Music in the World: Selected Essays 9780226442426

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Music in the World

Music in the World Selected Essays

T I M OT H Y D. TAY LO R

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978- 0-226- 44225-9

(cloth)

ISBN-13: 978- 0-226- 44239- 6

(paper)

ISBN-13: 978- 0-226- 44242- 6

(e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226442426.001.0001 Chapter 3 was previously published as “The Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of ‘Mechanical Music.’” Ethnomusicology 51 (spring/summer 2007): 281– 305. Reprinted by permission of the Society for Ethnomusicology. An earlier version of chapter 4 was previously published as “The Role of Opera in the Rise of Radio in the U.S.” In Music and the Broadcast Experience: Performance, Production, and Audiences, edited by Christina Baade and James A. Deaville. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Chapter 5 was previously published as “Stravinsky and Others.” AVANT: The Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard 4 (2013), http:// avant.edu.pl/wp - content/uploads/ Timothy-D -Taylor- Stravinsky-and- Others1.pdf. Chapter 6 was previously published as “Les festivals de musiques du monde: La diversité comme genre.” Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie 27 (2014): 49– 63. Chapter 7 was previously published as “Fields, Genres, Brands.” Culture, Theory and Critique 55 (2014): 159–74. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com. Chapter 8 was previously published as “The New Capitalism, UNESCO, and the Reenchantment of Culture.” In Networking the International System: Global Histories of International Organizations, edited by Madeleine Herren. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2014. Reprinted by permission of Springer. Chapter 9 was previously published as “Globalized New Capitalism and the Commodification of Taste.” In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip Bohlman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Taylor, Timothy Dean, author. Title: Music in the world : selected essays / Timothy D. Taylor. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016030085 | ISBN 9780226442259 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226442396 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226442426 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Music—Social aspects. | Music—Economic aspects. | Music and globalization. | World music—History and criticism. | Music trade. | Capitalism. Classification: LCC ML3916 .T4 2017 | DDC 780.9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030085 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Sherry

Contents List of Music Examples ix Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Culture, Capitalism, Globalization, Music 1 1

The Absence of Culture in the Study of Music 9

2

Music and Affect in the West: The First 2,000 Years 26

3

The Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of “Mechanical Music” 50

4

The Role of Opera in the Rise of Radio in the US 74

5

Stravinsky and Others 94

6

World Music Festivals as Spectacles of Genrefication and Diversity 114

7

Fields, Genres, Brands 127

8

Neoliberal Capitalism, UNESCO, and the Reenchantment of Culture 144

9

Globalized Neoliberal Capitalism and the Commodification of Taste 155

10

Valuing Music 174 Notes 201

References 209

Index 233

Music Examples Note: Music examples are available at www.musicintheworld.org. Example 1.1

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Piano Concerto no. 17, K. 453, III

Example 1.2

Mozart: Don Giovanni, overture

Example 1.3

Franz Joseph Haydn: Symphony no. 88, I

Example 1.4

Haydn: Symphony no. 88, III

Example 1.5

Haydn: Symphony no. 88, IV

Example 1.6

“Kondástánc,” played by Kisar Zenekar

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Acknowledgments Since many of these chapters collected here contained acknowledgments in their original form, I won’t recapitulate all of my thanks, except to express my heartfelt gratitude to all those who offered help and advice along the way: interlocutors, friends, colleagues, anonymous readers, and editors. Thanks are also due to various editors and others who requested the chapters included here, as well as to audiences who first heard them as presentations. But a few of these chapters are new. I would like to thank Wim van der Meer and other participants at the International Conference on Cultural Musicology: Premises, Practices, and Prospects at the University of Amsterdam in 2014 for useful comments and queries on an early version of chapter 1. And I would like to thank Jonathan Sterne and Steven Feld for putting me on the path of the value literature, and Steve and Jessica Cattelino for reading a draft of chapter 10, “Valuing Music,” and offering extremely helpful comments. Audiences at conferences at the University of Agder, Norway, the University of Hong Kong, the University of London, and the University of Toronto also provided useful feedback on this chapter. I would like to single out a few individuals, friends, and colleagues, and those who recommended readings or who were kind enough to read something of mine or who served as an interlocutor: Steve Feld, Robert Fink, Lila Ellen Gray, Jocelyne Guilbault, Tamara Levitz, Brent Luvaas, Louise Meintjes, Ana María Ochoa, David Novak, Anthony Seeger, Jonathan Sterne, Martin Stokes, and Bob W. White. xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would also like to thank all those students who have listened to me speak on the various subjects collected here, and those who took classes on particular subjects that some of these chapters represent. Gratitude also must be expressed to the members of the “Anthropology Salon” at UCLA, a great group and resource: Hannah Appel, Andrew Apter, Aomar Boum, Philippe Bourgois, Jessica Cattelino, Akhil Gupta, Laurie Hart, Chris Kelty, Gail Kligman, Purnima Mankekar, Sherry B. Ortner, and Shannon Speed. Thanks also must go to my editor and friend Douglas Mitchell at the University of Chicago Press, who first expressed enthusiasm for this collection. I would also like to thank all of the other good people at the Press who helped with this book: Joseph Claude, Jenni Fry, Ryan Li, Ashley Pierce, and Kyle Wagner. Thanks also go to copy editor Marianne Tatom. Finally, I would like to thank Sherry B. Ortner, my life partner, for her constant inspiration, encouragement, and support. This book is dedicated to her.

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Culture, Capitalism, Globalization, Music This book collects some of my recent writings that are concerned with questions about music in capitalist cultures. I pluralize “cultures” because this book covers a historical span that begins in the late nineteenth– early twentieth centuries and continues to the present, thus encompassing an older, industrial form of capitalism and its transition to the neoliberal capitalism of the past few decades, with resulting shifts in cultural production, dissemination, and consumption. In many respects, this book serves as a companion to Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present (Taylor 2016a). That book provides a broad overview of music and neoliberal capitalism of the past few decades, especially in the US. This collection is probably less comprehensive of neoliberal capitalism, but offers more particulars—about individual musicians, works, issues such as culture, affect, and value—and includes discussions of the production, advertising, dissemination, and consumption of music in capitalist regimes that precede neoliberal capitalism, an industrial capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the finance capitalism of the early twentieth century, and what became known as the “late capitalism” of the mid-twentieth century. This book begins with a consideration not of capitalism or globalization but of culture. For that, we still have no better guide than Clifford Geertz. I and many other graduate students were introduced to Geertz’s work by Judith 1

INTRODUCTION

Becker at the University of Michigan, which, during the period I was there, was the beginning of the crisis of representation in anthropology and, to a lesser extent, ethnomusicology. Much of what was taken to be true, or at least correct, was being challenged by publications such as Marcus and Fischer (1986), Clifford and Marcus (1986), and other works. Culture was seen as a homogenizing concept (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1991), or an explanation for something that stood in for inquiry into social, cultural, and historical particularities. It seems to me, however, that Geertz’s ideas about culture and ethnography still have much to offer. I remember well as a graduate student in historical musicology feeling vaguely but increasingly disappointed that the cultural form that I took to be the most meaningful and powerful—music—was being studied in ways that had nothing to do with its meaning or power. We as graduate students were taught to be concerned with musical form, style, and other such things. “Meaning” came under consideration only if there were a text or plot or program. Geertz’s concern for meaning, however, was central to his thinking. His famous formulation of culture, that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” insists that the study of culture should not be the scientist’s search for law but the interpreter’s search for meaning (Geertz 1973, 5). This concern was, and remains, deeply attractive. Keeping it in mind helps the analyst remember to attempt to think from the perspective of her subjects, and helps move beyond descriptions of what people are doing to analyses of why they believe what they are doing to be meaningful. People are, as Geertz once wrote, “symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking” creatures (Geertz 1973, 140). Symbolic practices such as music are attempts to “provide orientation for an organism which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand” (Geertz 1973, 141). Yet, the various reconsiderations of Geertz’s conception of culture have resulted in some important and useful updates and revisions, and I am in agreement with many of those who have offered them, most of all, unsurprisingly, Sherry B. Ortner (particularly Ortner 1999 and 2006). Ortner’s practice theory–inflected revision of the Geertzian culture concept both politicizes it and introduces the problematic of structure and agency, and is thus an immensely useful theoretical and analytical tool. The Geertzian- derived ideas about culture and meaning comprise one of the main intellectual forces driving all of my work, and I address some of these concepts directly in several essays in this collection. The

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first, chapter 1, “The Absence of Culture in the Study of Music,” revisits Geertz’s classic writings about culture as a web of signification, a position that isn’t always adopted in some studies of music. Chapter 2, “Music and Affect in the West: The First 2,000 Years,” observes that the current interest in affect isn’t that different from Geertz’s concern for meaning, and shows how the understanding of affect in music studies has tended to be ahistorical, assuming that people react emotionally to music the same way and have done so throughout history and across cultures. But even in Western culture, there have been different ways of experiencing music affectively, from the ancient Greeks, who viewed music as a kind of medicinal or mechanical agent that its hearers were helpless to resist, to today’s agential listeners who employ music in complex practices of mood management. Another driving concern of my work is interest in that form of social organization known as capitalism which, today, has become so pervasive that it cannot really be separated from any human endeavor, including the production and consumption (and distribution and advertising and branding and marketing . . .) of music. This is ever truer today, as neoliberal capitalism produces and is produced by new regimes of globalization, financialization, communications and other technologies, and other factors. On cultural production in the earlier, Fordist but post-industrializing capitalism and its transition to late capitalism, as well as this new capitalism’s relationship to cultural production, Theodor Adorno’s work continues to be influential, not least in the study of music. Yet, as important as Adorno remains in musicological circles, he is usually seen as simply that, a musicologist or critic, not as a student of the changing capitalism of the mid-twentieth century. Adorno was one of the best witnesses we have to the transition from an older to a newer form of capitalism, which he usually called “late capitalism,” and the resulting changes in cultural production (see, e.g., Adorno 1987; Horkheimer and Adorno 1990). His study of the culture industries and the changing nature of cultural production and consumption helped identify the transition from an older capitalism to one in which exchange value became paramount, and the true use value of cultural commodities (that they offer trenchant critiques of the society in which they were made) was disappearing, being replaced by false use values of enjoyment and status marking that were really nothing other than exchange values in disguise. Several of the essays in this collection analyze this transition from

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INTRODUCTION

industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism that is more reliant on financialization and new communications technologies. Chapter 3, “The Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of ‘Mechanical Music,’” considers the rise of sound reproduction technologies—in this case, the player piano—in the late nineteenth– early twentieth centuries and how audiences were convinced that purchasing music as a new kind of commodity, as sound, was better than making music themselves. Chapter 4, “The Role of Opera in the Rise of Radio in the US,” shows how a single individual’s love of opera helped develop broadcast technology in the first few decades of the twentieth century. American inventor Lee de Forest’s desire to disseminate his favorite art form to the masses was a common position among social elites in the early twentieth century, when they experienced sometimes- conflicting tensions between desires to differentiate themselves from the masses by sacralizing the culture they consumed, while at the same time attempting to ensure that the masses that encounter high culture through new media such as radio did so properly. And chapter 5, “Stravinsky and Others,” revisits an old question that neither I nor anyone else has been able to answer very well in the past, namely, why is it that nineteenth- century composers, who had fairly easy access to non-Western musics in notation, rarely quoted them? But by the early twentieth century, such quotations had become quite common (in the works of Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, and many others). This chapter argues that the rise of finance capital, as theorized by Rudolf Hilferding in the early twentieth century, marked the ascendance of exchange value over use value. Composers, and everyone else, began to regard other musics, other sounds—other objects—as something that could be exchanged. This new relationship to other music continues most prominently but by no means exclusively through musique concrète in the 1940s and into the rise of digital sampling in the 1980s and after. While Adorno and others employed the term “late capitalism” immediately following World War II, the first major theoretical attempt to chart late capitalism was Ernest Mandel’s often- cited (though, I suspect, little-read) book entitled Late Capitalism (Mandel 1978). This work was brought to the attention of many readers by Fredric Jameson in his enormously influential article “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (first published in 1984, reprinted in 1991), which focused attention on cultural production under late capitalism. Since then, however, most writings on today’s capitalism have coalesced around the term “neoliberal” capitalism, a particularly virulent form that emphasizes deregulation of markets, increased financialization, 4

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increased commodification, an amplified individualism, and much more (see especially Duménil and Lévy 2004; Harvey 2005; and Taylor 2016a). The chapters that are primarily concerned with the post–World War II era address neoliberal capitalism, examining this new financialized, globalized, technologized capitalism from a variety of perspectives. Globalization is a major theme, as it has been in much of my work in the past couple of decades. Many of my arguments over the years have attempted to historicize our globalization, to show that the globe is not interconnected for the first time in our era of globalization, but interconnected in new ways, though with old ideologies (about authenticity, as well as various forms of racism and xenophobia remaining remarkably resilient). This has profound ramifications for cultural production and consumption, as well as representations and appropriations of cultural forms from places far from Western metropoles. Several essays tackle these and related questions. Two chapters are concerned with the rise of “world music,” a category of music that emerged in the 1980s as non-Western popular musics increasingly found their way to Western metropoles. Western radio programmers, retailers, and reviewers weren’t sure how to classify these new sounds coming (mainly) from Africa and Latin America, and so they settled on the term “world music.” Since then, the Western music industry (broadly understood here as a conglomeration of industries including the recording industry, publishing, concert promotion, and more) has attempted to standardize and genericize world music in order to render it manageable, knowable, and emulatable by music industry workers. Chapter 6, “World Music Festivals as Spectacles of Genrefication and Diversity,” argues that today’s world music festivals serve numerous functions, including reducing various aural expressions from around the world to this putatively knowable and manageable “genre” of world music. I argue that the “genre” of world music is not simply a category containing entities of similar style but an ongoing social practice of categorization and containment. It is necessary to commodify difference in a capitalist system, and this tends to intensify at historical moments when regimes of consumption are changing. All of these factors were already in play with the construction of the “world music” market in the 1980s. Festivals maintain and push this process further, for they contribute to the cultural work of putting world music in its (generic) place. Chapter 7, “Fields, Genres, Brands,” further addresses the music industry’s attempts to genericize world music, efforts that are ongoing. 5

INTRODUCTION

World music is not (yet) a genre, though it is nonetheless possible to talk about it as a field of cultural production: there are identifiable forms of capital, such as the types of authenticities musicians are expected to sound and exhibit; and there are identifiable positions available to be taken, most prominently, the position of whether or not to sing in English or another major European language, and the proximity of the musician’s sound to Western popular music. This chapter takes up the theoretical problem of genres and fields: What is the relationship between an industry-imposed genre and a field? How do forms of capital congeal in fields? In today’s neoliberal capitalism, it is clear that the fields of power and economics are increasingly encroaching on all fields of cultural production, to the extent that some genres of music have become brands. The growing realization around the world of the importance of cultural expression, particularly of those cultures that are threatened by Westernization or urbanization or other modernizing forces, has resulted in some protectionist measures. Chapter 8, “Neoliberal Capitalism, UNESCO, and the Reenchantment of Culture,” concerns the growing global interconnectedness and continuing spread of capitalism in the postwar era, which accelerated rapidly with the rise of new communications technologies in the 1980s and after, and led among other things to increasing perceptions of the smallness of the world and the threats posed by modernization to local and indigenous cultural forms such as music. These perceptions eventually gave rise to UNESCO’s creation of the designation “Masterpiece of the Intangible Heritage of Humanity” early in this century; UNESCO now works with many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to preserve intangible cultural heritage. This chapter examines the history and deployment of the “Masterpiece” designation as the central node in a network of organizations dedicated to the preservation of intangible cultural heritage. In particular, I am concerned with how employment of the “Master piece” label has a kind of halo effect that can result in introducing those protected cultural forms to the market. Chapter 9, “Globalized Neoliberal Capitalism and the Commodification of Taste,” interrogates the ubiquity of the term “globalization” as a way of viewing the present and recent past. The term appeared relatively recently, yet it has come to dominate considerations of the present, both in and out of academia, eliding some aspects of other perspectives. This chapter examines what is lost when globalization as an analytical framework becomes dominant. “Globalization” as a perspective and a related body of theory can help us understand how mu6

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sics travel, for example, but is less useful in explaining what happens once world music has traveled and entered the Euro-American music industry in an era of neoliberal capitalism. With the explosion of music available on the Internet and the difficulty of finding what one wants, what emerges, among other things, is the importance of what people in the culture industries call “search”: the means of finding music or other cultural products. The importance of search has resulted in the increasing commodification of taste, in both the form of music supervisors, who choose music for use in films and television programs and who have become increasingly influential in the entertainment industry, and the rise of complex algorithms that help consumers fi nd music to listen to based on their prior purchases or listening habits and those of others. Finally, chapter 10 completes the Geertzian arc by considering the questions of the value of cultural goods. This chapter departs from the common ideas that the labor that produces cultural goods is somehow special, or that cultural goods themselves are special sorts of goods, instead insisting that our focus should be not on making taxonomies of labor or types of goods, but rather on how they are valued. Drawing on anthropological theories of value, some of which I believe are related to Geertz’s focus on meaning, I argue that there are regimes of value in which cultural goods can find themselves, an older regime that emphasizes the exchange value of cultural goods, and, today, a newly significant regime in which the digital distribution of music has given rise to forms of value derived from users’ curation of music as represented in the creation and sharing of playlists through social media and popularity on YouTube. This newer form of value derives from what I am calling, drawing on David Graeber (2001), users’ meaningful action. For the most part, I have resisted the urge to engage in major editing in those items collected here that have been previously published, though there are some minor updates here and there. I have made one systematic change, however: some of the chapters in this book originally used the term “new capitalism” (drawing mainly on Sennett 1998 and 2006) rather than “neoliberal capitalism.” The earlier adoption of “new capitalism” (and before that, “late capitalism”) was a way to avoid what I viewed, and continue to view, as the over- economistic connotations and ahistorical usages of the term “neoliberal.” I am more interested in the interpretation of cultures than the crunching of numbers though, of course, this matters, too; I have no reason to throw out Marx’s conception of base and superstructure, as long as we understand that both are caught up in a complex and dynamic relationship, one of 7

INTRODUCTION

the many things we learned from Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and elsewhere. But “neoliberal” seems to be the term that has gained the most traction, and if I want to participate in conversations about today’s capitalism, I need to employ this term. I hope that these essays, taken together, offer a useful and critical guide through the capitalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and some forms of musical production and consumption therein.

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ONE

The Absence of Culture in the Study of Music Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

KARL MARX, THE

EIGHTEENTH B RUMAIRE OF LOUIS B ONAPARTE

I begin with the famous statement by Karl Marx to make a point not about history but about culture. Few concepts are bandied about with the regularity of that term while at the same time being set aside. While plenty has been written about the overuse of the term “culture” or its limitations (see, e.g., Abu-Lughod 1991; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; and Troulliot 1991), I continue to find it a useful concept. My concern here is the absence, or feeble presence, of it in many studies of music. In the American context, at least, this problem is exacerbated by centuries- old ideologies of individualism (see de Crèvecœur 1981 and de Tocqueville 2003), ideologies that are extremely difficult to overcome. American individualism has fostered the understanding of the world as a congeries of cultures, but normally stops short of using the concept to understand ourselves, except as a means of differentiating ourselves from other (usually ethnicized or racialized) groups. In the American context at least, “culture” has usually come to refer not to the anthropological concept, but, simply, to difference: my culture is different from yours. “Culture” in this sense is thus a concept

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that merely replaces older ideas of race, ethnicity, or blood in American parlance. The elision of culture is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the reception and studies of music, in which individual creators are seen as just that: music is thought to emanate directly from someone’s head. Concepts of genius and talent are too often taken as axiomatic, not as ideologies with specific histories. Musicians lead complex lives (as does everyone), but are reduced to being isolated individuals who emit music, not people with various amounts of different forms of capital, people situated as subjects in different class, gender, generational, racialized, ethnicized (and still other) positions. This sort of focus is one of the challenges facing any field that studies a particular aspect of a culture rather than “culture” (as in anthropology), “society” (as in sociology), or “history” (as in history). Focusing on a single practice, no matter how broad and variable, can lead to a view of its practitioners as nothing other than practitioners; culture can be rendered secondary, if it enters the analysis at all. There is thus a general tendency in many music studies to examine the people who make culture, not how they are made by culture; study of music as (anthropological) culture becomes just the study of music as (nonanthropological) culture. Ethnographies of musicians who are people in a culture too often become just biographies of those musicians. Biographies are useful in and of themselves, of course, but do not always shed light on the cultures that shape musicians and their music.

Culture and Ethnography Revisited Let’s revisit the culture concept as promulgated by its most celebrated and influential proponent of the past half century, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz. I am sure it is not necessary to rehearse Geertz on the culture concept, save to reiterate this famous formulation: culture is “a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” (Geertz 1973, 89). Clear enough, one would think: meaning is our focus, what is meaningful for social actors. The analysis of culture is the study of shared meanings. This sort of analysis was famously characterized by Geertz (drawing on philosopher Gilbert Ryle) as “thick description.” I would like to go 10

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back, briefly, to Geertz’s classic article, for it seems to me that it is too often taken as an advocation for copious description, as if that somehow is an end in itself. But for Geertz, thick description involves the search for what is meaningful for social actors, which makes the analysis of culture the sorting out of “the structures of signification” (Geertz 1973, 9). “Ethnography,” he writes, “is thick description” (Geertz 1973, 9–10), and its proper object of analysis is “the informal logic of everyday life” (Geertz 1973, 17). Geertz then writes: If anthropological interpretation is constructing a reading of what happens, then to divorce it from what happens—from what, in this time or that place, specific people say, what they do, what is done to them, from the whole vast business of the world—is to divorce it from its applications and render it vacant. (Geertz 1973, 18)

Yet, there are plenty of examples of studies of music that serve up this very sort of vacancy. Geertz also admonishes that “anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods  .  .  .); they study in villages” (Geertz 1973, 22; ellipsis and italics in original). That is, the object of analysis is not something concrete, tangible—the goal is the interpretation of the “flow of social discourse” (Geertz 1973, 20). There are, unfortunately, many sorts of inquiries, including those employed by students of music, that avoid the sort of analysis advocated by Geertz. He lists what he calls “escapes,” approaches that have the result of “turning culture into folklore and collecting it, turning it to traits and counting it, turning it into institutions and classifying it, turning it into structures and toying with it.” But I would insist with Geertz that these are escapes (Geertz 1973, 29)—they are not enterprises in search of what is meaningful to particular social actors in particular places and times. And this is what our studies ought to privilege. While it may be recognized that Geertz’s focus was on meaning, signification, it isn’t always as well understood by some just what this means for the study of culture. First, some critiques of the culture concept raise the problem of homogenization, reducing complex and messy social practices to, simply, “culture” (see Abu-Lughod 1991 and Ortner 2006). But, as Sherry B. Ortner points out, culture as the shared practices of a group was only one aspect of Geertz’s conceptualization; the other, as I have emphasized, was concerned with meaning (Ortner 2006). The centrality of meaning in Geertz’s thinking presupposes subjects for whom objects, relationships, practices, events, are meaningful. It is nonetheless true that he did not always focus on individual subjects or questions of agency (see Ortner 1996 and 2006), but that 11

CHAPTER ONE

doesn’t mean that his concept of culture no longer has anything to offer. It must also be remembered that ethnography is actually quite a radical methodology, and a much different one than the conducting of surveys or other sorts of sociological inquiry, or historical inquiry, or philosophical inquiry; the first two are closer to what one could call scientific studies in which the main goal is to attempt to uncover objective social structures and practices (sociology) or the objective historical record as it shapes people’s thoughts and actions, characterizations I do not mean to be negative in any way, for these are all valuable endeavors; and philosophy, which attempts to address itself to transhistorical and transcultural sorts of questions (if indeed there can be any such things). But because ethnography is so comfortably the main methodology of ethnomusicology, I think that it is sometimes easy to forget just how radical it is, for it is less concerned with what is true or objective than with what people believe to be true and objective—what matters to them, and how this mattering, these beliefs, shape thought and practice—the flow of social discourse. Thus, while one can often find strong commonalities between historians’ conceptions of history and anthropologists’ and ethnomusicologists’ conceptions of culture, there can also be dramatic divergences, which can be no more or less enlightening. Actually, I would not even refer to ethnography as a method (that term is probably better reserved to describe fieldwork)— it is a perspective, an interpretive framework that forces us to wonder about somebody else: What is meaningful to them? Why? What kind of lives do they lead? What kind of lives do they lead that makes this music (or whatever practice) meaningful to them? Culture Occluded Some music studies still suffer from their employment of the more scientific and less qualitative approaches by asking questions that are less ethnographic, less thickly descriptive, less about meaning for social actors, and more about imposing “scientific”—including quantitative— questions on what people do and why they do it. Or some get bogged down in the sorts of questions that could best be described as ontological—that is, What is authentic? What is this or that genre? What is an ethnic group? These latter sorts of questions can’t ever be answered; they can only be addressed ethnographically or historically: What is (or was) said and done in the name of authenticity? What is or was said

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and done in the name of this or that genre? What is or was said and done in the name of this or that ethnic group? Other approaches have also ended up pushing culture to the sidelines. The uncritical importation of theories from fields that do not possess a culture concept (or that don’t bother to historicize) is a perennial problem. Perhaps the best example is the widespread popularity of practice theory in some of the music fields, which has yielded much productive research. Some of the most influential practice theorists, however, are sociologists (Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, most prominently), whose object of study is not culture but society. How useful is a practice theory of society if one is interested in culture? What, to be a little more specific, does one learn in Bourdieu’s classic Distinction (Bourdieu 1984) about French culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s (when Bourdieu’s survey data was collected)? Do we learn anything about real people, which one would in an ethnography (even if their names are changed)? It is thus necessary, I would argue, not only to be wary of “applications” of practice theory that render culture vacant, but to culturalize practice theory, as Sherry B. Ortner (Ortner 1996 and 2006) and William Sewell (Sewell 2005) have usefully attempted in some of their work. Another theory that has had the unfortunate and unintended effect of pushing culture to the side, at least in ethnomusicology, was Timothy Rice’s influential promotion of “subject- centered musical ethnography” (Rice 2003), which begins with rehearsing the various problematizations of the culture concept in anthropology and elsewhere. Rice also visits various theorizations of globalization, which foreground the movement of peoples around the world, to advocate our focus on individuals rather than culture (Rice 2003, 152). He then surveys some ideas about the nature of the individual, drawing from Giddens the idea of self-reflexivity (Giddens 1990) to justify greater ethnomusicological attention to the music-making self and the prevalence of selfnarration in the late modern world. Rice is careful in his attempts not simply to abandon the anthropological concept of culture, and does not say that moving the focus from culture to the individual will answer all questions. Nonetheless, the result has all too frequently been simply a revalorization of the musician as individual creator. What I am saying is that Rice’s turn away from culture to focus on individuals has had the unfortunate effect of taking us away from culture, in particular, the Geertizan concept of it that is concerned with what is meaningful for social actors. We should, of course, attend to

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individuals—it would be difficult not to. But we need always to keep in mind that the relationship between individuals and culture is extremely complex. Culture does not “determine” individuals’ thoughts and actions, and cultural forms are not simply products of individuals’ thoughts and actions. All coexist in complex dynamics, which, I believe, are best understood by employing a practice theory that has been politicized and culturalized. Ortner’s updated definition of culture productively imports practice theory thinking: culture consists of “(politically inflected) schemas through which people see and act upon the world and the (politically inflected) subjectivities through which people feel—emotionally, viscerally, sometimes violently—about themselves and the world” (Ortner 2006, 18). A weak or absent culture concept has also, I believe, led to seemingly endless formulations of “music and—” (e.g., music and identity, music and difference, and many more). Linkage between music and something else is a kind of lateral move, instead of a conceptualization that connects music to culture or history, identity (for example) to culture or history, and all three together. The problem of music and identity is particularly salient, for it exploded on the ethno/musicological scene a couple of decades ago, but, as Timothy Rice (2007) has shown, it was never interrogated or treated reflexively (Rice 2007). Identity was treated as natural, a given in the ethnomusicological literature he examined. Yet, identity as a self- conception—and self- construction—is not “natural,” or it is, of course, social, historical, and cultural. Any sort of cultural analysis of music needs to be conducted with the utmost reflexivity so as not to regress to pointless positivism, in which culture is rendered vacant. We must be vigilant. If we are not studying culture, why are we doing what we are doing? What is our music analysis for? Is it necessary to transcribe this or that musical performance? What questions about culture does music or performance analysis help us address? If we get bogged down in what we believe to be knowable through quantifying and scientizing, we may be rich in facts and figures but we will certainly be poor in our understanding of culture and what individual social actors say and do, and why they believe themselves to be saying and doing what they are saying and doing.

