This dissertation takes as its starting point Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s recent contention that the Enlightenment is best understood as "an event in the history of mediation," specifically the “proliferation” of "new and newly important" media that "establish the conditions for the possibility of Enlightenment." Media for the circulation of music likewise proliferated during this period, resulting in the unprecedented mobility and iterability of musical works. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s Stabat mater, as one of the most celebrated and copiously mediated works of the eighteenth century, offers a unique entry point into this changing mediascape and the effects of media proliferation on music discourse. By following Pergolesi's Stabat on its global peregrinations, this dissertation surveys society's evolving relationship with new musical media, how these media became naturalized in different places, how different media interfaced with each other and how media proliferation reshaped generations of listeners’ musical experiences.

The first three chapters serve as archaeologies of three media particularly enmeshed in the reception of Pergolesi’s Stabat. Chapter 1 focuses on the Neapolitan conservatory system, the medium through which the musical style that characterizes the Stabat was distilled and transmitted to Pergolesi along with his fellow students. Not only did the conservatory system serve as a medium for the transmission of Neapolitan style, but it was also crucial in fostering a musical diaspora that enabled Neapolitan music to traverse the Alps and spread across Europe. The second chapter examines Lenten public concerts and the new concert societies that reorganized local and supralocal sociabilities around musical performance. Originating in a symbiotic relationship with the opera season, these concerts became a new media format in their own right. By the end of the century, most cities in Europe had experimented with some form of “spiritual concert” and many concert organizations had also experimented with at least semi-annual performances of Pergolesi’s Stabat. (A short intermezzo between this and the next chapter looks at the influence of Pergolesi’s example on other Stabat settings, exploring how composers managed Pergolesi’s legacy through reference and allusion). The third chapter follows a parallel media development to that of the second chapter: the emergence of the new genre of composer biography. The popularity of Pergolesi’s music and the misfortune of his early death drove interest in his life. Biography offered writers and readers an opportunity to use the character of Pergolesi to (re)imagine musical communication, musical labor and musical history in ways that addressed music’s increasing mobility and iterability.

In the process of excavating these media forms, a reoccurring theme is the material underpinning of the Stabat’s exceptional and novel fame. Contemporary writers heaped praise on the expressivity of the Stabat. Rather than demonstrating the origin of this unparalleled expressivity in the music itself, the reception of the Stabat strongly indicates that its vaunted ability to depict and illicit feeling was nothing less than the sum of the sentimental valences that accrued around the work in the process of its constant mediation. The mediacy of the work, stemming from the peculiarities of Neapolitan style, allowed it to accumulate sentimental meaning, while allowing it to factor conspicuously in aesthetic debates concerning music’s new mobility and iterability. Its early entrance into cosmopolitan circulation, though, ensured an ambiguous position in discourses surrounding notions of progress, emergent nationalism, ideas of canon formation as well as concerns over sacred music’s religious propriety and music’s gradual commercialization. The final chapter investigates the aesthetics of media saturation, just as the first three explore those of media proliferation. With the naturalization of once new media, the currency of the Stabat’s mediacy became devalued, initiating a decline in prestige. But even as the Stabat’s European reputation waned, media proliferation into Europe’s colonies brought the Stabat into contact with non-European music, prompting a clash between competing aesthetic values.

Berlin, around 1800, has been considered the cradle of modern theology, as well as the epicenter of modern musical aesthetics and musical institutions. Without taking these coeval changes for granted, this dissertation addresses how music became a category of modern knowledge, arguing for its simultaneous and interdependent emergence with the field of religion. It does so by tracing what “church music” meant and how it was practiced in Prussia’s capital, exploring its print media, pedagogical methods, moral philosophies, and cultural institutions in Berlin. Kirchenmusik had long been a corporate expression of worship practiced in discrete civic locales. During the eighteenth century, its repertoire integrated with the informal, scattered sites of Protestant “domestic devotion” through print, which disrupted church music’s accompanying educational models, musical genres, and liturgical functions. The Romantic witnesses to these transformations, such as Wilhelm Wackenroder and E. T. A. Hoffmann, mounted new critiques of church music, taking for granted its ecumenical, trans-historical form, and advocated for its resuscitation by the political institutions of the city. The political and pedagogical interventions prescribed by those critiques disclosed music to Berlin’s new and revamped institutions of knowledge, such as the Royal Prussian Academy of Arts (est. 1809) and the University of Berlin (est. 1810). Through these institutions, music became subject to new scientific modes of inquiry. As it unpacks the relation of music and religion during this crucial period, this dissertation resists secularization narratives that have long bolstered histories of sacred music, demonstrating that music did not replace religious transcendence in German Romanticism, as is commonly claimed; nor was religion in any sort of decline. Instead, music and religion, I argue, recuperated and reconstituted one another in ways found audible in Romantic Kirchenmusik, culminating in their co-establishment as fields of study in the liberal modern university.

