Musical Labor Research Articles

Garth Brooks Soundalikes, YouTube Misinformation, and Authenticity Politics

Country musician Garth Brooks has long resisted digital distribution of his recordings, which remain unavailable on most streaming platforms. This artificial scarcity has led audiences to settle for virtually identical recordings performed by cover musicians. Known as soundalikes, these recordings garner hundreds of millions of streams across platforms. On YouTube, uploaders often post soundalikes with misleading titles, causing listeners to mistake soundalikes for original Brooks recordings. This widespread practice inspires users to debate the ethical, aesthetic, and economic implications of soundalikes using YouTube’s comments forum. This article uses text data mining to examine online reception for thirty-seven YouTube videos featuring Brooks and his soundalikes, comprising over 24,000 comments. Alienated from musical labor and absent authoritative paratexts and distribution networks, these listeners compensate by relying upon social media to fill in epistemological gaps and develop a new ethics of listening. Echoing historical discourses on artistic forgery, some listeners invest in exposing deception, posing as style experts whose sometimes erroneous attributions often spill over into negative aesthetic and ethical judgments. Yet others enjoy soundalikes as adequate alternatives, focusing on personal meaning or mimetic craft, thereby eroding the authority of the original recording as a uniquely expressive artifact. Broader user reflections on digital distribution reveal YouTube as a significant site of meaning-making, community formation, and epistemic danger. As deepfakes and other musical deceptions proliferate, this article demonstrates how deregulated social media distribution can destabilize previously straightforward questions of authorship and reshape attitudes toward artistic integrity and just listening habits.

Toward a Dialectical Understanding of North Indian Drumming Traditions: Musical Labor, Dance, and the Folk/Classical Distinction in Banaras

Abstracts: The distinction between “ folk” and “classical” is frequently invoked in discourses about North Indian music. This article investigates drumming traditions in the North Indian city of Banaras (Varanasi) to explore the nature of this distinction. Drawing on historical, ethnographic, and formalist methodologies, it proposes a dialectical approach to the study of drumming in North India. Particular attention is given to the structure of hereditary musical labor, the intertwined history of dancing and drumming, and the relationship between folk and classical drumming traditions in Banaras.

The DIY careers of young classical musicians in neoliberal times

This article seeks to deepen our understanding of the do-it-yourself (DIY) careers of a younger generation of classically trained musicians in the context of the neoliberal transformation of higher music education and music labour markets. Drawing on 46 interviews with white middle-class students and graduates of the three public, state-funded higher music education institutions in Austria, we examine how these artists seek to advance their careers as orchestral musicians, soloists or chamber musicians and manage the entrepreneurialism, competitiveness and precariousness that underpin the classical music labour market. Our study shows that the musicians cultivate an entrepreneurial ethos, but also adopt alternative cultural practices that promote collectivity, solidarity and care for one another. In these processes, the DIY ethos takes on a double meaning: It is adapted by the young musicians to neoliberal rationality, while also being fundamental for initiating, organising and managing small DIY music projects, festivals and cultural initiatives.

Do What You Love? New Music, New Work—After 2020

This article analyzes musical labor and notions of love in relation to gig work with a focus on musicians in new music in New York City. Working in new music as a gig worker entails many skills, many tasks, and many jobs, which hardly guarantee a release from precarity. Meanwhile the neoliberal myth of a “labor of love” propagates the conviction that love and hard work can overcome any challenge, including those posed by racialized and gendered difference. The account of contemporary musical labor I offer concurs with recent critiques of the complicity of new music discourse with neoliberal agendas. Yet I argue that even as contemporary practices of musical work demonstrate how new music is entrepreneurial work embedded in a capitalist system, the everyday experiences of working musicians confound a totalizing account of the neoliberal agenda. Musical work takes place alongside and despite neoliberalism. Based on ethnography and interviews, I argue that the unsettled norms of musical gig work in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore ways in which musical work is more than the perfect manifestation of exploitable “labors of love.”

