1. Appearing in Berkeley: A Journal of Modern Culture (July 1948): 1-2, 7-8, reprinted in Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays , edited by Edward T. Cone (Princeton, 1979), 157. The full statement reads: "No fact regarding music in America is more obvious, more pertinent, or more all-embracing in its implications than the fact that music here is in all of its public aspects a business, and a big one." This is the first sentence of an essay called "Music in a Business Economy."

2. "There is no doubt," Sessions continues, "that this is an inevitable state of affairs. I do not regard it as a favorable one for art or for culture ... but it is a condition which is wholly characteristic of our society, and one which exists and flourishes as a part of that society, entirely independently of the will or the intentions of individuals. I am not therefore deploring it[;] ... we must treat it as a condition and not a temporary accident" ("Music in a Business Economy," in Roger Sessions on Music , 157).

3. Sessions, "Music in a Business Economy," 158-59.

4. See Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music , translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1985), 37. When music becomes a commodity, Attali writes, it is transformed into "a means of producing money. It is sold and consumed. It is analyzed: What market does it have? How much profit does it generate? What business strategy is best for it? The music industry, with all of its derivatives (publishing, entertainment, records, musical instruments, record players, etc.) is a major element in and precursor of the economy of leisure and the economy of signs."

5. Sessions, "Music in a Business Economy," 158-59.

6. Sessions, "Music in a Business Economy," 161-63. On 161 Sessions acknowledges that the music he writes "costs money to perform, and yields little or nothing in the sense of immediate short-range box-office returns." His analysis of the "competitive" atmosphere of the concert hall, which he finds pernicious, appears on pp. 162-63.

7. See, e.g., Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, 1982), Introduction and Chap. 1, for a concise description of the sociological structure supporting the arts.

8. Webster's New International Dictionary , 2d ed., s.v. "trade," distinguishes among trade, craft, business, and profession. Trade, it says, "applies to any of the mechanical employments or handicrafts, except those connected with agriculture." Craft, while "often interchangeable with trade . . . denotes especially a trade requiring skilled workmanship; as a carpenter, bricklayer, blacksmith"; business "applies especially to occupations of a mercantile or commercial nature"; and profession ''designates the more learned callings" such as "a clergyman, a lawyer, a physician, a civil engineer, a teacher."

9. Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976), 86-87, gives four criteria for a profession:

1. it must be a full-time occupation providing a principal source of income

2. the professional must undergo theoretical training and master an esoteric body of knowledge or skill

3. the professional must be licensed to practice by a recognized institution

4. the professional would be likely to embrace an ethic of service, so that in a conflict a client's interest takes precedence over financial profit.

In spirit, if not letter, composing meets the last three of these criteria. See n. 12 below for more on the issue of income.

10. Virgil Thomson, The State of Music , 2d ed., rev. (New York, 1962), 70-72. Chap. 5 is called "Life in the Big City or the Civil Status of Musicians."

11. Thomson writes: "Our western societies consider original design as something just a little bit more important than execution. Either it is paid a special fee, or it is granted a share in the profits of exploitation, or both. And although in some cases the designer is allowed, and in others obliged, to execute his own designs, his civil status as a creator is different from and superior to that of the ordinary executant workman" ( State of Music , 69). Thomson also acknowledges that there are "rich" professions, "poor" professions, and "rich-and-poor" ones. Rich professions, which include law and medicine, operate on a fee basis and charge "what the traffic will bear." Members of poor professions, of which literature, scholarship, and musical composition are examples, "are small proprietors who live by leasing to commercial concerns the property rights in their work." Within the rich-and-poor group—painting and sculpture are included, as well as practitioners who live "sometimes on fees, sometimes on royalties"— wide differences in financial standing exist that have little to do with technical competence ( State of Music , 73).

12. Granting that composing provides less than a living wage for most composers, Thomson describes their working lives as a manifestation of composers' "multiple civil status." For all the "pride and intellectual authority" that musical creation brings, a composer who acts in the role of performer or teacher is at that moment behaving as a laborer, "a time-worker, a union-member, a white collar proletarian.'' At the same time, as an "author of published or frequently played works," a composer is "a small proprietor who leases out . . . property-rights for exploitation by commercial interests" ( State of Music , 126-27).

Attali, concerned primarily with economics and only in passing with professional hierarchy, also views the composer as a proprietor. A composer, Attali explains, "produces a program, a mold, an abstract algorithm. The score he writes is an order described for an operator-interpreter" ( Noise , 37). Attali describes the composer's place in the economy this way:

Generally remunerated with a percentage of the surplus-value obtained from the sale of the commercial object (the score) and its use (the performance), he is reproduced in every copy of the score and in each performance, by virtue of the royalty laws. His remuneration is therefore a kind of rent . A strange situation: a category of workers has thus succeeded in preserving ownership of their labor, in avoiding the position of wage earner, in being remunerated as a rentier who dips into the surplus-value produced by wage earners who valorize their labor in the commodity cycle [e.g., performers and others]. As the creator of the program that all of the capitalist production plugs into, he belongs to a more general category of people, whom I shall call molders . Entertainment entrepreneurs are capitalists; workers in publishing and performers are productive workers. Composers are rentiers. (40)

13. Thomson's often disparaging comments on teachers should be read in light of his long-standing "war" on a "Germanic" attitude apparently "in control everywhere—in the orchestras, the universities, the critical posts, the publishing houses, wherever music makes money or is a power." He describes that attitude as one of pretension and self-interest, masked by solemnity and based on "an intolerable assumption, namely, its right to judge everything without appeal" (Virgil Thomson, Virgil Thomson [New York, 1966], quoted from Virgil Thomson, A Virgil Thomson Reader [Boston, 1981], 180-81). In 1939, calling teachers "trade-unionists," Thomson wrote:

Pedagogy is not a profession like musical composition, nor even a trade like piano-playing. It has no traditions, no body of esoteric knowledge, no special skill, and no authority. . .. I don't mean to say one teacher isn't a more skillful pedagogue than another. Quite the contrary. I mean no system of pedagogy is any better than any other. The fact that there are so many systems on the market (they are as numerous in America as religions) means that there is no tradition. If the teacher knows his subject and keeps his temper, the student can usually be depended on to get everything out of him that he can digest. ( State of Music , 135-36).