Forms Let’s turn to some more concrete examples of how culture shapes the production and understanding of forms in music. That culture plays 14

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such a role should surprise no one. Yet, there are a number of ways that those who attempt to “read” culture out of forms do so that need to be examined but ultimately discarded. The first is the idea of reflection, that music, or literature, or visual art or other forms, “reflect” the society or culture that produced them. This idea, as Raymond Williams points out, enjoyed a long history, stemming from Marxist demands that cultural forms must “reflect” society as it really is. But the idea of reflection found usages outside this framework as a general theory of how society shapes cultural production. Williams critiques the concept nicely: The most damaging consequence of any theory of art as reflection is that, through its persuasive physical metaphor (in which a reflection simply occurs, within the physical properties of light, when an object or movement is brought into relation with a reflective surface—the mirror and then the mind), it succeeds in suppressing the actual work on material—in a final sense, the material social process—which is the making of any art work. By projecting and alienating this material process to “reflection,” the social and material character of artistic activity—of that art-work which is at once “material” and “imaginative”—was suppressed. (Williams 1977, 97; emphasis in original)

Related to the concept of reflection is that of “expression,” as in the idea that musicians and their music are “expressing” their culture. Like “reflection,” this formulation presupposes the idea that musicians and/ or music are somehow separate from their culture, so that they are in a position to “express” it. Yet, many studies of music remain studies of form and style as “expressions” of an individual, all divorced from the cultures, histories, and social worlds that produced them. Or, an individual’s emission of music is taken to be somehow representative or constitutive or reinforcing of her group, which is the sort of functionalist interpretation that Geertz also argued against. Last, there is the notion of homology. This is primarily associated with the Frankfurt School and is usefully summed up by Williams thus: “It extends from a sense of resemblance to one of analogy, in directly observable terms, but it includes also, and more influentially, a sense of corresponding forms or structures, which are necessarily the results of different kinds of analysis” (Williams 1977, 104– 5; emphases in original). The use of homology has become somewhat common in some analyses of music, in large part as a result of the influence of Theodor Adorno. In his hands or those of other skilled interpreters, this approach can sometimes yield convincing results. But, more often, 15

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there is a sense of a mechanical relationship that is being forced by the analyst and is frequently ignorant of history, society, and culture. But First, Culture Again I would argue that much of what passes for analysis in the various fields of music studies is actually a diversion from what ought to be the real business: the analysis of meanings produced in particular cultures in particular places in times. Anything else is an escape, as Geertz wrote. All of the escapes Geertz outlined above are predicated on a separation or division between “art” and “culture,” though to varying degrees. It is thus useful in this critique to revisit another of Geertz’s writings, “Art as a Cultural System,” to attempt to come to an understanding of art in/as culture. Geertz is rightly skeptical of those who believe that technical talk about art is all that is necessary for a complete understanding of it. Rather, one must realize that to study an art form is to explore a sensibility, that such a sensibility is essentially a collective formation, and that the foundations of such a formation are as wide as social existence and as deep, [which] leads away not only from the view that aesthetic power is a grandiloquence for the pleasures of craft.

It also leads away from the functionalist view of art of reinforcing or sustaining social cohesion (Geertz 1983, 99). The way to understand art is semiotically, by apprehending it as a system of meanings common to those who make it and to those in the same culture to whom it communicates: A theory of art is thus at the same time a theory of culture, not an autonomous enterprise. And if it is a semiotic theory of art it must trace the life of signs in society, not in an invented world of dualities, transformations, parallels, and equivalences. (Geertz 1983, 109)

Given Geertz’s concern for meaning, his demand for a semiotic study of art is put in service of a search of meanings that circulate in a culture, not a study of signs in and of themselves, which would only return us textual modes of analysis that still dominate some disciplines, including some of the music fields. Geertz writes: If we are to have a semiotics of art . . . we are going to have to engage in a kind of natural history of signs and symbols, an ethnography of the vehicles of meaning. 16

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Such signs and symbols, such vehicles of meaning, play a role in the life of a society or some part of a society, and it is that which in fact gives them their life. . . . This is not a plea for inductivism  .  .  . but for turning the analytic powers of semiotic theory . . . away from an investigation of signs in abstraction toward an investigation of them in their natural habitat—the common world in which men look, name, listen, and make. (Geertz 1983, 118–19)

But this can be accomplished only if the analyst possesses a robust concept of culture (or of history). Recalling Geertz’s point that anthropologists study not villages but in villages, let’s also remember that they study the culture of a place or people or group or historical period, not simply its manifested forms. Put another way, the French sociologist Nathalie Heinich identifies three generations of the sociological study of art, commencing with the study of art and society, then art in society, and finally, the study of art as society (Heinich 2004), which she appears to advocate. Most studies of music, however, whether Western European classical music or something else, have tended to be studies of what composers have done with forms, not the meanings that its makers and hearers and participants understood. Raymond Williams writes that advocates of formalist analyses put themselves in a position where it can be insisted that the formal composition, the formal structure, of narrative or drama reveals fundamental forms of social relationship, but at a level which can then be taken as determining, with the consequence that different forms of narrative or drama are seen only as variations of a fundamental form, and are explained as the result of internal, “systemic” developments, in a way that makes other kinds of social change, or even their own internal history, as history, irrelevant. (Williams 1981, 143; emphasis in original)

This is a point quite consistent with the reading of Geertz offered here. A Concerto in Late Eighteenth- Century Vienna Let me now offer some examples of what the possession of a more robust culture concept can offer the study of music. For no particular reason, both come from the late eighteenth century, though this was a period of incredible political and cultural foment as the feudal order was being eclipsed or overthrown, sometimes violently, making it easier to attempt to understand what meanings were in circulation and the stakes involved. 17

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I’ll start with an examination of a piano concerto by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. One of the leading “music appreciation” textbooks discusses Mozart’s Concerto no. 17 in G Major, K. 453, third movement, from 1784 (example 1.1). I want to interrogate this analysis, for to read such textbooks ethnographically is a way of understanding them as distillations of what their authors believe to be important to impart to undergraduate non-majors; if these textbooks generally do not attempt to consider questions of signification (except for works with texts), then it cannot be clearer how important formal considerations are in most studies of music. Mozart’s theme-and-variations movement is discussed in several music appreciation textbooks and of course in many scholarly publications, but most base their examination of the work on formalistic/stylistic terms, with formal diagrams and examples of musical notation. Mozart’s concerto movement is a theme and variations that is discussed almost entirely in formalistic terms by this textbook’s authors, employing “a” and “b” formal schematics and many examples of musical notation. This mode of description continues until the fourth variation, when the authors employ more a language of emotions: Variation 4 Woodwinds are replaced by strings, the mode changes to the minor, and the dynamic drops to a mysterious pp. This fascinating variation, with its syncopated melody and its almost ominous-sounding counterpoint, departs farthest from the actual theme, but the original dimensions and cadence structure are easily recognized. In the repeats (a4′ and b 4′), the piano works over this mysterious material more quickly and even more expressively. The variations have gradually been getting more and more profound; only a great composer could have written this fourth variation. But the deepening serious mood of the piece is about to be shattered. (Kerman and Tomlinson 2000, 200)1

Note how this passage relies heavily on pointing out technical information: dynamic markings, formal structure, terms such as “cadence structure.” Just as noteworthy is the reliance on adjectives that don’t necessarily reveal anything about what might really be going on in the music in the ears of Mozart and his listeners in a proper natural history of signs and symbols: “ominous-sounding,” “mysterious,” “fascinating.” Then, in the last paragraph, there is the familiar appeal to the composer’s genius to explain the “mystery” of the passage. Continuing:

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Variation 5 Suddenly a rather comical, loud march variation of the theme is heard in the orchestra—its first forceful statement since the opening of the movement. The solo cannot match anything as emphatic as this. So instead of a varied repeat, it takes an entirely new tack: It catches fresh interest by reintroducing the long-lost original version of the theme. The theme is certainly welcome back, after all the beautiful mystifications it has endured. Section b5′ is extended; there is a slowdown, with a place that Mozart marked for the soloist to improvise a short cadenza. (Kerman and Tomlinson 2000, 200)

(Following this variation, the coda begins and finishes the work with an increase in tempo.) Scholarly treatments of this movement are much the same. The influential musicologist Christoph Wolff writes of strictly formal considerations, after observing that the opening of the melody was warbled by Mozart’s pet bird (a story related in most scholarly and pedagogical treatments of this movement). Then: Variation 4 combines soloistically treated winds with the piano. Variation 5 brings a mode switch (to G minor) and subjects the tune and its accompanimental material to intensive contrapuntal manipulation. Variation 6 reintroduces the orchestral tutti and presents it in juxtaposition with the solo piano. (Wolff 1994, 128)

The noted musicologist of the eighteenth century Wye J. Allanbrook writes of the last movement’s debt to operatic conventions of the time: The wholly new material, the quickened pulse, the layering of voices, entering one after another in parallel thirds, dialoguing with seemingly distant horns and winds, and rising in the joyous rush to a closure—all this recalls the effect of the approaching military band that closes Figaro. It is a translation of buffa finale practice into instrumental terms—and a happy termination for the “dramatic scena” that [eminent musicologist Leonard] Ratner termed the piano concerto. (Allanbrook 1999, 98–99)

Finally, in this brief survey, the discussion by the respected pianist and musicologist Charles Rosen is scarcely less formalistic, though more detailed, observing usefully that “the last variation, half in military style and half a cadenza from the piano—a remarkable conception—leads to the opera buffa coda, within which the main theme of the variations only reappears impertinently after almost half the Presto is over” (Rosen 1972, 226).2

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The question I would ask of all such analyses, however, is not what Mozart is doing, but why? Rosen and the others provide a road map with an occasional historical bonbon but don’t tell us why the sights are worth seeing, why they were meaningful to Mozart’s audiences. Let me attempt to do this. Concluding movements in this era were designed to be fairly light, not taxing to the audience who has been forced to grapple with the complexities of the sonata-allegro form of the first movement (about which more below), or the slow motion of the second movement. Formally, this movement is fairly unusual; Rosen observes that it is “heavily chromatic” (Rosen 1972, 226). This movement behaves in a way comprehensible to listeners in the first few variations, but the fourth variation is in the minor mode, employs syncopations over the barline, and in general constitutes a marked departure from what has gone before. The fifth variation is a triumphant march, followed by a coda that concludes the work with, unusually, an increase in tempo. What is going on? Since I don’t think it is possible to account for the peculiarities of a formal utterance solely by employing formal/stylistic modes of analyses, it is crucial to turn to culture and history, as it is always necessary to do. Scholarly works and textbooks I have seen that consider this work do not mention, or do not perceive the significance of, the fact of the long history of animosity between the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire, who were to be at war only a few years after this concerto was written, a war that was just another entry in the long history of animosity between these two empires. This history allows us to interpret this work in a broader way that forces our attention to historical and cultural realities. In that fourth variation, Mozart employs virtually every musical-semiotic code at his disposal to represent the specter of the duplicitous Turks, who appeared in a number of his works (see Taylor 2007): the minor mode, the syncopation that extends over the barline, the heavy chromaticism making for twisted, contorted, disjunct musical lines signifying these slippery, unpredictable, irrational Others. In his era, this highly conventionalized musical language evolved because of the Austrians’ and Turks’ long history, a language that audiences of the time would have recognized and understood. Once the presence of the Turks is raised, of course, it has to be quashed—enter the Habsburgs, represented by a march, as Rosen rightly notes. Mozart was more than a simple jingoistic partisan, however, and this is still a concerto, so, as Rosen says, Mozart combined the

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march with the soloist’s cadenza. But this is quite unusual. How are we to account for this variation? It seems to me there are two things to consider. First, from the Habsburg perspective, the Turks must be conquered. And in terms of late eighteenth- century conceptions of musical taste, the minor mode needs to be balanced by major. Also, convention gives the soloist a cadenza. But why in this variation? I think Mozart’s music communicates two things at once. One is about defeating the Turks; the other is no less rooted in the culture and history of the time, and this concerns the slow emergence of the autonomous individual, the modern bourgeois subject, out of the web of social relations that had defined it under feudal, precapitalist times, as many scholars of the early modern period have discussed. The point is not simply that Mozart is working out this problem, but that he is working it out with the Habsburg army at hand, almost as if the army is protecting the new modern subject and Enlightenment values from the Ottomans, seen as premodern and undifferentiated—not Enlightenment subjects. So, the Habsburg collective reestablished, the new modern bourgeois subject protected, the Turks vanquished, the concerto concludes, in a section marked “Presto,” faster and more excitedly than ever: victory. The opera buffa music signals celebration by everyone, including the average commoner, who was the member of the class usually represented by opera buffa music, and whom Mozart seems to have been concerned with including in the benefits of Enlightenment thought.3 The Emergence of a Form That was a discussion of a particular movement of a particular composition and how it semiotically registered and communicated meaningful sounds to its contemporary audiences. But sometimes it is the case that, historically, particular forms emerge that perform important cultural work. Such is the case with sonata-allegro form, an instrumental form that emerged in Europe in the late eighteenth century. This is a form that is generally employed as the first movement of a multimovement instrumental work such as a concerto, symphony, string quartet, or sonata. It is easy enough to identify formal precursors to this form—mainly, the minuet and trio—but it is important, crucial, even, in cultural analyses of forms to go beyond histories of forms and ask questions about why particular forms emerged when and where they did. As Raymond Williams notes, “periods of major transition be-

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tween social systems are commonly marked by the emergence of radically new forms, which eventually settle in and come to be shared” (Williams 1977, 189). I have been guided in the following analysis of sonata-allegro form by historian Thomas Laqueur (1990), in which he argues that it was in the late eighteenth century that the modern conception of gender as consisting of two sexes emerged. Prior to this moment, it was thought that there was a single gender, conceptualized as having a feminine pole and a masculine one with a hermaphroditic center. It is difficult to imagine the kind of cultural confusion this shifting conception must have engendered, but we have countless records of how it was treated musically in, I would argue, sonata-allegro form. Struggles over the conception of gender were particularly potent in an era when the modern bourgeois subject was being formed—who was going to have access to this subjectivity, and who was not? Now, as I assume many of my generation and before were taught, in sonata-allegro form, the first theme could be thought of as “masculine,” and the second, “feminine,” a perspective that, as it turns out, has a long history. The character of the themes goes back to the beginning of this form, and if not characterized in expressly feminist terms, is nonetheless clearly feminized. What transpires in sonata-allegro form is that the key of the second theme, independent but harmonically related the first time it is heard, is eventually subordinated to the key of the first theme. Georg Joseph Vogler, for example, writing in 1779, said, “in symphonies there are usually two main themes. First a strong one, which gives the material for thematic development. Second a gentle one, which mediates the heated din and keeps the ear pleasantly diverted” (quoted by Stevens 1983, 280). In 1796, Francesco Galeazzi wrote: The Characteristic Passage or Intermediate Passage is a new idea, which is introduced, for the sake of greater beauty, toward the middle of the first part. This must be gentle, expressive, and tender in almost all kinds of compositions, and must be presented in the same key to which the modulation was made. (quoted by Stevens 1983, 301)

And A. B. Marx, writing in 1845, said: In this pair of themes . . . the main theme is the first one, therefore first and foremost the decisive one in freshness and energy, therefore the one constructed more energetically, more vigorously, more completely—the dominant one and the de22

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cisive one. The subsidiary theme on the other hand  .  .  . serves as contrast, constructed and determined by the preceding, thus by nature necessarily the gentler, cultivated more flexibly than vigorously—the feminine, as it were, to that preceding masculine. In this sense each of the two themes is different and only with the other becomes something higher, more perfect. (quoted by Citron 1993, 135; ellipses in Citron)

And finally, Hugo Riemann wrote in 1888 that “as a rule sonata form is laid out with a strong, characteristic, first theme—the representative of the masculine principle, so to speak—and a contrasting, lyrical, gentle second theme, representing the feminine principle, usually in a different but related tonality” (quoted by Citron 1993, 135). While musicologist Marcia Citron (1993) considers sonata-allegro form as being gendered, she does not mention the profound cultural shift that was taking place at the time of the form’s emergence, the shift from a one-sex to a two-sex conception of gender. Sonata-allegro emerged, I am arguing, as a way of grappling with this new conception of gender; it is not simply “about” gender, it is a working and reworking, and reworking of reworkings, of this new conception of gender and male dominance, and how this dominance would work with women newly conceptualized as gendered opposites. Formalistic approaches ignore or fail to comprehend the importance of these sorts of arguments about culture and history, or they subordinate them. James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, for example, consider the question of a “masculine” first theme and a “feminine” second theme in sonata form in their exhaustive treatment of sonata form, tracing the rise of the gender metaphor to A. B. Marx, quoted above, a notion they say “spread like wildfire” (Hepokoski and Darcy 206, 145). They also note cases in which Marx seems to contradict himself, and offer examples that could not reasonably be characterized as “feminine,” warning, “today one should be cautious in bringing the masculine-feminine stereotype uncritically to works before 1825 or so” (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, 146), thus clearly demonstrating that they fail to understand that sonata form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not simply a musical procedure that could be viewed as possessing themes that could be described employing language of metaphor or “stereotype,” but a musical working out of a profound epistemological shift in Western culture. Sonata-allegro was working out a new conception of gender before it was perceived or theorized as working on gender. Composers in the late eighteenth century seem to have had some 23

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sense of what this powerful form could accomplish in terms of its representation and treatment of gender. The overture to Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), for example, reverses the normal order of themes to begin with the more lyrical, “feminine,” theme, which puts it in the position of dominating the second, more “masculine,” theme. But given the subject of the opera, depicting a serial sexual abuser of women who goes to hell at the end, this makes perfect sense (example 1.2). Or Franz Joseph Haydn’s Symphony no. 88 of the same year, in which the first movement employs a first theme that evokes the nobility to contemporary ears (horns in fifths and thirds), but proceeds to a second theme that isn’t that different in character, as though the reconciliation of opposites here—generalized out from gender—isn’t meant as such, but as though to indicate that the “dominant”—in this case, the nobility’s—and “subordinate”—commoners’—positions aren’t so far apart. Haydn’s Enlightenment argument about equality is amplified in the third movement, the minuet and trio. This minuet, far from being an aristocratic dance, imitates folk music played by a bagpipe, with drones and ornaments. More than that, it uses asymmetrical phrases that are lengths of anything other than the standard eight measures—it would not be possible to dance the aristocratic dance to this minuet (example 1.4); it simply wouldn’t work. Haydn is saying, in so many ways, that the minuet now can belong to the peasantry. Additionally, the final movement employs themes quite like Hungarian folk music (examples 1.5 and 1.6).4 The references to folk music aren’t being used here as local color or as simple rusticisms but serve to buttress the point about the equality, even nobility, of the peasant. (Lest a reference to Hungarian folk music by an Austrian composer sound far-fetched, it’s important to remember that Haydn was employed for many years by the Esterházy family at their remote estate in Hungary.) Sonata-allegro form was thus an important means of treating the reconciliation of opposites in this era, a means that emerged for specific historical reasons—the reconfiguration of conceptions of gender. Other fields of cultural production produced their own modes of reconciliation, such as the “Hegelian dialectic” of thesis-antithesis-synthesis (though this formulation is more properly associated with the previous generation of philosophers, in particular Johann Gottlieb Fichte [1762– 1814]). Once a form concerned with the management of oppositions emerged, it could become generalized, as in the Haydn case, or aestheticized, with composers simply, or primarily, concerned with what they could do with the form as a form. Nonetheless, the form has origins in the Western European cultures in which it emerged, when it provided a 24

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way of working out changing conceptions of gender and selfhood more generally as it settled in and came to be shared.

Conclusions Despite the difficulties and critiques that the culture concept—Geertzian or not—has endured in recent decades, it remains a compelling and useful concept for the study of, well, everything. Its continuing utility outweighs whatever limitations it might be thought to possess, and those limitations are by now very well known, having been addressed by many. Yet, as I have discussed, it is all too common in some music studies to forget or omit or minimize culture. It has become too easy to believe that the music that moves us (whether or not we study that music) does so because of something in the music. But that something is in us, not in a psychological sense, but in the sense that everyone is a member of one culture or another (and many overlapping “little cultures,” to employ a term from Grant McCracken that I still like [McCracken 1997]). Meaning resides not in musical texts or sounds but in us, as members of cultures who share vocabularies of public signs and symbols. To study anything else is an escape.

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Music and Affect in the West: The First 2,000 Years There has been something of an explosion of interest in affect in the past couple of decades, reaching across humanistic fields, the softer and harder social sciences, and into the hard sciences, particularly neuroscience (see Leys 2011).1 I am not aware of a taxonomy of these various affects, but they certainly include studies of trauma (e.g., Bennett 2005 and Thompson 2009), animals (Panksepp 2004), theories derived from Spinoza by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and, following them, by Brian Massumi (2002), geography (e.g., Thrift 2008 on nonrepresentational theory), psychology, neuroscience, and still others, even music (e.g., Thompson and Biddle 2013). The most scientistic of these are the furthest removed from considerations of culture and history, yet some seem to enjoy great influence, seeming to produce a new publication about “music and your brain” almost every day. And other considerations of affect can also occlude culture and history, considerations from the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, and other fields, which frequently offer universalizing treatments of affect. The title perhaps obscures the simple goal of this chapter: to demonstrate that what most of us today take for granted is actually a historical, cultural, and social development. That music and affect—an emotional response or connection to music—have something to do with each other would seem to be obvious. But in many cultures this connection exists in complex ways that might 26

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differ markedly from contemporary assumptions (see, for some examples, Feld 2012 and Seeger 2004). Even if one confines one’s gaze to the West, it is clear that music was used to relieve the tedium of work, to praise god, to embolden warriors, to dance to, to pass the time, for sociality, and much more. The perception that music and affect go together is just one of the many ways that music can be culturally constructed as functional. Music served, and continues to serve, purposes other than the role it plays in mood management for many people in the West today; just because music’s connection to people’s emotions seems to be powerful and obvious doesn’t mean that it is also natural. This is an assumption that needs to be both historicized and deconstructed, and that is the work of this chapter. I will offer this historicization and deconstruction in capsule form, partly because I need to arrive at the main point of the chapter—that the micromanagement of mood through music that most take for granted, and which is largely responsible for the perceptions that music and mood are naturally connected, is a fairly recent development and is far from natural—but also because a history that culturalizes the relationship between music and the emotions doesn’t exist.2 But I want to begin first by reiterating the orientation of this part of this book toward the idea of culture, and in particular toward (updated) Geertzian conceptions of it. Affect, it seems to me, is another way of dealing with meaning, and the current interest shown to affect in the humanities and softer social sciences is, I believe, another way that Geertz’s concern for meaning is being realized, if not always following his many fruitful cues. An intervention such as this seems to be particularly urgent now, when conceptions of affect that are rooted in the social, cultural, and historical are under fire from at least two directions: from neuroscience, which would have us believe that “we” (whoever “we” are) respond to “music” (whatever that is—some cultures don’t have a word for it) in the same affective ways because “our” brains are wired that way (Levitin 2006; Sacks 2007; Storr 1992); and from some corners of the humanities that ignore culture, history, and the social in order to theorize affect drawing on neuroscience or psychology (such as Sedgwick 2003 and Smail 2008). One could argue that even for cultures in which music and affect are not thought to be related, something affective is happening, in our psyches, in our brains. I suppose this is true, just as if we put something in our mouths, we taste it. But taste, like music and its effects, is culturally shaped, and is different from culture to culture and his27

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torically within one culture, otherwise there wouldn’t be more cuisines than there are cultures on the planet. A language one doesn’t understand doesn’t convey meaning, or at least, not those meanings understood by speakers of it. Someone who has never heard, say, Japanese Noh music isn’t going to make sense of it the way a Japanese person would. All of this ought to be almost comically self- evident in today’s era of discourses of multiculturalism, diversity, and the widespread acknowledgment of cultural relativism, yet there are many who nonetheless seem to believe that music affects “our” brains in the same way, regardless of gender, generation, culture, personal tastes, and much more. The relativization of knowledge seems to have led in part to its compartmentalization. Cultural beliefs and practices matter and can be neither set aside nor ignored, yet this is precisely what happens in much of the literature about music and affect, in which historical writings on music and emotion are taken at face value, assuming that ancient Greek or medieval ideas about music and emotion somehow “prove” that there is a natural connection between the two that has existed for millennia and that the connection is the same now as it was then. Even if there has been a connection over long stretches of time, this does not mean that it has always been understood and conceptualized in the same way in every historical period. Ideas about music and emotion are a sort of backwards history in which the “historian” takes current ideology as axiomatic and then finds only those texts that support that position. But this is extremely selective, leaving out all the counterhistories, dissensions, and so forth. This is one of the great lessons from Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s classic The Social Construction of Reality (1967): reality presents itself to us as something that has a long history, but a particular historical trajectory could have begun just before we entered the scene, and we would only believe it to be an older, established, one. The next section thus offers a brief history of music and affect in the West, intended to show just how these understandings and conceptualizations of our reality have changed over time. Finally in this introductory section, a note on terminology. “Affect,” “emotion,” “feeling,” “mood,” are frequently conflated or used interchangeably, so let me sort out here how I will use the terms. Each enjoys technical usages in various specialized literatures, and so I am here following the lead of philosopher Jeanette Bicknell, who parses the terms thus: emotions, she writes, are fundamental, results of evolu-

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tion; feelings or affects “are the subjective experiential aspect of mental states,” that is, “how an emotional state feels to the person experiencing it” (Bicknell 2009, x); and moods are unlike emotions in that they “do not have precise objects,” and are less intense. Nonetheless, my primary concern in this chapter is to historicize the various ways that music and emotions—and affects, feelings, and moods—have been thought to be related in Western culture, and I will not always make much of these distinctions.

