160054 VO+UE Music, Money and Markets: A Socio-Economic Look at Western Music History (2016S)

Scholars of economic history continue to show us that the wheels of commerce matter (F. Braudel, 1979) for not only defining the wealth of nations (A. Smith, 1776), but also for defining the cultural legacies that a nation or people often produce (R. Goldthwaite, 1993).
The goal of the class (Lectures with exercises) is to investigate when correlations between economic history and music history exist, and when they do not. Many times the correlations are brutally clear, as witnessed, for example, by the macroeconomic shift from a feudal system to a mercantile system in the 15th and 16th centuries. With that shift the western world saw for the first time an extraordinarily large number of composers, musicians, music printers, and instrument builders working hard to keep up with the growing demand for music required not only by the church and the nobility, but also by an emerging bourgeois class. At other times, we see economic growth booming yet investment in music virtually non-existent (e.g., the Netherlands in the 17th century, or England in the 19th century). Finally, there are even examples where western economies are laid to ruin by war, famine or simply poor financial management, and yet during these bad times composers like Stravinsky, Schutz, Machaut, and Gershwin produced music of monumental proportions and originality.
Students enrolled in the class will be introduced to economic history and theory and will see how composers over a period of 500 years either capitalized on economic trends or did not. The class (Lectures with exercises) will discuss how macroeconomic and demographic changes in western history impacted the microeconomic business of composing, performing, and transmitting music.

Starting with the 15th century and ending in the 20th, the class will demonstrate that a direct correlation between economic history and music history often exists. Case studies will be examined which show that when the economies of the West flourished, music and the arts tended to flourish. And when they caught a cold, the arts often, but not always, caught pneumonia.

Topics to be discussed will include making music when the economies were:
1. In deep disorder (e.g., the Thirty Years Wars in the 17th century, or during the Revolutionary Crisis of the late 18th- and early 19th centuries when interest rates rose and real wages fell),
2. Growing and prosperous (e.g., the commercial revolution of the 16th century and the industrial revolution of the 19th century), and
3. Stable (e.g., during the Age of Enlightenment when interest rates fell and real wages rose).

Composers, musicians, music publishers, and instrument builders with such names as Dufay, Josquin, Cordier, Petrucci, Neuschel, Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Broadwood, Beethoven, Wagner, Strauss, Schönberg, Gershwin, and Johnny Rotten (Sex Pistols) will be singled out and discussed within the context of how they made a living during either good times or bad. The class will also deal with such business issues as risk management, portfolio diversification, productivity factors, and pension and investment planning as they pertain to those individuals who made a living making music, regardless of whether they flourished in the 15th century or are alive today.