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The Battle for Control of the Brass and Instruments Business in the French Industrial Revolution narrates and analyzes the largest judicial battle in culture and industrial property in nineteenth century Europe, the echoes of which still ring today.
Sommario
- Part 1: DEFENCE
- 1: Chimaeras, Tall Tales, and 'Joke-Horns' in First Instance: Presentation of the Bases of Prosecution and Defence
- 2: 'Let Him Calm Down' and the Report of the Lumières: The Position of the Prosecutor and the Technical Report
- 3: Judicial Setback or 'Nothing Patentable': Change of Regime and Procedural Course
- 4: Appel-incident or Ascent to Appeal
- 5: Persistence and Jump to Cassation
- 6: The Egg of Columbus and a Great Victory: The Denouement of the Civil Prosecution
- Part 2: CHARGE!
- 7: Hasty Raids
- 8: Gautrot or 'the Most Relentless Fighting Spectacle Between Makers': Double Resistance and Exhaustion
- 9: Masterstroke: The Extension of Contested Patents
- 10: With Malice Aforethought: Squeezing Out the Deadlines
- 11: Besson, a Brass Heavyweight Maker
- 12: Versus Eighteen... at the Same Time: Collective Confrontation
- 13: Tentacles in Strasbourg: Competition from Outside Paris
- 14: Transfer and Escape to London: The Resistance of Besson
- 15: Drouelle or the Valve Big Business
- 16: Endgame and Epilogue
Info autore
José-Modesto Diago Ortega is Professor of Saxophone and Organology at the Professional Conservatory of Music 'Manuel de Falla' in Cádiz, Spain. As a specialist in wind instruments of the nineteenth century in a multidisciplinary perspective, he has published articles in several specialized journals, such as The Galpin Society Journal and Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society. He is also the author of Elise Hall, the Saxophone Lady.
Riassunto
The Battle for Control of the Brass and Instruments Business in the French Industrial Revolution narrates and analyzes the largest judicial battle in culture and industrial property in nineteenth century Europe, the echoes of which still ring today.
The battle was about simple wind instruments made of brass and their related patents, not by opera - the musical genre that moved the most money and people at the time - or the revered and contentious high art. Music, in all its dimensions, had become a business. The nineteenth-century French industry of brasswinds shows how the strategic parameters of the Industrial Revolution and, essentially, the system that sustained them (capitalism), permeated everything. What lay behind those contentious disputes was the pursuit of commercial profit, and the consolidation of a dominant position that would yield the maximum possible economic return. The legal confrontation began when a group of French businessmen who built wind instruments saw their business and sources of financing threatened after being forced by the Army to use a series of musical instruments that were different to the usual ones and protected by patents for invention that belonged to Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone.
Diago Ortega provides evidence of how political power was used by economic power, and presents arguments on how culture articulated the social machinery and was a powerful tool for legitimizing political positions.
