MUSICIANS MAKE MARKETS: Aestheticising music distribution in Beethoven's Vienna

The distribution and consumption of art – its market – is inevitably value-laden.¹ Markets are part of the set of cultural practices by which the so-called, ‘artworks themselves’ are constituted. To speak of this process is to speak of how art works both frame, and are framed by, their modes of dissemination. That relationship is reflexive, or co-productive and the consequences of this co-production help to highlight the social and economic bases of artworks’ capacity for effecting social exclusion and, simultaneously, the organisational and economic bases of artistic lustre. Artists are, in other words, simultaneously artists and entrepreneurs (Alpers 1988).

In this article I describe the cultural practices and cultural imagery that surrounded music's distribution in the early nineteenth century, a time when all music-dissemination occurred through live performance and through the sales of musical scores. I will consider the case of Beethoven's keyboard concertos in terms of how the melding of performance and distribution, in particular the personnel and conventions associated with this work, demonstrated socially exclusive notions about gender and gender capacity, musically rendered but resonant with other culture-producing realms at the time.

My aim throughout will be to employ and (I hope) enhance the music ‘in action’ perspective (DeNora 2011) and its characteristic focus on musicking (Small 1998) as social practice, consequential for future action, musical and extra-musical within social fields (Roy and Dowd 2010). More specifically, I will draw upon forms of socio-musical analysis that consider music, ‘as social performance’ (Davidson 1993, 2002; Green 1997; Cook 2003; Frith 2003; McCormick 2006, 2009), in so far as these perspectives reveal music as a means for world-making. If music is a modality for social action, then, what is it that music can make happen, and how are music's market relations a part of this action?

Aspects of the case study I employ have been described in earlier work (the high culture market for music ca. 1800–1810; DeNora 1995, 2002, 2006). Here, however, I will use the material to explore the social shaping of music distribution, in particular the cultural framing of distribution practice. I will suggest that innovation, in live music performance, and in particular when such performance is read by its participants as imbued with social drama linked to and embedded in the musical texts performed, can sculpt the channels through which music is distributed. That sculpting can, as in this case, be consequential for the future conduct of music performance, affecting the opportunity structures through which music could be appropriated by producers and consumers alike. My overall aim will be to consider the ways in which markets are not neutral but are culturally inflected (MacKenzie 2006) and to deconstruct the dichotomy of purportedly ‘rational’ market exchange versus ‘irrational’ cultural values and significations. By contrast I will consider how these realms are conjoined (Zelizer 2010) and how they are mutually referential.

The mis en scene is keyboard and keyboard concerto performance in Vienna, 1780–1810, a time when all musical distribution (apart from the sale of musical scores) took place through live performance. I have described the particular sociological interest of this case in earlier work (DeNora 1995, 2002, 2006), including the aesthetic, technical and musical bases of edging women out of the mainstream of keyboard performance ca. 1800–1810. I will summarise those points briefly here before presenting new components of that history.

In Vienna, ca. 1800–1810, the musical canon (the preoccupation with a few select and ‘great’ composers and ‘great’ works) first emerged. At this time, focused listening was a novelty, and the organisational basis of patronage favoured the emergence of the ‘star system’ in music (Moore 1987; Morrow 1989; DeNora 1995).

Not all agents stand in the same relation to such markets; some are better positioned to appropriate conventional practices of distribution (Bourdieu 1977: 187) and so are able to determine their, ‘manner of utilization’ (Bourdieu 1984: 65–66). With regard to Beethoven, so uniquely situated in the protective bosom of Vienna's most illustrious aristocratic patrons, and so swiftly hailed as that city's ‘greatest’ composer, it is possible to witness a critical case where the composer is, simultaneously, a cultural entrepreneur (DiMaggio 1982; Alpers 1988). It is, in other words, around Beethoven's works that we see, arguably for the first time in music, the emergence of what Richard Leppert (1999) terms the ‘gold standard’ of sonorous inner life, and the delineation of the figure of the individual in ‘struggle’ with his [sic] socio-political environment. The mode of musical distribution associated with Beethoven was itself cultured, associated with certain images of musicking and musickers, and with a psycho-cultural dimension that delineated a then novel and highly private mode of musical experience. The question, then, is how did the market for high cultural musical goods come to be so inflected and with what social consequences for musical occupation, both as producer and consumer?

