Financial Incentives for Music Scholarship

Few figures were as consequential for the study of early music in the twentieth century as Armen Carapetyan. In 1944 he founded the American Institute of Musicology, an organization that has since published a wealth of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century music. But the full impact of AIM has not yet been acknowledged—above all, how Carapetyan changed the course of musicological research by offering scholars significant financial incentives to produce editions of repertoire he deemed worthy of publication. This article is based on a corpus of more than nine hundred letters to and from Carapetyan, along with AIM-related correspondence between other early-music scholars. Carapetyan offered prospective editors unprecedented royalties from his personal funds that incentivized them to participate in AIM, using cheap European academic labor to produce editions that were sold in the United States. He directly impacted postwar historiographical priorities by centering music from mid- to late fifteenth-century Italy, thereby shaping scholarly discourse by encouraging European scholars to continue their research on early music in a postwar environment that had started prioritizing other repertoires. This research shows how economic factors can impinge on the history and reception of scholarship—in this case, how one man’s financial resources and aesthetic proclivities shaped and continue to shape the stories we tell about Renaissance music.