Schoenberg founded composers’ clubs to bypass concert agencies and their profit-driven programming
Evidence
Schoenberg stated in a circular that the composers’ organization was intended to emancipate both artists and the public from the concert agencies and companies, which were trying to exclude everything from their programmes which did not ensure certain financial success, and which had `already caused a general waning of interest in music with their invariably identical programmes’. Numerous and frequent first-class performances would make familiarity with the new music possible. This was a precondition for any sort of appreciation of it to develop, and it was more necessary than ever, he claimed, because of the increased complexity of the new music. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 294
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- SEED: Schoenberg’s 1918 Association for Private Musical Performances as a proto-indie-label or open-access movement — a historical case of artists building infrastructure to escape gatekeepers, a rich angle.
- SHARE: For someone into music history or economics of the arts: Schoenberg fined concert agencies for repetitive programming a century before streaming’s identical-playlist complaints.