In a further jab at pedagogues' pretensions, Thomson writes that "much as they would like to be considered an intellectual caste," teachers "are really white-collar proletarians." He explains: "Their organized activities are aimed at getting some kind of authority over school curricula and at defending their salaries and their tenure of office from the depredations of trustees and school-boards, who represent in such disputes the profit motive and the authoritarian methods of finance-capital'' (136).

14. In both cases, occupationally speaking, craft practitioners (i.e., in the first case, musical performers, and, in the second, instrument makers) function as wage earners, and their labor provides money for the entrepreneur or factory owners. Thomson writes: "The organizing of musical performances is a business like fruit-vending" ( State of Music , 67). But for Attali it is more complicated. Attali's overriding issue is "the site of the creation of money in music." His analysis, which he describes as that of Marxian political economy, asks: "What kind of musical labor produces surplus-value?" When a musician "is paid a wage by someone who employs him for his personal pleasure," no surplus-value, or capital, is created. "But if, for example, he plays a concert as the employee of someone in the entertainment business, he produces capital and creates wealth." The musician is thus the wage earner and the entrepreneur the capitalist. See Attali, Noise , 37-39.

15. The key question is how far economic processes might go toward illuminating musical processes. During a session entitled "Worldwide Transmutations of American Popular Music" at the Twelfth Congress of the International Musicological Society in Berkeley, California (1977), William Austin noted the difficulty of studying the "vast cultural transactions" that certain musical processes embody. Can we study such processes as a whole, he asked?

If . . . the songs of some Eskimos are more popular than the songs of some Blackfoot Indians, or if the works of John Cage and Charles Ives are more popular than the symphonies and operas of Roger Sessions, still more popular than any of those things are, for instance, songs by Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin, Bob Dylan, and Stevie Wonder. . .. Those are very, very popular, more popular than any classical music or ethnic music. The question about this is "How are these various popular processes connected?" My personal answer so far is in thousands of ways investigated through individual biographies.

Austin's words are an apt reminder of how complex such investigation really is—especially in fields, like American musical economics, where biographical materials can be scarce and no handy "silhouettes" exist. See International Musicological Society, Report of the Twelfth Congress, Berkeley, 1977 , edited by Daniel Heartz and Bonnie Wade (Kassel, 1981), 586-87

16. These figures appear in a letter of 6 February 1753 from the Vestry of St. Philip's to an agent in London who was asked to recruit an organist there (see George W. Williams, "Early Organists at St. Philip's, Charleston," South Carolina Historical Magazine 54 [1953]: 87).

17. Andrew Adgate's Institution for the Encouragement of Church Music, formed in Philadelphia in 1784 and supported by subscription, was one of a number of singing schools known to be free to their scholars. More usual, however, were schools for which tuition was charged. As the Reverend William Bentley wrote in his diary in 1796, solo singing, as opposed to choral singing, "has never been taught in New England as a Liberal Art, in public schools, but by private tuition" (quoted in Richard Crawford, Andrew Law, American Psalmodist [Evanston, Ill., 1968], 132). I have not found evidence documenting the cost of private music lessons in the eighteenth century, though it probably varied as much then as it has since. As for singing schools, in the years after the Revolutionary War, my impression is that scholars typically paid between one and two dollars per quarter (usually two meetings per week for thirteen weeks). In Salem around 1783, according to The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., Pastor of East Church, Salem, Massachusetts , vol. 1 (Salem, Mass., 1905), 7, a singing-school session cost each scholar one dollar, with "deficiencies to be made up from the public fund." Oscar G. Sonneck's manuscript notes record psalmodist Samuel Holyoke charging two dollars per quarter in the same city in 1796, while Louis Pichierri, Music in New Hampshire, 1623-1800 (New York, 1960), 235, reports a singing master named [Ichabod] Johnson collecting the same fee in Portsmouth. In 1798, Andrew Law charged scholars two dollars per quarter for a Philadelphia school, plus an "equal proportion of the expenses of Wood, Room, Candles, and Doorkeeper." At the time, Law was paying $100 per quarter for the room in which he taught, high enough to complain about in a letter (Crawford, Andrew Law , 140). And in 1804, writing from Boston, he offered to return to Philadelphia if associates there guaranteed him ''one hundred scholars for two quarters at three dollars per scholar per quarter." The latter school never materialized; perhaps Law's proposal was simply a bargaining position (178). In 1821, a friend of Law's received a letter from Bond County, Illinois, from a singing master who reported he was teaching a school of "about 45 scholars [there] at $1" (246). Two years later, in 1823, Amos Blanchard was still charging two dollars per quarter for a school he opened in Salem. See Henry M. Brooks, Olden-Time Music: A Compilation from Newspapers and Books (Boston, 1888; reprint, New York, 1973), 115. Available figures support the notion that urban schools cost more than rural ones. I am grateful to Nym Cooke for help in documenting the cost of singing schools and for supplying the Sonneck reference from his notes.

18. Oscar G. Sonneck, after extensive: research, summed up the situation of New York's professional musicians, almost all of them immigrants, around 1800: "With their revenues from teaching, selling, copying music, with several societies and theatrical companies to engage them for their orchestras and with the salaries accruing from a participation in subscription-concerts . . . half [a] hundred musicians . . . were able to eke out a living" ( Early Concert-Life in America [Leipzig, 1907; reprint, New York, 1978], 233-24).

19. Allen Perdue Britton, Irving Lowens, and completed by Richard Crawford, American Sacred Music Imprints 1698-1810: A Bibliography (Worcester, Mass., 1990), 14-16, surveys the singing master's occupation, calling it "the only professional calling readily open to Americans who had a knack for music."

20. Britton, et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 4-5.

21. Britton, et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 9-10.

22. Britton, et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 20-21.

23. Britton, et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 26-42, analyzes the tune-book trade in sections on "publishers and publishing," "engravers and engraving," "printers and printing," and the "sellers and selling" of tunebooks. In eighteenth-century psalmody, most tunebooks were brought out by newspaper and book publishers rather than specialized music publishers.

24. In psalmody as it persisted well into the nineteenth century, performing, composing, and publishing continued as activities still existing chiefly within the teaching trade.