“Filipino Seekers of Fortune”: Jazz as Labor in 1920s Colonial Asia

ABSTRACT Filipino musicians were critical for the spread of jazz throughout Asia yet their place in histories of the music remains peripheral. I argue that the emergence of the Filipino jazz musician was based on contradictions central to a new imperial jazz economy: the possibilities of jazz as a form of labor in colonial Asia have to be paired with the devastating impact of U.S. imperial policies. Furthermore, the Filipino semimonopoly on musical labor in Asia that brought many Filipinos a sense of political pride was made possible by racialized hierarchies of work that served to undermine claims for Philippine independence.

Synchronization as Musical Labor in Italian Silent Cinemas

Abstract This article examines a series of lawsuits that consumed Italy’s legal establishment between approximately 1924 and 1933. Resulting from a protracted labor dispute between instrumental musicians who worked in cinemas and the exhibitors who employed them, the lawsuits turned on a question of employment law: whether musicians ought to be considered full-time employees—entitled to various benefits and protections against unfair termination—or more precariously situated freelancers whom exhibitors could hire and fire at will. As a consequence of the vagaries of existing Italian labor law and new Fascist legislation governing labor relations, musicians were already at a disadvantage in this dispute. Unexpectedly, their situation was further undermined by the judiciary, as Italy’s highest court made their employee status conditional on the perceived aesthetic value of cinema and its associated music making. That is, musicians had to prove that their musical abilities were integral to the artistic outcome of any given film screening—a tall order in the context of silent cinematic exhibition, where musical accompaniment was materially distinct from the projected film. Precisely because the courts valorized the fusion of music and image, however, the Italian musicians’ lawsuits illuminate a fundamental parameter of cinematic aesthetics—synchronization—and reveal something significant about the nature of film music. Public recognition for effecting music-image synchronization in film conferred symbolic, but also literal, capital; thus I contend that synchronization ought to be understood as a form of musical labor, both in the silent era and beyond.

Staging a ‘real’ masculinity in a ‘fake’ world: creativity, (in)authenticity, and the gendering of musical labour

ABSTRACT A distinction between creativity and commerce as opposing forces is central to discourses surrounding popular music, and this distinction facilitates a gendered hierarchy of valued and devalued forms of musical labour. The practice of singing has typically been coded as feminine and has held a lower status than the masculinized practices of playing an instrument or composing. Accordingly, male pop singers tend to be assessed as inauthentic – and, by extension, insufficiently masculine – by some critics and audiences. In this article, I investigate how entwined notions of creativity and authenticity might shape contemporary pop artists’ representations of masculinity. Through a case study of Justin Timberlake’s music video Say Something (2018), I demonstrate how the showcasing of particular forms of musical labour can function to authenticate constructions of masculinity in accordance with artistic and creative ideals with roots in the Romantic era. My approach to audiovisual analysis merges perspectives from critical musicology and cultural studies, in order to investigate the processes by which ‘real’ masculinities are articulated on multiple levels.

Review essay: Between the Material and the Ephemeral

Review essay: Between the Material and the Ephemeral

Between Cultural Policies, Industry Structures, and the Household: A Feminist Perspective on Digitalization and Musical Careers in Hungary

ABSTRACT This paper examines the ways in which the digitalization of the music industries has impacted the work of musicians locally, in the semi-peripheral country of Hungary. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which the work of musicians is shaped by gender relations. It aims to critique the democratization discourse of the digitalization of musical production by exploring, first, the local policy and industry context of digitalized musical labor, and, secondly, the role of gender relations within the household in the labor and careers of musicians in Hungary.

Affective block and the musical racialisation of Romani sincerity

ABSTRACT This article analyses field research on tambura chordophone traditions among Croatian-, Serbian-, and Romani-Americans to consider diverse performers’ strategies of musical (in)sincerity. These strategies mobilise affective investments of musical labour alongside more directly conscious discursive constructions of ‘Slavs’ and ‘Gypsies’. Developing theories of intensity that distinguish affects from emotions via their gradations, it argues for the importance of null affect (a theoretical absolute zero), examining how musical jokes block affect before musicians draw into the proximities of racially Othered embodiments. In doing so, it demonstrates that musical affect is just as important in its negation and social regulation as in its abundance. The article proposes a synthesis of discourse-analytical and embodied-participatory methods that calls into question affect’s theorised ‘autonomy’ from referentiality. Analysing diverse tambura musicians’ limited capacities and desires to embody one another’s subjectivities musically (and to become them racially), it examines musical affect as a cultural resource, rather than essence, that like discourse is subject to blocking – to constraint and strategy – as much as to excess and abandon. Ethnographic attention to those affected more flatly by music as well as those whom it affects intensely thus illuminates the reciprocal impingements of discourses and feelings of Otherness.

