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.
Continue readingCategory Archives: Workshop Vienna 2024
“ps – How about the Sibelius concerto occasionally?” | by T. Wozonig
The stimulating framework of the workshop “Historical Perspectives on Musical Commissions” prompted me to reflect upon the two protagonists of my ongoing PhD project – Salzburg-born conductor Herbert von Karajan (1908–1989) and Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) – from the perspective of “patronage” and “commission.” While in the call for papers, musical patronage, following Louis Epstein’s 2022-volume The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France, was defined as “premeditated collaborations between patrons and composers to produce new music,” I had to adapt some of these concepts: Not only was it necessary to extend the idea of “work” beyond composition to the sphere of performance but also to shift the focus from patron to commission in the broader sense of an agreement to provide a desired product.
Continue readingThe Creative Process of Ernst von Dohnányi’s American Rhapsody (op. 47) | by I. Kovács
Hungarian pianist, composer, and conductor Ernst von Dohnányi (1877–1960) spent the last eleven years of his life in America, in Tallahassee (Florida). From 1949, the old master worked as a professor of piano and composition at Florida State University, and in addition to teaching, he gave concerts and composed. Unlike in the earlier stages of his career, the majority of his American works were made to order (Table 1), and during these works, Dohnányi had a rather new situation in which he sometimes had to adapt to the wishes of the client.
Continue readingMusic for Commissions, Competitions, and Requests: Béla Bartók and musical patronage | by Zs. Németh
Following the enlightening call for the workshop “Historical Perspectives on Musical Commissions” at the end of 2023, I searched for any comprehensive studies focusing on Béla Bartók and his commissions or Béla Bartók and his commissioners. Over the past century or so, numerous studies have been devoted to Bartók’s compositional output, utilizing a variety of approaches. This led me to believe that there should also be a number of studies on the subject in question. I was surprised to discover that, while one can read about the subject of commissions in works that examine the genesis and early history of individual compositions [1], and the correspondence between Bartók and Paul Sacher (one of his well-known patrons) was published in a dedicated volume a decade ago [2], there is currently no work that provides an overview of the works Bartók composed in response to commissions, competitions, and requests. This prompted me to apply for the workshop, prepare my paper and, subsequently, write a longer study on this subject. The latter is currently in progress and is expected to be published in Studia Musicologica – An International Journal of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2025.
Continue readingOn 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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