25. Law's letters, preserved in the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, document a life of economic hardship. In December 1798, for example, Law opened a singing school in Philadelphia. Lacking enough tunebooks for his pupils, he appealed to his brother and publisher in Cheshire, Connecticut, to send the engraved plates of his The Art of Singing (1794) to Philadelphia for reprinting. By mid-February they still had not arrived. He complained in a letter that My school is coming on slowly. I have been almost sick for three weeks and unable to sing, tho I attended the school . . .. I [can] get a room, only for four evenings in a week, which is injurious to the improvement of the school; and I cannot get any except one room which, if I have it, I must take it from this time to the first of October at the rate of four hundred dollars a year. And there will be at least three [months] out of the time that I can have no school, for the people will be upon the wing [in the summer] whether there is any [yellow] fevor or not, which will make it at least 200 dollars per quarter for the room, which will take all the avails of the school. (Crawford, Andrew Law , 139-40) Law's letters abound in similar laments.

26. Any substantial amount of profit made from psalmody could only have come from the publication of tunebooks. Vinson Bushnell has concluded after a study of Daniel Read's papers that, by publishing his own tunebooks, Read probably made psalmody a profitable venture. See Bushnell, "Daniel Read of New Haven (1757-1836): The Man and His Musical Activities," Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1979, 203-14. But Read was an exception. The only other publishers of tunebooks likely to have profited from the enterprise before the 1820s were professional printers: Isaiah Thomas, with The Worcester Collection (1786-1803), and Henry Ranlet, with The Village Harmony (1795-1821). See Britton, et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 6-8, 28, 35-36.

27. [Waldo Selden] Pratt, ed., American Music and Musicians ([New York, 1920]), 391.

28. For comments on Adgate's ambitions, see Crawford, Andrew Law , 63-65. Law's aspirations as a reformer are discussed on pages 97-108, especially 97, 105-8.

29. Sonneck, Early Concert-Life , 103-11, describes Adgate's attempt in 1786 to pay for his school with profits from an ambitious program of subscription concerts—a dozen in one season. Early in his career, Law sought to extend his influence through younger protégés like Adgate (Crawford, Andrew Law , 63-69) and Thomas H. Atwill (75, 79, 200-210). When those relationships turned sour, Law tried to sell tunebooks through agents located all over the country (121-28). Finally he tried to enlist the support of Protestant denominations for his tunebooks (144-46; 190).

30. Richard Crawford, "Ancient Music and the Europeanizing of American Psalmody, 1800-1810," in A Celebration of American Music: Words and Music in Honor of H. Wiley Hitchcock , edited by Richard Crawford, R. Allen Lott, and Carol J. Oja (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990), 225-55. Between 1805 and 1810, as this article shows, a social movement sparked by the belief that the sacred character of psalmody was threatened, accomplished much of what Law had been struggling to achieve for the previous dozen years. In this case, once consensus was reached on an important issue involving sacred music, social interaction proved to be an agent of change.

31. Carol A. Pemberton, Lowell Mason: His Life and Work , Studies in Musicology, no. 86 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1985), 4, notes that in old age Mason referred to the clarinet as "my instrument" but that, "even as a teenager . . . he was also at ease playing the violin, cello, flute, piano, and organ."

32. Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church , vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1979), describes Gardiner's work on pages 231-32.

33. Mason wrote John Rowe Parker, editor of The Euterpeiad , on 20 June 1821, describing his collection as a book "containing a sufficient number of psalm and hymn tunes for . . . public worship and a small number of larger pieces for Country Choirs . . . harmonized according to the modern principles of thorough bass—and I trust every false relation, and every forbidden progression will be avoided." Mason confided to Parker his fear that the collection would "be too classical—that is—too much of Mozart, Beethoven, etc." (Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 32).

34. According to Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 35, Mason was "immediately given $500 as an advance payment."

35. Michael Broyles, " Music of the Highest Class": Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven, Conn., 1992) contends that proceeds from the tunebook kept the Boston Handel and Haydn Society in existence during a period when financial insolvency forced many other such organizations to disband shortly after being founded. According to the secretary's minutes, Broyles writes, the society "was in serious financial trouble between 1819 and 1822." But the treasurer's report, he continues, shows that between 1824 and 1831 profits on the tunebook "alone netted the society between $600 and $1100 per year"— half of the society's revenues and "enough to enable it to present several large concerts per year with orchestra." In a footnote, Broyles details the yearly amounts: 1824: $601.90; 1826: $964.28; 1827: $800 (estimate); 1828: $820; 1829: $1,000 (estimate); 1830: $1,000 (estimate); 1831: $1,166.67. The terms of his contract with the society called for Mason to receive like amounts in these years (167, 353).

36. Pratt, American Music and Musicians , 285. Arthur Lowndes Rich, Lowell Mason: "The Father of Singing among the Children " (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1946), 10, acknowledges that estimates of the book's total proceeds range from $10,000 to $30,000.

37. Charles C. Perkins, History of the Handel and Haydn Society, of Boston, Massachusetts , vol. I (Boston, 1883-93; reprint, New York, 1977), 83, writes that "at the end of five years" (1822-27) the book "had yielded the handsome profit of $4,033.32, to be divided between the contracting parties."

38. Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 45, reports that an offer of the society presidency helped lure Mason to Boston. In addition, he was "guaranteed $2,000 salary for musical direction in three churches during successive periods of six months each: the Hanover Street Church, the Essex Street Church, and the Park Street Church."

39. Pratt, American Music and Musicians , 391.

40. Broyles, Psalmody to Symphony , Chap. 2, argues that Mason's "historical position can be properly assessed only when his professional activities, thought, attitudes, and approach to musical issues are viewed within the context of nineteenth-century evangelicalism." Broyles believes that Mason had little interest in religion in his early years but that not long after he moved to Georgia— probably in 1813 or early 1814—he went through a life-changing conversion experience. From that time to the end of his life, Broyles believes, Mason always put religious values ahead of all others, including artistic and commercial ones (65-67).

41. Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 49-54. Her Appendix B, pages 223-24, lists Mason's sacred tunebooks in chronological order. From 1832, until 1854 they appear at the rate of approximately one new tunebook per year, sometimes in collaboration with others (e.g., George J. Webb, brother Timothy B. Mason). After the mid-1850s their number tapers off.