A Brief History of Music and Affect in the West In the most general terms, the history of thinking about music and affect can be characterized in three very broad historical stages; all of these ideologies of music and affect are rooted in history, but the older ideologies still persist. The earliest conception of music and affect in the West was a strictly mechanical one, in which music was thought to influence its defenseless listeners; the next model was one of a common language of representation, with composers employing culturally recognized signs of emotions; and the most recent conception, which arose with the idea of the modern agential subject, remains the dominant model, in which listeners simply assume a connection between music and emotion, and, since the advent of recorded audio and in particular portable playback devices, routinely manage their moods through their choice of music. Music and Affect in Early Western History In general, there were two main ideas about how music worked in the ancient world: the first was a Pythagorean idea that the planets and music vibrated at the same frequencies, which was a tenet of the philosophy of the “harmony of the spheres.” Pythagoras and others also thought that particular musical modes were capable of influencing listeners’ moods in particular ways (Garrido and Davidson 2013, 95). This was a kind of simple cause-and- effect, even mechanical, notion of how music was thought to work; people were thought to be helpless to resist its effects. This notion of music and affect does not presume an agential subject, a knowing self through which music must pass before it exercises its effects. Music in this thinking was a kind of drug, which entered into a subject’s ears with predictable effects (this is

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generally known today as the “pharmaceutical model,” after Sloboda 2005). The other main idea, a somewhat similar model known as the “ethos” doctrine, was subscribed to by Plato, who wrote in the Timaeus, likening harmony in music to the movement in people’s souls, that harmony, which has motions akin to the revolutions of our souls, is not regarded by the intelligent votary of the Muses as given by them with a view to irrational pleasure, which is deemed to be the purpose of it in our day, but as meant to correct any discord which may have arisen in the courses of the soul, and to be our ally in bringing her to harmony and agreement with herself, and rhythm too was given by them for the same reason, on account of the irregular and graceless ways which prevail among mankind generally, and to help us against them. (Hamilton and Cairns 1961, 1175)

Because music was thought to have these kinds of direct effects, Plato famously warned against the use of certain modes in The Republic, and admonished more generally: The overseers must be watchful against its insensible corruption. They must throughout be watchful against innovations in music and gymnastics counter to the established order, and to the best of their power guard against them, fearing when anyone says that that song is most regarded among men “which hovers newest on the singer’s lips” [Odyssey i.351], lest it be supposed that the poet means not new songs but a new way of song and is commending this. But we must not praise that sort of thing nor conceive it to be the poet’s meaning. For a change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes. For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions. (Hamilton and Cairns 1961, 665– 66)

Aristotle’s thinking was much the same, writing in The Politics that [W]e must make use of all the harmonies, we are not to use them all in the same manner, but for education use those which improve the character, for listening to others performing use both the activating and the emotion-striving or enthusiastic. Any feeling which comes strongly to some, exists in all others to a greater or lesser degree: pity and fear, for example, but also this “enthusiasm.” This is a kind of excitement which affects some people very strongly. It may arise out of religious music, and it is noticeable that when they have been listening to melodies that have

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an orgiastic effect they are, as it were, set on their feet, as if they had undergone a curative and purifying treatment. And those who feel pity or fear or other emotions must be affected in just the same way to the extent that the emotion comes upon each. To them all comes a pleasant feeling of purgation and relief. In the same way cathartic music brings men an elation which is not at all harmful. (Weiss and Taruskin 2008, 10)

This position carried over into the Middle Ages and beyond, with many authors returning to the ancient Greeks for insights into the workings of music. Sandra Garrido and Jane Davidson write of a medical theory called “Doctrine of the Humors” circulating around the time of Hippocrates (c. 400 BC). The balance or imbalance of four bodily fluids of humors determined mental health, and music could affect this balance; Galen or Galenus held a similar theory (Garrido and Davidson 2013). This theory also lasted for centuries. Aristotle’s and other ancient Greek beliefs about music were promulgated by Boethius (c. 480– 524 or 525), among others, who wrote, for example, in Fundamentals of Music that A lascivious mind takes pleasure in the more lascivious modes, and is often softened and corrupted by listening to them. Contrariwise, a sterner mind finds joy in the more stirring modes and is braced by them. This is why the musical modes are named after certain peoples, such as the Lydian and Phrygian; the mode takes the name of the nation that delights in it. For a people takes pleasure in modes resembling its own character, nor can it be that the soft should be joined to and delight the hard, or the hard delight the soft, but, as I have said, it is congruity which causes love and delight. . . . Discipline has no more open pathway to the mind than through the ear; when rhythms and modes gain access to the mind by this path, it is evident that they affect it and cause it to conform to their nature. One observes this among the nations. Ruder peoples delight in the harsher modes of the Thracians, civilized peoples in more restrained modes. (Treitler 1998, 138–39)

Cassiodorus, another important medical writer on music and affect, wrote in a letter to Boethius of how music can change the heart: Harmful melancholy he turns to pleasure; he weakens swelling rage; he makes bloodthirsty cruelty kindly, arouses sleepily sloth from its torpor, restores to the seedless their wholesome rest, recalls lust- corrupted chastity to its moral resolve,

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and heals boredom of spirit which is always the enemy of good thoughts. (quoted by Garrido and Davidson 2013, 98)

Writings throughout the Middle Ages considered the healing properties of music, building on and moving away from Greek notions of music to advocate music as a kind of prescription for what ailed patients. In the early Christian church, the perceived power of music was frequently justified to bring congregants’ attention to God, as St. Basil (329 or 330–379) wrote in the fourth century in his Homily on the First Psalm, employing metaphorically the “pharmaceutical model”: For when the Holy Spirit saw that mankind was ill-inclined toward virtue and that we were heedless of the righteous life because of our inclination to pleasure, what did he do? He blended the delight of melody with doctrine in order that through the pleasantness and softness of the sound we might unawares receive what was useful in the words, according to the practice of wise physicians, who, when they give the more bitter draughts to the sick, often smear the rim of the cup with honey. For this purpose these harmonious melodies of the Psalms have been designed for us, that those who are of boyish age or wholly youthful in their character, while in appearance they sing, may in reality be educating their souls. For hardly a single one of the many, and even of the indolent, has gone away retaining in his memory any precept of the apostles or of the prophets, but the oracles of the Psalms they both sing at home and disseminate in the marketplace. And if somewhere one who rages like a wild beast from excessive anger falls under the spell of the psalm, he straightaway departs, with the fierceness of his soul calmed by the melody. (Treitler 1998, 121–22)3

This idea of music as having the power to affect people directly in ways that they were helpless to resist continued for centuries. Aegidius of Zamora, in Ars Musica, published in the thirteenth century, wrote: Music stirs feeling, stimulates the senses, and animates warriors; indeed the more fierce the sound, the braver the soul in battle. Music gladdens the sorrowful, and it strikes fear in the guilty when the trumpet of the enemy sounds in their ears. Music lightens the labors of shepherds and of others, and braces those who languish; it calms agitated souls, banishes care and anxiety, and restrains and curbs violence. . . . [I]t casts out evil spirits from the body, banishing them by a certain miraculous and hidden divine power. (Treitler 1998, 248)

All of these theories, whether astronomical or medical, are predicated on the notion that music, not individuals, possesses power, and that individuals are helpless when exposed to it. 32

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Music and Affect in the Early Modern Era The rise of tonality as the dominant musical language of Western composers for several centuries constitutes an important development in the early modern period. Tonality grew out of existing musical systems and procedures (about which there is ample discussion in the musicological and music theoretical literatures; see for example Besseler 1974; Crocker 1962; Dahlhaus 1990; Judd 1998; Lowinsky 1961; Meier 1988; Randel 1971; and Rivera 1979), but it arose for particular cultural and historical reasons—it was, as I have written elsewhere, a particularly potent system for establishing centers and margins—managing modern subjects and their others—and as such should be seen in part as registering European colonial attitudes and ideologies (Taylor 2007). Western Europeans needed to reorient themselves—to remap themselves, literally and figuratively—in a cosmos in which there was a New World. This new musical system still needed to be invested with meaning as a system of signs, however: it began as a system of signs, but what did they signify? How did this new musical system come to be seen as one that could convey meaning, represent affect, in the way that it did, and still does? Tonality remains the dominant musical language in the West and, now, beyond, as the popular music of the West travels. Its affective effects have become so naturalized that to imagine otherwise has become extremely difficult. There is virtually no literature that discusses just how tonal music became the complex and subtle affective communication system that it did. Conferring meaning on any new communication system is a massive task, and usually fails; people tend to apprehend new systems of signification through the vantage point of the one they are most familiar with. Artists who attempt to devise a new language for themselves have found few followers historically. The only way that modes and many other maneuvers employed in tonal music can be thought to have a link to something affective is through practice—practice with texts or drama or dance that imparted meanings to sounds through association before tonality was a system of signifiers in its own right. In the history of Western European music, the maturation of tonality was accompanied by serious and contentious debates about the role of music in the support of texts (instrumental music being a minor part of what composers did in this era). These debates coalesced around two positions in the early seventeenth century, the prima prattica [first practice] and the seconda prattica [second practice]. In the former, the text 33

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was seen as subservient to the music; in the latter, the opposite. Claudio Monteverdi (c. 1547–1643) characterized the seconda prattica thus: “‘Second practice’ . . . is that style which is chiefly concerned with the perfection of the setting, that is, in which harmony does not rule but it is ruled, and where the words are mistress of the harmony” (Weiss and Taruskin 2008, 146). Giulio Cesare Monteverdi, in a writing on his brother’s compositional technique from 1607, uses the same metaphor of harmony serving as a mistress to the words, and quotes Plato in support of his argument: “For only melody, turning the mind away from all things whatsoever that distract, reduces the mind to itself” (Treitler 1998, 542). Monteverdi frère takes this to mean, this time invoking Italian music theorist Gioseffo Zarlino’s Istituzioni armoniche—“If we take harmony absolute, without adding to it anything else, it will have no power to produce any extrinsic effect,” and, “in a certain way, it intrinsically prepares for and disposes to joy or sadness, but it does not on this account lead to the expression of any extrinsic effect” (Treitler 1998, 542)—to argue for the importance of words over harmony. Musicologists usually take this debate to be about what is more important, the music or the words, a hoary musicological problem. But it was about much more than that. I would argue that the rise of the seconda prattica was a concerted effort by composers to make this new musical system into a signifying system, and their solution was to imbue it with the denotative power of language. Subordinating music to language was not, in fact, lessening or deprioritizing music, but investing it with the power to represent and evoke affects that were drawn from words in song texts and opera and ballet plots. With the establishment of tonality as the dominant musical language in the early seventeenth century and the investment of it with a system of affective significations derived mainly from language, the next development in Western European culture was to begin to codify and classify these means of representation, an activity that was part of a larger project in Western European culture in this period of classification and organization, as discussed by Michel Foucault, two activities that were central to the Classical episteme as he saw it (Foucault 1970). Affects were classified in philosophical and medical treatises, and musical means of representing those affects were haggled over by composers. Jean-Philippe Rameau, writing in his Treatise on Harmony (1722), said that “harmony may unquestionably excite different passions in us depending on the chords that are used. There are chords which are sad, languishing, tender, pleasant, gay, and surprising. There are also certain progressions of chords which express the same passions” (Treit34

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ler 1998, 694). There is nothing intrinsic in these chords that conveys these affects; Rameau is writing about a musical signifying system that had already been naturalized through decades of use. If affective meanings were initially assigned to tonal harmony, as I am arguing, they found their way to other aspects of tonal musical organization. Composer and music theorist Johann Mattheson wrote in The Complete Music Director (1739): So since the true goal of all melody can only be a type of diversion of the hearing through which the passions of the soul are stirred, no one will accomplish this goal who is not intent upon it, who is not himself moved, and who scarcely thinks of a passion at all, unless it were of the sort that emerges involuntarily. But if he is moved in a nobler manner and also desires to move others with harmony, then he must know how to express sincerely all of the emotions of the heart merely through the selected sounds themselves and their skillful combination, without words, in a way that the auditor might fully grasp and clearly comprehend the impetus, the sense, the meaning, and the expression, as well as all the pertaining divisions and caesuras, if it were an actual narration. Then what a joy it is! Much more art and a more powerful imagination is required if one wants to achieve this without, rather than with, words.4

Mattheson continues by referring to a number of instrumental genres: Now one would scarcely believe that the affections would have to be as greatly differentiated even in little, disesteemed dance melodies, as light and shadow can be. I give only one illustration of this, e.g., the affect is a good bit more sublime and stately in a chaconne than in a passacaglia. The affection of a courante is directed toward a tender longing. I am not speaking of an Italian violin corrente. A dogged seriousness is the only thing encountered in a sarabande. The purpose is pomp and conceit in an entrée, and pleasant joking in a rigadoun. The aim is contentment and pleasantness in a bourée, liveliness in a rondeau, vacillation and instability in a passepied, ardor and passion in a gigue, exulting or unrestrained joy in a gavotte, temperate diversion in a minuet, etc. (in Treitler 1998, 698; emphasis in original)

The aesthetic position of representing an emotion in music or another art was generally known as the Doctrine of the Affections, which held that music was a language of emotion that composers could wield to communicate emotions to listeners through performers. This was thought of as an abstract, signifying language, a system of musical codes that needed to be learned by musicians and listeners alike. The composers’ own emotions were not represented, nor were the performers’, though they were recognized as representations of real emotions. 35

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This mode of the representation of affect required no subjective participation by anyone (Rowell 1983, 112). These and other ideas about music and affect in this period led to a number of writings about how these representations work and could best be conceptualized, as imitation, “excitement,” or some other modality. Rousseau’s Dictionary of Music (1767), under “Imitation,” captures this idea of representation. He first compares music to painting, as many did in this era, but then goes on to enumerate the special properties of music; silence can give the effect of noise, and vice versa: But music acts more intimately upon us in exciting, by one sense, affections similar to those which may be excited by another; and, as the connection cannot be sensible unless the impression is strong, so painting, stript of that force, cannot render to music the imitations which that draws from it. . . .

Rousseau then writes of representational powers of the musician, concluding that “he will not represent these things directly; but he will excite in the soul the same movements which we feel in seeing them” (Weiss and Taruskin 2008, 241). Elsewhere, in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, Which Treats of Melody and Musical Imitation (c. 1760), Rousseau wrote: As much as one might want to consider sounds only in terms of the shock that they excite in our nerves, this would not touch the true principle of music, nor its power over men’s hearts. The sounds of a melody do not affect us merely as sounds, but as signs of our affections, of our feelings. It is thus that they excite in us the emotions which they express, whose image we recognize in them. (Treitler 1998, 950)

Author and philosopher Johann Jakob Engel’s On Painting in Music (1780) also views music and effects as separate, writing that he does not believe that music can “imitate” (i.e., depict) something real, an “external object”; rather, the composer imitates “the impression that this object tends to make on the soul” (Treitler 1998, 956). And, “all representations of the passions in the soul are inseparably bound up with certain corresponding movements in the nervous system, and are maintained and strengthened by the perceptions of these movements” (Treitler 1998, 958), something of the medicalized view adapted from the ancient Greeks. Engel thought that music paints or imitates the inner feelings of the soul by choosing “tones that have a certain effect on the nerves, which is similar to the impression of a given feeling” (Treitler 1998, 958). 36

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The job of composers in this era was to match affect to music, and to do so, they had to be aware of the quality of affect. Composer and theorist Johann Philipp Kirnberger wrote in The Art of Strict Musical Composition (1776): Each passion has its own degrees of strength and, if I may say so, its own deeper or shallower character. Joy, for example, can be solemn and almost exalted; it can be overwhelming, but also leaping and frolicsome. Joy can have these and even more levels and nuances, and such is the case with the other passions as well. Above all, the composer must have a definite impression of the particular passion that he has to portray and then choose a more ponderous or lighter meter depending upon whether the affect in its particular nuance requires one or the other. (Treitler 1998, 777)

The job of performers was to communicate affect as represented by the composer. Daniel Gottlob Türk wrote in School of Clavier Playing (1789) that “whoever performs a composition so that its intrinsic affect (character, etc.), even in every single passage, is most faithfully expressed (made perceptible) and that the tones become, so to speak, a language of feelings, of this person it is said that he is a good executant” (Treitler 1998, 876). These writings are all concerned with the proper representation, however conceptualized, of an affective state. Affect as Personal Experience With the rise of the modern agential subject, a new phase in Western modernity in the very late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries emerged; Foucault calls the period beginning 1790–1810 the “modern age” (Foucault 1989, 30). Composers as modern bourgeois subjects began to believe themselves to be able to represent their own emotions in music, and sought to devise new technical ways of accomplishing this. In the very late eighteenth century, these ideas began to be registered in writings about music. Heinrich Christoph Koch, in his Introductory Essay on Composition (1782–93), speaking metaphorically on the soloist in a concerto expressing his feelings and conversing with the rest of the orchestra, wrote: The expression of feeling by the solo player is like a monologue in passionate tones, in which the solo player is, as it were, communing with himself; nothing external has the slightest influence on the expression of his feeling. . . . There is a passionate dialogue between the concerto player and the accompanying orchestra. He 37

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expresses his feelings to the orchestra, and through short interspersed phrases it signals to him sometimes approval, sometimes acceptance of his expression, as it were. (Treitler 1998, 816)

The soloist here is conceptualized as a modern bourgeois subject, an agent in charge of his own feelings (see McClary 1987). It is possible to locate some introspective moments in Mozart’s music, particularly some slow movements, that are attempts to represent his own emotions, but it wasn’t until a later generation of composers that this became possible, even routine. Theodor Adorno once wrote of Beethoven’s “revolutionary achievement—the discovery of subjectivity as a constitutive category within the structure of music itself” (Adorno 1994, 359); Adorno later refers to Beethoven’s introduction of “subjective expression as a basic element of music” (Adorno 1994, 362). In other words, Adorno credits Beethoven with devising ways of composing music that could represent his own subjectivity. None of this is to say that composers were always expressing their own emotional states in their works, but they were drawing on them, whether or not their representations were supposed to be of their own emotions. Beethoven’s “discovery” became of course the basis of Romanticism in music, represented in works from Robert Schumann to Hector Berlioz to Frédéric Chopin to Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner, into the twentieth century and beyond. There is no need to investigate questions of music and affect in the rest of the nineteenth century and after, for this is the ideology of affect that is still current, and perhaps best articulated by Robert Schumann, who once wrote, “I am affected by everything that goes on in the world—politics, literature, people—I think it over in my own way, and then I long to express my feelings in music” (Schonberg 1997, 179). Simply put, the Romantic conception of affect is that composers draw on their own affective experiences to represent affects in works, which communicate that affect to audiences who can relate to that affective experience. And, through the use of recording technologies of various kinds, listeners can manage their own affective states and desires. As evidence of the power and dominance of this modern ideology of affect as personal expression, there were some famous dissenters, such as Erik Satie, but particularly Igor Stravinsky, who famously wrote in his autobiography in 1935: I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, or psychological mood, a phenom38

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enon of nature, etc. . . . Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. (Stravinsky 1936, 53; emphases and ellipsis in original)

Such notions were mainly attempts to move beyond the dominant Romantic ideology and appear to be novel, but they were also partly the result of the prevailing scientific objectivism of the age. But the Romantic notion of the emotional power of music has remained hegemonic, the dominant discourse, so much so that there is today a significant cottage industry of psychological, philosophical, neuroscientific, and other studies that attempt in various ways to understand how music expresses or communicates or conveys emotion (see Juslin and Sloboda 2010 for a collection in addition to those sources cited early in this chapter).

Sound Reproduction Technologies and Affect Once the Romantic notion of music and affect became the dominant ideology for the relationship between music and affect, sound reproduction technologies that began to appear in the late nineteenth century could themselves play powerful roles in people’s conception and perception of music and affect. Technologies, especially new ones, can complicate perceptions of musical affect, even create the idea of the communication of affect. The mystery, the cachet, the popularity surrounding a new sound reproduction technology, can add to perceptions that it can, somehow, communicate affect through music more readily or accurately or vividly than previous technologies. And the social excitement around a new technology can masquerade as, or amplify, perceptions of affect. The history of sound reproduction technologies is riddled with comments about how this or that sound reproduction device is entirely lifelike, though listeners a generation later would, and usually did, find such claims to be preposterous, believing their sound reproduction technologies to be the best ever. In 1924, the year that radio as a social and cultural force really began to take off in the US, Helen Keller recounted in a letter to the New York Times the thrill of feeling Beethoven’s music through radio speakers: I have the joy of being able to tell you that, though deaf and blind, I spent a glorious hour last night listening over the radio to Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony.” I do not mean to say that I “heard” the music in the sense that other people heard it; 39

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and I do not know whether I can make you understand how it was possible for me to derive pleasure from the symphony. It was a great surprise to myself. I had been reading in my magazine for the blind of the happiness that the radio was bringing to the sightless everywhere. I was delighted to know that the blind had gained a new source of enjoyment; but I did not dream that I could have any part in their joy. Last night, when the family was listening to your wonderful rendering of the immortal symphony some one suggested that I put my hand on the receiver and see if I could get any of the vibrations. He unscrewed the cap, and I lightly touched the sensitive diaphragm. What was my amazement to discover that I could feel, not only the vibrations, but also the impassioned rhythm, the throb and urge of the music! The intertwined and intermingling vibrations from different instruments enchanted me. I could actually distinguish the cornets, the roll of the drums, deeptoned violas and violins singing in exquisite unison. How the lovely speech of the violins flowed and flowed over the deepest tones of the other instruments! When the human voices leaped up thrilling from the surge of harmony, I recognized them instantly as voices. I felt the chorus grow more exultant, more ecstatic, upcurving swift and flame-like, until my heart almost stood still. The women’s voices seemed an embodiment of all the angelic voices rushing in a harmonious flood of beautiful and inspiring sound. The great chorus throbbed against my fingers with poignant pause and flow. Then all the instruments and voices together burst forth—an ocean of heavenly vibration—and died away like winds when the atom is spent, ending in a delicate shower of sweet notes. Of course, this was not “hearing,” but I do know that the tones and harmonies conveyed to me moods of great beauty and majesty. I also sensed, or thought I did, the tender sounds of nature that sang into my hand—swaying reeds and winds and murmur of streams. I have never been so enraptured before by a multitude of tone-vibrations. As I listened, with darkness and melody, shadow and sound filling all the room, I could not help remembering that the great composer who poured forth such a flood of sweetness into the world was deaf like myself. I marveled at the power of his quenchless spirit by which out of his pain he wrought such joy for others—and there I sat, feeling with my hand the magnificent symphony which broke like the sea upon the silent shores of his soul and mine. (reprinted in Taylor, Katz, and Grajeda 2012, 271–72)

I quote this at length to show the many and complex emotional relationships Keller formed with this broadcast. Her reaction would have been just as possible through putting her hands on phonograph speakers, but the social excitement around radio in this era, about how radio was capable of uniting Americans as a people, and the fact that this was a live broadcast (as were most in this period) meant that Keller could 40

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participate in this broadcast performance with the musicians and other listeners, believing herself to be receiving the affect Beethoven wrote into his music and conveyed by the performance broadcast by radio. In 1927, a 52-year-old cook in Vienna fell in love with a radio musician. She committed suicide “because of her failure either to see or to receive letters from an ethereal musician whose broadcast music and enthralled her” (“The First Suicide for Love of a Broadcast Artist” 1927, 408). Like this pitiable Viennese woman, many early listeners to radio believed that radio singers were singing directly to them, for example (see Taylor 2004b and Taylor, Katz, and Grajeda 2012). Crooning, a new singing style that emerged in the 1920s that was thought to be incredibly intimate, was facilitated by the electrical microphone. The first crooners—Rudy Vallée, Russ Columbo, and others—quickly became sex symbols, admired by men and women alike but especially, it was thought, by women. The radio press solicited essays from listeners on subjects such as who listeners’ favorite radio artist was, why listeners liked Vallée, and more. One winner, a woman from Buffalo, wrote in 1930: Rudy is beloved alike by matron and maid. To the flapper he represents the hero of her dreams. The matron, while listening to Rudy croon, lives over again the days of her own courtship. Personally, I do not believe the question of age enters into the matter at all. His voice is age-less and age- old, and the embodiment of all the romantic longings of all women—be they sixteen or sixty. . . . But he may be handsome, young, boyish; he may play the saxophone in a manner to bring envy to the heart of the Angel Gabriel himself, but the greatest lure of Rudy for me lies in his singing. His voice in itself is nothing to brag about—pleasant enough, but not more so than dozens of others—slightly—no, more than slightly— decidedly nasal, but none the less fascinating. What then, is it which causes us “hysterical women” as we are termed, to hang on his every note? And echo answers, what? The solution of this problem lies in the fact that he is a clever youngster—he knows how to use that voice. He knows that every woman likes to feel that he is singing just to her—and so he sings to every woman as an individual. The sophisticated man understands how to bring women to his feet and uses all his cleverness to do so. Rudy makes no effort—he doesn’t even know what it’s all about, but he accomplishes the same result out of his sheer naiveté. He knows we like to be sung to, and so he sings to us. Women feel this inherent decency and character of the boy, and love him for it. With the exception of one other, who must remain nameless, I would rather listen to Rudy than to any other personality on the air or screen, in spite of the fact that as a real singer he simply isn’t—and there’s a hundred million others like me. (“Rudy Vallee and Jessica Dragonette Lauded in Prize Letters” 1930, 36) 41

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Sound reproduction technologies bought with them conceptions of the “live” event and concerns over the loss of the “aura” (Benjamin 1969) of recorded or broadcast performances. Affective experiences can be heightened when one hears a favorite performer live rather than on the recording. Or such experiences can fail to live up to the recording. After the player piano, radio, and phonograph in the early twentieth century, subsequent music reproduction technologies were no less influential than radio in shaping listeners’ emotional connections and reactions to music. The rise of the Sony Walkman in the early 1980s, and other portable audio devices later, contributed to the rise of ubiquity of audio in everyday life (see Kassabian 2013). This had been possible before—even some early radios were portable in the 1920s, and the celebrated rise of the transistor made the miniaturization of radios possible in the 1960s. But before the rise of neoliberal capitalism and the culture it shaped, a culture in which the “care of the self” has become increasingly important and common, employing radios to listen to one’s private music in public wasn’t culturally acceptable, or possible. It simply would not have occurred to most people to tune in to their radios and tune out the rest of the world while with the rest of the world in public. Transistor radios had a tiny jack for a little earbud, but this was less for listening in public and more for listening so as not to disturb others, or to hide from one’s parents; I have vague memories of listening to Detroit Tigers baseball games under the covers at night when I was a boy. It is thus important to remember that listening to one’s private music in public was technologically possible before the 1980s, but it wasn’t socially and culturally possible—and acceptable—until the 1980s with the neoliberal retreat from the public (see Taylor 2016a). Since then, headphones have developed in ways that are meant to enhance one’s listening experience, not necessarily in terms of greater fidelity, but by creating a sense of greater intimacy, greater closeness, to one’s chosen music. Headphones that cover the entire ear envelop the listener; earbuds actually enter the ear canal, bringing music literally inside the listener’s head. When a major technology arrives that generates excitement across a wide social spectrum, that excitement can play a potent role in shaping people’s relationships to music, heightening, even creating, affects that might not have been there otherwise. I would aver, in fact, that every new sound reproduction technology has been greeted with a new structure of feeling related to the power of technology, the particular technology of a particular time, and the changing relationship to mu-

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sic that that technology was thought to engender, and that affect has always been implicated on those processes, as we have seen.

