------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW -------------- 
Published by EH.NET (January 2005) 
 
F. M. Scherer, _Quarter Notes and Bank Notes: The Economics of Music  
Composition the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries_. Princeton, NJ:  
Princeton University Press, 2004. x + 264 pp. $35 (cloth), ISBN:  
0-691-11621-0. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Fran=E7ois R. Velde, Federal Reserve Bank of Chica= 
go. 
 
 
Among lovers of classical music, there are those who recognize in the  
immortal works they so admire the purest manifestation of man's  
genius striving to manifest the divine and touch the soul. And then,  
there are the economists. 
 
F. M. Scherer, Aetna Professor Emeritus in the John F. Kennedy School  
of Government, Harvard University, and visiting professor at  
Haverford College, is one of those music-loving economists, who  
cannot help but see that the music he loves is, after all, an output  
like many others, and cannot help but ask how this output was  
produced, by whom, facing what prices and making what trade-offs, in  
what kind of markets. This book contains his answers, a bold raid by  
an economist into the subject matter of musicologists, but one that  
economic historians would be the last to reprove, and should be the  
first to imitate. 
 
Scherer has much material to work with: composers have been the  
subject of historical research and biographies, some of it  
particularly directed at the business aspects of composing and  
performing (such as the work of Milhous and Hume on Handel's  
finances). Scherer has delved deeply into this material, selecting 50  
composers whose biographies he read and from which he has selected  
many enlightening anecdotes. 
 
But quantitative analysis, guided by economic thinking, is the  
comparative advantage of the economist. The substance of the book,  
accordingly, consists of the analysis of a data-set constructed by  
the author. 
 
Scherer took all composers born between 1650 and 1850, listed in the  
_Schwann Opus_ Fall 1996 catalogue of recorded music, and whom he was  
able to match with biographical entries in the _New Grove_. The  
Schwann catalogue provided both the sample selection tool and the  
measure of musical output (the length of listings); the _Grove_ and  
additional documentation provided personal characteristics (dates and  
location of birth and death, type and level of education and  
training, years spent in various locations, type and duration of  
employment). 
 
The obvious weakness of the data-set appears both in the selection of  
composers and the in measure of output. The choice of composers  
reflects the availability to (and tastes of) North American music  
lovers of the last half-century. Moreover, musical "output" measures  
the number of recordings, not the number of recorded works, let alone  
the number of works written. Scherer wants to interpret this as  
output weighted by quality, or at least durability. This  
interpretation assigns a measure of reliability to the tastes  
reflected in the 1996 catalog. The same exercise today (albeit not  
with the _Schwann_, which disappeared several years ago) could well  
yield a quite different sample, because of the "early music" revival  
and rising interest in hitherto neglected composers. Scherer mentions  
that only three recordings of Salieri's operas were listed in Schwann  
in 1996: since then, Salieri's operatic "output" has tripled (and,  
with three dozen unrecorded operas, it has room to grow)! 
 
Not only does the author fully acknowledge this weakness, he  
constantly reminds the reader of it, when appropriate. And I would  
not be overly concerned about the bias in the measure of output,  
since the analysis rests mostly on the numbers of composers in  
various categories, rather than their output (regressions with this  
output on the left-hand side don't tend to yield significant  
results). But the selection bias itself is worrisome, particularly in  
opera, where the phenomenally prolific composers of the eighteenth  
century leave barely a trace in recordings today, for obvious reasons  
of costs. 
 
Be that as it may, Scherer proceeds to make full use of the sample he  
has painstakingly constructed, and does so, alternating graphical  
displays and regression analysis (with the estimates consigned in  
endnotes for general readability), and qualitative evidence taken  
from the biographies of the composers. Some anecdotes might already  
be familiar from recording liner notes, but the vast and rich array  
assembled here, if it does not prove or disprove the kinds of  
hypotheses economists test, nevertheless gives texture and context, a  
good feel for the reality of composers' working lives. 
 
