The Battle for Control of the Brass and Instruments Business in the French Industrial Revolution

The Battle for Control of the Brass and Instruments Business in the French Industrial Revolution 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 nstruments made of brass and their related patents, not by opera – the musical genre that moved the most money and eople at the time – or the revered and contentious high art. Music, in all its dimensions, had become a business. The ineteenth-century French industry of brasswinds shows how the strategic parameters of the Industrial Revolution and, ssentially, the system that sustained them (capitalism), permeated everything. What lay behind those contentious disputes as the pursuit of commercial profit, and the consolidation of a dominant position that would yield the maximum possible conomic return. The legal confrontation began when a group of French businessmen who built wind instruments saw their usiness and sources of financing threatened after being forced by the Army to use a series of musical instruments that ere different to the usual ones and protected by patents for invention that belonged to Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the axophone. Diago Ortega provides evidence of how political power was used by economic power (and vice versa), and resents arguments on how culture articulated the social machinery and was a powerful tool for legitimizing political ositions.