The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700-1914: Managers, Charlatans, and Idealists [Hardcover]

William E. Weber (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 9, 2004

To be successful, a musician often has to be an entrepreneur: someone who starts a performing venue, develops patrons, and promotes the project aggressively. Accomplishing this requires musicians to acquire social and business skills and to be highly opportunistic in what they do. In The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914, international scholars investigate cases of musical entrepreneurship between around 1700 and 1914 in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. By uncovering the ways in which musicians such as Telemann, Beethoven, Paganini, and Liszt conducted their daily business, the authors reveal how musicians reshaped the frameworks of musical culture and, in the process, the nature of the music itself.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Weber and company set out to examine the movers and shakers, shapter, and adapters within various musical and geographical landscapes in court, city, and town." — Caryl Clark, University of Toronto

(Caryl Clark, University of Toronto 2005)

"It is the fascinating nature of the subject matter that marries scholarly disipline with intriguing reading...This is, quite simply, good stuff: well—written, solidly documented and, best yet, very interesting. The book will satisfy the thirst of historians, musicians and perhaps even an economist or two." —American Music Teacher

(American Music Teacher )

"Weber is an excellent music historian and the book will please all readers interested in musical sociology..." —Choice, July 2005

(Choice )

About the Author

William Weber, Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach, has written and edited several books on music history, culture, and class. He is an Associate of the William Andrews Clark Library.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 280 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press (November 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253344565
• ISBN-13: 978-0253344564
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #984,806 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Composer-Concert Virtuoso as Entrepreneur, December 7, 2009

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Phyllis A. Karr (Wisconsin) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700-1914: Managers, Charlatans, and Idealists (Hardcover)

I bought this book hoping to learn something about the everyday life of such Victorian orchestra musicians as would, for instance, have played in the pit of London's Savoy Theatre. I learned precious little about that, except perhaps from Simon McVeigh's "Audience for High-Class Music"; there's also an illustration on p. 50 that seems to show a woman instrumentalist among the violins(?) in 1922 - I would surely have appreciated some commentary in the text about her! By "Musician," this volume seems to understand almost exclusively concert-hall virtuosos of the Beethoven-Liszt caliber. I did learn quite a bit about Lisztomania and had my old suspicions confirmed that in his own day Beethoven was something of a wild-eyed radical. In fact, this book gave me a lot of tolerant perspective on the musical world of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and for that I am grateful.
It appears to be a compilation of academic essays (cf. "Publish or Perish"?) by various authors of greater or lesser ability when it comes to putting words around their research. I'm also ready to guess that it was "proofread" by some word-processing program of questionable acuity in the matter of spotting sentences that just simply don't make sense. Nevertheless, with all faults, it could be a valuable addition to the research shelf of specialists.