| Summary: | <p>‘The inventor of modern music’, ‘the father of opera’; how did Monteverdi come to be known as these impossibly momentous figures? The answers, at their root, lie in two places: first, in the brand created by and for Monteverdi during his career; second, through the transmission, dissemination and subsequent treatment of his works. The first enabled the second; in having a brand, Monteverdi gained such renown that substantial interest was generated in his works, which were printed, reprinted, circulated, copied and performed.</p>
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<p>Developing a successful brand was important to Monteverdi. He relied on it for the prosperity of himself and his family. Moreover, his employers benefitted from their association with his brand and from it becoming established in the public consciousness, and those who printed his music could yield greater profits from his becoming a ‘big name’. The purpose of studying his brand is to illustrate how certain ideas about Monteverdi came to be, and who among Monteverdi’s contemporaries influenced and contributed to these ideas.</p>
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<p>Monteverdi’s music could have been received, performed, copied and collected in total separation from his brand, thus without benefitting any of the above parties. While efforts, such as printing works, were made to prevent this, inevitably, his music spread beyond his (and their) control. Monteverdi’s music’s dissemination abroad has allowed the musician to be received by an international audience for centuries, and has formed the basis for numerous academic studies from international scholars. More than this, his music’s influence in international cultures can be traced (to a certain degree), creating fascinating opportunities to explore routes of transmission, compositional practice, and stylistic development, to name a few topics. Monteverdi’s music’s survival in international archives and libraries has thus contributed heavily to modern conceptions of his contemporary significance, which in some cases, has enabled a modern view of him to become skewed and overinflated (as titles such as ‘inventor of modern music’ suggest).</p>
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<p>This thesis will first examine the creation of Monteverdi’s brand, before assessing his music’s treatment ‘beyond the brand’, looking at dissemination and reception (among other things) of his music abroad. All of this is with the aim of better understanding how Monteverdi’s contemporaries conceived of him and his music, as well as introducing the concept of ‘brand’ to the field of early modern musicology.</p>
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