42. According to Rich, Lowell Mason , 12, before Mason gave up the Handel and Haydn Society presidency in 1832, "he had hoped for its support in organizing note-reading classes for children, but the society's conservative board of managers declined to sponsor them, holding that their function was to cultivate classical and not elementary music."

43. Rich, Lowell Mason , 14. Rich does not give the date of this school, but Mason, An Address on Church Music (New York, 1851), 14, recalls that Mason taught it "for six or eight years, or until it was taken up by the Boston Academy of Music, by which society it was sustained until music was introduced into the grammar schools of the city" (quoted in Rich, Lowell Mason , 14). Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 64, reports that the school began in 1828 and grew by 1830 to 150-200 pupils. By 1832, she adds, George J. Webb had joined Mason in teaching this class.

44. For example, in Boston on 18 August 1830, the Reverend William Channing Woodbridge, an educational reformer, addressed the American Institute of Education advocating "Vocal Music as a Branch of Instruction in the Public Schools." Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 65-66, reports that when, as part of that event, some boys Mason had been teaching sang to illustrate the benefits of music education, "the beauty of their singing cast a spell upon the group." Writing in the North American Review in 1841, Samuel A. Eliot remembered the impact of Mason and Webb's first childrens' performances: "Never shall we forget the mingled emotions of wonder, delight, vanquished incredulity, and pleased hope, with which these juvenile concerts were attended. The coldest heart was touched, and glistening eyes and quivering lips attested the depth . . . of the feelings excited in the bosoms of parents and teachers . . .. A deep and lasting impression had been made on the public mind and the public heart" (quoted in Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 70-71).

45. Juvenile Psalmist; or The Child's Introduction to Sacred Music (Boston, 1829), a Sunday School tunebook, was followed by Juvenile Lyre; or Hymns and Songs, Religious, Moral, and Cheerful . . . for the use of Primary and Common Schools (Boston, 1831).

46. Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 71, adds that, though Mason was "the key figure in the academy," he "deliberately kept his name in the background." Broyles, " Music of the Highest Class ," 182, credits the Boston Academy of Music, especially under the leadership of Samuel A. Eliot (1798-1862), with bringing about a rapid decline in "interest in sacred vocal music . . . in favor of classical instrumental music." Within ten years of its founding in 1833, Broyles writes, the academy ''became the principal purveyor of instrumental music" in Boston. With that shift in interest, he notes, Lowell Mason's influence in the academy declined.

47. Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 87. Twelve teachers attended the first two-day session. By 1851 the enrollment of teachers at Mason's conventions had risen to about 1,500 (89).

48. Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 87-88; Rich, Lowell Mason , 144-45, lists printings through 1861.

49. Rich, Lowell Mason , 23-25, and Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 114-17, document Mason's first year of public school teaching at the Hawes School in South Boston. Again, a new venue produced new publications. The Juvenile Singing School , on which Mason collaborated with George J. Webb, appeared in 1837 and was reprinted in six of the next seven years. In 1838, Mason brought out a volume to aid public school teachers: Musical Exercises for Singing Schools, to Be Used in Connexion with the "Manual of the Boston Academy of Music, for Instruction in the Elements of Vocal Music ." See Rich, Lowell Mason , 148-49.

50. Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 118-24, traces Mason's career in the Boston public schools. Harry Eskew, in Amerigrove 3:187, reports his ten-year service in the teachers' institutes.

51. George Frederick Root, The Story of a Musical Life (Cincinnati, 1891; reprint, New York, 1973), 51-52.

52. Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 66-67, tells the same story, reporting that the two men were not well acquainted until the summer of 1830. According to Root, Mason put the material from these twenty-four lectures into the Manual of the Boston Academy of Music (1834).

53. Root, Story , 52.

54. Root does not report whether Woodbridge shared in the class's proceeds.

55. Mason was an active composer, performer, and writer on music. But teaching and distributing music were the keys to his economic influence and success. The years 1848-52 must have been especially profitable for him. Broyles, " Music of the Highest Class ," 331, quotes List of Persons, Copartnerships, and Corporations who were Taxed Twenty-Five Dollars and Upward, in the City of Boston, in the Year 1847, Specifying the Amount of the Tax and Real and Personal Estate, conformably to an Order of the City Council (Boston, 1848), to show that Mason's total estate in 1847 was valued at $41,000, making him "far and away the wealthiest musician in Boston." As Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 135-36, shows, however, four years later, in The Rich Men of Massachusetts (Boston, 1852), Mason's worth was set at $100,000. "His musical productions . . . are in every household," that source reported, ''and this also accounts for his wealth, which would have been far greater, were his benevolence less." Pratt, American Music and Musicians , 391, quotes a Journal of Education article estimating that by September 1857, "over a million copies" of Mason's various publications had been sold. In 1869, when the Oliver Ditson Company bought the assets of the Mason Brothers publishing firm, the plates of Lowell Mason's works alone were valued at "over $100,000," according to Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 175. Even without a detailed profile of Mason's financial affairs, it's not hard to see how he was able to accumulate a large enough fortune to travel twice to Europe (1837, 1852-53), to purchase a large and important music library, and to engage in benefactions, such as supporting the studies and work of Alexander Wheelock Thayer. (See Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 179-81). Mason seems to have been the first American patron of music who made his money inside rather than outside the field.

56. Among the different musical occupations named earlier in this chapter, Mason worked as everything but a manufacturer. (His son, Henry Mason, however, with the help of a $5,000 loan from his father, established the partnership of Mason and Hamlin in 1854, eventually a successful producer of reed organs. In 1882, the firm also began making pianos. See Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 177.) There is no evidence that composing or writing about music brought Mason much reward. And as a choir director and church organist his career follows the standard economic pattern of the performer as wage earner. It is in his other two callings, teaching music and distributing it, that Mason moved into arenas where he could create surplus-value, the capital described by Attali.

