Author: O'Hare, Michael

Publication Year: 1979

Media Type: Conference paper/presentation

Summary:

Paper presented at First International Conference on Arts and Economics, sponsored by the Association for Cultural Economics, held in Edinburgh, Scotland, August 8-10, 1979.

Abstract:

Paper presented at First International Conference on Arts and Economics, sponsored by the Association for Cultural Economics, held in Edinburgh, Scotland, August 8-10, 1979. Comment by William S. Hendon appears on p. 120-121.

In 1974, when I first considered Marianne Felton's survey of American composers, I regretted that most of the 434 compositions for that year alone would wait in line to be premiered, perhaps for years. In 1975 it occurred to me that another four to five hundred works awaited performance, yet there were still fewer than sixty orchestras to perform them. The next time I thought about it after that was around Mid-April, a date significant to Americans as marking a national ceremony of sacrifice on the altar of public goods. How many of those unperformed works did I pay for? I wondered. How many will I ever hear? How many will ever be heard by any audience? What the heck is going on here?

The mismatch between the supply of and demand for performable art is not a new perception. Felton notes that the likelihood of any new piece being performed is almost nil; she points to the number of performance groups as evidence. But the problem is deeper than that. The oversupply of compositions and low pay for composing are commonly dismissed by asserting that the psychic income received by composers or writers is partial compensation and that the best of the work produced is filtered through the critical marketplace. These observations amount to a facile assumption that some equilibrium is reached.

They may be all the attention the problem deserves, except that about 40 percent of the compensation received by the composers that Felton surveyed was in the form of commission or prizes. I know of no commercial commissions of serious music; this support is mostly philanthropic. Philanthropy for the arts, at least in the , is nearly half government money (Vandell and O'Hare 1979). Commissions provided directly by government agencies or funnelled from them through orchestras are, of course, entirely public funds. So it appears that the government is paying people to write music that will never be heard. This is only marginally more rational than paying farmers not to grow food or to grow food no one wants to eat (two American agricultural policy traditions of long standing). The supply of performing arts source material and the demand that might be developed for it deserve attention as inputs to policy formation. (p.114-115)

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Categories: Funding