, who commissioned dozens of string quartets from composers who were eager to write string quartets. For instance, Coolidge commissioned the 8th and 9th string quartets from Darius Milhaud, who had clearly already established himself as a composer of string quartets by the time he received the commission. In contrast, Stravinsky had no interest in composing a string quartet for Coolidge, but he was happy to compose the ballet Apollon musagète. And Maurice Ravel happily accepted a 1924 commission for a chamber work for flute, cello, piano, and voice which became Chansons madécasses,but rejected Coolidge’s 1931 commission for a second string quartet. Stravinsky and Ravel provide two of many examples of the power composers wielded: they could and did reject commissions. Even when they accepted, it was not uncommon for a composer to negotiate the offer or adjust instrumentation, length, genre, and style as they composed.

If musicologists have identified a disproportionate amount of chamber music and neoclassical instrumentation and form among interwar French commissions, that may be because patrons who enjoyed these features tended to commission composers who also preferred chamber music and neoclassical instrumentation and form. And if it was somewhat exceptional for composers to reject commissions, that is because patrons usually pitched commissions to suit the composers’ interests and priorities. Harmonic language and the vicissitudes of a particular composer’s craft seem to have been a secondary concerns behind the prestige or fashionability or seeming merit of an individual – in other words, the composer’s cultural capital and the cachet conferred by the composer’s own reputation motivated patrons just as surely as patrons’ economic, social, and cultural capital motivated composers.

It’s also worth noting that composers were capable of tailoring compositional styles to different patrons’ preferences without compromising their unique voices. Compare, for example, Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos and his secular cantata Le Bal Masque, both composed in 1932, both commissioned but by different patrons. The Princesse de Polignac commissioned the Concerto for Two Pianos in response to a direct appeal by Poulenc, which provides more evidence that sometimes it wasn’t a patron’s power that moved a composer to write, but rather a composer’s need and allure that motivated a patron to provide support. On August 13, 1931 Poulenc wrote to Polignac’s niece Marie-Blanche de Polignac,

You cannot imagine how the commission of which we spoke would change things. To be able to return to work at last, to put this nightmare behind me … think of it … Obviously dedication, manuscript, first performance, everything would belong to your aunt. Moreover I hope that she will find the price reasonable. It is, on the one hand, the fee that the Noailles gave me for Aubade and on the other hand the sum that at this moment would save me.[7]

The piano concerto is a largely serious affair, especially by Poulenc’s standards. The piece opens with a modernist coup d’archet, an accented major seventh chord, then abruptly transitions to a texture that evokes the gamelan Poulenc heard at the 1931 Colonial Exposition before moving on to a first theme with a neo-baroque sequence that alternates with a fairground melody. Quick shifts in affect, register, and reference are typical of Poulenc’s music and particularly audible here.

Francis Poulenc, Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (1932)

The second movement of the concerto (skip to 7:47 to listen) makes clear reference to Mozart, an indebtedness Poulenc explicitly acknowledged in an interview with Claude Rostand.[8]

Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra K. 466 in D minor, mvt. 2, “Romance”

Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra K. 537 in D major, mvt. 2, “Larghetto”

Overall, while there are puckish moments in the concerto, and while Poulenc’s toccata-like third movement is outright gleeful, the overall affect is decorous, much like the Princesse de Polignac herself.

In contrast, the balance between the absurd and the serious is completely inverted in Le Bal Masque, a piece commissioned by Charles and Marie Laure de Noailles in which Poulenc set texts by the Surrealist poet Max Jacob. We hear similar shifts in affect, register, and reference in this piece, but much more intensely, even hyperbolically. By and large, Le Bal masqué eschews the concert hall in favor of the cafe-concert and music-hall, with several detours into 12-tone and free atonal harmonic language.

Francis Poulenc, Le Bal masqué (1932)

The fragmented, frantically shifting polystylistic aesthetic of Le Bal masqué can’t be explained purely in terms of Poulenc’s usual postures, nor in terms of its Surrealist text, since Poulenc set Max Jacob in an earlier song cycle in a much more pensive, reserved style. It seems much more likely that Poulenc wrote Le Bal masque to match Charles and Marie Laure de Noailles’ penchant for the iconoclastic and the bizarre, as evidenced in their support for films such as Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poete and Salvador Dali’s L’Age d’or. The Noailles’s commission for Le Bal masqué gave Poulenc an opportunity – you might say an excuse – to amplify his mischievousness.