Publishing is a business, of course, devoted to exploiting its products through reproduction and the widest circulation possible. The materials available about Mason's life have not been researched with publishing in mind. Nevertheless, there is every reason to think that much of Mason's fortune came from sales of his publications. Mason himself was never in the publishing business. Late in his life his sons, Lowell Mason, Jr., and Daniel Gregory Mason, became partners in publishing firms—first Mason and Law (1851-53), then Mason Brothers (1853-69)—that published their father's works. There is no evidence that Lowell Mason worked personally as a part of either firm. Perhaps the spectacular success of his first publishing venture explains his lack of direct involvement in the publishing trade. If, as seems possible, Mason was able to publish later works on an economic footing like that of The Handel and Haydn Society Collection (not an author's royalty arrangement but something more like a publisher's cut of the proceeds), then Mason would have. been in a position to reap substantial profit with little risk—ample reason to stay out of a trade that already served his interests so well.

On the matter of Mason's teaching as a capitalistic rather than a wage-earning enterprise, the evidence, while incomplete, points in that direction. As a teacher, Mason was given to launching ambitious projects that proved to be more than he could handle himself. From 1832, early in his teaching of children's classes, Mason employed George J. Webb as an assistant; and shortly after the Boston Academy of Music was founded (1833), with Mason as its "professor," Webb was named as its "associate professor" (Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 64, 71). At the end of 1833, Mason opened singing classes in Salem, Massachusetts, to which he traveled while keeping up his Boston commitments. Mason himself taught some of the Salem classes, but he also hired Joseph A. Keller to teach others (Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 79-80). And after Mason began to collect money for teaching in the Boston public schools (1838), he hired assistants to do some of the teaching for him, including Jonathan Call Woodman, James C. Johnson, George F. Root, and others, paying them out of the $120 per year that school authorities had appropriated for music instruction in each school (Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 117-18). By 1844-45, Pemberton writes, "Mason was teaching without assistance in six of the Boston Public Schools and supervising ten teachers in ten other schools" (121). There is reason to think that Mason did not pass on to his assistants all the money he himself was paid for this teaching—that he hired disciples and took a cut of the proceeds their teaching produced, an act that would qualify him as an entrepreneurial capitalist of teaching. Evidence, as noted, is unclear. G. F. Root, a member of Mason's circle in the late 1830s and early 1840s, reported that Artemis N. Johnson, his first musical mentor, "proposed a partnership for five years, in which he should have two-thirds and I one-third of what we both should earn, he to have the privilege of spending one of the years in Germany, the division of profits to be the same during his absence" (Root, Story, 24)>during his absence" (Root, Story , 24). Perhaps Mason himself followed a similar principle: an older, well-established pedagogue, in effect, charging younger colleagues for helping set them up in the teaching trade.

At least two opponents attacked Mason for being mercenary, or overpaid, or both (see Pemberton, Lowell Mason , 91-92, 122). But George F. Root did not feel himself exploited. Admitting that Mason made plenty of money, Root testified that he considered Mason "the most misjudged man in this respect that I ever knew. . .. I do not believe he ever made a plan to make money, unless when investing his surplus funds. In his musical work it was . . . a clear case . . . of seeking first what was right" (Root, Story , 85-86).

57. Pratt, American Music and Musicians , 31-34, 82, surveys the development of music education after the Civil War with particular attention to conservatories and colleges. See also pages 169-74 for a detailed list, geographically arranged, of music programs in American colleges and universities. For a detailed account of one important conservatory in the late nineteenth century, see Emmanuel Rubin, "Jeannette Meyers Thurber and the National Conservatory of Music," American Music 8 (1990): 294-325. See also George Martin, The Damrosch Dynasty: America's First Family of Music (Boston, 1983), especially on Frank Damrosch's founding of the Institute of Musical Art, 226-29.

58. For empirical confirmation of this point, see Charles H. Kaufman, Music in New Jersey, 1655-1860: A Study of Musical Activity and Musicians in New Jersey from Its First Settlement to the Civil War (Rutherford, N.J., 1981), especially the index of music teachers and schools, 235-46. When analyzed, the data there show that almost 60 percent of the 400 music teachers known to have been active there during the entire period covered by Kaufman's book first advertised in the decade 1850-60. Of course, a wider assortment of newspapers makes data more easily available in the later years than in the earlier ones; but the evidence of increasing demand for music teachers in those years is striking.

59. Buell E. Cobb, Jr., The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (Athens, Ga., 1978), 63-67, surveys the singing school in its passage from New England to the South and links it to the development of shape notation. See also Amerigrove 4:233-34.

60. Edward Bailey Birge, History of Public School Music in the United States , new and augmented ed. (Washington, D.C., [1966]), dates the beginning of the school band movement at "about 1910." See pages 186-92 for Birge's survey of the subject.

61. F. O. Jones, ed., A Handbook of American Music and Musicians Containing Biographies of American Musicians and Histories of the Principal Musical Institutions, Firms and Societies (Canaseraga, N.Y., 1886; reprint, New York, 1971), describes the aims of Normal Institutes of music as "primarily, the preparation of persons desiring to teach music for that profession and the improvement of teachers already in the work, and, secondarily, the advancement of musical students in general in the science of music and the cultivation of musical taste and judgment." Normal Institutes, Jones notes, generally lasted four weeks; the first was held by George F. Root in New York City in 1852 (78). "Musical conventions," which according to Jones were devoted to "social enjoyment and musical advancement," generally lasted three or four days. Jones traced their origin to New Hampshire in 1829 (42-43).

62. By "out west," Mathews meant Illinois. Birge, History of Public School Music , 80-83, quotes at length from Mathews's communication.

63. The bibliography on music in American higher education is substantial. It ranges from lists and comments in Pratt, American Music and Musicians , 33-34, 85-86; to studies of particular institutions, like Walter Raymond Spalding, Music at Harvard: A Historical Review of Men and Events (New York, 1935; reprint, New York, 1977) or J. Bunker Clark, Music at KU: A History of the University of Kansas Music Department (Lawrence, Kansas, 1986); to inquiries into particular disciplines, like W. Oliver Strunk, "State and Resources of Musicology in the United States," Bulletin of the American Council of Learned Societies 19 (1932); to personal interviews like Morris Risenhoover and Robert T. Blackburn, Artists as Professors: Conversations with Musicians, Painters, Sculptors (Urbana, Ill., 1976); to general surveys like that by James W. Pruett in Amerigrove 2:17-21. No study that I have found, however, concentrates on how university teaching in music has evolved as a means of supporting and subsidizing faculty members' professional activity.