Music Labour of Local Musicians in the Social Life of Križevci, Croatia

Music Labour of Local Musicians in the Social Life of Križevci, Croatia

Music Labour of Local Musicians in the Social Life of Križevci, Croatia

Music Labour of Local Musicians in the Social Life of Križevci, Croatia

Popular Music in the Post Digital Age ed. by Ewa Mazierska, Les Gillon, Ton Rigg

Reviewed by: Popular Music in the Post Digital Age ed. by Ewa Mazierska, Les Gillon, Ton Rigg J. Martin Vest (bio) Popular Music in the Post Digital Age. Edited by Ewa Mazierska, Les Gillon, and Ton Rigg. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 292. Hardcover £103.68. In their introduction to Popular Music in the Post Digital Age: Politics, Economy, Culture and Technology, Mazierska, Gillon, and Rigg define the present “post digital age” not as a stage after digital technologies, but one in which these technologies have become ubiquitous (pp. 2–5). In bringing together these thirteen essays examining post-digital popular music, the editors have created an illuminating cross-section of evolving musical cultures in a number of national and international contexts, primarily in Europe, but with occasional forays beyond. The essays in part one provide snapshots of a post-digital music industry in which longstanding verities of production, marketing, and distribution have been shaken. Galuszka and Wyrzykowska, for example, chart the shifting meaning of “independence” by examining fifty-two Polish record labels, while Kenny Forbes and Waldemar Kuligowski document the persisting (and even increasing) role for live music festivals across Europe. In part two, contributors explore the lives and works of post-digital age musicians themselves, rendering a collective portrait of increasingly precarious musical labor. The theme wends through Mazierska’s and Rigg’s examination of English musicians Peter Hook and Graham Massey; Lars Bröndum’s interviews with contemporary Swedish composers; and Ewa Mazierska’s study of Austrian and Hungarian indie rock bands. Conversely, Chris Inglis’s essay examines European electro-swing, a genre foreign to most Americans, but which encapsulates perfectly the post-digital age’s potential to transcend past, present, and future through digital “sampling” techniques. Finally, part three explores music consumption in the post-digital age and here an important and recurring theme is that of “curation.” Emília Barna argues that music curation services, such as 22tracks, have played a key role in crystallizing new forms of class distinction. Andrew Fry, on the other hand, voices concern that by giving us exactly what (they think) we want, streaming music platforms and their curatorial algorithms will contribute to an impoverished marketplace of ideas. In their introduction, the editors also evoke French music scholar Jacques Attali to argue that the dematerialized, borderless, and fluid nature of music production and consumption in this post-digital age not only mirrors the broader global economy, but also prefigures its incipient transformations (pp. 1–2). In that spirit, many of the collection’s essays offer thought-provoking analyses of post-digital music’s compatibility and complicity with the present and emerging neoliberal dispensation. In Manchester, UK, Kamila Rymajdo finds club owners engaging in high-risk investments in the name of novelty, diversifying their investments across several [End Page 382] ventures and employing volunteer “crowdsourced” labor. Mathew Flynn, on the other hand, looks to media history to distill a “heuristic” for predicting the future of music consumption in the post-digital age. Technologies that facilitate broader playlist choice and “situational control” while also reducing the necessity of skill and knowledge on the part of users, he argues, will carry the day. Paulo Magauddo assesses predictions that blockchain technology will undermine neoliberal currents in the music industry and (smartly) issues a skeptical “not so fast!” The blockchain’s much-trumpeted decentralism, he points out, is already being challenged by the incursion of massive firms such as Spotify, while its potential to make early song-downloaders “shareholders” in the song’s revenues threatens to extend the logic of capitalism even further into the heart of post-digital musical culture. Finally, Michael Huber analyzes the findings of a 2015 survey on musical attitudes and behaviors conducted by the Institute for Music Sociology in Vienna. By examining the answers of young respondents, he is able to offer some well-founded predictions for the future of music consumption. As the American philosopher Yogi Berra once warned, however, “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Not surprisingly, then, contributors’ projections for the future of post-digital music are less consistently illuminating than their analyses of the present, with many opting for a non-committal prediction...