Nowhere else in the classical repertoire is the figure of the musician-as-individual (soloist against a ground of a social collective) displayed in relief as starkly as in the concerto genre. There, the performer literally positioned in front of his/her companions who themselves serve as the accompanying ‘tutti’ or collective background. From the 1780s onward, the market for concertos was buoyant and, prior to Beethoven's first concerto performance in 1995, W. A. Mozart (1756–1791) was the pre-eminent composer in this genre, and his works were performed, between 1780 and 1795 in a manner that would appear to have been gender neutral (DeNora 2006). After 1795, however, Beethoven usurped Mozart's position to become the most frequently performed composer of keyboard concertos in Vienna (DeNora 2002), displacing Mozart to runner-up. And along with this shift, something further was added, namely gender segregation (DeNora 2002, 2006): put bluntly, women more often performed Mozart while Beethoven was the province of male performers as illustrated in Table 1.

Men and women, it would seem concertised equally at the piano up through 1810 (DeNora 2002). From roughly the middle 1790s however, when the piano salesman and teacher, Andreas Streicher suggested that the ladies ‘did not wish to play’ Beethoven's works (DeNora 2002: 29), the piano repertory began to illustrate the more general trend of associating ‘great’ music with male musicians (Citron 1993): male pianists performed works by the composer generally acclaimed as Vienna's ‘greatest’ and women were increasingly thrust, de facto perhaps, into the role of music conservators through their association with the music of elderly or deceased composers and older musical styles, a trend that became diffused throughout Europe during the nineteenth century (see, e.g., Ellis 1997). I am suggesting that this gender segregation is initially visible in relation to the performance of Beethoven's music in early nineteenth-century Vienna – if we assume that this was the case, how was this gendered change effected? For there were neither overt rules against women's performance of Beethoven nor were women simply expunged from the canonic keyboard repertory. The absence of any overt regulatory activity makes the question ever-more intriguing for music sociology, since it suggests more subtle, aesthetic-technical mechanisms were at work.

In earlier work (DeNora 2002) I described how the new pianistic body required by Beethoven's music (in conjunction with the new piano technology that Beethoven actively lobbied for) was an heroic and physically demonstrative body, at odds with feminine decorum and devoted to a musically mediated notion of the sublime. Moreover, I have suggested (DeNora 2006) that while it was one thing to enjoy, as a spectator, the frisson of unconventionality and iconoclasm associated with the new heroic style and its repertoire of performance practices/pianistic agency as practiced by men, it was quite another thing for a woman to assume the heroic mien associated with this musical-practical aesthetic. In his study of the, ‘Beethoven Hero’, Burnham has described how Beethoven came to be seen as the, ‘the embodiment of music’ (1995: xvi), the artist-as-hero who was seen to have, ‘liberated’ music, ‘from the stays of eighteenth-century convention’ (ibid.). That heroism, Burnham has suggested, extends well beyond Beethoven's so-called ‘heroic’ style period ca. 1803–1809. By contrast, it indexes the much broader notion of social and psychic agency, notions that both Beethoven-the-musician and Beethoven's music were read as exemplifying, in particular, the notion of artist-as-heroic-individual. Circa 1809, for example, the itinerant musician-journalist Johann Friedrich Reichardt described Beethoven whom he visited in the latter's lodgings as follows, ‘[h]e is of a powerful temperament … visibly stubborn nature may well frighten away many of the good-natured, gay Viennese … gloomy and suffering … I am convinced that his best, most original works can only be brought forth when he is in such headstrong, deeply sullen moods’ (quoted in Comini 2000: 292).