64. Occupationally speaking, many musicians who teach in American research universities carry on dual careers, of which the second is professionally oriented. Typically, such men and women belong to "professional societies," like the American Musicological Society or the Society for Ethnomusicology. These organizations are only peripherally concerned, if at all, with the livelihood of their members, many of whom hold academic teaching posts. In that sense, they don't quite fit Bledstein's definition of a profession. On the other hand, as bodies providing forums for professional work, both oral and written, and as dispensers of professional awards and prizes, they do possess intellectual autonomy and the authority to pass judgment on work done in their fields. Moreover, acceptance or rejection of work in such professional forums may affect a teacher's occupational standing in his or her own institution.

65. From James Lyon, who contributed some half a dozen compositions to his Urania (Philadelphia, 1761), to William Billings, whose tunebooks (1770-94) are devoted almost entirely to his own music, to a large corps of American psalmodists who began to publish their compositions in the 1780s and 1790s, American composers produced some 5,000 sacred pieces by the end of the nineteenth century's first decade. This figure is a count made from a card index I prepared while completing Britton and Lowens, American Sacred Music Imprints . See that work, pages 9-11, for more on early American psalmodists as composers. As noted there on pages 27-28, the tunebook business directed income toward publishers rather than authors (composers, compilers).

66. Note, e.g., Thomson's and Attali's analysis, n. 12, above.

67. Biographical information on Reinagle is taken from Robert Hopkins's article in Amerigrove 4:26-27.

68. Sonneck, Early Concert-Life , 81-87, prints the programs of Philadelphia concerts in which Reinagle performed between 1786 and 1788. They include listings for all the examples mentioned except for the overture, which appears on page 128.

69. Richard J. Wolfe, Early American Music Engraving and Printing: A History of Music Publishing in America from 1787 to 1825 with Commentary on Earlier and Later Practices (Urbana, Ill., 1980), 41-42.

70. Wolfe, Early American Music Engraving , 116.

71. Wolfe, Early American Music Engraving , 116-17.

72. For a description of how things worked in sacred music publishing at that time, see Britton, et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 26-29.

73. Oscar G. Sonneck, A Bibliography of Early Secular American Music (18th Century ), new ed., rev. and enlarged by William Treat Upton (Washington, D.C., 1945; reprint, New York, 1964), and Richard J. Wolfe, Secular Music in America 1801-1825: A Bibliography , 3 vols. (New York, 1964), show that through the Federal era, virtually all of the music brought out by American music publishers was written by European-born composers, a few of whom immigrated to this country. The next major bibliographical source, Complete Catalogue of Sheet Music and Musical Works Published by the Board of Music Trade of the United States of America. 1870 (n.p., 1871; reprint, New York, 1973), carries a much higher proportion of American music, reflecting the vigorous growth of secular composition on this side of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, as Dena Epstein notes in her introduction to that volume, before an international copyright agreement was reached in 1891, American publishers had a strong economic incentive to issue foreign music because no rights to print it in this country were required (vi-x).

74. Julian Mates, The American Musical Stage before 1800 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1962), 194-207, surveys the careers of Reinagle and other immigrant composers. The basic source on this tradition and its music is Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1973).

75. Alexander Reinagle, The Philadelphia Sonatas , edited by Robert Hopkins, vol. 5 of Recent Researches in American Music (Madison, Wis., 1978), [xxv]. See page xi for dating information.

76. Alexander Reinagle, "America, Commerce, and Freedom" (Philadelphia, n.d.).

77. The first edition bears no date, but the work in which it appeared was probably first performed on 3 March 1794. "America, Commerce, and Freedom" was reprinted in collections of 1813 and 1815. See Reinagle, Philadelphia Sonatas , xix.

78. Richard Crawford, "American Music and Its Two Written Traditions," Fontes Artis Musicae 31 (1984): 79-84.

79. Readers will note that although some overlap exists between "composers' music" and "performers' music" and the other pairs of polarities, the former pair applies only to written music.

80. The talent and dedication required to write performers' music of high quality has received relatively little scholarly attention, but it looms large in the lore of the songwriting profession. Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 , edited and with an introduction by James T. Maher (New York, 1972), uses the word "professional" honorifically, applying it to masters like Arlen, Berlin, Gershwin, Kern, Porter, and Rodgers and to the tradition of craftsmanship that lies behind their songs. Irving Berlin's "ferocious appetite for work" is a leitmotif of Lawrence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (New York, 1990). In a magazine interview in 1920, Berlin's work ethic took center-stage as he denounced "mentally lazy" or "uninitiated" lyric writers for piling up images and ''thereby losing simplicity" (43, 170). For Berlin, more often than not, the simplicity of a good song was the outcome of toil. More recently, V. S. Naipaul has described a meeting with songwriter Bob McDill, who enjoys "a certain fame" in Nashville circles "for going to his office every working day to write his songs." For McDill, who began his career in rhythm and blues, then moved to country music, a "professional" attitude required having "a special relationship with singers. . .. You've got to say something that the singer wants to say and can identify with," he told Naipaul. "I had to learn this mind-set. I learned this subculture, which wasn't my own. The vocabulary is very limited. You have to learn to do big things with little words" (V. S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South [New York, 1989], 244-45).

Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York, 1979), describes in hierarchical terms the institutional background of conflicts in vernacular songwriting since the 1950s. On one side were establishment songwriters who belonged to ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers), the country's oldest performing rights society; on the other were those who belonged to BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.)—"a new organization," Hamm says, "hastily formed . . . to produce music for broadcast purposes; its membership was made up of composers and lyricists who had not been invited to join ASCAP, many of them young and others who had been involved with sorts of music not favored by ASCAP songwriters and publishers" (389; see also 338-39, 376, 401-2). According to Gavin McFarlane, writing on performing right societies, "BMI's initial success was largely attributable to its open-door policy. For the first time, writers of country music, jazz, gospel, rhythm-and-blues, and other types of music that had not previously been eligible to earn performing money could share in performing rights income" ( Amerigrove 3:504).

