In 1977 I discussed some common ways of writing about the social and economic contexts of music, and then suggested alternative procedures. Expressing dissatisfaction with prevailing fashions, that paper was essentially a plea for the use of economic history, recommending its analytical insights and quantitative sense. It sought discussion of typical events, and deliberately challenged the ‘deep-seated antipathy felt by most humanists toward anything that smacks of statistics’. The desired emphasis was also upon ‘thick’ description and analysis, by which one might avoid such contrasted, but equally fruitless, pursuits as unsubstantiated dogma and antiquarianism. Ten years later the invitation to arrange a conference on ‘music in the market-place’ provided an opportunity to look again. There was no attempt to survey current research systematically; less still to restrict subjects and speakers to any particular discipline. Indeed, despite the conference title, conventional approaches to the analysis of markets were scarce, with the notable exception of Julia Moore's paper, an exemplary demonstration of ‘thick’ economic history. Trying to achieve some coherence without imposing a strait-jacket inevitably brought overlaps and gaps. But if penalties were attached to open-mindedness, it also ensured the stimulus of diverse and multi-disciplinary papers, and informal contributions by active participants in the market-place. This introduction is not a summary of the conference, and is not confined to, though it touches upon, what was said there. Schematic, and therefore thin, it merely introduces a few possible themes which are further developed elsewhere, or still await exploration.

Joseph Kerman has suggested a distinction crucial in defining the meaning of ‘canon’ in musical culture: repertory, he argues, was simply the performance of old works; canon, by contrast, is their reverence on a critical plane and in a literary context. The distinction is a fertile one, for it challenges us to define when works were not just offered by convention, but when they functioned as models for musical taste critically and aesthetically. The distinction can be extremely fruitful in tracing the early history of the canon – its origins in repertory and gradual evolution into its modern form. What I would like to show here is how repertories grew up originally without true status as canon; before canon there was repertory, and that is where the whole tradition began. In inquiring just where the modern practice of performing old music regularly came about we can look into some of the most fundamental social and intellectual bases upon which the tradition was established.

Mozart's financial situation has been the subject of controversy and speculation since his death in December 1791, when a rumour circulated through Vienna that he had left debts of 30,000 fl. (see Table 1 for information on currencies). Although this fantastic figure was ten times too high, his widow's situation was indeed precarious, at least at first.

It is a commonplace that the nineteenth century witnessed a flowering of provincial musical life, and nowhere was this more pronounced than in the field of concert promotion. However, with a few notable exceptions, such as Michael Kennedy's work on the Hallé, little close scrutiny has been given to the topic. This paper seeks to give the provinces the attention they deserve.

At the auction sale of Sterndale Bennett's library in 1875, Thomas Taphouse paid £52 for the autograph manuscript of Fingal's Cave Overture. Two months earlier, at another auction, the publisher John Williams paid £990 for the plates and copyrights of Charles Coote's Prince Imperial Galop, a music-hall favourite (done – it was reported – to the applause of those in attendance). This essay will not attempt to account for such seemingly irreconcilable events and values – the market-place was always alive with such contrasts – but will, instead, focus attention on the auctioneer at both of those sales, the London firm of Puttick & Simpson, sketching its history from 1846 to 1971, describing its music sales, and demonstrating the singular importance, today, of its surviving catalogues. It will, it is hoped, persuade others to consider different and more painstaking studies of those relics than have been undertaken to this point.

It is strange, and indeed unfortunate, that the term ‘copyright’ is so uninspiring, because the subject-matter of copyright is inspiration itself: copyright is concerned with the creative output of authors, composers, artists and others who enrich the cultural and intellectual dimensions of life. It is the purpose of the copyright system, as it operates today, in accordance with principles which have been developed over the last century and a half, to ensure that cultural and intellectual works are created and disseminated as plentifully and as widely as possible.

The tendency to accept that music has a social context while resisting its definition as a social commodity is not particular to the conservative wing of British musicology (albeit influenced by Carl Dahlhaus). The aesthetics of European musical idealism have consistently, and since well before Hanslick, opposed any suggestion that ‘serious’ music should be seen or heard to engage with the market-place, let alone that it might, willy-nilly, be in one. The cherishers of musical purity, however, are to be found not only amongst reactionary critics, with their specific culturally inherited involvement with the Classical style. Pre-1914 modernists and decadents saw the market-place as the creation and province of a philistine bourgeoisie and expressed an often uncompromising, anti-popular idealism of their own. Debussy in 1901 stated:

The enthusiasm of society spoils an artist for me, such is my fear that, as a result, he will become merely an expression of society

- a fear that would have been comprehended by the Viennese Schoenberg, who later formulated the belief that

no musician whose thinking occurs in the highest sphere would degenerate into vulgarity in order to comply with a slogan such as ‘Art for all'… . If it is art it is not for all, and if it is for all it is not art … .

The subject of my paper is the use of new technologies in serious musical creation. Although I cannot develop the comparison with popular music and its mass market, one will understand implicitly the importance of the fact that ‘all of my story’ is set within the institutions and environment located on the edge of the market. My aim is not to show why diverse technologies that have appeared in the last 40 years have been exploited by composers, but rather how innovations such as electroacoustic and computer music were able to ‘succeed’. I employ the word ‘success’ in the organizational sense: it is the lasting formation of new segments of musical creation and the mobilization of composers, of partners from the scientific world, and of the technical and financial resources for establishing these new segments.

Can music really be said to exist without someone to listen to it? Anyone reading the works of musicologists – and even of social historians of music – might be forgiven for thinking so. Listeners had no place on Guido Adler's original agenda for musicology and they have had little attention since. While we have learnt much about composers and composition, performers and performing practice, patrons and impresarios, publishers and publishing, the ordinary listener has hardly had a look-in. (William Weber's pioneering work, Music and the Middle Class, is an important exception.) In the current vogue for analysis they are replaced by a kind of ideal listener, or in effect disappear altogether; whatever else it is, analysts' music is not music as it is heard by most actual listeners, with their ‘favourite passages’ and emotional reactions. And if not simply ignored, listeners are often regarded as pitiably unadventurous, indifferent to ‘form’, easily seduced by catchy tunes, extra-musical programmes and flamboyant personalities; the notion that music history is made by listeners as well as by composers and performers seems almost perverse. Almost the only audiences which have been studied with anv degree of sophistication are those for rock and pop. We have learnt much about the producers of music; the listeners remain a great unknown.

This conference illustrates how far the social history of music has come within the last two decades. Since musicological study was founded in the late nineteenth century, social topics have sometimes been looked upon as a threat to the integrity of the field, indeed of the music itself; the imputation of social interpretations seemed to some people to undermine the whole endeavour of musical study. The very grammar of the often-used phrase ‘Music and Society’ carried with it an unfortunate dualism that made the two parts seem disjunct, indeed ultimately incompatible. What was so refreshing about this conference was that the old problem just did not come up. It was assumed implicitly, as has been happening increasingly in the literature, that music is part of society, and that society turns to music to fulfil certain needs integral to it. With so fussy an old issue set aside, we can now go on to much more profitable matters. Some problems do remain, of course, over how independent musical and social analysis are of each other, but that is a tactical question as to the conduct of research that does not raise doubts about the very nature of the field as the old question used to do.