As I have described (DeNora 2006), this hero-artist simultaneously reconfigured the musician-audience relationship, using musical practice and musical style as a means for reworking the conventions of musical reception and thus also reworked the dominant relational script of elite musical life. On the one hand, the concept rewrote the role of the musician, recasting him as an empowered and moral being, one who grappled with unwieldy and difficult musical material and who, in his attempt to present the musical sublime, held a legitimate claim on attention. (Later, ca. 1820, Schumann described Beethoven's music as masculine because of its ability to command.) On the other hand, it rewrote the role of listeners, at once flattering them that they were worthy of being exposed to the sublime musical material (and to the display of the performer who grappled with it) and subduing them in the presence of that material.

With regard to keyboard performance, the new relationship between ‘powerful’ musician and a listener ‘held’ and, indeed, ‘overcome’ by the music was a cultural script. It sketched and afforded the enactment of visual and behavioural imagery. Importantly, it did not emerge ex nihlo but partook of earlier cultural developments in Vienna, in particular the sensation of Franz Anton Mesmer's (1734–1815) séances during the 1760–1770s. It is worth examining these events in some length because their structure was, I suggest, exemplary for the new, and more ‘powerful’ way in which Beethoven's concertos were distributed to listeners.

Mesmer, ‘scientist’, patron of the arts, friend of Mozart and his family, physician, and earlier, Jesuit priest, developed the notion that he could ‘cure’ illness through his personal quality of ‘animal magnetism’ and, moreover, that he could bring about cure simply by raising and directing his hand, or even just one finger. For Mesmer, health was conceptualised through the restoration of bodily ‘harmony’ and actual music played a role of the Mesmericic conditioning process; Mesmer considered that music could reinforce the waves of fluid and send them, as Darnton has recounted (1968: 8), ‘directly to the soul’. In this respect, Mesmer continued an earlier and, in Viennese musical life at least, virtually extinct, tradition of music and natural magic. In Paris, the instruments of choice for this procedure were, according to Darnton (1968: 8) winds (presumably woodwinds, perhaps flutes, since Darnton speaks of the music as ‘soft’ [ibid.]), fortepiano and glass harmonica. The latter was Mesmer's favourite (he was, himself, a gifted glass harmonica player). Certainly in Vienna, it was this instrument, ca. 1774 and beyond, that was most closely associated with psycho-acoustical effects.

Termed variously as the hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, the angelic organ, and the glass harp, the instrument was developed during the 1760s by Benjamin Franklin, who reconfigured it as a series of glass bowls, sized to produce different tones and played by rubbing the perimeter of each bowl with wetted fingers. The sound notable for its ‘celestial’ purity, was also considered to be dangerous, associated with causing nervous disorders, convulsions, fainting, and dejection and lowering life-expectancy. Indeed, one virtuoso, Marianne Kirchgessner died in 1808, age 39, reputedly due to the constant exposure to the instrument's vibrations and another, Karl Leopold Röllig invented a keyboard version of the instrument so as to prevent direct contact with the vibrating glasses (Morrow 1989: 173). This, supposedly safer, instrument's tone quality was considered to have been compromised and the instrument waned in popularity during the nineteenth century. (One might be forgiven for imagining that Mesmer took inspiration from the material practices and occult reputation associated with the glass harmonica when he developed his Mesmeric procedure – the role of the hands, the glass vibrating under the musician-therapist's touch, the provocation of convulsions or despondency, even the importance of fluid – the glasses only sounded when wet – were common to both.)

As Mesmer's treatment gained popularity, he performed increasingly to groups of patients. Mainly well-to-do women, the group would be established in or near a baquet, or magnetic tub, filled with iron filings. Mesmer would retreat behind a curtain to ‘soothe’ his patients with the glass harmonica's exceptionally pure, quiet and ‘celestial’ tone. He would then emerge, garbed in a lilac robe, to administer treatment, so producing in his patients the important ‘crises’ (surreal states such as trances or convulsions) that in turn relieved the purported blockages.