The Micromanagement of Mood Today The rise of the Sony Walkman in the early 1980s, combined with the availability and ubiquity of small and cheap radios that one could place anywhere in the house or apartment, helped usher in yet a new phase in the micromanagement of mood through music. Especially with iPods, and then smartphones that can house thousands of recordings, or employ streaming software to hear millions, music became practically ubiquitous. In a study from the early 1990s that considered everyday people’s relationship to music, Susan D. Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, and Charles Keil and others (1993) interviewed a number of listeners, who made clear the ways that they used music to manage their moods. One of their interlocutors, when asked if there were times when listening to music was particularly powerful, replied: I would have to say if I’m in an upbeat mood, and upbeat music is on, it doesn’t really make any difference, I’m still in a good mood. If I’m in a sad mood, or if I’m in a bitchy mood, or just . . . you know . . . this bluesy music that comes on . . . that’s going to bring me down. Whereas, if I’m in a bitchy mood, and good music comes on it’s not going to make a bit of difference either. I’m going to enjoy my bitch, so just leave me alone, because I earned this here self-pity period, and I’m going to have it and when it’s over with . . . why . . . then everything will be fine. Music can’t bring me out of a funk. It can make me go deeper into one where I can really enjoy it and luxuriate in it, you know, and you think, “Oh, this is great.” (Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil 1993, 165; ellipses in original)

Another said: When my tape deck was working I would spend hours, literally hours, recording various tapes for a particular mood. Okay . . . one tape is sensuous, uh . . . a tape of songs about rain . . . a tape of “down in the dumps” . . . a tape of varieties. I just really do use music as many things . . . as a companion, as a stimulant. It can pull me out of a mood . . . if I’m in a reflective mood or if I’m in a slightly down mood and just . . . ride it out. You know, there’s certain kinds of music you can do that with, not to get you more depressed, just ride a certain mood out. (Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil 1993, 118; emphases and ellipses in original)

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And another: When I’m happy, I generally put on happy music, something upbeat: Rickie Lee [Jones] or somebody to “join me in my good mood.” When I’m down, like when I have a lot of work or something, I tend to put on something less invigorating (Joni Mitchell—old stuff) or something of the sort to join me in my mood. It’s like having someone with you at all times good and bad who you don’t have to talk to about why you feel a certain way. It seems the musicians always know what’s on your mind like if you miss a close friend. They always pop a song or two on the album you put on about how you feel like they know you or something. Like your best friend, somehow spelling out the depression or good happy mood makes me feel like I have control over my mood, because I didn’t fully understand why I felt like I did or do but now that Joni spelled it out for me I know exactly why I’m so depressed. (Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil 1993, 69–70; emphasis in original)

And for one final example, I don’t mean to imply that when I’m sad I listen to sad music, and when I’m happy I listen to happy music, and if I’m sexual I listen to sensual music. I may use it in opposition too, you know, or to intensify; really, depending on the mood I’m in, which is really nice, I think. I mean there are some days I would listen to anything, to any of them, you know, and there are some when I’m feeling a little blue and I would just as soon get up and going, and then I’ll play something that I know will get me up. (Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil 1993, 122)

These are all illuminating quotations, for they show just how much listeners today (and I wouldn’t say that much has changed since that book was published in 1993) use music both to enhance their mood, but also to change it, and, in the case of one person, to help contradict her mood. All of these show just how much today’s listeners view themselves as active agents, and music as something that they as agential subjects can employ as they wish. They can still utilize a discourse of music as a kind of magic pill or mechanical device that can change their mood, but it is a kind of technology that they choose and use whenever they want for whatever they want. Choice of music, particularly when dealing with particularly strong emotions, can be, as Tia DeNora has argued, a way that individual social actors actively make their own subjectivity (DeNora 2000, 57). With the rise of computer technology, and, especially, smartphones, apps have emerged that facilitate users’ desires to employ music to affect their moods. Websites and apps that stream music chosen to suit 44

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users’ moods or activities have sprung up in recent years. An Internet service called Musicovery (musicovery.com) invites users to “play your mood,” which can be accomplished by using a snazzy, color- coded graphic interface. Another, Stereomood (stereomood.com), permits users to select music based on mood. Billing itself as “the emotional internet radio,” Stereomood provides “music that best suits your mood and your activities.” Their homepage offers a number of options (and more if one desires). Stereomood scans the Internet seeking songs on blogs, organizing them into playlists correlated to activities and moods. Clicking on an activity or mood takes one immediately to a playlist that begins with whatever track is first. Yet another popular website and app, Songza (now Google Play Music), similarly offers music tailored to moods or activities. Spotify (spotify.com), a popular application for streaming music on one’s devices, has incorporated a “Genres & Moods” menu in the most recent version as of this writing. Genres currently outnumber moods, but if one clicks on a mood such as “Chill” or “Romance,” one finds dozens of playlists to choose from. “Mood” in particular contains a variety of playlists for many different moods. This is the current direction of the company, which is devising playlists for all sorts of moods and activities, with the result of breaking down users’ allegiances to genres or old favorites. Shiva Rajaraman, Spotify’s vice president of product, said in 2015 that “what we want to do is make Spotify more of a ritual. You’ll begin to use it for a set of habits, and we will start to feed content for every slot in your day” (Manjoo 2015, B10). With over 30 million songs as of this writing, it has become increasingly difficult to find what one might want, and so utilizing prepared playlists tailored to specific habits or moods has become more and more the way that users are relating to streaming music. Music today is omnipresent for many, part of a seamless web of acquisition and constant consumption used primarily for mood management.

Sonic Affect as Common Language in the Commercial Music Industry The ubiquity of the belief about music and affect is such that it is the main lingua franca in the cultural industries in musical discussions, since not everyone possesses a technical vocabulary about music. Affect was cordoned off for decades in the realm of the production 45

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of radio advertising before World War II. Conceptions of affect around music were well formed and in constant circulation by the advent of film in the 1920s, whether “silent” (though accompanied by a pianist or more musicians) or with sound. Considerations of affect were common with respect to film in this era: finding the right sounds, musical and otherwise, to underlie action on the screen was all important. In the world of radio, however, particularly advertising on the radio, discussions of affect are almost entirely absent in the trade press and other publications until the late 1950s (see Taylor 2012a). Sound and music were used to animate products, to bring them to life in the absence of pictures. Not until well after the advent of television did musicians and others in the industry begin to think about using music for affective purposes. It took some time, but by the 1970s ideologies of music and affect had become as normalized in the world of advertising music as they had long been in film. Here, I want to examine how ideologies of affect circulate in the world of advertising musicians today, beginning in the 1980s when a new wave of heightened consumption appeared in the US, an event that had consequences for workers in the realm of commercial music. In the 1980s and after, affect through music was deployed in increasingly sophisticated ways to attempt to motivate consumers. I discussed this at length in Taylor (2012a) and will briefly recapitulate some of those arguments here. A complex language of emotions has become the main way that people in the commercial music industry (advertising, broadcasting, film) communicate, particularly with non-musicians who, lacking a technical vocabulary, rely on emotional descriptors to tell musicians what they want. But this language always needs harmonization and calibration. Fritz Doddy, the former creative director at Elias Arts, a commercial music production company in New York City, told me in an interview: So we get together and figure out—my sad is your sad, and your blue is my blue, my fast is your fast . . . so we have some sort of understanding that, “well we don’t want the spot to be melancholy, we want it to be bittersweet”—so we’re dealing in very subtle shades. “We want it to be a bossa nova, we want it to be a tango, we want it to be heavy metal”—so we define some very broad genre and mood parameters for a project. (Doddy 2004)

Composers of library music, who write music to be sold to advertisers or broadcasters (as opposed to music that is custom composed), 46

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also communicate with clients in a language of emotions. Andrew Knox, one such composer, discussed the issue of music and emotion at length. He not only composes music in a variety of moods, but also writes prose that describes each piece of music so that they can be searched by mood in his company’s database: Adjectives—they try to give me as many adjectives possible, and most of the time they’re not musically inclined, and they don’t know what to say. “So, we want it to be more yellow, or more blue.” You have to start to learn the different adjectives that people use and then kind of interpret that into music. “Okay, I want something that’s simple and sad, but not over the top.” So maybe we go for an oboe kind of a sound, rather than a violin, because a violin seems too sad-sounding. So maybe a light flute or solo piano might do that. So, you get to interpret, which is kind of fun for me to interpret their feelings, or their words, into music.

Knox told me that one of his skills is to describe music in a single sentence in such a way that it can be found in his company’s search engine: The whole idea with these descriptions is to try to sell the client on actually listening to this track, ’cause once they listen to it then they have their own idea. But you have to figure out, “Okay, what can I say that talks about this piece of music but then also will let the client buy enough to even put it in the CD player?” The other thing that you think about when you’re describing your music is now in the world of technology computers we have computer programs that you can search for music by descriptive words. [Typing] “sad,” “orchestral,” it’s like doing a Google search. And, let’s see, 1,194 tracks came up with that. Now I’m sure there’s more than that many, I’m sure there’s more than that many, but those are all the ones that have “sad,” “orchestral” in the description. (Knox 2004)

Composers who write music for film and television view their main function as providing an emotional undercurrent to what is occurring onscreen. Composer David Schwartz told me that he doesn’t think in emotional terms when he’s composing music, but I’ll try to get people at a spotting session [when the program is previewed by the composer, music editor, and usually some sort of producer] to talk that way. Often they’ll be saying things like, “oh, we need something here.” I’ll say, “what layers would you like to bring to this? Do we really want to tip them that this is going on, or do we want to add some slight note of tension over here, make people a little 47

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nervous, but don’t really let them know what’s going to happen in the next scene?” Or they’ll say, “it’d be great to get something really dramatic here,” or, “we didn’t really like this performance.” So there’s a lot of conversation like that. (Schwartz 2012)

Music supervisors (about which more in chapter 9), whose job it is to find songs to place in films and television programs, search by mood as well as genre and other factors. They can utilize various search services, such as MS-PRO (musicsupervisor.com), and some record labels, that include mood as a search category. And some music supervisors keep playlists by mood. Lindsay Wolfington, the music supervisor for the television drama One Tree Hill, says: When I get the script, I read it and mark scenes where I think a song will go—sometimes it’s obvious because we are in a bar, other times it’s an emotional moment that I think we’ll want to score with a song. Then I break down all the scenes in a spreadsheet, divvy up where we will spend our money (because we can’t use big artists in every spot, hence our search for great indie artists!), and then put my headphones on. I go through new albums I’ve received from major labels, publishers and companies who represent indie artists. And then I also browse through folders I have been filtering music into. I have folders in my iTunes for mellow music, for dramatic “what’s going to happen” moments, and then upbeat and quirky songs. (Smith 2012)

Jimmy Iovine, recording engineer, producer, music executive, and the entrepreneur behind Beats by Dr. Dre headphones and the streaming service Beats Music (acquired by Apple), defended that company’s decision not to offer a free service (unlike their competitors) by saying that people would be willing to pay for his service: “But, of course, they will. Who won’t pay for emotion?” (Sisario 2014, AR24).

Conclusions This chapter had a simple goal—to historicize and culturalize affect and the different conceptions of its relationship to music so that we can understand that music is believed to act (when it is believed to act at all) in different ways in different historical periods in the West (and outside the West). That affect is so taken for granted, thought to be so normal in accounts of the power given it, a power that in most schol-

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ars’ hands has gone uninterrogated. Music and its effects, after all, need to be studied like anything else—in terms of their social, historical, and cultural specificities. It is much more interesting to consider the diversity of ways that people on the planet, past and present, relate to music than reducing those myriad relationships to one.

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The Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of “Mechanical Music” Once upon a time, everyday people made music for themselves. Then along came the phonograph, and they stopped making music and started buying it instead. So the story goes of the commodification of music. And it is a story that has continued to be told for quite some time, seldom historicized or deconstructed. Writings in ethnomusicology, musicology, popular music studies, cultural studies, and other fields are replete with assumptions and assertions of music’s commodity status, but there are very few treatments of the subject theoretically; the question has been scarcely tackled in the literature save for some suggestive but fragmentary pronouncements by Theodor Adorno that in my view have been unduly influential among scholars of music; and a few writings by less polemical authors such as Chanan (1994), Dowd (2002), Gramit (2002), Maisonneuve (2001), Straw (1999–2000; 2000), and Toynbee (2000), all of whom offer treatments of the subject, some of which are theoretical. But the literature lacks a thoroughgoing theoretical exploration of the subject, a lacuna that this chapter hopes to begin to rectify. To be sure, few would deny that music in many cultures is a commodity—something that can be turned to commercial advantage, bought and sold. Music’s commodity status, at least in the realm of popular music, is so com50

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mon that it seems to be self- evident, even natural, though this is usually thought to be a bad thing; musicians can be accused of selling out. Explicitly or implicitly, writer after writer decries the commodification of music, music made expressly for the purpose of making money, not art, or heartfelt individual expression, or, simply, for a good groove. Many fan groups also recognize the commodification of music, often trying to rescue their particular music from this soulless fate by asserting that it is made for less commercial reasons. In part because music’s commodity status has been naturalized for decades in the so- called developed countries, formulating a theoretical understanding of music as a commodity is a complex and intricate problem, made all the more difficult because music and other cultural commodities are routinely produced, reproduced, and consumed in more than one way: as an object in the form of a score, as a recording (in an ever-growing number of formats), or as a performance. Music also plays an often-indispensable role in larger processes of commodifying and consuming, such as broadcasting, or providing ambience in coffee shops, malls, restaurants, or airports. Furthermore, music is not a commodity all the time, or always in the same way, instead undergoing constant periods of commodification and decommodification. Does the music contained on a CD sitting on the shelf in the record store remain the same commodity after it has been ripped from that CD and traded on the Internet? Is it the same commodity as the recording one has purchased in the hope of displaying one’s familiarity with the hippest and coolest sounds? Another obstacle to a theorization of the music- commodity is that the best set of tools for understanding it, which I will rely heavily on in the following, is deeply problematic with respect to the question of cultural commodities such as music. The argument that Karl Marx advances in The Grundrisse that the piano-maker is a productive worker but the pianist is not is well known, at least for students of music (Marx 1971, 79, footnote 1; see Naumann 1976; Williams 1977; Chakrabarty 2000; and Gramit 2002 for discussions of this example), but doesn’t go very far in advancing the question of the music- commodity. Explicating this position elsewhere, Marx writes that Milton’s Paradise Lost, even when he sells it, is not a commodity, but a product; it only becomes a commodity when it enters the system of capitalist exchange, when it can be used to generate surplus value (Marx 1990, 1044). Likewise, therefore, a musician who sells her music is a merchant selling a product. A person may sell her music as a service, but that makes her a merchant, not someone producing surplus value in the capitalist 51

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system. If that musician joins forces with a capitalist entrepreneur to, say, sell tickets to concerts, then she is producing surplus value and is thus a productive worker in his framework. These types of services, says Marx, are of “microscopic significance” (Marx 1990, 1043– 44). Not, however, to musicians or listeners. Marx’s writings on the subject of the commodity in Chapter 1 of Capital, which have been more influential than any other single publication he wrote on the subject, are also limited by their implicit critique of Adam Smith’s objectivist theory of commodities and money; Marx was not attempting to advance a dialectical and historical theory of the commodity in this portion of his oeuvre (Hart 2006; see also Hart 1982). One of the points that this chapter will make is that the musiccommodity has to be understood as always in flux, always caught up in historical, cultural, and social forces; music does not sit around exuding commodity status—it has to be commodified, and in ways that are different than other commodities, such as, say, corn or iron (Marx’s examples in Volume 1 of Capital). That is, it is important to think beyond Marx’s objectivist conceptions of the commodity and articulate a theoretical sense of the commodity that is social, cultural, and historical. We cannot understand the general processes of commodification until we begin to dissect particular historical moments and practices in order to ascertain how specific ideologies and practices—institutional and otherwise—were formed, and continue to operate. The main goal of this chapter is to argue that whatever the musiccommodity is, it is utterly dependent on the circumstances surrounding its commodification, which are largely driven by its means of reproduction, themselves commodities. The production and dissemination of music involves a wide range of technological artifacts: violins, pianos, tin whistles, radios, CD players, mp3 players, and so forth. Each of these technologies exists as a separate commodity—yet inextricably intertwined with the musical commodities they contribute to producing. Ultimately, the commodity status of each depends on the other: music could not exist as a commodity without the technologies involved with its making and transmission; nor would those technologies serve much purpose without the music they purvey. The processes by which music is constituted as a commodity are therefore particularly clear when new music reproduction technologies are introduced. This chapter will focus on the development of player pianos in the US—the first mass-produced technology that allowed music to be made by individuals with no musical training or experience—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to develop 52

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a detailed theoretical analysis of music as a commodity within a particular historical context. The introduction of the player piano near the end of the nineteenth century was at the vanguard of a broad transformation of the ways that music was made and experienced, helping to constitute it as a commodity in the sense we know it in today’s market. This did not happen overnight. First, with the various writings that sprang up around the new technology, people were reassured that they were still making music themselves; later, however, a reified “music” was proffered as a way of selling the instrument to consumers, who were given to believe that this was better than making music themselves. I will use a variety of approaches to this issue, most importantly, the Marxian concept of reification, a term that describes a relationship between people that has been transformed into a thing. Despite its objectivist origins, Marx’s concept is useful in understanding the processes in a historical moment when most music was transitioning from something made for oneself or heard made by others to something that was bought and sold. Examining a particular music technology in a particular historical moment and the ways that this technology became a commodity constitutes not only a case study for this chapter, but a primary theoretical point about the necessity of understanding the musiccommodity as caught up on historical, social, and cultural processes. Admittedly, even this period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is difficult to characterize, as there was a substantial sheet music industry by the mid-nineteenth century in the US that one could consider to have been industrially produced, as well as the mass production of musical instruments.1 By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the production of music had not only become industrialized, but Taylorized (in the sense of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principles of “scientific management” that were extremely influential) and Fordized, with a new, rationalized industrial bureaucracy to commodify music, from record labels’ marketing tactics to Tin Pan Alley song pluggers to the use of modern advertising techniques to sell player pianos and rolls, phonographs and recordings. This period of the industrialization of music marks the rise of what we can properly call popular culture, as Stuart Hall has influentially argued, in the period of roughly 1880–1930 (Hall 1981; see also Leach 1993; Lears 1983; McGovern 1998 and 2006). It is no accident that scholars of consumption usually identify the same span of time as the period when American culture became a consumer society in ways that are still familiar today; and it is no coincidence that this era also 53

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witnessed the rise of the modern advertising industry (Fox 1984; Lears 1994). Although all of these developments are closely intertwined, I will pay particular attention to the advertising of player pianos in what follows, for as many have argued, advertising plays a powerful role in shaping and sometimes assigning meanings to goods and services (see Jhally 1990). Focusing on this era and the player piano technology will, I hope, help clear away some of the accretion of clutter that has hindered a clear understanding of music as a commodity, and will also help provide a more historically and culturally specific discussion of the question of music as a commodity, out of which more general theoretical points can be made. This, I hope, will go some way toward obviating the Adornian legacy of employing a mode of grand theorizing that pays little attention to—or even disdains—what people were actually doing in a particular place and time.

The Player Piano as Transition Even though the phonograph appeared around the same time as the player piano, this seemingly less sophisticated technology provides a better site to address the question of the commodification of music. For one thing, since the original player piano was a machine that attached to a piano, it had an easier time of becoming a part of everyday life since as many as half of all American homes already contained pianos by the mid-1920s (Walsh 1927, 112). The phonograph, on the other hand, was slow to catch on; there was some debate about its use, even whether or not it should be used for music; and its poor fidelity prevented it from becoming popular until well into the twentieth century (see Katz 2010). There was no question about the use of the player piano—its function was reasonably self-evident. The earliest player pianos, which date to the mid-nineteenth century, were freestanding devices that attached to existing pianos with “fingers” that “played” the keys of the piano, responding to the machine’s “reading” of music encoded in perforations on a paper roll; one contemporary commentator described these machines as having “the exuberant spirits of a machine-gun” (Whiting 1918/1919, 831). Later, the external playing mechanism was integrated into the piano cabinet itself. Subsequent instruments featured devices that could affect playback by the player pianist: tempo lever, accenting apparatus, sustain54

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ing pedal lever, and usually, a softening button as well (White 1910, 49). Player piano rolls could contain wavy lines on them to instruct player pianists about musical matters, especially tempo. These lines were made in the factory and reproduced on the roll. The player pianist followed it with a pointer by moving the tempo lever to alter the tempo as a “real” musician might (see White 1910, 75). These pianos gave rise to an ultimately short-lived industry of how-to guides, player piano teachers, and other modes of instruction that I will examine below. The final phase of development of player pianos was marked in the early twentieth century by the “reproducing” piano, which played rolls that had been “recorded” by musicians, preserving the nuances of a live performance, and many famous pianists and composers availed themselves of the opportunity to make rolls for these instruments. It is important to wonder how player piano manufacturers made their instrument a widely desirable technology and avoided having it seen as merely a faddish gimmick. This question addresses one of the main theoretical points of this chapter—that music had to be converted into a commodity—and will illustrate the central importance of advertising in shaping public opinion and this music technology. At first, the player piano was something of a gimmick. Entrepreneurs popularized the machine in the same way that moving pictures, phonographs, and radios were popularized in their early histories, as machines in which one inserted a nickel to hear a little music, a practice that served to introduce the instrument to the public (see Bowers 1966). Player piano sales were indeed unremarkable after its immediate introduction. Early advertisements for the instrument tended to tout its mechanical qualities, instead of articulating a broader vision for the role of the player piano in the increasingly modern, consumer- oriented, technological world. The player piano did become seen as something desirable to own in the early part of the last century, thanks in no small measure to the young but fast-growing advertising industry, which played an instrumental role in popularizing the instrument and defining and shaping sign values for it beyond its immediate utility. In 1902, the Aeolian Organ and Music Company of New York City placed a landmark four-page advertisement in Cosmopolitan magazine for their machine, the Pianola (see figure 3.1). The ad employed two colors, unheard of for advertisements of pianos or player pianos in this era (see Bates 1896 for a telling critique of piano advertising from the standpoint of the advertising industry). This and later advertisements contributed powerfully to the appeal 55

3.1 Aeolian Pianola advertisement, 1902 (author’s collection)

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of the player piano, so much so that sales skyrocketed in the first couple of decades in the century. The breakthrough year was 1905 when four manufacturers, including Aeolian, standardized the perforation of rolls so that they could be played on different brands of machine. Sales rose from roughly 2,180 instruments in 1905 to 95,000 by the end of the decade (“1900–1909: Talking Machines and Player Pianos Transform the Industry” 1990, 52). US Census data collected between 1909 and 1919 reveal that player piano sales in this period overtook conventional pianos, comprising just over half of all piano sales; sales of piano rolls went from about $200,000 to over $3.1 million in this period. (Sales dropped slightly by the 1921 Census of Manufactures [Department of Commerce 1924].) The typical middle- class home with the piano-playing—or nonpiano-playing—daughter was considered a perfect market for player pianos; young women were expected to acquire cultural capital in the form of musicking as part of “the cult of domesticity” in Victorian America (Roell 1989, 13; see Solie 2004 for a discussion of girls playing pianos).2 The piano for decades had been a primary marker of middleclass cultural capital, the symbol of perfect domesticity and family harmony (see Roell 1989); Arthur Loesser ([1954] 1990) writes that the player piano gained popularity in American homes because so many of these homes housed pianos that were never, or badly, played. Along came an instrument that played itself and was relentlessly promoted. A Cleveland piano store asked in a 1905 advertisement, “how many thousands of American parlors contain that shining monument to a past girlhood—a silent piano. Do you wish to enjoy your piano?” (quoted by Loesser [1954] 1990, 583). Countless advertisements, photographs, and drawings depicted women at the piano, sometimes alone, sometimes surrounded by happy families. One cartoon showed two mothers having tea in the parlor while a daughter pumps the player piano with the caption “Yes, My Daughter Has a Great Foot for Music” (reproduced in Roehl 1973, 15). At the same time, however, the player piano’s status as a machine, a new kind of technology, brought men into the picture, and they were also pictured with player pianos many times in this era; some drawings show a group of men around the instrument; some show it as a high- class machine in the background being enjoyed by the man of the house. In some arenas, the player piano came to be seen as a necessity. Robert Peary took one on his expedition to the North Pole in 1909 in his ship’s stateroom, saying, “the Pianola is an essential part of our equip57

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ment. Men become lonely in the Frozen North, and they are elevated and their depression is dispelled by the wonderful music” (quoted in “1900–1909: Talking Machines and Player Pianos Transform the Industry” 1990, 52). In that same era, the US Navy supplied 128 warships with player pianos (“1900–1909: Talking Machines and Player Pianos Transform the Industry” 1990, 52). One popular magazine account from 1922 tells of a woman who, whenever she traveled, would “have the best player piano in town sent to her room. She is a regular fan” (Schauffler 1922, 13). The author of this article, a music critic, became so enamored of the sound of his hotel neighbor that he purchased a player piano for himself, only to discover that it sounded “like a super-hurdy-gurdy” (Schauffler 1922, 13). What to do? Take lessons. Player piano teachers proliferated in this era, along with published how-to guides. Schauffler’s account also offers several examples of how people adapted their player pianos for various purposes: one person invented a device for picking out a counter-theme in the roll; some musicians learned to play a string or wind instrument while accompanying themselves on the player piano. Additionally, phonograph records were released that were intended to coordinate with player piano rolls of accompaniments so that people could accompany famous singers and soloists on recordings (Schauffler 1915).

