Postwar experimentalism provides an ideal conceptual playground for blending the history of work with the history of music. From designing groundbreaking notational systems to interrogating the very definition of music itself, creative sound-makers pushed the boundaries of acceptable ways to be musicians. These practices have informed my long-term research on artistic interpretation, leading to the development of a theoretical framework that I call “interpretive labor.” Each model in this framework, and its representative case studies, demonstrates a unique but interrelated form of engagement with the work of being a contemporary musician. With the boss-like Executive calling the shots, the Scientist exploring new ways of engaging with music and its technologies, the Administrator making sure events happen on time and on budget, the Hacker subverting a given system, and the Gamer making a new system entirely, all of these characters, and their characteristics, constitute a powerful system of working methods that can help us understand creative work more broadly.
In this talk, I share models of this labor, discussing not only how they have functioned in the past but also how we might apply them to artistic practices today. As we navigate the challenges of precarity, austerity, inequity, and outright hostility toward creative thinking, we may benefit from a bit of the hacker ethos that became, in my view, one of the most fruitful outcomes of this era. I would argue that Interpretive Labor’s various forms can be instructive to anyone whose work involves some degree of creativity, from computer programmers to social-media influencers, interior designers to event planners––and, of course, musicians.
On September 20, 1569, the notary Giovanni Francesco Vollari drew up the statutes of the Congregazione di Santa Maria degli Angeli (SMDA), the earliest known occupational confraternity for musicians in Naples. The thirty-two instrumentalists whose names appear in the document pledged to support fellow members and created rules to safeguard the social and musical quality of the group. Certain forms of labor, such as playing in popular street masquerades, were to be prohibited. Furthermore, music-making was to be regulated among “those who are freelancers and vagabonds,” who “should not play nor dance without the license of the Chapel.” These restrictions would ensure the “consecration of the public good, the honest living of the musicians, and the integrity of the [musical] art in this most magnificent and faithful city of Naples.”
This paper examines the obligations of SMDA members as evidence of what social historians have called a moral economy, an integrated value system that governed the norms and reciprocities of social behavior. While musicologists have examined ideologies of labor within pre-modern music theoretical discourse, much less remains known about the social relationships that working musicians engendered among themselves. Drawing on extensive archival research, I articulate how musicians of the SMDA developed complex networks of credit, debt, and trust, through which they expressed notions of respectability, hierarchies of musicality, and assertions of social distinction. I argue that the framework of moral economy provides a novel approach to the study of musicians’ corporations and the history of musical labor in early modernity.
This talk focuses on Willis James and a small group of associated Black collectors including Sterling Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, Lewis Jones and John Work III, who sought to uncover Black sonic worlds in the 1930s and 40s. The genius of James and other Black collectors has been largely omitted from the history of folk collecting, forgotten in a story of (White) memory workers devoted to collecting Black musical expression. Turning to accounts by and about James, I listen for how he crafted a counter history of Black folk music centering work songs as precursors to the blues. I contrast James’ approach outlined in his posthumously published Stars in De Elements: A Study of Negro Folk Music (1945/ 1995) with John Lomax’s conceptions of fieldwork, facilitated by governors, wardens, and the LOC’s latest recording equipment, to focalize key differences between White and Black collectors in the labor, method, and practice of folklore in this moment. While James labored in the field, he attended to the cultural work of the songs he gathered and the labor of the singers as composers, arrangers, performers, and organizers. As his own labor comes to the fore in his accounts of fieldwork with longshoremen and coal miners, he emerges as a union man, of sorts, with labor central to his folkloric practice. Like Brown, Hurston, Work III, Jones and others, James built this labor-oriented archive by using embodied and writerly technologies in the field, devices no less modern than Lomax’s latest Presto machine.
