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.