Category Archives: General

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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Performers as Commissioners – New Research Project | by E. Reisinger

The last quarter of 2021 held something special for me: the start of my new research project “Performers as Commissioners of New Music in the Twentieth Century: Preconditions, Self-Conceptions, Impacts.” It is funded by an Elise Richter Grant (with a volume of € 379,095.37) from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and runs from October 2021 to September 2025 at the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna. As a follow up to my work on Benny Goodman, this study includes further artists, who essentially shaped their instruments’ repertoires and aesthetics by hiring composers to write for them (see below), and takes the questions investigated within the Goodman-pilot onto a broader level.

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