The Fromm Music Foundation (FMF) has been a crucial source of funding for contemporary American music since 1952. Using private letters, speeches, concert programs and reviews, and other documents from the FMF archives (which are only beginning to be cataloged, and to which I was the first to be granted free access), plus copious interviews with people who worked with and knew Paul Fromm, the progenitor of the FMF, this dissertation chronicles the first thirty-one years of the Fromm Music Foundation.

By and large, scholars who have written about this period in American music history have focused on the influence of the Cold War on American compositional aesthetics, philosophies, and methodologies. Others have written about the confluence of ideas that led to the creation of Ph.D. programs in composition. And many have speculated as to how the installation of composers on university and college campuses affected new American classical music and musical life more broadly drawn. These scholarly preoccupations circle around perhaps the defining problem of post-war musical life: its retreat into the academy, its renunciation of a "lay" audience, and the much-disputed claim that music composition should be treated as scholarly, "scientific" research. These interests neglect more evidently material and institutional contexts for post-war American music - crucially, private foundation support for contemporary music. Consequently, this study leads to a richer understanding of the institutional pressures and funding structures, and the interpersonal relationships at their heart, that promoted certain musics at the expense of others.

Paul Fromm was an amateur pianist and classical music enthusiast. He was also a German-Jew; he and his family were forced to flee Germany in 1938. They settled in Chicago, where Fromm established two wine importing firms. According to his later account, Fromm promised himself that, once he was financially able, he would express gratitude to the United States for providing refuge and citizenship. He identified American composers and emotionally disturbed children as his primary philanthropic concerns. Influenced by his upbringing and early exposure to canonical and contemporary music, Fromm sought to develop an equivalent American "high culture" of music. His self-described "Utopian" goal for American music was to integrate contemporary composition with the mainstream of American musical life.

Fromm's network was small, and he wanted it that way. He had wanted to become a composer himself, and although his youngest brother was allowed to pursue a musical career, Fromm had to join the family business. The FMF may have been a way to give thanks to America, but it was also the way Fromm maintained an active, and influential, musical life. Fromm came to value his friendships with composers and musicians that the FMF helped him forge as much as the compositions he funded.

Unlike larger foundations aiding cultural activity during this period, Fromm took on a traditional role of patron, working closely with a select group of composers and accepting their advice. Fromm's closeness to select composers affected them in obvious ways, but his "stable" of composer-advisors, as one composer described it, influenced Fromm and the activities of the FMF to an equal degree. Insecure about his musical abilities and in need of external, professional validation, this dissertation shows how Fromm trusted a coterie of composers and used their advice to shape his Foundation's activities. Fromm and the "academic modernists" had values and goals in common, and Fromm became a close friend and a promoter of many of these composers. Yet private patronage from the FMF shaped the development of post-war ideologies about new music in ways that differed significantly from the university system. That said, Fromm was slow to recognize that his Foundation's activities had unintended consequences that undermined his professed goals - and slower still to break with the composers he trusted to advise him. He negotiated with these men for years, believing, often erroneously, that he who held the purse strings would hold sway. Only after many failed attempts to get his composer-advisors to see his point of view did Fromm sever those relationships and refocus his Foundation's support.

This history of the Fromm Music Foundation nuances our view of the period, showing the complications and confusions "on the ground," as the various actors in contemporary musical life squabbled over scarce material resources. This dissertation ultimately proposes a fresh historiographical paradigm for post-war American music.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Flemish harpsichords by the Ruckers and Couchet families were exported widely across the globe. These instruments were so highly valued in France, that, beginning in the 1680s, French harpsichord makers began updating them for modern use. The process, described as ravalement, could involve rebuilding the keyboards and action, redecorating, and sometimes even enlarging the case. They also began copying and forging these instruments, creating an extremely lucrative luxury market: a Flemish ravalement could cost up to ten times as much as a new French-made harpsichord. The harpsichord in Ancien Régime Paris was thus not only a musical instrument and vehicle for artistic expression, but also a decorative objet d’art authored by numerous craftspeople in a vast collaboration sometimes spanning centuries.This dissertation positions the harpsichord as an actor within the polychromatic environment of Paris, investigating how it united communautés of professional musicians, artisans who mediated knowledge production in the arts and sciences, and the flourishing milieu of the salon. As I argue, the harpsichord, molded by generations of changing artistic and philosophical ideals, also came to shape these very ideals, actively transforming contemporary notions of history, communication, life, and human consciousness.