Musical Taste and Publishers' Policies. Developments of Musical Repertoire and Canonization Mirrored by Sales Data of Leipzig Music Publishing Houses (ca. 1830–1930)

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Since at least the 19th century, the city of Leipzig became an internationally significant platform of musical life. The multitude of mutually intertwined musical institutions and the high density of publishing houses with global outreach were important factors for this development. Supply and demand of a worldwide musical market that has a normative function until today drew from this pool. However, the mechanism of the evolution of musical repertoire and musical taste and resulting canonisation processes have seldom been explored hitherto and have especially not been examined in systematic ways drawing from empirical evidence. This is what our project aims at, drawing from extensive documented data on the trade situation of three major music publishing houses (C. F. Peters, Friedrich Hofmeister, Rieter-Biedermann). This pool of data is to be evaluated using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Based on this material, the musical market of the 19th and early 20th century will be examined beyond the personal biases of its individual actors and with completely new types of research questions. Such questions not only concern the history of private music making (on which it is hard to shed light on with other methodologies), but also interplays between various sectors of public musical life: How did selling results, public performances and critical reviews affect each other? Were certain composers, genres or ensemble types in vogue at certain times; did they encounter boom times resulting from general predilections? To answer such and similar questions, the economic data gathered during the project's runtime will be contextualized with a further body of diverse sources in order to broaden our perspective of musical life during the 19th and early 20th century especially by exploring fundamentals of a history of everyday musical life. Among the project's results will be an extensive database providing a collection of quantitative material for research that will be provided open access for scholarly research. This pool of data will be initially examined during a symposium during the project's runtime as well as by a monograph dealing with the above-stated questions that will mark the project’s completion and main scholarly outcome. The project's design rests upon a cooperation between the Department of Musicology of the Leipzig University of Music and Theatre "Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy" and the Saxon State Library – State and University Library Dresden in close association with the Saxon State Archives – Leipzig State Archives. Such a combination of resources from an institution of higher education and institutions that provide scientific infrastructure provides the basis for a methodologically up-to-date project that generates new research findings and makes these findings and their underlying data (re)usable with long-term commitment.