Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era by Marianna Ritchey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era by Marianna Ritchey Dale Chapman Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era. By Marianna Ritchey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. [v, 213 p. ISBN 9780226640068 (hardback), $90; ISBN 9780226640235 (paperback), $30; ISBN 9780226640372 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, music examples, index. When I heard that the composer Mason Bates was going to register one of his operas as a nonfungible token (NFT), the story struck me as an archetypal embodiment of the times, on two interrelated fronts: The phenomenon of the NFT (in which blockchain technology is used to exchange unreplicable iterations of digital media) has been invoked as the potential savior of music's financial valuation, allowing undercompensated artists in the era of streaming to achieve the market scarcity specific to the contemporary art world. Meanwhile, Bates, in embracing the technological fetishism of Silicon Valley and the electronic dance music (EDM) world, has been received by classical music institutions as the potential savior of a Western tradition whose obituary is republished on a near-weekly basis (Felix Linsmeier, "Ethereum Voices: Do NFTs Matter for Classical Music?" VAN: An Independent Online Classical Music Magazine, posted 13 January 2022, https://van-magazine.com/mag/nft-classical-music [accessed 26 February 2022]). The story of the Bates NFT entails a narrative of messianic rebirth specific to neoliberal discourse: that a new financial instrument might be the vehicle through which this or that moribund cultural practice or industrial sector becomes unshackled from the earth and permitted to fully become itself. A less rose-tinted critical perspective on the NFT, however, might see it as falling somewhere between a quixotic boondoggle and an alarming multiplier of wealth concentration; similarly, a more skeptical critical perspective on Mason Bates himself might wonder what his ideology of techno-market credulity might be doing to our understanding of a classical music legacy that listeners sometimes see precisely as a refuge from Karl Marx's idea of capitalism's ethos of "creative destruction." The kinds of questions raised by the Mason Bates NFT require the development of a new(er) musicology, a field of critical practice adequate to the demands placed upon it by a formidable set of ideological and political-economic formations. Few scholars in contemporary musicology are as well [End Page 417] placed to achieve this daunting task as Marianna Ritchey, whose new book, Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era, is the culmination of her exciting research on the ways that the longstanding cultural practices of Western classical music have collided with the emergence of the neoliberal regime of flexible accumulation. Ritchey is part of a dynamic cohort of scholars, including Andrea Moore, William Robin, John Pippen, and others, who are interested in the ways that late capitalism has shaped classical institutions, reframed its prevailing ideological assumptions, and variously established or undermined the conditions of possibility for working musicians. One important function of Composing Capital is to register a strategic impatience with contemporary musicology's frequent bracketing of class and political economic analysis, particularly in the context of the New Musicology's otherwise vital critique of gender, race, and sexuality. Outside of musicology, this perspective is by no means new. We might locate it, for instance, in work by Terry Eagleton extending back to the 1990s, or in Thomas Frank's work from the same era, which highlights the utility, for capitalism, of an approach to cultural studies that, in setting aside materialist analysis, permits its subversive rhetorics to be co-opted by capital (see, for instance, Terry Eagleton, "Body Work," in The Terry Eagleton Reader, ed. Stephen Regan [Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998], 157–62, and Thomas Frank, One Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy [New York: Anchor Books, 2001]). For this reason, Ritchey's incisive puncturing of musicology's treatment of cultural difference as an isolated vector of analysis—one too often shorn of its connection with political economy—is important and comes not a moment too soon. To be sure, the point can never be to ignore the way that patriarchal, White supremacist, and heteronormative ideologies and practices enact structural violence; rather, it becomes...