Patronage and Capitalism in the Musical Associations of Late Nineteenth-Century Colonial Manila

The rapid economic growth in the colony beginning in the mid-nineteenth century gave rise to a modernity that transformed the musical mode of production in Manila. A new market comprised of the culturally-supportive elite and middle-class population patronised musical productions. In addition, musicians and other artists formed unions to create an institutionalised representation of themselves corresponding to the larger socio-political and economic forces in the network of production, creating new relations necessary in the existing social formation. Exchanges between the various players of the musical mode of production required matching forces to avoid exploitation, particularly of labour. This article examines three of the more prominent musical associations in the late nineteenth century—Liceo Artistico-Literario, Sociedad de Conciertos Union Artistico-Musical, and Sociedad Musical Filipina de Santa Cecilia—investigating how they advanced music and education and promoted the arts, regulated the practice of music making, responded to the market demand for commoditised music labour, and accelerated modernity in Philippine music during the last decades of Spanish colonial rule. Their patronage represented the continuing feudal and new capitalist systems of managing musical productions and remunerating musical labour, providing a possibility for indigena (island-born native) musicians to accumulate cultural capital and afford them social mobility in the colonial system. Membership in these associations became symbols of prestige, which helped establish social networks among Filipino musicians.

Wet and wobbly harmonies: music and saloon-life in the industrial workers of the world, 1905–1920

ABSTRACTDuring the first fifteen years of its existence, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) gained a reputation for being an exceedingly musical labor organization. Where did this proclivity originate? This article complements and elaborates existing explanations by sourcing the roots of IWW music to the institution that was both historically and contemporaneously integral to working-class culture – namely the saloon. It demonstrates strong and persistent links with the culture of proletariat drinking establishments. First, it investigates the ease with which individuals and songs travelled between the recreational environments of the barroom and activist environments of the IWW. Second, by comparing the values and attitudes associated with the musical cultures of the IWW and the saloon, it demonstrates an enduring compatibility between these two working-class institutions. Finally, it demonstrates the value of these findings for historians of the IWW organization, labor historians, and theorists of social movements.

Music as Feminine Capital in Napoleonic France: Nancy Macdonald’s Musical Upbringing

Abstract This microhistory situates the musical activities of Nancy Macdonald, a French student at Madame Campan’s National Institute for Young Women and Napoleon Bonaparte’s school for daughters of Legion of Honour Recipients, in broader discourses about women and music in Napoleonic France. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of capital, it eschews a simplistic assessment of music as either constraining or liberating young women, by arguing instead that performance operated as a kind of ‘feminine capital’, accrued and then circulated to achieve tangible socio-economic ends. A feminine-capital framework exposes the paradoxes inherent in female music-making and reveals how values about music were enculturated from girlhood to womanhood in France. This approach contributes to recent scholarship that challenges the rigid binaries previously defining women’s musical labour during the Classical era and inserts France into historiographies of women’s musical practices in the early nineteenth century.

