The Business of Music Michael Talbot, Editor LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS The Business of Music Liverpool Music Symposium 1 Michael Talbot (ed.), The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? (2000) 2 Michael Talbot (ed.), The Business of Music (2002) Liverpool Music Symposium 2 The Business of Music edited by Michael Talbot LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS First published 2002 by LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS 4 Cambridge Street, Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2002 Liverpool University Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A British Library CIP record is available. ISBN 0 85323 528 7 cased ISBN 0 85323 538 4 paper Typeset in Sabon with Gill Sans by Northern Phototypesetting Co. Ltd, Bolton, Lancs. Printed and bound in the European Union by Bookcraft, Bath Contents Notes on Contributors vii Introduction 1 Michael Talbot 1 A Venetian Operatic Contract of 1714 10 Michael Talbot 2 What Choirs Also Sang: Aspects of Provincial Music Publishing in Late-nineteenth-century England 62 Judith Blezzard 3 The Modernisation of London Concert Life around 1900 96 Simon McVeigh and Cyril Ehrlich 4 Debussy, Durand et Cie: A French Composer and His Publisher (1884–1917) 121 Robert Orledge 5 Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979): The Teacher in the Marketplace 152 Caroline Potter 6 Copyright as a Component of the Music Industry 171 Dave Laing 7 Illegality and the Music Industry 195 Simon Frith 8 The Tarnished Image? Folk ‘Industry’ and the Media 217 Mike Brocken vi Contents 9 Collective Responsibilities: The Arts Council, Community Arts and the Music Industry in Ireland 244 Rob Strachan and Marion Leonard 10 Paying One’s Dues: The Music Business, the City and Urban Regeneration 263 Sara Cohen 11 Learning to Crawl: The Rapid Rise of Music Industry Education 292 Mike Jones Index of Personal Names 311 Notes on Contributors Judith Blezzard is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Liv- erpool. Her areas of interest include manuscript studies, especially relating to choral and church music of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her publications include several editions and translations of choral works from European repertories, and she directs a local chamber choir. Mike Brocken lectures at Liverpool John Moores University and Liv- erpool Hope. He is owner amd managing director of Mayfield Records, and as a broadcaster has just completed for the BBC a series of six documentaries on Liverpool venues in the 1970s. Sara Cohen is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Liverpool and a member of the editorial board of the journal Popular Music. She is the author of Rock Culture in Liverpool (Oxford University Press, 1991). Her most recent publications have focused on the diverse areas of popular music, gender and sexuality, and popular music and urban regeneration. Cyril Ehrlich, Emeritus Professor of Social and Economic History at Queen’s University, Belfast, specialises in the economic history of music. His books include studies of the piano, of the music profes- sion, of the history of performing rights and of the Royal Philhar- monic Society, and he has recently completed a history of the Wigmore Hall. He is currently Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths College. Simon Frith is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Stirling, and co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Rock and Pop. He chairs the judges of the Mercury Music Prize. viii Notes on Contributors Mike Jones is Course Director for the MBA in Music Industries at the University of Liverpool. His PhD research dealt with the industrial processes of music commodification. As a member of the group Latin Quarter, he released seven albums between 1984 and 1997, mainly for RCA Records. Dave Laing is Reader in Music at the School of Communication and Creative Industries, University of Westminster. His many publications include The Sound of Our Time (1969) and One Chord Wonders (1985). His next book will be a study of the international music business. Marion Leonard is a Lecturer at the Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool. Her PhD research addressed issues of gender in the music industry. She has investigated and written on various sub- jects related to popular music that include ethnicity, gender, cultural policy and youth cultures. Simon McVeigh is Professor of Music at Goldsmiths College, Univer- sity of London. He has written extensively on the history of concerts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London (including Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn), and he is currently engaged on a project with Cyril Ehrlich entitled ‘The Transformation of London Concert Life, 1880–1914’. He is also completing a study of the early-eighteenth-century Italian concerto. Robert Orledge is Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool. A specialist in French music from 1850 to 1950, he has published books on Fauré, Debussy, Koechlin and Satie, as well as numerous related articles and editions. He is currently preparing a critical edi- tion of Debussy’s Poe opera La Chute de la Maison Usher. Caroline Potter is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Kingston. A specialist in French music since Debussy, she is the author of Henri Dutilleux (Ashgate, 1997). She is currently co-editing French Music since Berlioz, also for Ashgate, and writing a book on Nadia and Lili Boulanger. Rob Strachan is currently completing a PhD at the University of Liv- erpool on the politics of independent record production. He teaches at the Institute of Popular Music, runs an independent record label and is an active musician. His research interests include cultural policy, taste cultures and the political economy of the music industry. Notes on Contributors ix Recent publications include a chapter on the semiotics of music video in Music and Manipulation (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Michael Talbot is James and Constance Alsop Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool. A specialist in Venetian music of the late Baroque, he has produced books on Vivaldi, Albinoni and Vinaccesi. His most recent book is The Finale in Western Instrumental Music (Oxford University Press, 2001). This page intentionally left blank Introduction Michael Talbot The double meaning of the title for this volume, and for the sympo- sium that preceded it, is of course intended. The first meaning, which one could paraphrase as ‘What music is (or ought to be) about’, con- trasts with the second, which is: ‘How music is produced and con- sumed, bought and sold’. But even if the two meanings are quite different, they are intertwined. No one is so naive as to imagine that the material circumstances of music’s existence leave no mark what- ever on its character. The important questions are, rather, whether such influences are (or should be) central or marginal and whether, on balance, they are good or bad. No musical tradition is wholly unanimous about the answers. Where music produced in our own age is concerned, a kind of litmus test is provided by reactions to the description ‘commercial’ and its subtly different pair of antonyms, ‘non-commercial’ and ‘uncommer- cial’. Within the Western art music tradition, commonly known as classical music, it would usually seem inadvisable, even improper, to apply the term ‘commercial’ to the music itself. Of course, everyone wishes for success (the composer and his or her performers must eat!) and for wide dissemination, even if, unexpectedly, to the vulgus. But in the view of the musicians most intimately involved, this success must appear almost accidental rather than engineered. If the commu- nity of practitioners and professional commentators describes a com- position as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ according to its consensual aesthetic and technical standards, this quality remains unaffected by public success or failure and sticks to the work for as long as the experts remain in agreement. The insulation of the concept of artistic value from survival in the marketplace is perhaps logical for a tradition that prizes durability and, almost uniquely among musical practices, likes to take the long- 2 Michael Talbot term view. Viewed in this light, the subsidy of classical music from the public or private purse is a great benefit, since it validates a distinction between artistic and commercial value: a deus ex machina plugs the gap between what concertgoers are willing to pay and how much composers, performers and venues need to earn in order to keep going. But such patronage is simply a different kind of commerce from the more familiar brand rather than a negation of commerce as such. Classical composers and ensembles nowadays compete for funding in the same way that others compete for market share. It was not always so, of course. During the comparatively brief period when classical music, principally via publishing, the sale of musical instruments and the public concert, circulated among all European urban classes with little competition from other musical traditions – a period stretching from the middle of the nineteenth cen- tury to the end of the First World War – it possessed a vast ‘popular’ sector (of drawing-room ballads, piano miniatures, fashionable dances, etc.) that entered, and competed in, the marketplace like any other set of commodities. Classical music is probably the only surviving musical tradition rou- tinely to be funded, albeit only in part, by taxpayers and purchasers of consumer products who are not among its adherents. To give one example: a subscriber to a pension scheme who has no personal interest in classical music may nevertheless subsidise a symphony concert, unwittingly or even unwillingly, if his or her pension com- pany decides to sponsor it.