Ideologies Advertisements and other publications helped shape public attitudes toward the player piano and I want to recount some of their themes, for they articulate many of the ideologies that were to become underlying cultural assumptions about purchasing music. Drawing on the earlier mode of piano advertising, player piano advertisements emphasized the social status offered by the player piano by depicting instruments in beautiful houses, with well- dressed people enjoying themselves. Everybody always looks happy, children always look well behaved. As Roell (1989) notes, advertisements took many tacks, including the health benefits, both physical and mental, that could accrue from owning a player piano. Perhaps most prominent in the writings on the player piano is the theme of the “democratization” of music, a term in use in this period though it was usually employed in haphazard and uncritical ways that I will attempt to sort out (see also Gitelman 2004; Roell 1989; and Thé58

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berge 1997 on the subject of democratization and player pianos). The primary usage of the concept concerned the democratization of access to music—anybody can have live music in the home, thanks to the player piano: “The Pianola solves the problem of music in the home,” began Aeolian’s landmark ad, later telling readers “the music of the world is free to all” (reproduced in Roehl 1973, 7). Not entirely true, since this Pianola cost $250 and had to be attached to a piano, and one had to purchase piano rolls. Some authors wrote of this democratization in striking terms, such as the influential music critic Deems Taylor, who said that “even an Alaskan, nowadays, can hear the masterpieces of piano literature played by great artists” (Taylor [1922] 2003). The well-known American music critic Gustav Kobbé echoed this enthusiasm in a book on the instrument that contains paeans to the player piano as an instrument of the democratization of good music: “What a leveler of distinctions, what a universal musical provider the pianola is!” he wrote breathlessly in 1907 (Kobbé 1907, 6). The ideological position being enunciated is quite clear in writings such as these. The claim of democratization was common for many new music technologies—from player piano to phonograph to radio to the personal computer—and was perhaps the most powerful ideology in support of the player piano. Another form of the democratization ideology found in contemporary writings of the period concerned who can play the player piano; call this democratization of ability. Everybody can play it, one learns, even a child. No more time spent on practice, on the development of technique: “every member of the household may be a performer,” says Aeolian’s 1902 advertisement. Many ads for player pianos showed small children at the instrument, their feet dangling above the floor. An ad for the Simplex player piano reproduced a photograph of a child with the caption “anybody can play anything” (reproduced in Roehl 1973, 10). In many ads, Gulbransen player pianos were depicted with a baby paddling on one of the pedals that powered the machine before they were electrified (see figure 3.2), which became one of the most famous trademarks in all of mechanical music along with Nipper, the Victor Talking Machine Company dog. A Gulbransen advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post from October 17, 1925, said, in the ad’s largest font, “The Biggest Thrill in Music is playing it Yourself”; followed underneath by: “And now even untrained persons can do it. You can play better by roll than many who play by hand. And you can play ALL pieces while they can play but a few” (reproduced in Roehl 1973, 23, emphases and uppercase in original). 59

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3.2 Gulbransen Player Piano advertisement, 1922 (author’s collection)

What appears to be the deliberate ambiguity here between “play” as in play an instrument, and “play” as in play a mechanical instrument, is particularly striking in this ad.3 This advertisement, and that pioneering Aeolian one, also employ an ideology of plenitude, what I’ll call the democratization of availability: there is so much music available for the player piano, with more all the time, that it is now possible to have in one’s home more music 60

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than even the best pianists could ever learn to play, a strategy used in the later Gulbransen ad just quoted. A 1909 advertisement for the Pianola emphasized the amount of music available—over 15,000 compositions—and says, “it is for the music it affords that so many thousands of people have purchased the PIANOLA or PIANOLA PIANO” (“The Pianola Piano” 1909, emphasis and uppercase in original). This ideology of plentitude, of the democratization of availability, was a particularly potent argument at the dawn of a new phase of consumption in this era. Another prominent ideology that many early writings addressed concerned the role of the self in playing these new instruments. The construction of selfhood was a major preoccupation in American culture in this period as people’s sense of personal autonomy was increasingly threatened by new bureaucratic corporate models, the growth of an interdependent market, the rise of mass culture, the movement from rural areas to urban, and other factors that I have examined elsewhere (Taylor 2016a; see also Lears 1983). Much advertising copy tended to speak to preoccupations with the self that were being articulated in this era (see Lears 1983, 4). Time and again, advertisements and other publications about the player piano in the first wave of its popularity return to the question of the player’s self- expression, assuring anxious readers that they were not surrendering their selfhood or individual musicality to a machine, but that, in fact, only they could make music; the machine merely contributed the technical means of playing. Claims of the importance of the human contribution constituted a powerful discourse to which distinguished critics and musicologists could be just as susceptible as advertising copywriters. For example, the well-known British critic Ernest Newman, who edited a popular magazine on the player piano for several years, wrote, First-rate playing is not so much a matter of technique as of feeling; and no amount of teaching or of practicing can give the plain person that. All that the average young lady has done after five or ten years of hard work is to get her muscles into a certain state of flexibility and control. But if all she is to have as the result of all this labour is technique, surely she may as well trust to the piano-player for that. (Newman 1920, 30)

For Newman, freedom from technique meant that music could be more attentively listened to, but what was really introduced with the player piano was the rise of passive listening, marking the beginning 61

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of the transformation of the musical experience into an object of consumption. Many advertisements and how-to guides invoke the human soul that players can bring to the player piano machine; it is not just agency that is being preserved, but the human soul itself. As Gustav Kobbé wrote, “I find a great feature of the so- called mechanical piano-player lies in what it allows you to do yourself. It provides you with technique, but, to use a colloquial phrase, ‘you can still call your soul your own.’ The technique, the substitute for that finger facility which only years of practice will give, is the pianola’s; but the interpretation is yours!” (Kobbé 1907, 12, emphasis in original). “Your interpretation”— facilitated by the expressive controls on some pianos discussed above. D.  Miller Wilson, author of a how-to guide, echoed Newman on the machine’s technique, and wrote in the early 1920s that “to give free play to the imagination, to allow the heart to be moved, to attain an ideal interpretation, and to bring out—coax out—the melody which is echoed from the soul, one must be freed from the mechanically difficult operation of fingering” (Wilson n.d., 55– 56, emphasis in original). In a similar vein, Arthur Whiting, writing in the late teens, says that “the mechanical art meets one not only half way but all the way, for there are no preliminaries to its mastery and the soul becomes at once articulate” (Whiting 1918/1919, 829).4 Readers were assured that even though they were relying on a machine, the machine was simply a tool to help them express themselves better than they had ever been able to before.

Reification These discourses about the importance of the self, the soul, in player pianos eventually gave way to discourses about “The Music Itself”— this is what the residue of the player pianists’ agency is put in service of. The seeds of such an approach can be found even in Aeolian’s breakthrough 1902 ad, which represents its instrument as a self—an unusual stratagem—in order to set music aside as something else: “The Pianola’s self is not the question,” the ad reads; “the music it makes possible is the consideration” (reproduced as figure 3.1). The Pianola is content to let its “self” recede in favor of the geniuses and great works it brings into the home. And, it is content to allow its self to take a backseat to the human Pianola player, whose taste and expression still matter, even with a machine that makes music. The “selfhood” of the Pianola is acknowledged but minimized so that the agency of the composer 62

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and performer—recorded in piano rolls—and the agency of the human player can assume their rightful positions. As a 1901 article reassuringly had it, “the self-player is a player which you control yourself; the ‘self’ you furnish, the instrument does the rest” (Mathews 1901, 187). This advertisement shifts focus away from the performer (whose few roles are meant to address the question of “expression”) to the music itself, encoded, but not contained in any simple manner, in piano rolls. Owning great music, and knowing that more is always being manufactured as piano rolls, came to be seen as more important than making music oneself the old-fashioned way, since even the greatest artists are unable to play all the music available. Music publishing companies had marketed “great music” before the player piano, but with the rise of the reproducing player piano, great music could be played by great musicians in the home, removing it further from the realm of an activity that one practiced for oneself.5 In part, this shift was driven by the public’s knowledge of the technical aspects of the machines; it was no longer necessary to educate them about this, or speak of it in advertisements. The very success of the player piano meant that, after a time, proselytizers for the instrument did not have to rely so much on purveying information or technical data, but could concentrate on what the piano was for: the music itself. When the automobile was new, for another example, advertising filled an “educational” role, imparting facts and technical details. But then, according to the best-known advertising man of his generation, Bruce Barton, writing in 1926, “there is no more need of advertising the details of automobiles to the American public than there is for advertising the multiplication table” (quoted by Fox 1984, 109). The player piano reached this same stage by the mid-1920s, and manufacturers began to shift their approach from selling instruments and pianistic technique to selling music, especially with the popularity of the “reproducing” piano, those that could “record” performances, usually of famous pianists and composers. No longer was technique required of the player pianist. By this period, player piano manufacturers understood very well that it was music they were selling: they did not see themselves as mere purveyors of hardware. In 1924, Marian Reed, Manager of the Ampico Library (a major manufacturer of reproducing pianos), wrote that player piano salesmen were too accustomed to selling pianos and confining their sales language to technical attributes of the machines, saying, “it is being constantly reiterated and must always be remembered that in selling reproducing pianos, one sells first MUSIC” (Reed 1924, reproduced in Roehl 1973, 188; uppercase in origi63

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nal). She continues: “Good music must be sold. The reproducing piano, by eliminating the distraction of a personality, is training the music lover to listen” (Reed 1924, reproduced in Roehl 1973, 188). Listen— not play. With the arrival of the reproducing piano and the elimination of the “personality” playing the player piano, the conversion of music from music as something that people made themselves to a commodified and reified “music” that people bought was nearly complete (though the phonograph and radio had a considerable impact on this process as well). Writings about the reproducing piano were ultimately selling the idea that one could listen to music at home passively, demonstrated clearly in this 1920s color ad for the Artrio Angelus reproducing piano that shows an elegantly dressed woman relaxing in a chair across the room from the player piano, instructing readers how to listen to music passively in the home, with the caption “Lean Back and Listen” (see figure 3.3). Note that the light illuminates the piano more than the listener—it is the music itself, conveyed by the piano, that is the star. This process of making music something apart from the social and apart from one’s own labors, and masking the social labor that produced it, describes what Marx called “fetishism” and described as “the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx 1990, 165). Fetishism for Marx describes that which had been a relationship between people but had become a thing, a commodity, with a phantom objectivity (Lukács 1971, 83), a form of a broader phenomenon that Georg Lukács was later to call “reification.” In the system of historical capitalism, producers’ relationships are realized through the exchange of commodities, and the relationship between commodities has come to mask the relationship between people. With new technologies such as the player piano and phonograph, music was increasingly less something people made for themselves, increasingly a commodity produced for consumption in the capitalist system. These music technologies hid the social relations of the making of the music they played back, as well as masking the industrial production of music recorded as piano rolls and phonograph recordings. Music had been reified in earlier eras and forms, especially as published scores, but this new form of reified music, cut off from the original makers of sounds, was dealt with by the publications that sprang up around the player piano—advertisements, the popular press, howto guides—which attempted to grapple with the problem in two ways. The role of the individual was emphasized, as we have seen, and then, 64

3.3 Artrio Angelus advertisement, 1926 (author’s collection)

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later, “music” was valorized in and of itself. Earlier publications had employed a familiar discourse of the importance of the individual in arguing that it was the human contribution to “performing” player piano rolls that made piano rolls music. With the reproducing piano, however, “music” thus became increasingly remote from social practice, heightening its commodity status and reifying it in a new way. In 1910, an ad for the Aeolian Pianola (see figure 3.4) read, “when people buy a piano nowadays, they buy it for music. The day when pianos were bought as ornaments is past” (“The Piano That Means Music” 1910, emphases in original). Authors of how-to guides articulated the same position, as, for example, Ernest Newman, who wrote that “people  .  .  . are confusing, I think, pianoforte technique with musical culture. There is nothing in technique itself that will make a musician of any man; he may spend three months in overcoming the difficulties of double thirds and sixths, and be as ignorant of music, as destitute of musical feeling, at the end of that time as he was at the beginning” (Newman 1920, 167, emphasis in original). Similarly, D. Miller Wilson quoted music critic Edwin Evans, who, again raising the question of technique, exhorted his readers to “try and imagine what would happen if an intellect like that of Busoni, who can work such miracles beyond surmounting the keyboard difficulties of modern music, were set free from all those difficulties and concentrated entirely upon the true essence of music, which is a thing independent of keyboards, hammers and levers” (quoted by Wilson n.d., vii, emphasis added). All of these discourses serve this new form of the reification of music, naturalizing it. What one formerly played at home oneself might be music, but it is not the rarefied “music” being constructed in these writings. This form of reification is central to the commodification of music in this era—it was only through the player piano and piano rolls (or phonograph, or radio . . .) that consumers could have access to this “music,” which they were told was better than what they could make for themselves. In part, it was the peril of the machine that forced a reconsideration of just what constituted “music”—if machines such as player pianos, phonographs, and radios could make music, then true music had to be something other than what these machines provided, something apart from the machine, but also becoming something apart from the hearer. Thus, music was gradually made into a commodity, but this could not be achieved in a direct fashion at first: it was music technologies that were advertised, marketed, hyped, while music went along for the 66

3.4 Aeolian Pianola advertisement, 1910 (author’s collection)

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ride for a time in the form of piano rolls, or sound recordings, or what have you, slowly becoming separate and transformed into a new form of commodity itself after its means of reproduction have become well known and naturalized. Use values, exchange values, and sign values had to be made for new music reproduction technologies so that music could enter, or remain, in the system of exchange as a commodity form, whether a piano roll or phonograph disc or mp3.

Fetishism Fetishism is a more frequently employed and thus better-known Marxian concept than reification, but it is a form of reification, the attribution of powers to commodities that they do not actually possess in the absence of the human faces of social labor that made those commodities. It is important to recall that, as with “commodity” or “reification,” “fetishism” in Marx’s writings is a technical term; this is frequently misunderstood or overlooked in discussions of fetishism, in which the commonplace usage of the term sometimes is used. If reified “music” were a tangible object, a physical commodity, its fetishization might be straightforward. But it isn’t. Player pianos as a means of reproduction were advertised as crucial tools to access reified music, but this rendered them, and piano rolls, as only partly satisfactory commodities for the purpose of sales—and advocates for the consumption of music more generally—since they weren’t “music” itself; a player piano or a piano roll isn’t “music,” only a means for reproducing music. In order to locate an object on which to direct the fetishism of reified music, advertisers and proselytizers for player pianos and phonographs focused on the great musicians who could come into the home because of these technologies, thereby transferring abstract, reified music onto the face of a particular musician who becomes in part a fetish herself. Many player piano ads used testimonials—a new advertising strategy in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century— from famous composers and musicians. Some ads (e.g., one of the Starr Pianos reproduced in Roehl 1973, 39) showed composers’ faces coming out of the instrument, just as several early phonograph ads actually picture the faces of great musicians emanating from the machines’ horns.6 In an enlightening study, historian David Suisman has written of famous musicians who posed for advertising photographs in factories where their recordings were made; these images were meant to educate consumers that these mass-produced commodities did indeed 68

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have something to do with the musicians whose performances were enshrined in them (Suisman 2009, 132). Writings about reproducing pianos followed the approach articulated by Marian Reed above, emphasizing the music and the genius of the pianists who “recorded” their music on reproducing piano rolls. For example, The Piano and Organ Purchaser’s Guide for 1919 writes of the reproducing piano made by Aeolian, the Duo-Art, introduced in 1913: The remarkable patented mechanism of the Duo- Art reproduces not only the notes, tempo, phrasing and attack, but also every tone gradation precisely as originally played and recorded by the artist . . . also all pedal effects of the artist in the use of the sostenuto and soft pedals; also all other expression effects so true to the individuality of the respective artists who recorded the original Duo- Art rolls that their style and identity is unmistakably to be recognized in their performance by the Duo- Art Pianola. (quoted by Roell 1989, 43– 44)

Advertisements showed composers or pianists at the keyboard, or just singing the praises of the reproducing piano in testimonials. Dead composers were brought partly back to life, as in this 1921 ad for the Apollo reproducing piano which shows the ghost of Beethoven playing (see figure 3.5). The Welte-Mignon reproducing piano, the first of its kind, had as its motto: “The Master’s Fingers on Your Piano,” as in this ad from the 1920s (see figure 3.6) showing the master’s ghostly fingers. Living and dead famous musicians were fetishized, becoming the human faces of this newly reified music. One could object that by putting a human face on player pianos or the manufacturing of recordings, advertisers were actually attempting to de-reify music, trying to reinsert it into a system of human relationships. But reification is the obscuring of the realm of the social and replacing it with objects. Despite the appeal to human agency made at the time, the human face that really matters—after the invisible one of the targeted consumer, of course—was that of the performer/star who was increasingly used to sell player pianos, piano rolls, and phonographs. In so doing manufacturers and advertisers were also heightening the star power of performers, facilitating their fetishization, and placing them at the top of an intricate process of commodity production that ends with an object to hold in one’s hand—a fetishized commodity. Thus, it isn’t music, or musicking, that is de-reified. The player piano literature constructs making music for oneself as important but as inferior to hearing great artists in one’s home; it is they who are 69

3.5 Apollo advertisement, 1921 (author’s collection)

3.6 Welte- Mignon advertisement, 1926 (author’s collection)

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thought to serve best this reified music, consumed by owners of new music technologies.

Conclusions Advertising, how-to guides, journalism, and other kinds of writings played and continue to play an important role not simply in shaping the meanings of commodities, but also in thrusting goods such as the player piano into the system of consumer capitalism. This process was at first more restricted to sound reproduction technologies, whose commodification and valorization is fairly straightforward compared to meanings that can spring up around musical sounds and styles. (Later, music’s usage in broadcasting and film would play an important role in assigning meanings, but consideration of these processes is beyond the scope of this chapter.) After the rise of mechanical and electrical reproduction technologies, the music- commodity became a commodity in its own right apart from its mechanical means of reproduction, and apart from musical notation. Once the player piano and, later, the phonograph became successful, the commodification apparatus—advertising, cultural brokers as critics, authors of how-to guides, etc.—was no longer necessary. Whenever a new music technology is introduced, however, this commodification apparatus is called into use again. With the popularization of the player piano, phonograph, radio, and sound film, music could subsist on its own as a reified object, a commodity to be bought and sold like any other. After the introduction of these sound reproduction technologies, manufacturers of cultural commodities came to conceive of their products as commodities in ways that their predecessors did not. Clearly, however, a great deal of work was required in the forms of marketing, advertising, and other kinds of proselytizing to transform these wares into commodities—to create use values or sign values or other kinds of values for them, promulgating an ideology that buying music was better than making it oneself. The arguments I have been making here emphasize the complexity of music as a commodity form after the rise of important new sound reproduction technologies around the turn of the previous century. Music is never simply a commodity or, rather, it is never a commodity in a simple way. It is made into a commodity by a variety of processes that are dependent on its social uses, its industrial production, its brokering in the broadest sense—including marketing, advertising, and 72

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other practices that are part of the infrastructure of consumer capitalist cultures. While I have offered here a theoretical discussion of music as a commodity form, I would like to emphasize that it is not productive to speak simply of music as a commodity in general; one can only speak of particular ways and circumstances in which music becomes a commodity, and specific historical nodes in the complex history of the commodification of music in a particular culture. In short, to return to the introduction to Marx above, it is essential to view the commodity not simply as a social form that can be understood in and of itself, but a social form that must be understood historically and dialectically.

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The Role of Opera in the Rise of Radio in the US Radio thrills me like champagne.

MARY GARDEN (“MARY GARDEN SEES

O P E R A’S D O O M S O O N ” 193 0)

Many of the same ideologies surrounding the commodification of music in the form of player piano rolls or phonograph recordings carried over, or recurred, with the reception of radio in the 1920s. Discourses of “democratization,” that the masses would be able to hear Great Music for the first time, remained powerful. Opera was at the center of these discourses, playing an important role in the development and early popularization of radio in the US in the 1920s because it figured prominently in the era’s conceptions of high culture, only recently sacralized, as Lawrence W. Levine has famously written (Levine 1988). This was part of a broader cultural shift that Levine chronicled, the rise of “highbrow” and “lowbrow” culture, or, rather, the rise of the perception of a divide between them, a construction made expressly against the advent of ragtime, jazz, and other forms of popular culture in the late nineteenth– early twentieth centuries, when social elites viewed ragtime as a “contagion” (see Roell 1989). The rise of sound reproduction technologies such as player piano, phonograph, radio, and sound film in this period played important roles in this dichotomy, purveying lowbrow musics and highbrow musics both. Countless polls were taken charting audience tastes, the results of which were used to show that Americans’ tastes were im74

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proving, or becoming debased, by what they were choosing to listen to on the phonograph or radio (see Taylor 2012a). Those who championed highbrow tastes mobilized powerful discourses about making Americans more musical, uplifting the tastes of the nation, and, most potently, democratization of access to great music, all of which played a part in convincing ordinary Americans to purchase radios.1 According to this potent discourse of democratization, Americans of all walks of life, even in remote areas, would be able to hear great music for the first time. This was a discourse that was employed to greet new recording and broadcasting technologies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—player pianos, phonographs, radios, and sound films— as technologies that could increase access to great music. This discourse of democratization was powerful. Proponents of classical music and other high arts fervently believed in the power of art to uplift and ennoble those who came into contact with it. And they believed that greater exposure to classical music could make the US compare more favorably in cultural terms to Europe, where support for the arts was state-supported and thus more easily available to poor and rural people (see Katz 1998). But the increased accessibility of classical music brought with it fears among the educated elite that uneducated listeners might not know how to apprehend these great works of music properly, which spawned a new music appreciation industry. This appeared early in the twentieth century with a spate of books, articles, and pamphlets on the subject of how to listen to classical music, all part of a project of the cultural uplift of the nation, as has been discussed by the major radio historians Susan J. Douglas (1999), Michele Hilmes (1997), and Susan Smulyan (1994), and more specifically by Shawn VanCour (2009).2 There was also an attempt to bridge the gap with the rise of discussions about “middlebrow” culture (see Rubin 1992): “The radio audience is commonly divided into ‘high brows’ who like grand opera and symphony concerts and the ‘low brows,’ who don’t,” one article said in the early 1920s (“Are You a ‘Middlebrow’?” 1923, 619). Virtually all of the early radio press was technical in nature, educating the public about how radio worked, how to assemble one (early radios had to be built by users), but one of the first content-related articles promoted the discourse that radio could help bring great music to those who could not afford to hear it live or did not have easy access to it in metropolitan centers (radio in its early form was conceptualized by some as radiotelephony, i.e., wireless one-to- one communication, and there were subscription telephone services that brought music into one’s home [see Taylor, Katz, and Grajeda 2012]): 75

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Suppose that all you had to do was to step to the telephone at 8:30 in the evening, no matter if you lived in New York or anywhere else in the country, and immediately had the whole room filled with Caruso’s voice. Would this not appeal to you, providing of course that you were musically inclined? All this is now possible, and, we believe, will shortly come about. While of course the idea itself is nothing new— it having been tried thirty years ago to transmit music in this manner—there was one great technical difficulty at that time which only during the past two years has been overcome. (Gernsback 1919b, 855)3

(That technical difficulty—of boosting signals adequate to mass broadcasting—was conquered by the invention of the Audion tube by inventor Lee de Forest, to be discussed below.) The author concluded that, with de Forest’s invention and the eventual broadcast of opera by radio, listeners could hear the greatest opera singers live, and it was cheaper than paying for a phonograph record: Today the man who owns a phonograph thinks nothing of spending between three to five dollars a month for records which are “dead.” If he knew he could hear Caruso, Galli Curci4 or any of the other stars tonight in one of his favorite operas, he certainly would not object to spending 50 cents or even a dollar for the privilege, and at that he would think he was getting it cheap because he, with his entire family, would hear the music in his own home without having to travel to and from the opera. (Gernsback 1919b, 924)

Those who wielded such discourses included leading classical musicians of the day, educators, and others such as Lee de Forest (1873– 1961), an important inventor who contributed enormously to the development of radio. The desire of some inventors and some proponents of high culture to broadcast opera on the radio was a powerful motivating force in the development of broadcast technologies. De Forest frequently claimed that his inventions were propelled in large part by his love of opera. This championing of opera was of course partly a result of his personal predilection for the music, but it was also part of the effort of elite groups to uplift the tastes of the nation, which also entailed denigrating the popular musics that most people actually preferred to listen to. De Forest’s distaste for these musics was well known. In a 1946 letter to the National Association Broadcasters meeting in Chicago, de Forest portrayed himself as the father of radio and bemoaned the fate of his offspring. Broadcasting was supposed to bring culture to the masses but instead, his child had been sent to the streets wearing “rags and 76

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ragtime, tatters of jive and boogie woogie, to collect money from all and sundry” (quoted by Hijiya 1992, 119). Just a few years later, in his autobiography, de Forest recalled his early years in New York City as a halcyon period when access to live classical music was easy: And away uptown stood Pabst Harlem, where poor Bohemians like me could come of a Sunday night to quaff deep steins of cold amber to the thrilling throbbing of a seventy-piece band playing music that was music—of Weber and Offenbach, Liszt and Rossini—not, then, the emasculated emptiness of jazz and hysterical syncopation. (de Forest 1950, 198)5

In his championing of opera, de Forest was in effect participating in what Levine calls “paternalistic capitalism,” a form of elite support for the arts that was neither by royal nor state (Levine 1988, 132). De Forest was not using his money to subsidize the arts, however, but his prowess as an inventor. And his successes gave him something of a bully pulpit to proselytize for classical music, especially opera. De Forest, the son of the president of a historically black college and a Yale graduate, had plenty of supporters among social elites in their various projects of social stratification. The bourgeoning radio press was fairly quick to identify opera as the holy grail of broadcasting, not just because it was the most potent representative of high(brow) culture, but also because of the technical challenges involved in broadcasting opera in the early days of radio. It should be noted, however, that despite or perhaps because of its prestige, opera was never particularly popular with early radio audiences, despite the popularizing efforts of record labels and silent films (see Suisman 2009 and Fryer 2005). No survey of radio listeners resulted in high figures favoring opera broadcasts. A 1924 survey, for example, revealed that only 1.7% of listeners said that they desired opera, whereas 24.7% declared that they wanted classical music, the secondhighest category (the highest was popular music at 29.0% [McDonald 1924, 383]). But, at the same time, the author proffering these polling results employed a democratization discourse in his discussion of an airing associated with the Chicago Civic Opera, which broadcast frequently during the 1920s: In former days, when only the well-to- do could afford to hear so- called artistic music, they alone evinced any general desire for it. But now radio gives equal opportunity to people in all walks of life, no matter how lowly, to hear the best music, there is a commensurate growth of general appreciation for it. When Miss Florence 77

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Macbeth6 of the Chicago Civic Opera sang a series of operatic selections on Saturday evening, December 23, more than 5,000 letters of thanks were written to her. (McDonald 1924, 384)

Thus, there were always tensions between audience preferences, what was considered to be prestigious, what advertisers wanted to sponsor, and what advertising agencies desired to broadcast. While the prestige of opera was one way to convince people to purchase radios, once radio was accepted, the attention of the radio press turned mainly toward popular musicians, new “crooners” such as Rudy Vallée, Russ Columbo, Bing Crosby, and others, new luminaries in a system of stardom that advertising agencies, which produced many programs, had helped to create.

Lee de Forest and the Rise of Radio With such discourses of democratization of access to what was thought to be great music, there was significant cultural pressure to bring opera to the airwaves. Broadcasting brought the frisson of liveness to high culture, an appetite cultivated by the phonograph, with its “dead” or “mechanical” or “canned” performances (all epithets used in this era). Nevertheless, there were substantial obstacles to broadcasting opera. First was the development of radio itself, which was slow to take off and catch on, for it was mainly the province of boy and adult male hobbyists until the mid-1920s (see Douglas 1999). Second, the number of microphones required for opera broadcasts presented a problem. Symphony orchestras could be broadcast with a single microphone, but since opera singers moved about the stage, multiple microphones were required, as well as an efficient means of controlling and coordinating them. Lee de Forest was clearly motivated by a desire to make what he thought was good music available to everyone. Radio in this era offered a number of significant advantages over the phonograph. First, a single 78 rpm phonograph disc could hold only a few minutes of music, making the recording of complete operas difficult, and thus rare; Verdi’s Ernani, the first opera ever recorded in its entirety, in 1904, required over forty discs. A second advantage offered by radio was that it sounded better. Given these technical challenges and his own predilection for classical music, some of de Forest’s earliest experiments with broadcasting were of opera. A 1907 article described his vision for “radio-telephony” based at an opera house: 78

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The great and universal appreciation of music reproduced by graphophone [an early phonograph], telharmonium [an early electronic musical instrument], or other device has suggested to Dr. de Forest that radio-telephony has also a field in the distribution of music from a central station, such as an opera house. By installing a wireless telephone transmission station on the roof, the music of singers and orchestra could be supplied to all subscribers who would have aerial wires on or near their homes. The transmission stations for such music would be tuned for an entirely different wave length from that used for any other form of wave telegraph or telephone transmission, and the inventor believes that by using four different forms of wave as many classes of music can be sent out as desired by the different subscribers. (Wade 1907, 685)

These “classes of music” were, presumably, all forms of classical music and nothing else. De Forest wrote in his autobiography that, following a career setback, “as was usual in my periods of deepest gloom or uncertainty, I

4.1 Lee de Forest (author’s collection)

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again turned to music as my solace. Hence it was that during the winter of 1909–1910 I realized my long-advocated ambition for the radiotelephone—the broadcasting of Grand Opera” (de Forest 1950, 267). De Forest soon thereafter successfully broadcast Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci from the Metropolitan Opera House on January 13, 1910, with Enrico Caruso and Emmy Destinn. It was heard by only a few hobbyists and reporters whom de Forest had assembled for the event. This broadcast was made possible by de Forest’s invention of the Audion tube in 1906, an electronic amplifying vacuum tube that boosted signals from microphones so that they could be broadcast to many listeners. De Forest tried again in May 1910, engaging Mariette Mazarin, “the new star of the Manhattan Opera Company” (“Radio Telephone Experiments” 1919, 63), to sing selections from Richard Strauss’s Elektra, the title role of which she had recently originated in the US, performing in de Forest’s New York City laboratory. The music was heard by amateurs up to 20 miles distant. The hobbyist press reported: The first song Mme. Mazarin sang was the Aria from [Georges Bizet’s] “Carmen.” The listeners  .  .  . not being familiar with the notes as received from the wireless telephone, expressed great surprise at the clearness of the articulation. As is well known, an operatic selection is particularly hard to transmit by other medium than the natural sound striking distance, due to the extreme high and low notes reached by the singer’s voice. This point, however, was not noticeable over the wireless telephone. Every intonation of the singer’s voice was brought out clearly. The writers noticed the difference between the wire and wireless by first listening over the wire telephone and then over the wireless. Over the wire line the received notes were louder but the wireless brought out the vowel sounds with a “velvety” tone. (“Radio Telephone Experiments” 1919, 63)

Such statements on sound quality were still the norm in this era. In 1916, de Forest successfully broadcast some recordings, the first demonstration of sending music over the air by radio for the general public. The New York Times reported that this was the culmination of two years’ effort to broadcast music, and that de Forest hoped to use a more powerful transmitter to broadcast concerts (“Music Sent by Wireless” 1916, 7). De Forest wrote in 1922 that when he first “prophesied” radio broadcasting, he had emphasized its importance to the public in general, and “to producers of grand opera especially, to send this form of inspiring music to every corner of the land.” De Forest continued by arguing that radio’s ability to broadcast what he thought was great 80

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music meant that it should be free of charge, thus taking a side on the contentious debates in this era over how radio broadcasting was to be funded (see Smulyan 1994): If this were the only application of the radiophone, its ability to educate the people in good music, that alone would amply justify the Government, or our musical societies, in endowing and maintaining such a service as I have just described. In this field of opera and symphony, of high- class concert and chamber music, secrecy of radiophone transmission is quite unthinkable. The better the music, the more general its value, the more the necessity for making the service quite free to all who can hear. The musical organizations which give freely of their product will suffer no loss; on the contrary, they will earn the grateful interest of multitudes who would otherwise never learn of this superb art. And from these new ranks will flock new patrons, new recruits, new lovers of music who will next seek to hear and to know their newfound friends face to face.