Contemporary illustrations depict individuals in a variety of postures and attitudes during crisis. (Once the crisis was achieved, patients were led to mattress-lined recovery rooms.) Simultaneously, they describe the visual display of the relationship between charismatic musician/healer and his clients which, as with music, depict compendia of states of trance and transport, and focused, rapt attention.

In 1778, after controversially failing to cure the blindness of the well-known (and nobly connected) Maria Theresa von Paradis, Mesmer was forced to flee Vienna to Paris. His celebrity grew. His career ended abruptly, however, in 1784 after a Royal Commission inquiry into his methods rejected the idea of magnetic fluid (though accepting that the crises were genuine, albeit psychosomatic). (The panel included Lavoisier, Guillotin and Benjamin Franklin all of whom subjected themselves to the Mesmeric process.) The Commission report also reconnected Mesmerism with the very religious exorcism he had, a decade prior, been seen as criticising through his more ‘scientific’ procedure. Thus, by the late 1780s, Mesmer had been discredited and the first of a series of highly successful (Steptoe 1986: 254) satires on Mesmerism emerged in 1784, depicting Mesmer as a charlatan. Mesmer left Paris in 1785 (he went to Switzerland) and spent the final 20 years of his life in obscurity (ibid.), calling, on his deathbed, for glass harmonica music. Contrary to the decline of Mesmer-the-man, the practice of Mesmerism by no means faded away. Rather, Mesmerism was relocated within popular culture where, as Cooter has observed, it was seen as overcoming its sceptical reception by ‘proofs of its efficacy’ (1991: 149) and as an alternative to the emerging profession of gynaecology. Back in Vienna, Mesmerism was by no means eradicated from the culture of ‘science’; to the contrary, it persisted, providing some of the early resources for the emergence of psychoanalysis and hypnosis in years to come. The role, meanwhile, of charismatic musical performer ‘overtaking’ his [sic] audience and thereby transforming them, was part of a script and set of cultural resources that could be appropriated by the right type of musical composer/performer.

With Beethoven, the emphasis placed upon his heroic mien, his prowess at the keyboard, the musician's body itself became a locus of transformative power, latent force. The social relation of the charismatic individual, articulated via Mesmerism's psycho-dynamic relation between specialist and client, can be seen to have been transposed to the realm of music and the metaphorically ‘magnetic’ character of the virtuoso-composer and virtuoso-performer. In ‘essence’, then, the pianistic body, musically distributed through repeat performance, had become a new site from which social distinctions could be derived and bodily capacities, in relation to new notions of individual agency, dramatised. Music in other words, could elaborate notions of agency, action, personality and power through models it imported from science. How the new notions of musical agency came actually to be cast and staged coincided, I will now go on to suggest, with other ‘scientific’ realms, in particular with the pseudo-science of physiognomy as promulgated by Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801).

Exceptionally popular in its day, physiognomy was the ‘science’ of facial and bodily features, read as indications of character and capacity. Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy, a multi-volume set that included hundreds of illustrated engravings, was first published in Leigzig in the 1770s, reprinted in translation and popularised in pamphlet form, some of which were ‘pocket editions’ that could be handily consulted upon meeting a stranger.

Lavater's ‘science’ conjoined bodily trait with social and psychological state, the latter understood as socially distributed capacities for action, signified by the former. At a time when philosophy was articulating the concept of the modern individual and the modern state (Rousseau 1762) and the individual's capacities via the sublime in Kant, Lavater pioneered new formats of social classification within which difference came to be conceptualised and exclusion, implicitly legitimated. Among these new distinctions, gender, ethnicity and race were marked. In retrospect, the stunning ‘trick’ of reading the body as exhibiting the ‘causes’ of its socio-economic disadvantage is, at time, breath-taking in its complacency, shocking in its racism.

