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Andrew Pinnock, To great benefit, Early Music, Volume 49, Issue 1, February 2021, Pages 152–154, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caab014
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Extract
Relatively few students at my university want to take modules exploring English Restoration-period literature and music. Fair enough: the world has moved on. I make myself useful teaching arts management, cultural economics and cultural policy modules instead, and to that end spend a lot of time reading and thinking about all three.
Music and the benefit performance in eighteenth-century Britain seems to me to be a significant contribution to cultural economic literature; more significant than its editors, contributors and even its publisher perhaps realize. It isn’t the only book about pre-industrial cultural economics that I have come across, but the genre is a niche one. High-quality additions to it are to be welcomed.
Economics can be understood in rather narrow terms, as an accountancy challenge: noting what things cost (play and concert tickets, for instance), mapping routes along which money flows from paying customers to producers, seeing who in the producer category ends up comparatively wealthy and who goes bust. Or it can be understood more broadly, as a ‘science of human behaviour’ (Bruno Frey)—as a study in human psychology, gaining in rigour thanks to its numerical aspect but by no means excluding ‘softer’ lines of enquiry.