81. For example, Clarence Eddy (1851-1937), identified in Amerigrove 2:9, as "the leading organist of his time," was also described in Jones, Handbook , 52, as a composer of "canons, preludes and fugues, and some other organ music, all of high order." B. J. Lang (1837-1909), a pianist said in 1886 to occupy "a leading place in Boston's musical affairs" (Jones, Handbook , 84) and by Steven Ledbetter in Amerigrove (3:10) to have been "a remarkable . . . organizer" and outstanding ensemble performer and accompanist," composed "an oratorio, David , as well as symphonies, overtures, piano pieces, church music, and songs" but published little of it. Frederic Louis Ritter, Louis Charles Elson, Oscar G. Sonneck, and John Tasker Howard, all remembered as earlier historians of American music, were active as composers at different times in their lives.

82. Thomson, State of Music , 77.

83. Composer George B. Wilson of the University of Michigan, when asked by the author how many American composers of composers' music there are— that is, how many people in the United States write such music and consider themselves composers—replied that the figure he uses is 40,000. Wilson says he first heard that number from Gunther Schuller "in the 1970s." He notes several reasons a reliable figure remains elusive: first, the designation "composer" is amorphous; second, no umbrella organization exists to which even a majority of composers belong; and third, the music of many composers remains unpublished and hence unavailable. The American Music Center in New York, founded in 1940 "to encourage the creation, performance, publication, and distribution of American music," claimed 1,200 members in 1985, most but not all of them composers ( Amerigrove 1:38). The American Society of University Composers in 1984 gave its membership as 900 ( Amerigrove 1:40), presumably overlapping some with that of the American Music Center. ASCAP has more than 35,000 members; but that number includes lyricists and music publishers as well as composers of popular or "performers' '' music ( Amerigrove 1:39).

The notion that the supply of new American composers' music far exceeds the demand for it is reflected in the contents of W. McNeil Lowry, ed., The Performing Arts and American Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1978). This book provided background reading for "the Fifty-third American Assembly," which in 1977 "brought together at Arden House, Harriman, New York, a group of sixty-one Americans—performers, trustees, critics, directors, managers, and teachers from the worlds of ballet, modern dance, opera, theater, and symphony—to discuss The Future of The Performing Arts," especially in its economic dimensions (v). According to the official report, no composers were invited. But composer Roger Reynolds has told me that he attended the assembly and "was noisy."

84. Louise Varèse, Varèse: A Looking-Glass Diary , vol. 1, 1883-1928 (New York, 1972), shows that in 1921-22, when he was organizing the International Composers' Guild, Mrs. Whitney gave Varèse "An allowance" of $200 a month (155, 165-66, 170). She also paid the rent of a Paris apartment for Varèse and his wife during the summer of. 1922 (194). Rita Mead, Henry Cowell's New Music 1925-1936: The Society, the Music Editions, and the Recordings , Studies in Musicology (Ann Arbor, 1981), writes that Harriette Miller, "a wealthy woman from New York," subsidized Ruggles "for years" and eventually "bestow[ed] a lifetime annuity upon him" (14-15). Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 through 1942 (New York, 1984), reports Mrs. Wertheim's gift of $1,000 to Copland in 1924 (110, 112) and another of $1,800 to support Roy Harris's study in Paris in 1926 (129). Wertheim also financed Cos Cob Press, founded in 1929, which Copland describes as "an early effort to assist young American composers to publish music that would not be taken on by established publishers" (157). See also Carol J. Oja, "Women Patrons and Crusaders for Modernist Music in New York: The 1920s," typescript, consulted in manuscript through the kindness of the author.

85. Gillian Anderson, writing on Mrs. Coolidge in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, a Biographical Dictionary , ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 160-62, notes that the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation at the Library of Congress, "which was to be administered by the Library's Music Division," produced "a yearly income of approximately $25,000." In addition another gift of $60,000, "later substantially increased . . . made possible the construction at the Library of the Coolidge Auditorium, a hall for chamber music.'' Frank Bridge and Gian Francesco Malipiero are two composers to whom Mrs. Coolidge gave long-term support in the 1920s and 1930s. Later, however, "her musical efforts were channeled through the Coolidge Foundation which, with her encouragement, supported modern music." Copland's Appalachian Spring (1944), choreographed by Martha Graham, was a foundation commission, as were additional new works by Bartók, Piston, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky. Pratt, American Music and Musicians , 130, reports all the works and many of the artists who performed at the first two Berkshire Festivals of Chamber Music (1918-19), sponsored by Mrs. Coolidge and held at her summer home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Reporting that a prize of $1,000 was offered "for the best chamber-work submitted" each year, Pratt notes that the winners were Tadeusz Iarecki in 1918, Ernest Bloch in 1919, and Francesco Malipiero in 1920.

86. Aaron Copland was the first recipient. He received a fellowship of $2,500 for the academic year 1925-26 and a renewal the next year (Copland and Perlis, Copland , 116). Other early recipients include Roger Sessions (1926, 1927), Roy Harris (1927, 1929), Robert Russell Bennett (1928, 1929), Randall Thompson (1929, 1930), and Otto Luening (1930, 1931) (John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Directory of Fellows 1925-1974 [New York, 1975]).

87. Amerigrove 2:172-73 briefly describes the foundation's goals—"to promote the composition and performance of contemporary music and restore the composer to his rightful position at the center of musical life"—and activities. The article also contains a list of composers (and works) the foundation has commissioned. See also Deena Rosenberg and Bernard Rosenberg, The Music Makers (New York, 1979), 378-92, for an interview with Paul Fromm, the foundation's originator.

88. The Ford Foundation, Annual Report , 1957 (1 October 1956-30 September 1957), 19, reports a grant of $210,000 "for a three-year experiment by the American Music Center and six American symphony orchestras in multiple regional performances of new symphonic works." The next year, ten classical singers and instrumentalists received grants-in-aid, plus the right "to name American composers to write compositions for them to perform. The foundation will pay the composers' commissions plus additional rehearsal time" ( Annual Report , 1958, 34). In 1959, the foundation appropriated $950,000 for the commissioning and performance of new American operas over the next eight years ( Annual Report , 1959, 47-48). And the next year, a three-year grant of $302,000 was made to enable "young composers to write for and work with the musical ensembles of high-school systems." The Annual Report , 1960, 49, describes that program as follows:

Conducted jointly by the Foundation and the National Music Council, the project is also intended to acquaint high-school students with contemporary music written for their specific needs and abilities, and to expand the repertory of secondary-school music throughout the United States. Under the new appropriation, the schools themselves will help finance the resident-composer project, with the ultimate aim of making it an integral part of educational and musical life of the country. By 1964, a total of about forty composers and about forty communities in the United States will have participated. In 1960, twelve composers in their twenties and thirties received stipends of $5,000 plus dependency and travel funds.