Kimberly Hannon Teal: “Jazz Festivals, Black Labor, and White Leisure”
While the middle decades of the twentieth century saw jazz thrive in urban club scenes, festivals now offer some of the most common and consistent spaces for jazz performance. This talk will engage the origins of the Newport Jazz Festival in the 1950s, the first major American jazz festival and a model for many future festivals. Using Terrance MacMullen’s writing on whiteness as a philosophical framework, I explore Newport, Rhode Island’s history in relationship to race, considering its origins as a center for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. By the twentieth century, Newport was a recreation center for America’s wealthiest white families, and the roots of the American jazz festival in Newport situate this form of jazz culture as one directed toward producing temporary spaces for white pleasure on the proceeds of Black labor. I contrast the Newport model and some of its offshoots with the Detroit Jazz Festival’s centering of working-class, predominantly Black audiences. Unlike many urban American jazz festivals, the Detroit Jazz Festival draws a large contingent of local residents from one of America’s largest and most concentrated Black urban areas that mixes with the more typical jazz festival audience of predominantly white tourists. Maintaining free admission, a downtown location, and a Labor Day weekend schedule aligns with a culture that identifies labor with local identity. The mixture of the jazz festival format and conceptions of Detroit as a place creates the potential for connections outside the segregated norms of the everyday.
For the past thirty years, social media has been integral to how contemporary classical ensembles made their music valuable. Social media posts provide behind the scenes discussions of rehearsals, analyses of musical works, interviews with composers, and anecdotes about the lives of touring musicians. In the 2000s, such media fed optimistic narratives of musicians as people doing what they loved, in a sense not “working” at all. In contrast with online narratives, musicians explained social media to me as necessary work that secured paid gigs. Contemporary classical music was, musicians felt, in need of some explanation.
My paper places social media in an ethnographic and historical context to consider how musicians circulate value. I argue that musicians use social media to create what Bryan Parkhurst calls “production-tracking use values.” Such use-values are distinguished from other use-values by using less automated production processes and by publicizing details of production. Blog posts that described details of musical structure and Instagram videos of musicians rehearsing displayed the artisanal nature of contemporary classical music. They also reproduced enduring historical forms of explanation, namely the program note. Such displays, however, were always part of an idealized presentation and never showcased all aspects of production. By critically interrogating the musical production process, my paper critically interrogates the construction of musical commodities and points out new directions for Marxist analyses of music.
Session II: 2:15pm-3:45pm
Justin Tremayne Wilson: “Conform to Perform: Opera Singers and the Neoliberal Race to Standardize Aesthetics”
Singers working in the contemporary American opera industry face numerous obstacles on the path to a viable career. Here, I present a snapshot of what it takes to become (and remain) aesthetically competitive in a shrinking labor pool dominated by neoliberal values of branding, optimization, and entrepreneurial self-betterment. I study the lived experiences of opera singers aiming to work in an industry governed by ever-higher and more-codified aesthetic standards; viable singers must look, sound, and act the part of the “ideal laborer” within the American opera industry. Relying on Marx’s theory of alienation, I argue that entry into this labor pool requires near-total self-abnegation in favor of the demands of opera’s donor class, which both governs financing and influences hiring practices.
To construct the definition of “ideal laborer” in this context, I rely on my experience as a working opera singer alongside my own ethnographic surveys and interviews of working singers. First, I outline the neoliberal aesthetic standards that singers must meet in today’s American opera industry regarding visual appeal, sonic beauty, and personal comportment, concluding that the “Hollywoodization” of opera is well underway. Second, I trace how individual singers conform to these rarified standards in pursuit of a career in the American opera industry, ultimately concluding that the status of “ideal laborer” represents an unattainable goal for the average singer.
Despite record ticket sales, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association reported a staggering amount of debt before the 2019 contract negotiations: loans taken out in the 1990s to finance the Symphony Center renovations had grown to nearly $150 million. Their solution? Transition the musicians from their traditional pension plans to a 401k—thereby shifting risk onto the musicians. During the ensuing seven-week strike, members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) gave fourteen free concerts, selectively withholding labor from their financiers while redistributing it to parts of the city that historically have been most marginalized by the exclusionary practices of classical music.