Gender roles are spelled out clearly in Lavater, in ways that were reinforced and elaborated over the century in theoretical texts and encyclopaedias (Pederson 2000: 316 and passim) often in caricature: ‘Man is more solid, woman is softer. Man is straighter; woman is more supple. Man walks with a firm step; woman with a soft and light one. Man contemplates and observes; woman looks and feels’ (quoted in Jordanova 1989: 92). Lavater also described how men's and women's natures in turn implied their roles within, respectively, the public (male) and private/domestic (female) spheres, traits that could be read in every detail of their anatomical and individual physical difference. For example, in a pencil drawing of male versus female hands (a critical body part for keyboard performance) Lavater contrasts, ‘the delicacy of the female hand with the energy of that of the male’ and goes on to describe the illustration, showing two male hands, one in repose and one in movement, ‘ready for execution’ (Lavater 1789–1798, vol. 3(2): 424–5).

The question arises – just what type of connection if any was there between these notions (freely circulating in Vienna at the time) and Beethoven's practice, and further, between those things and implicit regulations on Beethoven's concerto performance and its reception. Here the evidence is only circumstantial. And yet, even if Beethoven did not decide consciously to incorporate popular scientific or philosophical notions into his composition (a somewhat simplistic notion anyway of how cultural forms migrate and are transformed through cultural practice) it seems not unreasonable to suggest that Beethoven, with his initial training in Kantian philosophy and his proximity to cultural producing circles and aristocratic soirees, was attuned to intellectual and popular scientific trends within his world, more so, arguably than most of his composing contemporaries. There is little doubt that Lavater's and Mesmer's ideas were in full circulation in intellectual and aristocratic circles, in both Mozart's and Beethoven's day, as were other scientific realms which were at times also used as resources for drawing gendered distinctions, such as botany in Mozart's circle (DeNora 1997).

Lavater was himself a devotee of Mesmer; until his death in 1801, by which time physiognomy was firmly established in popular culture, Lavater promoted Mesmer's work in Vienna, even after Mesmer's departure from Vienna in 1778. Moreover, the work of the two ‘scientists’ is intermingled in their popular reception and apparently some time confusion. For example, a contemporary observation of Count Franz Joseph von Thun (1734–1800 – Thun was father in law to Beethoven's foremost patron, Prince Lichnowsky) by Doctor Franz Wegeler, Beethoven's childhood friend and some time physician, describes how Thun was, ‘prone to excess romanticism because of his association with Lavater. It was well known that he believed he could heal sickness through the power of his right hand’ (Wegeler and Ries 1987: 34). The reference to ‘excess Romanticism’ (the German phrase is, ‘Schwarmerei’ which would suggest that the translation might better read, ‘Thun was … in the thrall of Lavater’) helps highlight the then-emerging, almost mystic emphasis on special individuals, in and outside of the musical realm. Thus, as the occupational musician became, during the nineteenth century, increasingly abstracted from the local patronage network of the old order, a minority of musicians also came to be associated with charisma and physical capacity – power over the listener. With that image, a new dimension of musicality emerged – the musician, ‘of the imagination’, as Leppert (2004) has put it, as one with special powers and one of whom such special powers are expected.

If the modality of that imagination was visual, the occupant of that visual category was, as Pederson (2000) has recently observed, male. It is, in other words, possible to read, in the Beethoven imago, and in the growing iconography of the virtuoso-musician-hero, a visual poetics of (musical) agency, one that constructed a new and more vigorous musical performance practice and that valorised an active, masculine body as most fitting and most fit for increasingly public modes of concerto practice and display.

Musical practice and its image helped, in other words, to prototype new understandings of what it meant to be a man and a woman in modern society, and elaborated some of the differences between and within these categories. The by-product of this work was the erection of new symbolic boundaries in the field of keyboard production that functioned tacitly to exclude women from the core of the canon, and thereby to heighten then-emerging lineaments of gender difference. Was it any wonder that women tended to shy away from the performance of Beethoven's most public keyboard works? Or that women also came increasingly to be associated with and classified as best suited for the musical topoi of softness and plaintiveness? Music genius, like creative genius more generally, increasingly involved a look; as Battersby has observed (1989: 76–7), Kant himself helped lay the foundation for this chain of associations in some of his earlier, more obscure texts on the nature of the sublime where the creative genius-masculinity cluster was made plain:

While women were unsuited to greatness, not all men were equally poised to achieve it either and this differential capacity, according to Lavater was legible in the face. ‘The more the chin’, he suggested, ‘the more the man’: the physical basis for social and psychological capacity was thus made plain in the connections that Lavater made between the arrangement of bones and cartilage and, notably here, the capacity for heroic action, sublime suffering, and heroism.