The Young Composers program was renewed for six years in 1963, this time in a grant of $1,380,000 to the Music Educators National Conference. The composers who worked in high schools during these years, as noted in annual reports, include Emma Lou Diemer, Martin Mailman, Conrad Susa, Donald Erb, Philip Glass, Salvatore Martirano, Richard Wernick, and J. Peter Schickele. See Ford Foundation, Contemporary Music for Schools: A Catalog of Works Written by Composers Participating in the Young Composers Project, 1959-1964, Sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the National Music Council (Washington, D.C., 1966).

89. Among its many benefactions to the creation of new music, one of the Rockefeller Foundation's most notable was a sum of $500,000 between 1953 and 1955 that allowed the Louisville Commissioning Project, first established with resources from the Greater Louisville Fund for the Arts (1948), to commission works for the Louisville [Kentucky] Orchestra. See Amerigrove 3:116-17, and Jeanne Belfy, The Louisville Orchestra New Music Project: An American Experiment in the Patronage of International Contemporary Music: Selected Composers' Letters to the Louisville Orchestra . University of Louisville Publications in Musicology, no. 2 (Louisville, 1983). In 1963, the foundation established a Cultural Development Program that announced three missions related to music: "the development of creators and performers, the dissemination of new American music, and the encouragement of critical and interpretive writings about music." See the Rockefeller Foundation, President's Five-Year Review and Annual Report 1968 (New York, 1968), 94. Among Rockefeller-sponsored programs in the years 1963-68 was a joint project of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Spelman College. According to the report (95): "Of the 15 composers whose works were read and performed, eight were Negroes, and of this group only one had ever had a composition performed by a major American orchestra. The works of four of the hitherto unknown Negro composers—T. J. Anderson, Frederick C. Tillis, George Walker, and Oily Wilson—were subsequently played by the Baltimore and Minneapolis orchestras, and at least one is scheduled to be repeated by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in its subscription series."

90. Carolyn Bryant, And the Band Played On (Washington, D.C., 1975), 8, notes that the United States Marine Corps Band was "officially organized in 1798." Elise K. Kirk, Music at the White House: A History of the American Spirit (Urbana, Ill., 1986), contains information on activities of the U.S. Marine Band as "the president's own" ensemble. (See Kirk's index, pages 453-54, for citations.)

91. See Amerigrove 4:567. As noted in Dick Netzer, The Subsidized Muse: Public Support for the Arts in the United States (Cambridge, 1978), 54, "the purpose of the program was simply to reduce the unemployment caused by the Depression." The Federal Music Project sponsored a Composers' Forum-Laboratory to encourage the composition and performance of new music. Barbara A. Zuck, A History of Musical Americanism , Studies in Musicology, no. 19 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980), 170-76, describes the Forum-Laboratory's activities.

92. See Amerigrove 3:325-26. Christopher Pavlakis, The American Music Handbook (New York, 1974), 63-68, provides a good description of the National Endowment for the Arts programs in the early 1970s, showing that little of the agency's grant money goes to composers and composition. Amerigrove 1:96-97 contains a list of cash prizes exceeding $500 that are available to composers.

93. Amerigrove 3:502-5 offers a concise introduction to "performing right societies" by Gavin McFarlane. As noted there, "in music, the most important right is the right of public performance, known as the 'performing right.' " (Others include copyright, the right to reproduce the notation in published form, and the "mechanical right," the right "to recover musical works in sound recordings.") McFarlane writes:

It is almost always impossible for an individual copyright holder to receive royalties on more than a very small number of the performances on which they are due. Even if he could locate a few of the performances, he would not always have the means or the expertise to negotiate appropriate royalties and issue licenses. Collection for performances nationwide or overseas would be out of the question for the individual or small publishing company. Societies have therefore been set up in most countries to collect royalties for the use of copyrighted music and to distribute the revenue among the parties entitled to it." (502-3)

The two main performing-rights organizations in the United States are ASCAP (founded in 1914) and BMI (founded in 1940). The two organizations have different formulas for distributing income. See, e.g., Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 (New York, 1988), 298-99, 403-4, et passim for detailed information on both.

94. In a famous article of 1958, originally titled "The Composer as Specialist" but published as "Who Cares If You Listen," Babbitt writes:

The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation can understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields. (Quoted from Gilbert Chase, ed., The American Composer Speaks: A Historical Anthology, 1770-1965 [(Baton Rouge, La.) 1966], 239)

95. Thomson, State of Music , Chaps. 6 and 7. Chap. 7 identifies four sources of income for a composer (whom Thomson always describes as male):

1. "non-musical jobs or earned income from non-musical sources"

2. "unearned income from all sources" ("money from home" and "other people's money," including patronage, commissions, and prizes)

3. "other men's music, or selling the by-products of his musical education" (e.g., performing, teaching, publishing, lecturing, writing)

4. "the just rewards of his labor" (e.g., royalties and performing-rights fees).

In Chap. 7, Thomson describes with gleeful irreverence the kinds of music that each income source is most likely to produce. Admitting that "art-music composers who live off their just share in the profits of the commercial exploitation of their work . . . are almost non-existent in America," Thomson pays respect to their achievement.

Of all the composing musicians, this group presents in its music the greatest variety both of subject-matter and of stylistic orientation, the only limit to such variety being what the various musical publics at any given moment will take. Even the individual members of the group show variety in their work from piece to piece. This variety is due in part to their voluntary effort to keep their public interested and to enlarge their market. (Stylistic "evolution" is good publicity nowadays.) A good part of it is due also to the variety of usages that are coverable by commercially ordered music. Theater, concert, opera, church, and war demand a variety of solutions for individual esthetic cases according to the time, the place, the subject, the number and skill of the available executants, the social class, degree of musical cultivation, and size of the putative public. Music made for no particular circumstance or public is invariably egocentric. Music made for immediate usage, especially if that usage is proposed to the composer by somebody who has an interest in the usage, is more objective and more varied. (122-23)<End Popup Text>