Simple Shaker Folk: Appropriation, American Identity, and Appalachian Spring

Research Article| December 01 2018 Simple Shaker Folk: Appropriation, American Identity, and Appalachian Spring David Vanderhamm David Vanderhamm David VanderHamm is a Visiting Teaching Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Denver. He earned his PhD in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he completed his dissertation, “The Social Construction of Virtuosity: Musical Labor and the Valuation of Skill in the Age of Electronic Media.” His research focuses on the meanings of musical labor across multiple genres of US music from the twentieth century to today and on the ongoing role of advertising and commodification in American musical life. David has presented widely at international, national, and regional conferences, including meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Musicological Society, and the Society for American Music. His other publications include “Preserving Heritage, Fostering Change: Accidental Archives in Country Music and Hip-Hop,” coauthored with Mark Katz (Public Historian 37, no. 4), and an entry for “Virtuosity/Virtuoso” in Oxford Bibliographies Online. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2018) 36 (4): 507–526. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0507 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation David Vanderhamm; Simple Shaker Folk: Appropriation, American Identity, and Appalachian Spring. American Music 1 January 2018; 36 (4): 507–526. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0507 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Business, Transnationalism, and Patrimony

This article examines how musicians involved in the government sponsored music scene in Recife, the capital of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, (meta)musically perform different versions of the ‘entrepreneurial self,’ a form of neoliberal subjectivity. Through comparing specific musicians’ practices and narratives, I argue Pernambucan state sponsorship is a mechanism which redefines citizenship on entrepreneurial terms and reinforces structural inequality. As government programs provide new opportunities to formalize and professionalize their labor, musicians face more bureaucratic and socioeconomic challenges that require them to broaden their musical labor to include skills like social media marketing and grant proposal writing. These expectations are difficult enough for middle-class, educated musicians to meet, but even harder for marginalized, lower-class, and racialized citizens to manage. By comparing how three musicians construct themselves as business-oriented, transnational, or patrimonial entrepreneurs, the article makes explicit what similar studies suggest, but often leave implicit: professionalism and entrepreneurialism are increasingly interdependent. Furthermore, while the entrepreneurial self is predicated on autonomy, these musicians' autonomy paradoxically depends on a combination of social networks and state sponsorship. In sum, the article reveals how individuals are creating new subjectivities to adapt to changing economic conditions.

The Paradox of Progress: Jazz, Resistance, and Black Musical Labor in Pittsburgh (1955–1974)

ABSTRACTThis article examines jazz musicians as Black musical laborers in the context of urban redevelopment and the Civil Rights era. I focus specifically on the activities of Local 471: Pittsburgh’s Black Local of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), which was founded in 1908 and merged with its white counterpart, Local 60, in 1966. As labor leaders, Local 471 presidents Carl Arter (1955–1962) and Joseph Westray (1962–1965) used their positions to challenge discriminatory practices in Pittsburgh’s musical workplaces with Westray negotiating the 1965 merger of Locals 471 and 60. I examine how Local 471’s members struggled to both challenge workplace discrimination and maintain autonomy within the union system, actions that were both resultant of and resistant to segregation. When the merged local failed to elect any Black musicians to it executive board in 1970 and again in 1972, the activist group Black Musicians of Pittsburgh (BMOP) was formed to address the lack of Black union representation. The ongoing racial tensions and BMOP’s unsuccessful lawsuit against Local 60-471 presented a central paradox for Black leadership and activism in Pittsburgh’s musical labor as the promises of progress resulted in widespread abandonment of the union by Black musicians in Pittsburgh.

SAY NO SCORE: A LEXICAL IMPROVISATION AFTER BOB OSTERTAG

AbstractMusic that features the interface of notation and improvisation tends to dwell in liminal regions of musical labour. It thus calls much entrenched musical vocabulary into question. The word score is one such example. What seems like a synonym for notation in everyday parlance turns out to be something quite different on closer inspection – more regulatory, yet at the same time more inclusive. This article explores three different meanings of the word score through the lens of composer-improviser Bob Ostertag's 1990s tetralogySay No More: a cut, an index of a game, and a record kept.Say No Moreconsists of a chain of tape pieces and ensemble pieces in which performers Joey Baron, Mark Dresser, Gerry Hemingway and Phil Minton were put in front of a machine-made mirror of themselves … with wacky lenses that distorted the image into something superhuman. In the performances the musicians tried to keep up with their digital reflection, a task at which they could only fail. Although the notation seems to play a minor role in this dynamic, its usage in the score as a whole offers important lessons on what writing might still have to offer composers in the digital era.