Toward a theory of patronage
Subtitle: funding for music composition in France, 1918-1939
By: a dissertation presented by Louis K. Epstein to The Department of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Music
Contributors: Harvard University. Department of Music
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 356
Subjects: Music patronage; Music; History and criticism
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.
Notes: Dissertation committee, Sindhumathi Revuluri, Alexander Rehding, Anne Shreffler.

Thesis Ph.D. Harvard University 2013
Table of contents: title: Music and money from interwar France to the present; title: Commissions as private patronage; title: Crise économique, crise musicale : a shift in public patronage; title: Marketing modernism : new music and the dance; title: Maintenant parlons "business" : the correspondence of Darius Milhaud.