Handel’s Impact: The Well-Funded DYI Composer Who Set Everything Off
Of the three English musicians who were able to earn a solid living solely or primarily from their compositions, not performance, George Frideric Handel was the most important in terms of the composers’ fight for copyright. Handel made his name (and money) by working in the markets for public performance and publication of his work. Simply put, Handel hustled hard, expanding his audience through a series of innovative measures. He was the first major composer “to pursue freelance composition in a serious way.”
Breaking away from Italian opera, which was all the vogue in eighteenth-century London, Handel invented the English oratorio. And as a composer/impresario, Handel came up with various ways of raising funds for his performances. Notably, he secured funds through individual attendance tickets, a modern-day direct-to-consumer ticket scheme akin to crowdsourcing his shows through his own Kickstarter start-up. Individual attendance tickets were particularly revolutionary because they “permitted middle class citizens who could not afford seasonal subscriptions to become part of his audience.”
Further, not missing out on any money bag available to him at the time, Handel served as musical director of London’s principal opera company, the Royal Academy of Music, for eight years, from 1720 to 1728. After that, “Handel then became partner in managing King’s Theatre, where he continued to stage operas and other musical performances.”[1] Taken together, all of Handel’s hustles demonstrate that he was an entrepreneur and a self-made music star. By today’s metrics, Handel would be the quintessential iconic indie artist, strategically diversified, popular, and presiding over his name, brand, and self-made empire.
Notes:
1. Michael W. Carroll, “The Struggle for Music Copyright,” 57 Fla. L. Rev 907, 934 (2005), 929.