While patrons tended not to exert power over composers’ styles when it came to individual pieces, there is ample evidence that interwar French patrons leveraged sheer volume to shape repertories. Polignac commissioned 21 works, and Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge commissioned dozens more, the vast majority of which reinforced the neoclassical strand of early twentieth century music. Similarly, in the 3rd chapter of my book, I argue that impresarios and patrons such as Rolf de Mare, Etienne de Beaumont, and Ida Rubinstein profoundly shaped the concert dance repertory by commissioning dozens of new works in the 1920s and 1930s as they sought to compete with Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. Even when it comes to sheer volume, however, a patron’s power to shape repertory was limited by the reception history for that repertory. Ida Rubinstein enjoyed the affluence to commission a number of works, but she could not buy a positive reputation or historiographical staying power.

Individually, it’s hard to prove that patrons have power. But what about collectively, and what about when they disburse their wealth not as individuals but as trusts or foundations? In Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How it Can Do Better, the Stanford political scientist Rob Reich argues that volume can beget power: “In the case of wealthy donors or private foundations especially, [philanthropy] can be a plutocratic exercise of power, the deployment of vast private assets toward a public purpose, frequently with the goal of changing public policy. In the United States and elsewhere, big philanthropy is often an unaccountable, nontransparent, donor-directed, and perpetual exercise of power.”[9] Elsewhere in the book he cites the 18th-century French philosophe and economist Anne-Robert Turgot, who wrote the entry in Diderot’s Encyclopedie on philanthropic foundations. Of Turgot’s many objections to foundations, the one that Reich takes most seriously and that is of greatest interest to me is his argument that foundations permit the vision of the donor to remain in effect in perpetuity, despite the changing needs of the people that vision is meant to benefit. Reich paraphrases Turgot as saying, “No person is so wise as to be able to anticipate the needs of future generations; no foundation’s purpose, endowed in perpetuity, could guarantee its social utility. And yet the law demands fidelity to donor intent and protection of assets across generations.”[10] Turgot’s objection corresponds to what musicologists have traditionally understood as the greatest benefit of music patronage: the cultivation of a durable repertory of excellent music that, in the form of a canon, comes to shape music composition for generations, well after the patron’s demise.

In the guise of canon construction effected by a private foundation established by a wealthy individual patron, music patronage demonstrates its greatest power. But foundations and individual patrons are ontologically distinct. The power of individual patrons simply remains too limited and too conceptually murky to prompt the same skepticism that Turgot and Reich and others say private foundations deserve. In other words, individual music patrons have always struggled to commission or fund at a scale to rival that of the Rockefeller Foundation or the Koussevitzky Foundation, not to mention the French government. And those individuals who have commissioned prolifically have generally not received credit for profoundly shaping the canon, most likely because even those like the Princesse de Polignac or Coolidge or Rubinstein who seemed to try were hardly the puppet masters that many critics and composers feared they would be. Instead they were activists, collaborators, co-creators, and elite amateurs who wanted to stay as close to the creative act as possible. They were not disproportionately successful at shaping the canon in part because the “invisible hand of the canon,” as Anne Shreffler calls it, has not by and large been the hand of composers or patrons who commission but rather writers on music, including critics, musicologists, and composers themselves, as well as the performing organizations that cater to largely upper middle-class concert-goers.[11]

I find myself drawn to what I imagine to be the power of patrons because of my desire to decenter composers as the primary agents of music history. But it would be a mistake, I think, to merely shift veneration or ascriptions of power from composers to patrons. Insofar as patrons and performers who commission music can be understood as agents who negotiate and collaborate to produce new music, we can avoid the kind of hagiographic portrayals of patrons that exaggerate their power over composers and thus distort the historical record. What power individual patrons had and have is the power to render themselves creative agents, to create opportunities to collaborate with composers, and to draw the attention of scholars such as ourselves who have the ultimate power to write them into history.


