Musica Mercata is the seventh music history congress by the University of the Arts Helsinki Sibelius Academy

Music, especially classical music, is often thought of as an intangible, purely intellectual art form with only the necessary economic links. We are all familiar with the myth of the poor artist who lives by the sacred spirit of his vocation and for whom material considerations are completely irrelevant. Yet the history of music shows that composers and musicians – Wagner, Puccini, Verdi, Paderewski, Jenny Lind and many others – have typically been just as lured with financial temptations as anyone else. Moreover, the courts and the Church, the traditional sponsors of music, have always wanted a return on their funding: court composers, for example, had to give musical expression to the power, authority and wealth of their employers.

This was also the case at the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King – the king invested 200 million francs a year in court music alone. Given the splendour of that environment, this is very understandable, but even more than three centuries later, the importance of music in the context of the court is astonishing. Court music was present at almost every moment of the ruler’s life – in different purposes and in different tones. The king’s waking and going to bed, dining and other activities were all part of the public sphere, and music was involved in all of them. People were prepared to pay for it, and a skilled court musician was worth a high salary.

Composers of art music from Handel to Gerschwin, from every century, have become wealthy for their music. Some composers, in turn, became wealthy in other ways, which contributed to their artistic independence. Would the radical madrigal art of Carlo Gesualdo’s day or the original orchestral music of Charles Ives have been possible without capital and wealth? It is only a slight exaggeration to say that money and financial constraints also have a direct influence on the stylistic history and aesthetics of music.

In addition to the economic aspects of music and composition, money is also linked to the commodification, professionalisation and mediatisation of music. The Musica Mercata symposium will focus on topics such as musical stardom, publishing and the transmission of music, the relationship between music institutions and the economy, and the promotion of musicians all through the centuries of western art music. All of this is now part of the field of music history, which draws not only on the theory and methods of traditional historiography, but also on research traditions such as economic history, social history and cultural studies.

As the above suggests, the links between music and the economy are not just a matter of material and economic issues, but of the history of the whole concept of music and the idea of ‘art music’. The socio-economic upheavals, industrialisation and the explosion of music mediatisation that have shaken Western society over the last two centuries have also changed the way we think about music and our ideals of musical performance. These issues also fall within the scope of music history research.

There will be in total 60 number of presentations and discussion panels on the three days of the congress, and two keynote speeches. The speakers, the symposium’s guests of honour, Professor Kyle Barnett (Bellarmine University, USA) and Gundula Kreutzer (Yale University, USA), are top researchers in their field and are visiting Finland and the Uniarts Helsinki for the first time.

Markus Mantere

Professor, music history, DocMus Doctoral School, Sibelius Academy