And de Forest invoked a familiar trope of the era, the cultural uplift of the nation: many people who had never heard classical music before will be able to hear it: Maintain this service for ten years and we shall see a national musical awakening the like of which history cannot record! Then, and not until then, will we see a genuine American opera—one worthy to rank with those of Verdi, Bizet, or Puccini—one destined to live! (de Forest 1922, 13)

In 1928, when de Forest was something of a national hero as an inventor, he was interviewed by one of the popular radio magazines about the state of radio. Asked about the quality of programming, he was enthusiastic: It is a source of immeasurable gratification to me to observe the very marked increase in the quality of musical programs now being broadcast, as compared with that of two years, or even one year ago. This is particularly noticeable on Sundays; a lover of good music may then listen to his radio for hours at a time and hear nothing but music of the highest order. Today’s radio is abundantly making good my prediction of many years ago, that radio would be instrumental, as no other institution of man’s creation possibly could be instrumental, in a rapid development of the public’s taste for good music.

And de Forest referred again to the ideology of cultural uplift, taking the opportunity to criticize jazz and other popular musics: 81

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Countless thousands are now educated to hunt for and genuinely appreciate a type of music of which five years ago they were entirely ignorant, or under no conceivable condition would trouble themselves to hear. This cultural influence of radio is cumulative, accelerative. I have no doubt that, five years from now, most of the cheap jazz and mediocre music which the public now enjoys will be as distasteful in the United States as it has always been among the more cultivated and musicloving peoples of Europe. (“Dr. de Forest Talks on Radio” 1928, 113)

De Forest was quite wrong, however, for “cheap jazz” and other popular musics prevailed in the broadcast environment of the 1920s and after. De Forest was aided in his campaign by the early radio press, which, once it ceased covering mainly technical matters and began to promote radio for its programming, frequently featured interviews with and profiles of opera singers, who usually praised radio for helping to make America more musical through the democratization of access to great music (figure 4.2).7 Some admitted that radio could not convey the action or the costumes of a staged opera but asserted that broadcasting opera was nonetheless a positive development (“Marie Sundelius Says: ‘Radio Is Helping to Make Musical America More Musical’” 1922, 29). And, given the splash that opera broadcasts were making, occasional articles appeared detailing how opera broadcasts worked.8 And the advertising of radios attempted to capture the prestige of opera. A Magnavox advertisement from 1924 depicts a radio horn with different figures emanating from it. Featuring favorite operatic characters, the ad’s copy begins, “opera—one of the many events enjoyed by Magnavox owners” (figure 4.3). Another manufacturer, AMRAD, named a series of radios “Symphonic,” with an “Opera” model, which combined a phonograph and radio. A 1924 advertisement features a picture captioned “The OPERA, Paris.” The advertisement’s copy touts the classiness of the cabinetry, with “French Renaissance design” and “richly figured, hand- carved walnut” (figure 4.4).

Chicago: The First Opera Broadcasts De Forest wasn’t opera’s only advocate, of course, since the promise of access to great music was a widely circulating discourse in this era. Engineers and broadcasters in several big cities in the US were working toward airing live opera performances. The first opera broadcast was not from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, which was viewed by many as the holy grail of broadcasting, but from Chicago, beginning in 82

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4.2 Opera stars Alice Gentle, Queena Mario, Francesco Peralta, and Antonio Scotti read score

of Tosca while listening to radio of opera, 1922 (author’s collection)

1919. Reporting on the beginning of opera broadcasting was suffused with the language of the democratization of access to great music. Radio journalist Hugo Gernsback reported, “wireless amateurs all about the surrounding country were thus able for the first time to hear grand opera.” This broadcast was an experiment, not part of a regular series, 83

4.3 Magnavox advertise-

ment, Saturday Evening Post, 1924 (author’s collection)

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4.4 AMRAD “The Opera” model advertisement, 1928 (author’s collection)

but, he wrote, “grand opera by wireless will soon be an accomplished fact” (Gernsback 1919a, 106). A broadcast on 11 November 1921 in Chicago, featuring “our Mary” (the famous soprano Mary Garden) among others in the Chicago Grand Opera Company, was another experiment but one preparatory 85

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to a series planned to commence the following week. A Chicago Daily Tribune article on the broadcast concluded, “no longer will it be necessary to dress up in evening togs to hear grand opera and no longer will grand opera consist solely of phonographic selections in towns 500 or 1,000 miles from Chicago” (“Opera Carries 1,500 Miles by Radio Phones” 1921, 13). Another announced the dawn of a new era for “stay at home” opera lovers, who could now satisfy their “artistic desires” (Smith 1922, 692). Now, opera was available to all, broadcast live and not recorded as “mechanical” or “canned music,” against which there was a strong bias in the early radio era: “no longer will their ‘canned opera’ consist solely of phonographic selections. This latter recourse was hitherto the only method for hearing opera on the plains of Iowa or the hills of Minnesota” (Smith 1922, 728). This author continued by writing rhapsodically: Like a sunburst after a long and dark night, wireless telephony has been assured a new and practical usage in the everyday social lives of the people of the Middle West. Radio telephony now has made possible the transmission of Grand Opera over an area roughly estimated at 750,000 square miles, stretching over a great circle with Chicago as the pivotal or central point of distribution. (Smith 1922, 692)

This article also reported that two department stores in Chicago installed public radios so that people could listen to opera broadcasts (Smith 1922, 728). Over 50,000 people tuned in, in part because of an extensive campaign to inform listeners that the broadcast was going to occur. The discourse of democratization of access was strong in reports of the Chicago broadcasts. A 1922 article entitled “Radiating Culture” articulated what many people were thinking in this era, that radio would bring high culture to the hinterlands: “the day of universal culture has dawned at last,” the article opens; “no longer can Gopher Prairie say, ‘Nothing ever happens in this town.’ There is now culture for all” (Hart 1922, 948). As a result of these concerts, some commentators believed that regular radio broadcasts of opera would help break down the stereotype that it was only entertainment for the wealthy; greater familiarity, it was hoped, might bring appreciation. An editor of the World in Omaha wrote in 1922: Grand and the lighter operas, both of which heretofore have been looked upon, more or less, as entertainment for the rich, now have the chance of “going on trial” in every home in the land, with the advent of the Radiophone. . . . 86

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This author also noted the perceptions of opera as an elite form of entertainment: Operas are criticized mostly by people who have never heard them; by those who have never had the opportunity to appreciate them. Most of these look upon them with displeasure—the opera as a place where only the elite go to display the gorgeous gowns and dresses they wear, but once the strains of the opera singer’s voice or from the symphony orchestra go floating on the ether into the homes in every village, hamlet and at every cross-road, and are heard as they are rendered—not just reproduced—opinions may be changed.

But if the masses hear opera, they will come to like it. Opera music must be heard to be appreciated. It’s like eating olives. At first you don’t like them, but when you try them a second time they taste better, and on the third trial you find that you actually are fond of them. So it is with opera. (“Comments from Newspapers” 1922, 6)

The Chicago Civic Opera broadcast thirteen operas in the 1929– 1930 season, heard across the country in what engineers said was “the most elaborate and complete radio pick-up in the United States” (elaborate because in the days before satellites, radio stations were linked by telephone lines). The announcer was not backstage as in the past but could view the stage and so could describe the onstage action instead of relying on a script (“Civic Opera from Chicago for Nationwide Audience” 1929, §20, p. 21). Costs of the broadcast were underwritten by the National Broadcasting Company, which paid for such “sustaining programs.” Network support for such highbrow programs was a way of buying into the discourse of the democratization of access to great music, of uplifting the musical tastes of the nation. The networks also hoped that underwriting highbrow programs would generate goodwill, the main advertising strategy of this era when entire programs were sponsored by a single entity rather than supported by commercials (a system that emerged after World War II). Paternalistic capitalism as identified by Levine had taken something of a turn, with NBC acting as the kind benefactor bringing high culture to the masses. According to Merlin H. Aylesworth, the first president of NBC: There is a growing demand for the music of great composers on the air, and grand opera has grown to be in increasing favor. Radio broadcasting has a responsibility to place before the listeners of America the best productions it can give the radio 87

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and to more than meet the public demand for music of the highest class. We try to create a demand for good music and then to supply just a little more than enough to satisfy the demand we have created. (“‘Aida’ Is Premiere Opera in Chicago’s New Theatre” 1929, §10, p. 14)

Aylesworth employs the language of the goodwill strategy while positioning NBC as the (paternalistic) purveyor of high art to the masses.

The Growth of Opera Broadcasts The success of the opera broadcasts from Chicago was only one step toward de Forest’s and others’ goal of making live performances of opera accessible to all. But there were still detractors, and record labels, to contend with. The recording industry’s idea of democratization of access to great music was to sell recordings, while radio, once one purchased the hardware, was free. In New York City, where most of the major stars were located, the Victor Talking Machine Company, the leading record label of the era with artists such as Enrico Caruso on its roster, refused to let its star musicians appear on the radio (“Stars of the Opera to Sing over the Radio” 1924, 1). When they finally did broadcast, on New Year’s Day 1925, the event received first-page treatment in the New York Times with the headline “Famous Stars Sing First Time by Radio to 6,000,000 People.” These luminaries included Lucrezia Bori (1887–1960), a Spanish lyric soprano and one of the great figures of the Metropolitan Opera. The artists, unpaid, performed various operatic and other vocal selections in the studios of WEAF in New York City, NBC’s flagship station, which later reported that it had received 20,000 letters in favor of the concert and that it planned to offer another (“Famous Stars Sing First Time by Radio to 6,000,000 People” 1925, 1; “WEAF Received 20,000 Letters Lauding McCormack and Bori” 1925, §8, p. 13). Two days after the concert, a New York Times headline announced, “Radio Stocks Soar after Opera Songs,” although this was partly the result of the previous year’s surge in radio sales (“Radio Stocks Soar after Opera Songs” 1925, 16). Victor slowly realized that perhaps radio could be used to increase sales of recordings, and thus it allowed stars from its roster to broadcast in the mid-1920s, following on the company’s massive promotion of recordings of Caruso and other opera stars. The initial success of radio had contributed to a lessening of Victor’s sales by nearly half, but Victor hoped that permitting its biggest stars, especially opera singers, to 88

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appear on radio might help to boost sales in the future. Star singers allowed to broadcast included the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin (1873–1938), soprano Amelita Galli- Curci, and the celebrated tenor Beniamino Gigli (1890–1957), among others (“McCormack & Jeritza on Air” 1925, 16). The appearance of opera singers on WEAF seems to have increased sales of both radios and phonographs (“Opera Singers Stimulate Radio and Phonograph Sales” 1925, §8, p. 13). For these and still other reasons, unstaged opera broadcasts increasingly became the norm in New York City (“WGBS Will Broadcast ‘Il Trovatore’ Tonight” 1925, §10, p. 14). Backed by the radio manufacturer Atwater-Kent, WEAF scheduled 30 Sunday night performances beginning in 1925 that featured many musicians, including opera singers who sang in 60-minute opera adaptations. The broadcasts were frontpage news in the New York Times9 (“Opera Stars Sign for Radio Concerts” 1925, 1). The Atwater-Kent Hour was an early and pioneering program featuring stars from the Metropolitan Opera, accompanied by an orchestra. The program also included a house vocal quartet, “the Atwater-Kent Quartet,” a soloist, “the tenor of the Atwater-Kent Quartet,” and the orchestra was the “Atwater-Kent Symphony Orchestra.” (Such naming practices were the norm in the early days of radio, when freestanding commercials did not yet exist and there was trepidation about direct selling on the air.) The program featured regular stars, however, such as Lucrezia Bori and John McCormack, and many other notable singers and instrumentalists of the era (Dunning 1998). Artists who initially showed reluctance to appear on the radio proved to be quick to snap up the hefty fees Atwater-Kent was willing to pay. The popular radio press, which had long been advocating for great artists to appear on the air, heaved a collective sigh of relief. “At Last— Great Artists over the Radio” was the title of one article lauding Bori and the Irish tenor John McCormack’s appearances, even while the author recognized that it was the desire to sell recordings that caused Victor and other record labels to relent and permit their stars to broadcast (Mix 1925, 880). In 1927, Atwater-Kent pitched to the National Broadcasting Company a scheme called “National Radio Auditions,” a national competition to locate the best singers. Across the country, women’s clubs, musical groups, and civic associations were asked to sponsor contents and determine winners (DeLong 1980). Votes from audiences would determine 60% of the decision, the remaining 40% coming from a jury of musical specialists (“Sing to Millions in Radio Contest” 1927). Roughly 50,000 young amateurs competed. The final competition took place in 89

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4.5 Radio Opera Contest singers with the president of the National Federation of Music Clubs and Madame Louise Homer of the Metropolitan Opera, 1927 (left to right, Mrs. Edgar Stillman Kelley, president of the National Federation of Music Clubs; Charles Offer, bass; La Rue Schmidt, contralto; Madame Louise Homer; Sidney A. Williams, tenor; Marie Bronarzyk, soprano), author’s collection

December 1927 in New York City and was broadcast over WEAF, which was connected to 32 radio stations in a national chain. Five women and five men competed. First place went to Agnes Davis, a 21-year- old schoolteacher from Denver, and Wilbur W. Evans, a 22-year- old student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Each grand champion won $5,000, plus the tuition at a music school or conservatory for two years (“The Microphone Will Present” 1927; “Sing to Millions in Radio Contest” 1927). Both went on to have respectable careers as performers and teachers.

The “Golden Horseshoe” in the Ether Despite the success of the opera broadcasts from Chicago and the enthusiastic press afforded to operatic broadcasts, the Metropolitan Op90

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era Company in New York City (in its old location at Broadway and 39th Street, with the elite seats referred to as the “golden horseshoe”) continued to be absent from the air. The Company had received many proposals, but its officials simply did not think that there was enough popular demand to warrant undertaking broadcasts. This was true enough, given the near- constant surveying of listener preferences in the early days of radio that consistently revealed a consistent lack of listener interest in opera, such as in the 1924 survey mentioned earlier.10 A Metropolitan Opera Company representative said, “the idea has been taken up time and again, but we can’t see where it would be beneficial to opera. There is no chance of anything of the kind at present” (“No Opera by Radio during This Season” 1922, 35). In lieu of regular full-length opera broadcasts from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, ad hoc opera broadcasts were aired with some regularity in and around New York City. These broadcasts helped cultivate a radio audience for opera, which sometimes translated into attendance at performances. The New York Times, for example, reported that the former Hammerstein Theatre had been “besieged” by operagoers on 19 February 1923 for a performance of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Theater officials were at a loss to explain the crowd, described by the Times as a riot, until someone realized that perhaps the recent broadcast of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman was responsible (“Manhattan Thronged for ‘Meistersinger’” 1923, 12). Despite the acclaim and the popularity of these occasional broadcasts of opera singers and operas, the Metropolitan Opera still remained resistant to broadcasting staged productions. An early rationale for the reluctance to broadcast—that great voices would not carry well over radio—was largely refuted once many major singers appeared on radio beginning early in 1925. Still, many continued to believe that a staged opera would not reproduce well over the air, including, it seems, Giulio Gatti- Casazza, the head of the Metropolitan Opera. Further, there were technical problems of broadcasting live from the stage, since singers were unaccustomed to having to step close enough to a microphone to be picked up. Another problem was that of connecting many stations together, which, as noted above, could only be accomplished by telephone in this era. A technological breakthrough late in 1927 aided the broadcast of fully staged operas. A new mixing panel called a “transmitter attenuator” was developed by an engineer at WEAF, apparently for the broadcasts of operas from the Auditorium Theatre of Chicago where the Chicago Civic Opera Company performed. This new device permitted 91

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engineers to use and control large numbers of microphones, which obviated the problem of singers wandering about large stages and thus exceeding the range of microphones. The old mixing board could control sixteen microphones but only twelve simultaneously, and required that microphones be turned on and off as required by the singers. This meant that someone had to be stationed in the audience to communicate telephonically to the control operator backstage where the singers were moving so that the nearest microphone to the singer could be cut in; or the control operator himself could sit in the audience and make adjustments on equipment he held in his lap. Cutting in to a microphone near a singer usually resulted in higher volume that could be noticed by listeners. The only way to achieve as smooth a broadcast as possible was to have a controller who “knows the opera as well as the musical conductor and can anticipate in advance when the chorus and various soloists are to start singing.” Based on all of these problems, the new mixing board was designed so that all microphones were always live but could be tuned in or out. The new model employed eighteen microphones, plus two more for the announcer (“Quality of Opera Broadcasts Aided by New Mixing Device” 1927, §10, p. 16). With the technical problems and intransigence at the Metropolitan Opera Company overcome, live, staged broadcasts of opera finally began in New York City late in 1931. NBC paid the Met $30,000 in 1931 for exclusive rights to Met artists. As the New York Times’s first radio critic, Orrin E. Dunlap Jr., wrote on 22 November 1931, “the Metropolitan Opera is going on the air Saturday afternoons. And having gained entree to the golden horseshoe the broadcasters feel that the final barrier has been passed in opposition to the broadcasting of fine music” (Dunlap 1931, §9, p. 9). On Christmas Day 1931, the Metropolitan Opera Company broadcast live to the nation a performance of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel. Recognizing the value of opera as broadcasting in the public interest, NBC covered the cost as a “sustaining” program. The broadcast was reported on the first page of the New York Times, which, linking the broadcast to de Forest’s early transmissions, wrote in sober tones destined for the opera history books: Almost twenty-two years ago a microphone was placed on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House and Enrico Caruso and Emmy Destinn sang a few solos and duets from the opera “Tosca.” Their voices were heard by a few amateur experimenters, and it was generally decided that there were “insurmountable obstacles” to the broadcasting of opera. 92

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The Metropolitan went on the air again yesterday and the melodious strains of Humperdinck’s “Hänsel und Gretel” were carried without distortion to millions of radio listeners in the United States and abroad. (“Metropolitan Broadcasts First Full Opera” 1931, 1)

The New York Times report included a photograph of Paul D. Cravath, president of the Metropolitan Opera Company, and Merlin H. Aylesworth of NBC before a large radio. Cravath said: I believe that interest in the opera will be so stimulated by broadcasting that listeners will flock in such numbers to the opera house—where they can see opera as well as hear it—that we will have to build a new and bigger opera home to hold them. Let me assure the millions of my listeners who have heard opera in the Metropolitan that the grand opera you will see and hear there surpasses the music you hear over the radio, perfect as it is, just as a beautiful woman standing before you in all her glory surpasses her pale image cast upon a screen. (“Metropolitan Broadcasts First Full Opera” 1931, 3)

Members of the cast (when not onstage) as well as stagehands listened to the broadcast and pronounced it a success. General Manager Giulio Gatti- Casazza, who had long opposed opera broadcasts, was in the end convinced that “his beloved opera had not been ‘disgraced’” (“Metropolitan Broadcasts First Full Opera” 1931, 3). Famous conductors and musicians from across the country telegraphed in their praise of the broadcast. Letters poured in from all over the country—4,000, according to NBC (“America Applauds the Opera” 1932, §8, p. 8).11 Opera, it seemed, was no longer only for highbrows but now, thanks to radio, could be for the multitudes (Dunlap 1932, §9, p. 7). The Metropolitan Opera broadcast remains today the longest continually broadcast classical music program in the history of radio.12 The genesis of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts was fueled by powerful discourses about spreading great music to the masses, discourses that were also articulated by Lee de Forest, a representative of the social elites who desired both to sacralize opera while at the same time endeavoring to ensure that the masses had access to it and learned to appreciate it. The popular radio press in the early days of radio used the cultural prestige of opera as one of many ways to encourage everyday American to purchase radios. But this press barely registered the first Metropolitan Opera broadcasts; the prestige of opera had served its purpose of making radio respectable and creating radio aficionados who, once they owned radios, tended to listen to something else. 93

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Stravinsky and Others While no one today disputes the importance and influence of Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, it is nonetheless incontrovertible that the work appeared in a period of extraordinary artistic ferment and creativity in some European metropoles in the early twentieth century, particularly the capitals of Paris and Vienna. Both were not simply capitals, but seats of empires, serving as magnets for people around the world, including imperialized subjects from central and eastern Europe—the extent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—and from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific, and the Caribbean as parts of the French empire. Stravinsky’s then-radical cultural production was by no means unique, and could only have happened when and where it did, a result of a particular confluence of social, cultural, and historical factors. Despite the large amount of scholarship on musical modernism, and, more specifically, composers such as Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Claude Debussy, and Charles Ives, to name just a few—composers whose willingness to quote and manipulate folk or traditional or popular or other musics in their own music is well known and has been much studied—explanations for just why these composers made these engagements with other musics are inadequate.1 Elsewhere, I have discussed these engagements in terms of changes in consumer capitalism and the decline of the importance of use value and the rise of exchange value in cultural production and consumption (Taylor 2007), but it seems to me now that these discussions did not go far enough. Composers in the nineteenth century had ac94

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cess to published examples of non-Western musics in notation, yet they never quoted or engaged with non-Western musics in any significant way. Why? What I argue in this chapter is that Stravinsky’s relationship to other musics and the musics of Others was not unique, and in fact was part of a massive epistemological shift in the early twentieth century in which musics of Europe’s Elsewheres, and its own past, became newly conceived as appropriable, exchangeable. This was in large part a result of an even larger shift in which the growth of the importance of finance capital in Western countries and increasing urbanization ushered in a new relationship between subjects and how they constructed their objects, with profound ramifications for cultural production and consumption. Many Western composers began to engage in wholesale quotations, emulations, and representations of musics from other cultures for the first time. I am building on an argument presented in Taylor (2007) on the music of Charles Ives, whose use of snippets of hymns and popular songs is well known, but now want to theorize more deeply and expand that argument to Stravinsky and other composers whose musics show an engagement with musics and sounds from other cultures, other social groups from their own culture, or the past. In 1910, the Austrian- German economist and politician Rudolf Hilferding published Finance Capital, a book that explicated the importance of banks and the banking industry to capitalism, and in particular the capitalism of Hilferding’s era. Finance capital in his thinking was globalized, helping to expand capitalism quickly, which in turn was aiding in perpetuating capitalist societies generally. This expansion united all of the wealthy in the service of finance capital (Hilferding 1981, 365). Hilferding defined “finance capital” this way: An ever-increasing part of the capital of industry does not belong to the industrialists who use it. They are able to dispose over capital only through the banks, which represent the owners. On the other side, the banks have to invest an everincreasing part of their capital in industry and in this way they become to a greater and greater extent industrial capitalists. I call bank capital, that is, capital in money form which is actually transformed in this way into industrial capital, finance capital. So far as its owners are concerned, it always retains the money form; it is invested by them in the form of money capital, interest-bearing capital, and can always be withdrawn by them as money capital. But in reality the greater part of the capital so invested with the banks is transformed into industrial, productive capital (means of production and labour power) and is invested in the productive process. An ever-increasing proportion of the capital used in industry is finance capital, 95

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capital at the disposition of the banks which is used by the industrialists. (Hilferding 1981, 225)

Finance capital is thus capital that is owned by the banks that can be used by industry, a situation that gave banks enormous leverage and power. V. I. Lenin, drawing largely on Hilferding, elaborated on this conception of finance capital: It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier, who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions. The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy; it means the crystallisation of a small number of financially “powerful” states from among the rest. (Lenin 1939, 59)

Hilferding observed that finance capital gave the control of “social production” to a small number of large capitalist firms, and had the effect of separating management of production from ownership and socializing production to a certain degree. This socialization was limited by the division of the world market into “national economic territories of individual states.” This division could only be overcome, partially and with difficulty, through international cartelization. The struggles of cartels and trusts against each other are aided by state power (Hilferding 1981, 367). What I want to focus on here is the expanded role played by exchange value in Hilferding’s thinking and what that meant for cultural production in the early twentieth century. First, Hilferding rehearses Marx on the process of exchange value: A commodity enters the process of exchange as a use value, having proved that it can satisfy a need to the extent required by society. It then becomes an exchange value for all other commodities which fulfill the same condition. This symbolizes its conversion into money, as the expression of exchange value in general. In becoming money, it has become the exchange value for all other commodities. (Hilferding 1981, 34)

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Then, he makes a case for the heightened importance of exchange value in the realm of finance capital: The distinctive feature of commodity exchange trading is that by standardizing the use value of a commodity it makes the commodity, for everyone, a pure embodiment of exchange value, a mere bearer of price. Any money capital is now in a position to be converted into such a commodity, with the result that people outside the circle of professional, expert merchants hitherto engaged in the trade can be drawn into buying and selling these commodities. The commodities are equivalent to money; the buyer is spared the trouble of investigating their use value, and they are subject only to slight fluctuations in price. Their marketability and hence their convertibility into money at any time is assured because they have a world market . . . (Hilferding 1981, 153)