I argue that the “From the Heart of the Orchestra” concert series strategically aestheticized hard work. By giving free concerts as demonstrations of manual labor and embodied endurance, the striking musicians cultivated what I term the “affect of effort”—an intentional staging of strain, discipline, and virtuosity that renders visible (and audible) the corporeal and affective dimensions of musical labor. Patrick Jagoda’s interrogation of difficulty in video games provides a helpful heuristic: I map Jagoda’s three forms of difficulty (mechanical, interpretive, and affective) onto the types of musical labor put on display during the “From the Heart” concerts. These performances marked a critical juncture for conceptualizing classical musicians as workers, wherein one of the symphony’s core functions—the veiling of mass labor within fantasies of collectivity and transcendence—was briefly inverted. In doing so, the musicians materialized the latent tensions between collective bargaining and the bourgeois mythology of artistic autonomy.
Among other morbid symptoms of the ongoing interregnum is a return to one of the twentieth century’s most speculative mythological objects, Freud’s “death drive.” A hundred years after Freud’s initial formulations, death drive now recaptures, in popular imagination and academic theory alike, the lurid emergency of the present omnicrisis: a thick braid of repetition, compulsion, and self-destruction binding individual and collective destiny. Undergirding genocide and ecocide, democracy’s dismantling and neo-fascism’s forward march, the percussive thrum of death drive. But such fatalistic accounts mischaracterize Freud’s intervention, not least by missing what is musical in it. Wrongly conflating death drive with death cult, these narratives of civilizational self-undoing seek to seal a fate that speculative mythologies of music can help open back up.
Nowhere is this truer than on the matter of labor. The psychoanalytic drive is not foremost a matter of death or destruction, but of work: “a measure,” Freud writes in 1915, “of the demand made upon the mind for work [via] its connection with the body.” Here music can provide a remarkable mediating function, grasping a defining contradiction of both capitalism in the longue durée—the capitalist subject’s compulsive, often coerced work on behalf of capital accumulation—and of modern psychic life: the “infinite labor” of unconscious desire, active even during sleep, in pursuit of libidinal satisfaction. As the contemporary world’s cascading emergencies paralyze our best efforts, it may ironically be through music—perpetually caught between its historical-material objectivities and its stubbornly promissory abstractions—that we conceive a more fluent, empowering, even emancipatory understanding of the endless work ahead.
In the nineteenth century, Marx developed a theory of labor under capitalism that has continued to undergird left analyses of the capitalist system into the present. The labor movement, too, is rooted in a certain version of Marx’s theory, which is that labor—rather than the creativity or thrift of capitalists—is what creates “value,” in the capitalist sense of the term. If human labor is where value comes from, then it stands to reason that human workers should be paid and treated fairly; this demand has energized historical labor struggles in almost every sector of the U.S. economy, including music. Scholars like Eric Drott, John Pippen, and Kirsten Carithers have explored our field’s longstanding tendency to separate music from work, and some of the problems and blind spots that this tendency generates. In such a historical context, the growing labor movement in music is interesting precisely because it does call musical work “labor,” in the sense that it is value-producing and deserves remuneration. In this talk, I will explore Marx’s theories of labor in more detail, arguing that the labor movement in the U.S., including in music as well as in the university context, tends to deploy a partial version of his theory while avoiding the more utopian, future-oriented visioning and action that for Marx was really the point of such theorizing. I will suggest that the demand to pay workers fairly cannot constitute the extent of the labor struggle’s analysis or the naming of its end goals. Drawing on recent work by Søren Mau, I try to outline a more fully Marxist appreciation for what is truly valuable about labor, and I suggest some of the ways that applying this expanded understanding might help broaden the political, ethical, and imaginative horizons of labor struggles in both music and in the academy.