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“ykey small” “ekey small” “nkey small” We’ve placed the first item on Yabut’s Eternal Nightstand (the YEN List: things we’d really like to read, view, or listen to, if only we had the time). It’s an intriguing book called Quarter Notes and Bank Notes: The Economics of Music Composition in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, by the venerable F.M. Scherer (Princeton University Press, 2004). Prof. Scherer focuses his vast economic expertise on the realm of classical music, showing the intellectual, political and economic roots of the change from composers dependent on noble courts for their livelihoods to a freelance marketplace for music composition. As the book’s Synopsis notes:
“$key small” [Scherer] analyzes changing trends in how composers acquired their skills and earned their livings, examining such impacts as demographic development and new modes of transportation. The book offers insight into the diversity of composers’ economic aspirations, the strategies through which they pursued success, the burgeoning music publishing industry, and the emergence of copyright protection. Scherer concludes by drawing some parallels to the economic state of music composition in our own time.
You’ll find an excellent mini-review here, by my friend Bert Foer at the American Antitrust Insitute. Bert asks, “Has the winner-take-all dynamic which has made it possible for a musician to become wealthy in the mass market also brought us back to something like the eighteenth century model in which subsidies are needed for performances — with patrons from the middle class rather than the nobility providing the subsidies through expensive tickets?”