It all began a few years ago with a clarinet concerto by the American composer Aaron Copland (1900–1990). My eye was caught by the words at the very top of the page: “For Benny Goodman”. Was Copland friends with the swing icon? Did they work together? Or did the composer simply admire Goodman (1909–1986) as a musician?

My research at the time was focused on musical patronage during the 18th century, and I’d been thinking about how I wanted to continue developing my interest in forms and structures of music funding, support, and enablement. As it then happened, the path opened up by Copland, Goodman, and the aforementioned clarinet concerto turned out to be the right way forward. My initial research revealed to me that Goodman had commissioned this piece from Copland in 1946 and paid him a fee of $2,000. As part of this deal, performing rights for the initial two years were held by Goodman alone. I then soon hit upon other compositions by composers including Béla Bartók, Darius Milhaud, Henry Brant, Paul Hindemith, and Malcolm Arnold that Goodman had likewise commissioned. Research works that dealt with this history in detail were, however, few and far between.

Leonard Bernstein and Benny Goodman, presumably rehearsing a composition commissioned by Goodman from Alex North (1946). © William P. Gottlieb, The New York Public Library/Digital Collection, via Wikimedia Commons

I therefore initiated a pilot study on performers as commissioners of new music in keeping with Benny Goodman’s example. This work took me to archives and libraries on the East Coast of the United States as well as to Harvard University as a visiting researcher. At Harvard, I not only pursued my Goodman project but also continued my related work—which ultimately resulted in an FWF-funded research project that I have been leading at the mdw since October of 2021. In this project, I’ve started from a whole series of case studies to investigate the phenomenon of composing commissions by early 20th-century performers. Why did they commission these works? How did they fund them? To which composers did they turn? What conditions were negotiated? What sorts of collaboration took place as part of the composing process? And, finally, what did this special configuration entail for how the music turned out and for its subsequent performance and reception?

I’m arriving at answers to these questions through the study of further musicians including the pianist Paul Wittgenstein (1887–1961), the singer Marian Anderson (1897–1993), and the harpsichordists Sylvia Marlowe (1908–1981) and Antoinette Vischer (1909–1973). All of them commissioned large numbers of works—strategically and with concrete ideas about what they wanted. These cases all likewise demonstrate the proactive role of performers in processes of musical creation and repertoire formation. Shifting this phenomenon into the limelight of music history makes a contribution to overcoming the “genius composer” and “masterpiece” paradigms as well as to a more diverse and dynamic impression of how new music comes into being.

To the research project.

In the new research column up-and-coming academics at the mdw offer glimpses into their intriguing and wide-ranging research activities.

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