A synchronic study that highlights the importance of printed packaging, rather than notes on the page, to the complex relationship between composers, publishers, and consumers of music. Why dedicate music? What did dedications mean to their readers and writers, especially after 1785, when more works were offered to fellow composers as well as to patrons? Borrowing from book history and sociological theory, Dedicating Music, 1785-1850 is a large-scale study of patterns of dedications. Emily H. Green argues that the kinds of offerings printed in the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries reflect a changing financial and aesthetic landscape in which patronage was waning and independent artistry surging. Dedications labeled written music as a gift while presenting composers with an opportunity for self-promotion. They also contributed to a new kind ofbranding of music by communicating composers' friendships and artistic allegiances.. Dedicating Music considers dedications issued in print between 1785 and 1850 in sets of overlapping corpuses: offerings to peers (as in Mozart's string quartets dedicated to Haydn); to patrons (as in Ignaz Pleyel's string quartets for Count Erdödy); to friends (as in Ferdinand Ries's offerings for Beethoven); and dedications issued by publishers (as in Beethoven's song "In questa tomba oscura," included in publisher Tranquillo Mollo's collection offered to Prince Lobkowitz). The result is a synchronic study that highlights the importance of printed packaging, rather than notes onthe page, to the complex relationship between composers, publishers, and consumers of music. EMILY H. GREEN is Assistant Professor of Music at George Mason University. The University of Rochester Press gratefully acknowledges generous support from the Claire and Barry Brook Endowment of the American Musicological Society and the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, both funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

"Dedicating Music deserves the broadest readership...An unusual, thought-provoking, and far-reaching piece of work that will be of substantial interest to students and scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to anyone curious about cultures of printing, publishing, and authorship in music. Tantalizing historical trends emerge from these reams of hard data. Consider that 90 percent of the works dedicated by Mozart had women dedicatees. The author and press are to be applauded." - JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

"[...] Dedicating Music steers clear of intellectual currents that encourage entertaining how objects might have (or be narrated into having) lives of their own. Dedications emerge from this study as sites of composers', publishers', and consumers' shifting desires and capacities, making this a book from which scholars not only of music but of any artistic medium can gain insight into the significance of a work's paratextual packaging and the process of transition from patronage system to market economy." - Eighteen Century Studies

"Green addresses different kinds of dedications and, quite astutely, she considers how these categories overlap. Demonstrates how interrogating a quotidian practice can help us to develop a fuller picture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music culture." - MUSIC & LETTERS