Toward a theory of patronage

This dissertation illuminates the funding contexts that structured art music composition in interwar France. While music historiography tends to focus solely on patronage - an ill-defined and limited category - as the paradigmatic economy within which pre-paid composition takes place, the author brings patronage into conversation with other, similarly enabling funding sources: publishing, radio, film, orchestras, and ballet companies. Through a series of case studies of the individuals, institutions, and practices that provided a market for interwar French art music, this thesis pursues two central ideas: first, that musical works, genres, and styles present sonic traces of the economic forces that structured their composition, and second, that the funding context of music often determines its historiographical reception.