Toward a Theory of Patronage

Description:

This dissertation illuminates the funding contexts that structured art music composition in interwar France. While music historiography tends to focus solely on patronage - an ill-defined and limited category - as the paradigmatic economy within which pre-paid composition takes place, the author brings patronage into conversation with other, similarly enabling funding sources: publishing, radio, film, orchestras, and ballet companies. Through a series of case studies of the individuals, institutions, and practices that provided a market for interwar French art music, this thesis pursues two central ideas: first, that musical works, genres, and styles present sonic traces of the economic forces that structured their composition, and second, that the funding context of music often determines its historiographical reception.

subjects: Music patronage,  Music,  History and criticism

People: Darius Milhaud (1892-1974)

Places: France

Times: 20th century