What Hilferding is saying here is that exchange value has come to dominate (a major theme in Theodor Adorno’s work on the culture industries and more generally, e.g., Horkheimer and Adorno 1990 and Adorno 2007); use value no longer matters. Later, he is more explicit: “for the capitalist only exchange value is essential” (Hilferding 1981, 167). Following Hilferding, others have focused on the importance of finance capital, such as Lenin (1939), as we have seen, and, more recently, many scholars concerned with the neoliberal capitalism of the last few decades (e.g., Duménil and Lévy 2004 and 2011; Harvey 2005). But I want to spend some time considering Giovanni Arrighi’s important book The Long Twentieth Century (Arrighi 1994), which, inspired by Fernand Braudel, offers a long view of the role played by finance capital in Western culture. If for Marx the “law of the motion of history,” as Engels put it in his preface to The Eighteenth Brumaire (Marx 1963, 14), was the struggles among the classes, for Arrighi, history was shaped by the long spirals of growth, expansion, and speculation. And it can be seen as anticipating the economic decline of the US and the beginning of another upward spiral, this time in China (see Arrighi 2009). Arrighi takes Marx’s famous formula—MCM, or “buying in order to sell dearer” (Marx 1990, 256)—and expands it. This formula does not simply characterize particular capitalist investments, but can be understood to describe the workings of capital as a historical pattern in the capitalist world system (Arrighi 1994, 6). “The central aspect of this pattern,” he explains,

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is the alternation of epochs of material expansion . . . with phases of financial rebirth and expansion.  .  .  . In phases of material expansion money capital “sets in motion” an increasing mass of commodities . . . ; and in phases of financial expansion an increasing mass of money capital “sets itself free” from its commodity form, and accumulation proceeds through financial deals. Together, the two epochs or phase constitute a full systemic cycle of accumulation. (Arrighi 1994, 6; emphasis in original)

Arrighi examines several of these cycles in history in which finance capital has played an important role in the capitalism of that era: Genoa from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, Holland from the late sixteenth through most of the eighteenth centuries, Britain from the latter half of the eighteenth century into the early twentieth century, and the US beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the present, though the US cycle is currently spiraling down (the financial crisis of 2007–9 is evidence of this). Arrighi views the rise and fall of regimes of finance capital as occurring in a kind of spiral fashion historically. These spirals aren’t necessarily discrete; there can be temporal overlaps, as in the British and American cases. Britain’s free trade imperialism, as Arrighi calls it, made London a natural financial center, out- competing other European capitals such as Amsterdam and Paris. London became the home of high finance (Arrighi 1994, 55). Britain’s unilateral adoption of a free trade practice and ideology and the opening up of its domestic market meant that Britain created “world-wide networks of dependence on, and allegiance to, the expansion of wealth and power of the United Kingdom” (Arrighi 1994, 56). British imperial hegemony had created not just a world empire but a world economy. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, however, Britain began to lose control of the balance of power in Europe, and, later, the balance of power in the world, in part because of the development of Germany. And Britain was being surpassed by the US, which was greater in size and richer in resources. The British and American phases of the influence of finance capital occurred in a historical moment of rapid urbanization in both Europe and the US, and I want to turn now to that question. Fredric Jameson (1997), in his study of finance capital and culture, notes that Georg Simmel’s essay on the metropolitan experience, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” first published in 1903, contains, among other things, a diagnosis of the cultural effects of the rise of finance capital. Simmel’s conception of the urban experience is in some sense an interpretation of how ideologies of finance capital entered the broader culture. Sim98

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mel begins by noting the difficulties modern urban subjects have with maintaining conceptions of themselves as individuals, also noting how metropolitans react not emotionally but rationally to the myriad stimuli of the city. But Simmel quickly moves to recognizably Marxian and (pre)-Hilferdingian discussion of the role played by capital in urban spaces, and in particular, process and ideologies of exchange. The city, as Marx pointed out long ago, is the center of capitalism, and it is no different with Simmel’s metropolis. The “intellectualistic” (i.e., rational) ways that metropolitans interact with each other and, indeed, everything, is in a close relationship with the money economy. Simmel writes: They have in common a purely matter- of-fact attitude in the treatment of persons and things in which a formal justice is often combined with an unrelenting hardness. . . . Money is concerned only with what is common to all, i.e., with the exchange value which reduces all quality and individuality to a purely quantitative level. . . . [I]ntellectual relationships deal with persons as with numbers, that is, as with elements which, in themselves, are indifferent, but which are of interest only insofar as they offer something objectively perceivable. It is in this very manner that the inhabitant of the metropolis reckons with his merchant, his customer and with his servant, and frequently with the persons with whom he is thrown into obligatory association. (Simmel 1971, 326)

In this rich passage, Simmel covers not only the nature of relationship between people and things but what these relationships owe to capitalism and, in particular, exchange in a capitalist market. Under capitalism, according to Simmel, “the interests of each party acquire a relentless matter- of-factness, and its rationally calculated economic egoism need not fear any divergence from its set path because of the imponderability of personal relationships” (Simmel 1971, 327). The kind of rationality he describes is rather Weberian: “The modern mind has become more and more a calculating one” (Simmel 1971, 327). He continues, “it has been the money economy which has thus filled the daily life of so many people with weighing, calculating, enumerating and the reduction of qualitative values to quantitative terms” (Simmel 1971, 327–28). The rise of capitalism, coming to a form of maturity with the predominance of finance capital in the late nineteenth– early twentieth centuries, produced, for Simmel, a new kind of person, originating at the beginning of capitalism as we know from Weber, but taken to new extremes in this period and in these new urban environments and experiences. 99

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Simmel also notes what he terms “the blasé attitude” that is prevalent among the metropolitan type, an attitude produced in part by the money economy: “The essence of the blasé attitude is an indifference toward the distinctions between things” (Simmel 1971, 329). Simmel writes that he does not mean that the difference between things goes unperceived, but that “the meaning and the value of the distinctions between things, and therewith of the things themselves, are experienced as meaningless” (Simmel 1971, 330). Money in Simmel’s view thus becomes the “frightful leveller,” hollowing out “the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair. They all float with the same specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money” (Simmel 1971, 330). Simmel also writes, “the development of modern culture is characterized by the predominance of what one can call the objective spirit over the subjective.” The predominance of this objective spirit has been less and less satisfactory for the individual. Perhaps less conscious than in practical activity and in the obscure complex of feelings which flow from him, he is reduced to a negligible quantity. He becomes a single cog as over against the vast overwhelming organization of things and forces which gradually take out of his hands everything connected with progress, spirituality and value. (Simmel 1971, 337)

Simmel’s and Arrighi’s thinking on the importance of finance capital was taken up with respect to cultural production by Fredric Jameson (1997), who summarizes Arrighi’s argument before addressing what the rise of finance capital means for the production of culture, positing that it is a problem of abstraction, which in effect produced modernism: Real abstractions in an older period—the effects of money and number in the big cities of nineteenth- century industrial capitalism, the very phenomena analyzed by Hilferding and culturally diagnosed by Georg Simmel in his pathbreaking essay . . . had as one significant offshoot the emergence of what we call modernism in all the arts. (Jameson 1997, 252)

I am in agreement with Jameson on the question abstraction but only up to a point, for I think he overstates his case; abstraction in his thinking is too narrow a way of conceptualizing the modernist shift. Money produces equivalence, but equivalence doesn’t necessarily lead 100

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to abstraction. And when it does, it is not the only road to that particular destination. I would say that finance capital as money opened up this avenue but didn’t prescribe it, for, obviously, not all cultural production in the early twentieth century was abstract, not even all modernist cultural production. And abstraction can take many forms, not all of them manifesting as atonality in music or abstract expressionism in the visual arts. Abstraction in Jameson’s hands is too specific a way of conceptualizing what actually happened, and it strikes me as ahistorical, not paying enough attention to specific historical realities and aesthetic trends in the various arts. For example, composers’ embrace of dissonance, and, for many, an atonal musical language early in the twentieth century, was less a question of being motivated by a new ideology of abstraction ushered in by finance capital, but more of a technical response to their belief that tonality as a musical system had been used up, that nothing new could be done with it. And in several arts, technological advancements played a powerful role in creating a sense among some artists that abstraction needed to be pursued. For the Second Viennese School (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and others), the move to abstraction was a way to withstand the repeatability of music facilitated by new means of reproduction—player piano, phonograph, and radio—technological developments that many greeted with considerable consternation. Much the same occurred with painters, the course of whose art had been dramatically altered by the rise of photography in the mid-nineteenth century. Various reactions to these new technologies, whether fear, condemnation, or resignation that were evinced by major intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, do not need to be rehearsed. I would argue that what finance capital really wrought in the realm of cultural production was a new conceptualization of other cultural forms as exchangeable. Just as Hilferding’s capitalism inculcated the ideology that everything was an exchangeable commodity, obliterating all differences between commodities other than their price, other musics (or modes of visual representation) could become reconceptualized as appropriable, suitable to be imported into one’s own work. This is how I would explain certain trends in modernist cultural production in the twentieth century, whether composers borrowing from non-Western musics or European folk musics, or visual artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque employing readymade objects such as newspaper fragments, bits of furniture, and wallpaper in their works around the same time as Le Sacre. Cultural forms in other realms, other 101

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fields, became thought of as appropriable, exchangeable, available to be used in one’s own creation. Composers became willing to employ other music, and Others’ musics, in their own creations. Relinquishing some time in music or space on a canvas to sounds or images other than your own became acceptable, even, in some circles, fashionable. Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, with its extensive use of Russian folk music (see Morton 1979 and Taruskin 1980), in many ways continues nineteenth- century nationalistic musical treatments of folk musics. But since other works such as Three Japanese Lyrics (1913) and Pribaoutki (1914) were composed around the same time, it becomes clear that Stravinsky was also engaging with sounds emanating from other cultures.2 I would thus characterize Le Sacre not simply as a case of the continuation of nineteenth- century nationalism in music, but complicatedly as an example—along with other such works as Three Japanese Lyrics and Pribaoutki—of the new kind of exchangeability made possible by the rise in importance of finance capital in the West, which elevated the importance of exchange value over use value. Stravinsky’s music, of course, wasn’t the only musical symptom of this shift, since, as I and others have written (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000; Locke 2009; and Taylor 2007), many composers early in the twentieth century became fascinated with musics and sounds from other cultures and attempted to represent or emulate them in their music. But Stravinsky’s representation of the Russian folk Other in Le Sacre using its own music—however modified—is perhaps the most salient example in the early twentieth century of this important shift in Western culture. Not viewing the influence of finance capital as simply a recourse to abstraction also helps explain Stravinsky’s and others’ later stylistic trends. I would argue that Stravinsky’s later turn to a style that has been called neoclassical with works such as Pulcinella (1920) does not represent a break from his earlier, “Russian” stylistic period (in which Le Sacre is normally placed), but, rather, exemplifies the same sort of relationship with other music—this time musics from eighteenthcentury Europe rather than folk and traditional sounds from his native Russia. This, then, is another way in which I take issue with Jameson’s thinking on abstraction (not to mention musicological stylistic periodizers): Stravinsky’s turn toward musics from Europe’s past was not, after all, a turn toward abstraction, but in fact an embrace of earlier musical languages, an embrace that could only be justified in a historical era when the predominance of finance capital and the ideologies

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accompanying it rendered such engagements with other cultural forms possible to artists and intelligible to viewers and listeners. Let me now continue and expand the question of metropolitan life as advanced by Simmel and others. The condition of the individual, or, better, conceptions of the individual, constitutes another important set of social, cultural, and social factors at play in the early twentieth century. This was an era when conceptions of the centered subject, an Enlightenment subject who believed he could control his own destiny, were being undermined by a number of ideas emanating from a number of directions—Freud on the unconscious, Saussure on the nature of language, Darwin on evolution, Marx on history, and the rise of mass culture (Hall 1989; Taylor 2007). The condition, the maintenance, of the individual in the early twentieth century was of great concern to a number of artists and intellectuals in this period, and they found various ways of reasserting their individuality or collective individualities in the face of the pressures just mentioned. The nationalisms of the nineteenth century that gave rise to the collection of folk songs, some of which found their way into compositions in that century, were residual or (re-)emergent by this period of the early twentieth. The nationalisms of this later period that informed composers’ and others’ self- conceptions and cultural production are part of this search for stability. Nationalism proved to be something to hold on to, something one could employ to help define oneself in a historical moment when everything seemed disconcertingly and dangerously in flux. Even if nationalistic ideologies weren’t that salient with respect to a particular individual, they were nonetheless circulating throughout Europe in this period, since some nations had only recently become nations—Italy for one, Germany for another. Stravinsky’s interest in Russian folk music can be seen in this light. Raymond Williams’s thoughts on metropolitan artistic formations are especially useful here. He notes their proliferation in the late nineteenth– early twentieth centuries, observing that this is largely a metropolitan phenomenon and is strongly influenced by international members visiting European metropoles, a function of imperialism, and that immigrants play an important role as well (Williams 1981, 83– 85). Williams writes elsewhere of the important role played by immigrants to the metropolis, many of whom played important roles in modernist cultural production, and how immigrants and others could form communities based on aesthetic affiliations (Williams 1989, 45). Immigration to the metropolis, in part because of some European countries’

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imperialist projects, helped fuel various modernist projects, while at the same time affording these immigrants to the metropolis a sense of community and belonging as parts of various aesthetic alliances. There was also an efflorescence of aesthetic affiliations—frequently fluid and ephemeral—in which composers and other musicians could seek and find commonality with others with similar tastes and beliefs in cultural production. We thus find in Paris and Vienna in the late nineteenth– early twentieth centuries—the two capitals of musical modernism—a veritable explosion of groups organized along common aesthetic beliefs, groups whose ideas on cultural production usually took the form of some sort of -ism—impressionism, expressionism, cubism, fauvism, primitivism, and many more. Finding common aesthetic cause with others was another solution to the problem of everything solid melting into air. In the Paris of Stravinsky and so many other artists and intellectuals, part of the synergy provided by new immigrants was augmented by the rise of international exhibitions, which put on display peoples, sights, sounds, and smells from other cultures, displays that were influential not just on everyday Parisians but artists as well. These international exhibitions helped bring musics from Europe’s Elsewheres to the French public, which famously captured the attention of many musicians in the French capital, Debussy perhaps chief among them, who heard in non-Western sounds new melodies and textures that they attempted to emulate in their own music. Peoples and objects were on display in a juxtaposed fashion, creating a jumble of sights, sounds, and smells. An account from the 1889 exposition describes the scene thus: A little further along is the Exposition of Colonies. It is composed of a main palace surrounded by pavilions where Indochina, Vietnam, Madagascar, Guyana, Guadeloupe, Gabon display their products. We can, if we wish, stop in a Tahitian, Senegalese, Cochin- Chinese, or New Caledonian village, and examine the indigenous peoples: the tour of the world, no longer in 80 days or 80 hours, but an hour or an hour-and-a-half, and without risk of being massacred or devoured—that is truly something.3 (Grison 1889, 23)

And historian Rosalind Williams quotes a French journalist on the 1900 exhibition: “Hindu temples, savage huts, pagodas, souks, Algerian alleys, Chinese, Japanese, Sudanese, Senegalese, Siamese, Cambodian quarters .  .  . a bazaar of climates, architectural styles, smells, colors, cuisine, music” (Williams 1982, 61). The risk-free opportunity to view 104

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peoples from other places was a major appeal. What is clear from these short passages is the variety and availability of cultures displayed. Every thing had its proper place, in a pavilion on the famous rue du Caire (Cairo Street). It was convenient, pleasant, and safe. The objects on display and that were imitated and purchased by Parisians soon acquired forms of value that had nothing to do with where they were from, but made sense in a changing social system in which foreign objects were increasingly consumed, since they had been newly conceptualized as possessing value. Foreign objects were just objects of exchange, objects to be consumed, whether curios or musical sounds. Composers and other artists, with the changes brought by finance capital, sometimes reacted positively to these exotic sights and sounds and were not reluctant to employ or imitate them in their works (see Taylor 2007). The path taken by Stravinsky and others wasn’t the only one pursued by composers in the twentieth century. Stravinsky’s (and others’) practices—which were the result, as I have been arguing, of the rise of the importance of finance capital and changing conceptions of cultural production formerly seen as “other”—quickly became an aesthetic, a position to be taken in modernist fields of cultural production. This position made the quoting or imitating of non-Western music and music from Europe’s past possible, and was held by French composers in addition to Stravinsky. But this wasn’t the dominant position of its time, however, though it was certainly a prominent one given Stravinsky’s fame and influence. The dominant composers in the other major imperial capital of culture, Vienna, chose another route, staking out a different position in the field of modernist musical production. The music of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School was much more self- contained, even hermetic, emphasizing the lone individual’s uncompromising creativity. Here one can find music that practiced Jameson’s abstraction but, even here, not only a result of the rise of financial capital, as I have said. After World War II, there was a concerted effort by the champions of the Second Viennese School to ensure that group’s aesthetic legitimacy and supremacy over Stravinsky and the French. Books by Adorno (Adorno 1973) and others (e.g., Leibowitz [1949] 1970; Newlin 1947), defended Schoenberg and his school as the wave of the future, the only true path for the advancement of music following the war. As part of this defensive way, some authors also attacked Stravinsky and the French, mainly along the lines that these composers were too willing to compromise their originality. 105

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The Parisian position of exchangeability as the incorporation of other sounds, whether “exotic” or not, became so tainted in the first couple of decades after World War II that scarcely any composer dared to adopt it. Those few that did faced severe recriminations, even ostracism, and to this day have been largely relegated to the footnotes of mainstream music history, if they are mentioned in that history at all.4 Adorno in particular assailed Stravinsky. His ballet Petrushka (1910– 11), for example, owed something to the cabaret, to which Stravinsky was somewhat faithful, according to Adorno, but he rebelled against the elements of narcissistic elation and harlequin-like animation and he succeeded in asserting, against the Bohemian atmosphere, the destruction of everything intrinsically inaugurated by the cabaret number. This tendency leads from commercial art—which readied the soul for sale as a commercial good—to the negation of the soul in protest against the character of consumer goods: to music’s declaration of loyalty to its physical basis, to its reduction to the phenomenon, which assumes objective meaning in that it renounces, of its own accord, any claim to meaning. (Adorno 1973, 142)

Adorno writes that Stravinsky’s music in Petrushka is like the intellectual’s idea of the fairground, “analogous to the position of the intellectual who enjoys films and detective novels with well-mannered naiveté, thus preparing himself for his own function within mass culture” (Adorno 1973, 143). Stravinsky and French composers, and still others, were thus seen as capitulating to mass culture, too amenable to the incorporation of the products of mass culture into their own work. This struggle for the legitimacy of this position in the postwar field of the cultural production of concert music was successful for decades. The dominant position after the war became a kind of hermetic twelvetone method of composition that excluded virtually everything that could not be controlled or manipulated by the composer’s use. Schoenberg’s method of composing with twelve tones extended in the immediate postwar era to encompass virtually every musical parameter that could be controlled by the composer. This was a kind of technocratic music that was of a piece with postwar ideologies that valued science and rationality above all else. What couldn’t be created by the composer in his hermetic system was excluded. And this music evidenced a kind of extreme conformity, which was also the cultural norm of the immediate postwar era. Everything had to be in its place. Everything was organized. Nothing was left to chance. Except chance music, but even John Cage became so enamored of his method of making indeter106

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minate music that he believed himself to have much in common with the composers of total serialism, and his method of employment of chance operations was extremely rigorous. This Viennese-inspired formalist hegemony lasted into the 1960s, when some members of the counterculture began to call into question the formalist compositional procedures of the most famous postwar composers such as Pierre Boulez in Europe and Milton Babbitt in the US, thus increasing the assault on the dominant position in this field of cultural production. Some composers once again began to allow themselves to be influenced by other musics, whether popular musics from their own cultures or non-Western musics and ideas about music. The best-known examples are the minimalist composers, whose debt to non-Western musics and ideas is well known (see Fink 2005 and Grimshaw 2011). Philip Glass (1937– ) described the Paris scene in which he had been immersed as a field that was “a wasteland, dominated by  these maniacs, these creeps, who were trying to make everyone write this crazy, creepy music” (quoted by Rockwell 1983, 111). Glass, Terry Riley (1935– ), and La Monte Young (1935– ) became influenced by classical music from India, Steve Reich (1936– ) by African drumming (Reich 1974). Such influences were evident in popular culture as well, with perhaps the Beatles’ interest in India and Indian musics as the best-known example (see Farrell 1997). Minimalism, however, was controversial, attacked by defenders of the existing position in the concert music field as dull, “like listening to paint dry,” as one of my music analysis professors once put it. The minimalist composers played an important role in beginning to destabilize the hegemony of the formalist position, however, helping to introduce modes of cultural production that have been called postmodern (though that term seems to have outlived its usefulness).5 Despite the assaults by composers associated with the counterculture against the dominant formalist position, it wasn’t until the 1980s that this position began to lose traction. It was in this period that the next phase in the relationship between composers and other musics begins, with the rise of neoliberal capitalism, another important era in the history of finance capital. In the realm of concert music production in this decade, it became common, even fashionable, to engage with musics from other cultures. While I was writing my dissertation on this subject in the early 1990s, I described the topic to a composer friend, telling him that I was writing about composers who borrowed or appropriated non-Western musics. He laughed and said, “who doesn’t?” This interest occurred with the rise of the category of world music 107

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in the 1980s, when the Western music industry decided to recognize world music as a “genre,” spurred importantly by the success of Paul Simon’s Graceland (1986). The music industry began to carve out a space for it in the music industry infrastructure: world music charts were begun at Billboard magazine in 1990, a Grammy award was created in 1992 (and another in 2003, which was later removed in 2012), spaces opened up in brick-and-mortar record stores and in virtual ones such as iTunes, and commercial musicians increasingly had to learn to “compose” and perform sounds that could pass as world music (see Taylor 1997 and 2012b). With all of these developments, exchange values for world music began to be created. This process has been described by R. Murray Schafer ([1977] 1994) and Steven Feld (1994) as “schizophonia,” a process whereby sounds are split from their makers, but this is in fact the process of the creation of exchange value, in which the laborer is divorced from the product of her labor. Once the exchange value of world music began to be established, it was much more likely to be appropriated by composers. And it is in this period that one begins to see musicians engaging with musics from far away. Unlike Stravinsky or Bartók, employing folk and regional musics for quasi-nationalistic purposes (among others), or Debussy, writing gamelan-inspired music that he encountered through colonial pathways and modes of display such as international exhibitions, the entrance of some of the world’s musics into the commercial marketplace as commodities with exchange values not only made it possible for composers to conceive of employing those musics in their own work, but made it possible to do so. In the initial flowering of interest in world music by Western composers in the 1980s and 1990s, Meredith Monk’s (1941– ) opera Atlas (1991) serves as an example. It employs traditional Western instruments (violins, viola, cello, clarinet, bass clarinet, French horn, keyboards) with the sheng, a Chinese version of a kind of mouth organ found all over Asia and that gave rise to the European pipe organ, and a shawm, a medieval wind instrument, precursor to the oboe. The borrowed sounds here, far from being used as local color, or as revitalizing agents, or as abstract material, have now become a regular part of the contemporary composer’s palette of sounds and techniques. Monk’s heroine, Alexandra Daniels, is based on the life of Alexandra David-Néel, one of the first Westerners to travel to the east and meet with holy people of various traditions, most prominently, Tibetan Buddhism. The French-Belgian David-Néel (1868–1969) adopted a Ti108

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betan lama as her son, and authored and co-authored several books on Tibetan Buddhism, some of which are still in print. In Atlas, Monk transplants David-Néel into contemporary America. The plot, as such, consists of thirteen-year- old Alexandra Daniels dreaming of traveling, then as an adult realizing this dream with two companions, Cheng Qing, of Hunan, China, and Erik Magnussen, a Norwegian. Two more join the party along the way: Franco Hartmann, Italian, and Gwen St.  Clair, born in Montserrat, West Indies. They travel all over the planet. Magnussen dies along the way, but the others attain a kind of spiritual enlightenment, the narrative of the journey becoming a metaphor for the journey of a soul. And a parable of the composer’s own era thought to be best characterized by the term “globalization.” Engagement with musics from far away wasn’t the only manifestation of the influence of finance capital in this period. The rise of the world music category, as well as interest in it, was accompanied by new digital technologies that made it possible to copy exactly recorded music, which one could copy and use in one’s own music, composed solely at the computer. Elsewhere I have discussed the rise of sampling as a practice related to the heightening of the importance of consumption in American culture in the 1980s and after (Taylor 2016b), though would now cast it as in part another phase in the development of finance capital in which consumption becomes more urgent. What we now call sampling, in the sense that it is a copying of sounds external to one’s own work, has been technologically possible since at least the advent of magnetic tape after World War II, but those few composers who engaged in some form of sampling were quite marginal. Sampling as a widespread practice didn’t begin to catch on until the 1980s, with changing attitudes towards music marked in part by the increased emphasis on consumption, but also, the increased role played by finance capital. Musicians began to think of sampled musics—other musics— in even more atomized, abstract terms. The nationalist, imperialist, and self-grounding impulses that shaped modernist composers’ interactions with other musics have seen the addition of more abstract modes of relating to other musics aided by new technologies, and occurring at the beginning of the downward spiral of finance capital in the West. Many, perhaps even most, of today’s composers don’t always listen to music as music, but music as something that might be copied, sampled. When asked by an interviewer where he gets his samples or ideas for samples, Toby Marks, whose electronic “band” is called Banco de Gaia, replied, 109

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It varies. Sometimes I’ll just come across something I think is amazing and I might be able to imagine a tune built around it. Other times I stockpile stuff and when I’m working on a tune if I need a male Arabic vocal to fit a section I’ll see if I have anything which would be suitable. (Marks n.d.)

