Money, money, money…
What are we really hearing when we listen to music? Instruments, voices and organised sound, for sure, but there’s something else that resounds when we stream that aria or – what nostalgia! – put on a CD. All of those sounds are mediated through technology: either the apparatus and architecture of live performance or the electronic media that allow us to access musical history from the comfort of our armchairs.
And all of that costs money. A lot of money. When we’re listening to Mozart or Madonna, we’re really hearing the sounding fruits of a flow of capital that has created these musical technologies of performance and di usion.
Behind those albums, concerts and compositions is an o en overlooked story of music’s dependence on money – the financial power of the church, court or state that employed musicians in chapels, palaces and concert halls. Those musicians needed works to be written for them to show o the prestige of the political and cultural leadership of, say, Paris in the 12th century, Vienna in the 1800s or New York in the 20th century. Composers were paid to write music, performers to play it, and a paying public was required to consume it. From Pérotin to Palestrina, Purcell to Pfitzner, Penderecki to the Pet Shop Boys, the ‘social technologies’ of music and money (that’s the way Felix Martin, author of Money: The Unauthorised Biography, describes the flow of credit) have been locked in a centuries-long dance of creativity and conflict.
Conflict? That’s because when they’re writing about filthy lucre, many composers and songwriters decry its e ects on society, whether through the tragic fate of Prokofiev’s opera The Gambler, or the satirical and sardonic edginess of the soundworld of songs like Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ or the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Shopping’. But while they may protest money’s power, all of these musicians are dependent on the flow of capital to produce and disseminate their work – and to reward them, too.
And yet… maybe we all need a moneyfree illusion when we’re experiencing the music we love the most. None of us are really working out how much it costs to build the concert hall where our favourite orchestra plays, or totting up the value of the instruments when we hear a Mahler symphony, or accounting for how much Arts Council money has been poured into a backdrop for a production of Rigoletto. When we buy our tickets, we’re buying the privilege of not having to think about money for a few hours, to escape life’s pecuniary mundanities for a place where the music flows and the money stops.
That’s a fiction that we can buy into as audiences. Yet the reality of the soundless industry of money making music, and music making money, is a continual underscore below the whole of musical history: follow the music, follow the money.
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