In this context, it is worth considering in some detail the men who performed Beethoven, most notably Ferdinand Ries (hailed as dashing, despite/because of a glass eye), the distinguished-looking (as his contemporaries perceived him) Archduke Rudolph, Leidesdorf, Stein (a young man and thus perhaps an exception) and Friedrich Schneider (who premiered Concerto Number 5 and who bears resemblance to Beethoven himself). Is it reading too much in these visages to suggest that the portrayed bone structures of these men further delineated the image of the hero? The point, contrary to Lavater, is that assumptions about who, as it were, fit the picture of musical hero (and thus the felicity conditions surrounding the question of who was sufficiently worthy to distribute via live performance these increasingly canonic musical texts) was increasingly elaborated via specific bodily traits.

It is important, here, to distinguish between the cultural and mythic understandings of what these actors ‘looked like’ and their actual appearances in and over time/place. Beethoven's own physiognomy, for example, was itself subject to virtual body modification, reframed and refashioned within the plastic arts during the first decade of the nineteenth century such that the Beethoven portraiture came to be aligned with the imagined heroic mien: his chin was extended, his hair increasingly allowed to flow in the romantic fashion, his mouth and jaw set powerfully – the ‘progressively leonine’ (Comini 2000: 291) depictions popularised in the nineteenth century by lithography that signified, ‘somber genius inspired by inner voices in the presence of nature, with long locks of hair writhing wildly in symbolic parallel to the seething turbulence of creativity’ (ibid.). As Leppert has observed, this attempt to square Beethoven's jaw with his character (no pun intended), ‘was coterminous with the heyday of phrenology (no accident)’ (2004: 49) such that, as Dennis has observed, ‘the “sign” of this composer's mien in particular has come to ‘signify’ serious Western music in general’ (2000: 298). (Compare, for example, the 1804 Mahler portrait of Beethoven with the 1806 Neugass. From around 1815, Beethoven begins to ‘age’ in his portraits done from life, but around 1820 his portraits begin to develop the iconographic flowing locks and jutting chin which, over the next century, became insignia of Beethoven's genius (see Comini 1987, 2000) and of genius in music more generally.)

The Beethoven imago was associated with a visceral imagery of strength and power. It articulated a relational script that would appear to have tapped and certainly overlapped with Mesmeric ritual practices and their emphasis on the charismatic and powerful individual who, through some special personal capacity, exerted psycho-acoustical, ‘magnetic’ control over his subjects. It was in turn fleshed out as a social-somatic type through reference to the science of physiognomy where opportunities for assuming the new form of musical agency could be seen to be allocated to a type of man and withheld from women.

This script was elaborated later in the nineteenth century through the more overt and sensationalist versions of virtuosity associated with Liszt, Thalberg and Paganini. Whether genius, moral power, charisma, animal or diabolical force, these cognitive conceptions shared a common accounting procedure, lodging capacity in the inherent, and often physical features of specific, extraordinary individuals (powerful performers) and, by implication, their audience-client base. Viewed in this light, music may be seen as a medium within which newly emerging notions about agency and embodied distribution of opportunity, later configured as discourses of professionalism, talent and expertise, were demonstrated in the object lessons provided by, as Leppert has memorably called it 1993), ‘the sight of sound’.