After a good general overview of the historical and economic  
background and a description of the music-producing sector, Scherer  
asks the questions that naturally come to mind, on origins and  
backgrounds, education and training, the nature of careers and  
employment, geographic mobility, the trade-offs faced, the rewards  
that could be expected, and the degree of financial success that  
could be hoped for. An additional chapter looks into more detail at  
the economics of music publishing. 
 
Among the interesting findings of chapters 3, 5, and 6, Scherer shows  
that the transition from long-term employment relationships to  
market-oriented activity was much more gradual than is frequently  
asserted. While support from nobility and church collapsed after  
1800, composers had already largely begun to shift toward freelance  
composing and performing in the eighteenth century (comparing  
employment within Germany between merchant cities and court-dominated  
principalities confirms this). In the geography of music, Austria  
(modern-day borders) overwhelmingly dominates the eighteenth century,  
both in producing and in employing composers (the concern about  
selection bias returns here). Thus, Scherer does not find support for  
the hypothesis that political fragmentation in Germany led to  
increased demand for music from princelings competing to decorate  
their courts. Also, poorer nations tended to be exporters of musical  
talent. This is perhaps less surprising after Scherer shows that the  
type of training did not seem to matter much in what was still a  
craft, hence poorer nations were not at a particular disadvantage in  
accumulating this type of human capital. Interestingly, the mobility  
of composers dropped very sharply in the nineteenth century, because  
improved transportation and communication made it easier not to move  
(change residence) in order to make a living. 
 
Chapter 4, on the financial rewards and successes of composers, has  
little in the way of concrete results, although Scherer is able to  
document a very skewed distribution of rewards for musicians (being  
mindful again of the selection bias: for those musicians whose music  
we like enough to track down their probate inventories). But focusing  
on the income derived from publishing, which is done in the final  
chapter, proves fruitful. Many facts are gathered about the  
technology and the costs of publishing music, and the evolution of  
copyright, whose impact on the number of composers is examined.  
Scherer also looks at the fees paid by publishers to Schumann and  
Beethoven for their works, and measures how the fees per work rose  
with cumulated output (presumably a reputation effect). 
 
In the conclusion chapter, Scherer indulges in further speculation  
about which system (court/church employment versus freelance)  
produced better music. Modern debates over government subsidies for  
the arts might find useful elements here, if the bias did not  
interpose itself once more. The best Scherer could do with his data  
is to make a statement about which system was better able to produce  
music for the listeners two hundred years hence, not necessarily the  
relevant question for today's taxpayer. The concluding chapter also  
argues that a turning point in the 1920s (identified as the emergence  
of radio and recordings, and documented by the collapse of piano  
sales) led to a bifurcation between "serious" music and mass-market,  
the former contracting Baumol's cost disease and now requiring  
permanent transfusions of money to survive. These considerations are  
a little hasty, as it is far from clear that the turning point is  
correctly identified, and it is performance of old works, rather than  
the composition of new works, that suffers from the cost disease. The  
interesting question is: Why have we invented this concept of  
"classical" music, i.e., music which by definition becomes more  
expensive to perform? In most of the period that Scherer studies,  
music died with its composer (if not before), and neither court nor  
church subsidized the performance of centuries-old music (Allegri's  
_Miserere_ notwithstanding). 
 
If the book's only merit were to raise such questions, that would be  
praise enough. But this book, designed to be accessible, deserves to  
be read widely and foremost by his music-loving colleagues in the  
economics profession. Even if Scherer has already done much of what  
can be done with the material already gathered by musicologists,  
there are still open questions (the economics of performing is  
largely untouched). And this is, of course, not a flaw but an  
invitation to follow in his footsteps. 
 
 
Fran=E7ois R. Velde, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, is co-author of  
_The Big Problem of Small Change_ (Princeton University Press, 2002),  
and a music-lover 
 
Copyright (c) 2005 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be  
copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to  
the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the  
EH.Net Administrator ([log in to unmask]; Telephone: 513-529-2229).  
Published by EH.Net (January 2005). All EH.Net reviews are archived  
at http://www.eh.net/BookReview. 
 
-------------- FOOTER TO EH.NET BOOK REVIEW  -------------- 
EH.Net-Review mailing list 
[log in to unmask] 
http://eh.net/mailman/listinfo/eh.net-review