[1] Louis Epstein, The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2022), 8.

[2] Nye, Joseph S. “Soft Power.” Foreign Policy, no. 80 (1990): 153–71. https://doi.org/10.2307/1148580.

[3] Sylvia Kahan, Music’s Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003), xvii.

[4] Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1988); Richard Taruskin, “Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology,” 19th-Century Music 16, no. 3 (Spring, 1993): 286-302.

[5] Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Souvenirs et commentaires (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 113 and 116, qtd. in Myriam Chimènes, Mécènes et musiciens: du salon au concert à Paris sous la IIIe République (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 620. “Tout en minimisant l’importance des commandites en ce qui concerne mon propre art, je crois qu’elles influencent et même prédéterminent dans une certaine mesure la plupart de la musique nouvelle” (113). “J’ai eu moi-même ma petite expérience des commanditaires: une escarmouche avec l’Antimécène en personne – l’héritier d’une chaîne d’épiceries, soi-disant spécialiste de l’’art moderne’ -, qui aurait volontiers commandité The Rake’s Progress, si j’avais accepté la condition qu’il voulait m’imposer de siéger en juge tandis que je lui jouerais ma musique au piano. Vous souvenez-vous de la lettre que Sigismondo Malatesta écrivit à Giovanni di Medici pour demander qu’un artiste embellisse de fresques les murs nouvellement enduits du Tempio Malatesta? Il promettait au peintre, quel qu’il dût être, ‘qu’il pourrait travailler comme il voudrait, ou perdre son temps comme il voudrait, sans jamais manquer du nécessaire.’ Voilà qui devrait être lu par quiconque se propose de commanditer une œuvre.”

[6] Michael De Cossart, The Food of Love: Princesse Edmond de Polignac (1865– 1943) and Her Salon (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 151 and 159.

[7] Poulenc to Comtesse Charles de Polignac, August 13, 1931, in Poulenc, Correspondance 1910-1963, ed. Myriam Chimènes (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 344. “Vous n’imaginez pas ce que la commande dont je vous ai parlé changerait les choses. Pouvoir retravailler enfin sans cauchemar … songez donc … Bien entendu dédicace, manuscrit, première audition, tout appartiendrait à votre tante. J’espère aussi qu’elle trouvera le prix raisonnable. C’est, d’une part, le prix que les Noailles m’ont donné pour Aubade et d’autre part la somme qui actuellement me sauverait.”

[8] Nicholas Southon, Francis Poulenc: Articles and Interviews: Notes from the Heart, trans. Roger Nichols (Burlington VT: Routledge, 2016),  219.

[9] Bob Reich, Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How it Can Do Better (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 7.

[10] Anne-Robert Turgot (1727-1781), “Fondation,” Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 7:72–75 (Paris, 1757), paraphrased in Reich, Just Giving, 50.

[11] Anne Shreffler, “The Myth of the Canon’s Invisible Hand,” guest post at Not Another Music History Cliché by Linda Shaver-Gleason, 27 December 2017, accessible at https://notanothermusichistorycliche.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-myth-of-canons-invisible-hand-guest.html.


Information on the author: Louis K. Epstein (St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota)

is Associate Professor of Music at St. Olaf College. His monograph, The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France, appeared with Boydell Press in 2022, and he has also published articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Musicology, Music & Politics, the Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and the Revue de musicologie. With Daniel Barolsky, Louis co-edited two volumes of Open Access Musicology. He won the 2016 AMS Teaching Award for the Musical Geography Project, a repository of student-generated digital maps intended as resources for scholars, teachers, and students of music history. Louis currently holds an ACM-Mellon Academic Leadership Fellowship and, in addition to teaching music classes, he serves as Special Assistant to the Provost for Student Belonging and Retention. In his spare time, Louis makes unbearably catchy, surprisingly sophisticated music for kids and their families as one half of a duo called Louis and Dan and the Invisible Band. Contact: epstein@stolaf.edu


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Louis Epstein (April 9, 2025). Patronage and Power | by L. K. Epstein. Performers as Patrons of New Music. Retrieved November 16, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13prk


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