Category Archives: General

Musical Crossovers in Budapest: ERASMUS+ Teaching Mobility at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music | by E. Reisinger

The interaction of musical traditions is always not only a wellspring of artistic creativity but also a negotiation of power and privilege. In late March 2025, I was invited to discuss phenomena of musical crossovers during an ERASMUS+ Teaching Mobility at the Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti Egyetem in Budapest.

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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.

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On Commissioning the Musical Avant-garde | by R. Adlington

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.

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Reflections on the International Workshop “Historical Perspectives on Musical Commission” | by E. Reisinger

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.

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