The performed drama was articulated in relation to Beethoven, the body hexis of his music in performance (DeNora 1995, 2002), and the social distribution and sequestering of these meanings. It partook of and elaborated cultural materials, relations and images initially developed in philosophy and natural ‘science’. They elaborated the categories depicted there by showing them in action, as performed physical and aesthetic capacities. The mutual referencing between these realms in turn performed new social realities, in particular categories of distinction and exclusion.

The case study presented here highlights music as both auditory and visual – as demonstrative, albeit of what depends upon the situated case and neighbouring cultural realms as they are dragged into the interpretive frame and coupled with music so as to delineate its meanings. Through musical performance practice in Beethoven's Vienna, and through the ways that this practice was interpolated with other practices, new categories of difference and capacity were wrought and secured. Increasingly in live musical distribution, appearances mattered. These appearances were, moreover, bases of social and occupational segregation.

While the case of keyboard performance in Beethoven's Vienna is specific, there are, in closing, some more general lessons to be drawn. First, to comprehend how music ‘works’, it is perhaps useful to recall Clifford Geertz’ discussion of symbols and their power. This power, Geertz (1973) suggested arises through situated occasions of use; it is not an abstract cultural force but is rendered forceful through the ways agents draw together materials, acts and ideas. This drawing together implies an ecological model for socio-musical study. In this case, the deployment of symbols, initially developed outside the world of keyboard performance, inflected the world within which keyboard works were distributed, namely, the world ca. 1800, of live musical performance and reception.

Second, to paraphrase MacKenzie (2006), markets are shaped by the materials (theories, practices, products) that flow through and reconstruct them, with social repercussions. As Peterson and Berger (1975) have shown, concentration of musical production can lead to a decline in opportunities for diversity of musical production. Similarly, other forms of organisational change and deregulation can lead to changes in music markets. Moreover, as Dowd (2003) has shown, changes in the law in the early twentieth century (the expiry of patents that allowed for a concentration of control among record companies) opened up the field to competition and led to a flurry of new music for new markets (in Dowd's example, R&B). And, conversely, at times severe repression of music distribution can lead to ‘creative constriction’ whereby consumers find innovative means for distributing ‘banned’ works and, through innovations in distribution actually generate new aesthetic and musical forms (Hagen and DeNora forthcoming). In the case I have considered, the organisational basis of patronage shifted, leading to a concentration of attention on a few ‘star’ composers (DeNora 1995, Chapter 3), which in turn was coupled with innovations in the performance of performance and associated imagery. These innovations in turn led to a concentration of opportunities for musical performance, or at least performance of the most performed composer. Unlike any composer hitherto, the musical appropriation of Beethoven's concertos was literally in the hands of a certain type of performer, one who was also aligned with the visible signs of the Beethoven mien, hence, not women and not, perhaps, certain visual-types of men.

Thus, under some economic and cultural conditions of musical production, musical agents can sculpt the channels through which creative products flow en route to consumers. In the case of concertos in the early eighteenth century, the resources and tools for that sculpting came from adjacent fields of ‘science’ and healing. As they made their appearance, dragged into and through the world of musical performance, they left their mark on the way in which live keyboard concertos were presented to the public. They inflected music distribution with psycho-cultural content that affected what was done in music, and by whom.

Tia DeNora is Professor of Music Sociology at the University of Exeter. Her scholarly interests include aesthetic politics, music, science and social differentiation, and music, health and wellbeing. From 1999–2001 she was Founding Chair of the European Sociological Association's Network on Sociology of the Arts. She is author of Beethoven and the Construction of Genius (California 1995/Fayard 1998), Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge, 2000), After Adorno (Cambridge, 2003), which received honourable mention for the American Sociological Association's Culture Book Prize in 2005, and Music in Action: Essays in Sonic Ecology (Ashgate 2011). In collaboration with Gary Ansdell of the Nordoff Robbins Centre for Music Therapy, she has recently completed a 5-year longitudinal study of music and mental health. She and Ansdell are preparing a three volume Triptych based upon their research (Music, health and wellbeing: ecological perspectives) to be published by Ashgate in 2013.