Music and Capitalism in the Eighteenth Century

This panel will expose intersections between capitalist dynamics and musical practices, which connected eighteenth-century England, France, and Germany to more expansive global contexts. Through socioeconomic analyses, our short papers will illuminate the intimate and socially embedded ways that new conceptions of economic exchange inflected beliefs and values around music. By foregrounding the influence of consumer culture, global trade, and financialization on everyday musical life, we suggest a reconsideration of foundational concepts in music studies—particularly the category of commodity.

Each panelist will give a short position paper (approx. 10 minutes each), followed by a panel discussion (15–20 minutes) and Q&A (up to 30 minutes).

Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of North Texas College of Music, where she coordinates the bachelor of arts degree Critical Studies in Music and Society. Her archival research about musical labor in the Age of Revolutions was recently supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Hagley Museum and Library. Her first book, From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution (Oxford, 2022) received the American Musicological Society’s Lewis Lockwood Award, and her article “Music as Feminine Capital in Napoleonic France” (2019) was awarded a Music & Letters Centenary Prize.

Nicholas Mathew is Professor of Music and Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Political Beethoven and The Haydn Economy.

Morton Wan is a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, the University of Oxford. A cultural historian of political economy and music and a performer on both modern and historical keyboards, he recently earned his Ph.D. in musicology from Cornell University. His current research spans two main areas: how eighteenth-century music registered and responded to emerging financial markets, and how keyboard instruments became entangled in the global circuits of modern capitalism. His article on the first made-in-China piano is forthcoming in Keyboard Perspectives.

Andrei Pesic is an Assistant Professor of French and Italian at Stanford University. His book The Enlightenment in Concert: Music, Markets, and Secularization is forthcoming from Yale University Press and his research has appeared in journals including Past & Present and French Historical Studies.