Clearly, a different aesthetic, a different relationship to music, is at work. It is not unusual, of course, for composers consciously to take musics and sounds from other places, as in the Stravinsky case, but to seek out these other sounds as, it seems, the foundation of one’s own music, and to listen to them in this atomized fashion is new. In the 1990s, once sampling technologies had been widely adopted and questions of its legality were largely over (see Demers 2006 on this), musicians began to articulate how they approached sampled musical material, going beyond simple conceptions of homage or novelty. Listen to the way Prince Be (formerly Prince Be Softly, 1970– ) discusses his work with interviewer Terry Gross, for example. Gross asked, “now, how much of the music on your new record is played by musicians and how much of it is sampled, and is that balance changing?” Prince Be responded: I would pretty much 35% of it is musicians and are rest are samples. I’m a sampling artist, what can I tell you? I love listening to records, I love feeling vibes from other people, I love being influenced by everything. I guess that’s why music takes the turns that it does because there are no boundaries in who we want and who we listen to; we can take a Sly Stone sample, we can take a Joni Mitchell sample, we can take a James Brown sample, we can take a Cal Tjader sample. It doesn’t really make a difference, it’s just all vibes and how everything feels and how everything emotes itself, you know. (Prince Be 1995)

Or composer Henry Gwiazda (1952– ): “What interests me is the juxtaposition of various sounds, which feels right for the world we live in.” He continues: I have my domestic sounds, my musical sounds, my outside/environmental sounds, and my percussion sounds. I introduce the sounds all at once, and as the piece progresses I spend time with each category, letting the listener understand where each sound comes from. And I spend some time with each sound because I like the sounds. (Gann 1991)

Others have come to hear commercial recordings and works as incomplete or unfinished, since they can now be easily manipulated in 110

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one’s home studio or by computer. John Oswald (1953– ), known for what he calls “plunderphonics,” described in 1994 his working process, which was to manipulate existing recordings: I approach these works as if I’ve adopted the role of a producer. I try to frame the artist in a way that is complimentary and interesting. But I work with source material which in all cases seems like it’s not quite finished. Even though it’s something I might admire to no end, there’s something that’s missing, something that my ears want to hear that I think can be supplied by coaxing this raw material along. So I help finish it up. I help with the arrangement or help with the vocals in order to make Dolly Parton, for instance, sound her best. (Bowman 1994)

Oswald thus conceptualizes recordings that have already been approved by artists and producers and released for sale as raw material, incomplete, ready to be finished by him. These new digital technologies have thus brought about entirely new genres of music, as well as those genres that would not be what they are without the practice of sampling. Some types of musics are characterized or even defined by the kinds of music or other sounds that they sample. Goa trance, for example, is characterized in part by its samples from science fiction movies (see Taylor 2001). The jungle music of the 1990s was marked by its sampling of reggae. In that case, reggae samples served to mark jungle as jungle and not some other (sub)genre of techno music. For Jameson, “postmodern” cultural production represents another stage of abstraction (Jameson 1997, 252). Finance capital during the historical period that produced modernist artworks was about exchange value and monetary equivalence, which “provoked a new interest in the properties of objects” (Jameson 1997, 258). But this newer period witnesses “a withdrawal from older notions of stable substances and their unifying identifications” (James 1997, 258). Jameson believes that if everything has become equivalent as a commodity, money having reduced their differences as individual things, then “both color and shape free themselves from their former vehicles and come to live independent existences as fields of perception and as artistic raw materials” (Jameson 1997, 258). Jameson also introduces Deleuze and Guattari on the subject of deterritorialization, which he interprets in a Hilferdingian/Simmelian fashion of implying “a new ontological and free-floating state” (Jameson 1997, 260– 61). He continues his argument about abstraction into the present “postmodern” moment. “What is wanted,” he writes, “is an 111

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account of abstraction in which the new deterritorialized postmodern contents are to an older modernist autonomization as global financial speculation is to an older kind of banking and credit, or as the stock market frenzies of the eighties are to the Great Depression” (Jameson 1997, 260– 61). For Jameson, the symptom of this new form of abstraction is the fragment (echoing an earlier argument about modernist collage giving way to postmodern pastiche in Jameson 1991), offering as one example the transformation of the structure of film previews, which have had to become more comprehensive than before, so much so, he believes, that to view the film that the preview is a teaser for is no longer necessary. I suppose one could characterize digital samples of music as fragments, but this seems to me to put too much emphasis on the symptom rather than the cause. Jameson concludes by again contrasting modernist cultural production with postmodern, describing a kind of Baudrillardian universe awash in signs, fragments, that profoundly influence cultural production and consumption (Jameson 1997, 264– 65). Today, again, I would, like Jameson, continue to argue for the importance of finance capital, though no longer precisely as theorized by Hilferding, or, for that matter, like Jameson, at least with respect to his concern for abstraction as its main effect in cultural production. Finance capital, thanks to the development of powerful computers and communications devices that allow for split-second financial transactions anywhere on earth, has ushered in a whole new era of the dominance of finance capital in the capitalisms of the so- called advanced countries in the last few decades. But I am less interested in stylistic categories (collage, pastiche, fragment) than what one might call infrastructural shifts in the culture industries that affect modes of cultural production and fields of cultural production, and shifts that affect distribution of cultural forms and their consumption and interpretation (see Taylor 2016a). Today’s finance capital has been instrumental in creating these new attitudes, but I do not want to imply that older attitudes toward other musics, and Others’ musics, have disappeared. Stravinsky’s and other composers’ relationships to other musics became, as I said, an identifiable position in the field of modernist musical production, and that position still exists; the new form of engagement via sampling has not supplanted the old one. Both positions co- exist. There remain plenty of composers who continue to engage with other musics as did Stravinsky, Debussy, and others before World War II (see Locke 2009; Taylor 2007; Tenzer 1994). But the field of the cultural production of postwar concert music has changed since the champions of Schoenberg and the 112

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Second Viennese School. There are more positions that are seen as legitimate, and more positions to be taken as the old hegemonies slowly break down. This is neither to praise finance capital nor simply condemn it. Appropriations of Others’ music, particularly Others who are historically disadvantaged such as ethnic minorities or formerly colonialized subjects, raise complex questions of ethics (if not legality, since now most digital samples are cleared with copyright holders). But, if Arrighi was right and the hegemony and influence of finance capital do rise and fall in spiral form, we can only wait with impotent interest to see what the declining hegemony of the West will bring with respect to cultural production while watching what happens as China rises.

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World Music Festivals as Spectacles of Genrefication and Diversity As an avid Irish traditional musician, some years ago I attended a kind of camp- cum-festival for this music, a weeklong event that is fairly common in the US for many kinds of traditional musics. One night, my teacher was playing with a small group of other musicians for a dance, so some of my fellow students and I attended to hear the music. Afterwards, as we all stood around chatting, preparations were made for a square dance in the same space. An old-time fiddler tuned up and began to play. My teacher, normally quite good-natured, turned around, looked disdainfully at the fiddler (who was actually quite excellent), and asked in a derogatory tone that was unusual for him, “what is this music?” Clearly, for my teacher, who had grown up in the 1930s and 1940s in rural Ireland, the word “music” signified what is more commonly known as Irish traditional music. For my teacher, it wasn’t a “genre” of music or a “style,” it was simply music. This anecdote is, in a way, historical, showing how types of music once believed to be simply music have become “genres” in a catalogue of genres in today’s capitalist music industry. This chapter thus offers a meditation on the question of genres in music, on why such labels are important to the music industry and cultural entrepreneurs and how festivals enforce them. In this view socalled world music offers a striking example as vast col114

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lections of unrelated musics have come to be considered of the same “genre” by the music industry and, thus, many Western listeners. Because of this paradoxical heterogeneity, I will not spend time on musical characteristics of genres. I am more interested in the process of definition and the stakes behind it. Just because some people want to call something a genre doesn’t mean that it just happens (Negus 1999). Yet, unlike almost any other category of music I can think of, world music is not a creation of musicians or fans but rather of the music industry (Taylor 1997). The latter must then work hard to make world music into a genre, i.e., an acknowledgeable, manageable and profitable entity. I argue in this chapter that festivals play an important role in this task of transforming a wide, disparate body of musics—some ancient, some more recent, some associated with social elites, some with the poor, some rural, some urban—into a single genre.

Genre It seems to me that scholars have dealt with genre mainly in two ways: on the one hand from the bottom-up perspectives of musicians and aficionados who become invested in certain sounds, practices and techniques (Fabbri 1982, 1985, and 1989; Frith 1996); or, on the other hand from the top- down perspective of corporations that try to exploit, market, and shape the consumption of music (Negus 1999). This conceptual opposition is far from new, reflecting the Birmingham School vs. Adornian approach to the study of cultural production and consumption. While I am sensitive to the Birmingham School perspective, in focusing on what might be called processes and practices of “genrefication,” I acknowledge that, since this chapter is mainly concerned with how the music industry produces and enforces genres, it is more aligned with the Adornian perspective. Nonetheless, as Simon Frith puts it, a new genre is first constructed and then articulated through a complex interplay of musicians, listeners, and mediating ideologues, and this process is much more confused than the marketing process that follows, as the wider industry begins to make sense of the new sounds and markets and to exploit both genre worlds and genre discourses in the orderly routines of mass marketing. (Frith 1996, 88)

Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature (Williams 1977) offers an important historical perspective on the concept of genre which 115

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arose, he says, out of a general theory of “kinds” during the Renaissance, preceding the looser concept of genre which was meant to be more encompassing (Williams 1977, 183). For Williams, genre must not be viewed as an ideal type nor a “traditional order” nor as a set of technical rules and procedures. It is rather a “practical and variable combination and even fusion” of “different levels of the social material process” (Williams 1977, 185) that are always involved in making culture. Genre and Ideologies of Otherness Notions of genre, at least in the West, are deeply tied to conceptions of selfhood and otherness, manifested as conceptions of my music vs. their music (my music is sophisticated, theirs isn’t; mine is complex, theirs is simple; mine is pure, theirs is polluted, etc.). The histories of genrefication in Western Europe and the US are filled with occasions of how one social group—usually members of the dominant culture— sought to differentiate itself from those it thought to be its inferiors, whether along social class lines or racial- ethnic ones. Well-known examples of this process can be found in the rise of “classical” music as a genre in the early 19th century, which has been well documented by historian William Weber (Weber 1975); or the rise of “race records” in the 1920s (Miller 2010); or “hillbilly music” in that same decade (Miller 2010; Peterson 1997). David Brackett examines more recent cases of the segregation of sound into marketing categories and radio formats such as rhythm and blues, urban contemporary, soul, and others (Brackett 2002 and 2005). If festivals have consistently accompanied the development and genrefication of world music since the beginning of its commercial branding in the 1980s, they also perform some much older tasks. These include domesticating the Other, keeping it at a safe distance, reducing it to a few manageable signs, commodifying them, and placing them in a capitalist framework of consumption. To make this argument, I will examine international and colonial exhibitions in Europe of the late nineteenth century, as well as world’s fairs such as the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago of 1893. Such events might indeed be considered as precursors to today’s world music festivals, for they share many similarities in terms of display and ideology: other cultures are put on display through their music, dance, cuisine, and commodities for sale. Such displays are usually meant to be educational but seldom accomplish much educationally. Issues of representation or inequality or forms of oppression whether colonial, 116

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imperial, or economic are deliberately hidden by the celebratory tenor of such events. Another common feature of festivals and international exhibitions is their claim to offer a travel-like experience at home, to offer “authenticity” but in an artificial setting, to reconcile adventure with comfort and safety. These ideologies are part of a process of domestication: if a “true” encounter is always engaging and potentially loaded with danger, then exhibitions and festivals make it safe, reducing Otherness to its most familiar, understandable, and enjoyable aspects. They make it easily accessible in terms of distance and affordable in terms of merchandizing. Emile Monod’s extensive treatment of the 1889 Exhibition in Paris, on which scholars have relied extensively, wrote, “the organizers of the colonial exhibition had, in the conception of their work, served a double preoccupation: they had wanted to show the colonies France and show France to the colonials” (Monod 1890, vol. 2, 139).1 A serial of short fictions written by Gaston Jollivet in 1889 (Jollivet 1889b) narrates the visit of the Parisian exhibition by a bourgeois couple. They capture the social importance of attending such an event and the kind of “knowledge” that it promulgated. At the beginning, the characters think that the main benefit of traveling is to see foreign people but the Exhibition makes all the trouble unnecessary, for one can see Africans at home, with no risk of catching a fever in Central Africa (Jollivet 1889b, 75). Or catching something worse today: contemporary world music festivals are much the same in the ways that they make the Other accessible, safe, and unthreatening. In Jollivet’s serial (1889a, 1889b), there is also a telling exchange between a husband and wife that stresses the relationship between viewing the Other and consuming it. After visiting the exhibition, the couple discusses the opportunity to embark on a voyage. England? the husband suggests. The wife replies: Yes . . . that’s an idea. But perhaps it would be better to do that another year. What is fun in London is to go “shopping” [in English] in Regent Street or Piccadilly, so we just went to visit the English section at the Exhibition, and we saw everything we could find interesting in the shops of London. (Jollivet 1889b, 75)2

The husband then proposes Sweden or Norway, but the wife points out that they had just spent two hours in the Swedish and Norwegian chalets and that she had purchased an item from a woman in native costume for the same price that she would have paid in Stockholm. Other potential destinations are also ruled out. The wife concludes 117

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6.1 “La Maison arabe,” image published in Le Figaro (1889) (Grison 1889, 17)

that by not taking a voyage, she can save money for more shopping at the Exhibition, which is the same thing as buying goods in foreign countries. Better than that, proximity allows her to wait long enough to get things on sale. England, Sweden, and Norway are not as exotic as French colonies or other faraway places, but the link between Elsewheres and consumption is clear here in this passage. International exhibitions presented other cultures—especially non-Western ones—in a safe but chaotic patchwork of sounds, sights, shows, smells, and tastes. Such a cluster of signs and objects eventually became an aesthetic in its own, labeled the “chaotic exotic” by historian Rosalind Williams (Williams 1982). She convincingly argues that it quickly found its way out of the realm of exhibitions and into the newly founded department stores, which helped to shape new modes of consumption in Paris and beyond.3 Over 100 years ago, international exhibitions thus powerfully linked experience of the Other with its consumption and defined a scenographic landscape that has survived up to now, notably in the field of world music festivals. For example, the Berkeley World Music Festival boasted of its “craft bazaar” with these words in 2012: The African sculptures, Tibetan prayer flags, Ecuadorian village handicrafts; instrument makers of native American drums and African kalimbas & gourds with local culture, face painting, pouches, soaps and more . . . create a vibrant market and fun stroll against a backdrop of music. (Berkeley World Music 2012; ellipsis in original) 118

6.2 “Les Musiciens javanais,” image published in Le Tour du Monde (1889) (Jollivet 1889b, 76)

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World of Music and Dance (WOMAD), the granddaddy of all world music festivals, also has no problem to put consumable goods and musical performance on equal terms: WOMAD Festivals are family- oriented, diverse and active musical events; sometimes offering as many as seven stages within the festival site. There are also participatory workshops, where the audience has a chance to meet and learn about the visiting artists and their music. Special events for children, including organised workshops and activities, create an experience both educational and entertaining. . . . A global village of shops is also important to the WOMAD experience; a worldwide range of international arts, crafts and cuisine stalls, which are an essential part of WOMAD’s unique atmosphere. (WOMAD n.d., “About Us”)

Consumption of the Other is thus one of the major underlying organizing logics of world music festivals today. Genre and Consumer Capitalism Conceptions of genre are also necessary in the system of capitalism. I am not saying that they are unique to capitalism, but they are necessary in it. If a kind of music is out of the realm of the commercial production, dissemination, and consumption of music and is not, therefore, in the capitalist system and is not a commodity, bringing that music into the system of the production, dissemination, and consumption of music is a complex process. Once a music, any music, enters the realm of the commercial production of music, that music becomes subject to the workings of commercial enterprise: it becomes a commodity, something produced for the purpose of mass distribution and consumption in a capitalist system of the production of commodities for profit. In modern consumer capitalism, a whole host of infrastructural shifts and accommodations are necessary to create a genre. An ongoing concern, of course, is the creation of demand, which is accomplished first through the identification or naming of a genre, then advertising of it, placement of it on the radio, in record stores, and in other sorts of venues. Once there is demand, there is the question of sales of the newly commodified music: as ticket sales, sheet music, recordings, and other forms. The transformation of music into a commodified object means

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that this object has to be sold somewhere, and retailers need to know where to place sheet music or recordings in their shops to permit customers to find what they want easily. With the rise of radio in the 1920s, for example, the idea of the radio format became increasingly important. The advent of a seemingly ever-increasing number of popular musics after the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s put even more pressure on the infrastructures of containment and classification. Today, even easily searchable databases of music for sale such as iTunes still classify music by genre. Historically, the formation of genres seems to have flourished during crucial moments in regimes of consumption, as should be clear from the previous discussion on international exhibitions. Those exhibitions have taught consumers to relate to Others as producers of consumable goods, including music, but the production of musical goods has a broader history This is obviously related to the key role played by capitalism in genre formation,4 which I would argue has undergone three main shifts in the long 20th century. International exhibitions and world’s fairs taught consumers to relate to Others as producers of consumable goods, including music, but the production of musical goods has a broader history. The first regime of what I would call modern consumption (as compared to earlier regimes, as discussed by Colin Campbell 1989, among others), began at the turn of the last century and witnessed the rise of mass production, wage- earning, leisure, department stores, credit, advertising, and ultimately the growth of “popular culture,” a concept that has been famously analyzed by Stuart Hall (Hall 1981). Much earlier, economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen questioned this period and saw it driven by what he called “conspicuous consumption” (Veblen [1899] 1994), an aspect of this regime that culminated in the 1920s with the advent of radio, a powerful new medium used not only for purveying information and entertainment, but also for advertising products (Marchand 1985; Taylor 2012b). As part of this shift, many popular music genres were solidified in the same decade: “race records,” a category that included all African American musics; “hillbilly music,” which included rural musics by people of European descent; Cajun music; Irish music; and still others. This occurred during a period of burgeoning phonograph market, which had existed for some time but which received a boost thanks to the rise of broadcasting. The onset of the Great Depression, late in 1929, put a halt to this

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first regime of consumption. The second began with the massive economic growth following World War II and the establishment of what historian Lizabeth Cohen has called a “consumer’s republic” (Cohen 2003), in which consumers were constructed as citizens because they consumed, viewing consumption as a civic duty. The same historical moment witnessed the explosion of new popular forms of music that were largely made possible by increasing urbanization and availability of new technologies such as magnetic tape and electrical amplification. Many of those eventually coalesced under the new genre term of “rock ’n’ roll” after a good deal of cultural work by musicians, fans, critics, and the music industry. The most recent regime of consumption, the one in which we still find ourselves (though it was challenged by the Great Recession of 2007– 9), began in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher advocated neoliberal ideologies which amplified the role played by consumption in the US and Western Europe. Consumption became an almost sacred task of citizens and a defining feature of the construction of individual “identity” (Taylor 2007). Neoliberalism encouraged the encroachment of commodification into all realms: anything that had not been commodified before became fair game. “We could commoditize anything,” boasted an Enron employee after the company’s demise (Frank 2002, 20). It seems retrospectively inevitable that musics from around the world—musics that had never appeared in Western record stores before—began to be sold during the 1980s, lumped under the new terms “world music” or “world beat.” During the same time, there was also a good deal of cultural work done in the US over the genrefication of heavy metal and hip hop (Brackett 2002). Questions such as “where should these musics be placed in shops and on the radio?”; “where does hip hop fit in vis-à-vis other African American musics (and where do the latter fit in vis-à-vis American popular music in general, after a long period of segregation)?”; and “where does heavy metal fit in vis-à-vis rock?” were exhaustively debated. At this point, let me review some of the arguments I have made about how genre is made and the conditions under which it is made. 1. Conceptions of genre are deeply caught up in ideologies of otherness; 2. Constructions of genre are necessary in a capitalist system of the production of commodities and the organization of them, in part for the purposes of consumption; and 3. The impetus for genrefication occurs in historical moments when consumption regimes are ascendant or particularly strong. 122

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I would summarize, in the most concise fashion that omits many genres that could be included, the previous points in the following table: Table 6.1 Consumption and genrefication in the long 20th century First Wave of Modern Consumption

Second Wave

Third Wave

Date

1880s–1920s

1950s–1980s

1980s– present

Venue

international exhibitions; radio/ recording industry

radio; television

television; personal computer; Internet; festivals

Genres

“the popular”; “race” records; hillbilly

rock ’n’ roll; country

hip hop; heavy metal; world music

Festivalization and the World Music “Genre” So, is “world music” really a genre in spite of its heterogeneous musical content? It seems at least clear in terms of its treatment by the music industry—which provides dedicated sections in record stores and on iTunes, specific magazines, radio channels, and of course festivals and concert series—that world music is indeed a genre, or, at least, genrefied. It is also evident from interviews that I have conducted with many working musicians. For them, it has become very useful to learn how to play various genres, including world music, in order to fulfill the demands of the music, film, broadcasting, and advertising industries and thus be employable (see Taylor 2016a). While other genres are usually quite strongly codified—though there are always fans and experts to challenge received wisdom about genre boundaries—world music encounters a greater degree of flux. This is probably due to its fairly recent genrefication. But also and mainly because the questions at stake behind genres are not just bound to sound and aesthetics but also to conceptions of selfhood and otherness. In this view, the heterogeneity of the world music category does not present a conceptual problem. Now let’s return to the process of genrefication: in a particular historical moment when an industry wants to organize forms of cultural production into recognizable, manageable, consumable, and profitable entities such as genres, how is this achieved? In the case of world music, festivals seem to play a crucial role, giving a common and intelligible shape to utterly diverse kinds of music and merging them into a single entity. As Thoroski and Greenhill (2001) point out, their basic principle is to reduce cultures to three elements (music and dance, food 123

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and beverage, handicraft and costume) and juxtapose them in a same stage or pavilion display, a strategy that is not that different from late nineteenth- century international exhibitions. Contemporary festivals show the same commodity- oriented approach, the same hodge-podge, the same smidgen of something educational, the same touristic inflection, and the same kind of romanticization of peoples thought to be premodern and/or precapitalist (Taylor 2007). Rosalind Williams’s “chaotic exotic” is still vivid there, though in an updated perspective that I would call the “disorderly diverse,” i.e., a mode of representation in which myriad individual and cultural differences are overwritten by a single signifier of “diversity.”5 And otherness is kept at a safe distance once again: the selfpresentation of acts has become remarkably standardized over the years; musicians from cultures where the difference between 8 p.m. and 8:15 p.m. is essentially meaningless have learned the necessity of conforming to the time constraints of Western practices (see Baumann 2001); performances start and finish reasonably on time, in two or two and a half hours; repertoires that would traditionally never be played before midnight are now routinely performed earlier, even in the afternoon if required; sound has been adapted to technical requirements of huge open-air stages and expectations of Western festival crowds. In addition to that, many world music performers have learned to interact with their audiences in a highly regulated and innocuous manner, e.g., by teaching a dance step or a few words in their native language; and by making people clap their hands in rhythm or respond to certain musical phrases.

Diversity as Cultural Dominant Clearly, judging from world music festivals and the world music industry altogether (record labels, radio stations, films, appearances on TV or in commercials), the “disorderly diverse” has become the dominant representation of Otherness. Discourses about “diversity” and multiculturalism prevail in the presentation of most world music festivals. Countless websites, leaflets, press releases, and reports use this word to describe festivals in rosy and celebratory terms. For just one example, the International Arts Foundation New Orleans, a non-profit organization that runs the International Arts Festival, typically writes such cryptic statements as “world music embodies the essence of diversity” (International Arts Foundation 2011). 124

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But if diversity is supposed to be a positive term, its meaning has become compromised along the way, signifying little more than a jumble of differences. World music festivals are typically made out of heterogeneous elements, but they do not really cope with difference: they mostly define and promote a box labeled “diversity” into which musics, peoples, practices from all over the world are placed. They combine foreign elements in a pleasant, non-threatening, and non-reflexive way. They claim to give an opportunity to encounter people and cultures from other places but at the same time limit interaction to commodified goods and services, thus perpetuating stereotypes and asymmetrical relationships. As Feld (2000) puts it, “diversity” is a celebratory narrative, the flip side of the anxious one which is both about fear of the Other and, simultaneously, fear that the Same Other might disappear, become like us, get Westernized, dissolve in frightening homogeneity. In this view, the abstract celebration of diversity is a substitute for action: one doesn’t have to learn much about any particular Other or engage in some way. Just wait a few minutes and this Other will leave the stage and another one will appear. In addition to Feld, I would suggest that the trope of diversity is also a side effect of neoliberal capitalist globalization, a necessary way to help conceptualize what might otherwise be a bewildering array of commodities. In this view, diversity in types of musics is congruent with diversity of goods to consume at the supermarket, what festivals make rather obvious in their unavoidable emphasis on shopping and consumption. What world music festivals introduce, and what is now quite common, is the conglomeration of musics, goods, and foods from all over the planet into a single convenient space. Local and historical particularities are lost in favor of ideologies of “diversity” (or less frequently these days, at least in the US, “multiculturalism,” which is here just a positive spin on “globalization”). The results are not without similarities to the “food courts” one finds in airports, shopping malls, and American universities: food that rarely tastes exotic or familiar, but is just different enough.

Conclusions Festivals thus do the work of the international music industry, but they also offer musicians a platform. In this ideology, this miasma of diversity, such a platform can help some musicians emerge and become 125

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stars, though not—or not yet—on the level of Western ones. They have the burden of cutting through the massive “genre” of world music with the language of diversity that hides their particularities, as individuals and musicians. I await the day when, someday, a festival is devoted to a single musician—as some are for Western stars—a world music artist such as Youssou N’Dour or Oumou Sangaré or Salif Keita or any one of a number of the world’s greatest musicians outside of the West, when such musicians are main events instead of being bit players in self- congratulatory spectacles of genrefication and diversity.

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Fields, Genres, Brands This chapter continues my long-standing interest in “world music,” that body of disparate musics so named, at least popularly, in the late 1980s as retailers and DJs attempted to come to grips with the increasing amount of popular musics entering Europe and North America that sounded like Western popular musics but weren’t sung in English (see Taylor 1997). Beginning with that historical moment, the music industry has attempted to genericize world music so that it could be easily found in retail establishments (including digital ones such as iTunes), in music streaming applications such as Spotify, RDIO, and Google Play, in radio formats, and so that it could be mimicked by composers and studio musicians for use in broadcasting and advertising. The term “world music” has caught on, even though many musicians have resisted it, finding it to be marginalizing, even ghettoizing (see Taylor 2016a). I have written at some length about the process of the genrefication of world music (i.e., Taylor 2012b, 2016a), but it wasn’t until I attempted to write a detailed study of a particular musician’s career in world music—Angélique Kidjo (Taylor 2016a)—that I came to realize that, however messy world music might be as a genre (if one considers it to be a genre at all, which I do not), those who are relegated to it are faced with a number of positions, as in a Bourdieusian field of cultural production (Bourdieu 1993). And, clearly, there are forms of capital at play in the world music field. Can we consider world music to be a field of cultural production if its generic qualities are not the result of the social and aesthetic debates and processes of 127

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musicians, but the profit-seeking imposition of a category on them by the music industry?1 With this question, several more emerge: What is the relationship between an industry-imposed generic category and a field of cultural production? Where do forms of capital come from in such a field? Do forms of capital exist before there is a field for them in which to operate? If so, do they play a role in the formation of a field? The aim of this chapter is to meditate on and attempt to address these questions and related issues of cultural production. Today’s neoliberal capitalism has witnessed the increasingly sophisticated and pervasive encroachment of the economic field into various fields of cultural production (see Taylor 2016a), so that there are different organizational logics at work, two “emic,” which relates to musicians and their practices and conceptions of genre and scene (though sometimes genre, as in the case of world music, is a category imposed by the music industry on musicians); the “field,” which is analytical, but captures the social logics at play; and, finally, the logic of the economic field, which in today’s neoliberal capitalism is best represented by the complex processes of branding.2 These logics can compete, even within the realm of the cultural industries. The music industry is increasingly seeking to profit from representing certain musicians and bands as brands, but at the same time, other cultural industries, particularly advertising, broadcasting, and film, exert pressures of genrefication, so that musics and musicians can be managed and placed wherever these latter industries want—in particular radio formats, for example.

Field Theory and Music Bourdieu mainly considered fields of cultural production in two books (Bourdieu 1993 and 1996), though the concept of the field was common in his work, and he used it to interrogate other realms such as politics, journalism, and education. According to Bourdieu, “a field is a separate social universe having its own laws of functioning independent of those of politics and the economy” (Bourdieu 1993, 162). Bourdieu refines and extends this point, using the literary field as an example (Bourdieu 1993, 163), but then hastens to clarify that his conception of field is not the same as an artistic milieu, but, rather, “the place of entirely specific struggles, notably concerning the question of knowing who is part of the universe” (Bourdieu 1993, 163– 64). Bourdieu never used the idea of the field to attempt to understand popular 128

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cultural production of any sort, instead focusing mainly on literature and the visual arts. Nonetheless, field theory has proven to be a powerful tool for understanding fields of cultural production, including large-scale fields. For what follows, it is also important to remember that a field, whether or not of cultural production, needs to be thought of as a kind of force field that makes available some positions and not others and that it imposes those positions on whoever enters the field. It is also a battlefield on which social actors compete over what counts as capital and its distribution (Wacquant 1998). These struggles are important in constituting a field. These struggles mean that fields, like genres, have histories and are not fi xed, though they can come to seem so. Fields emerge, disappear, wax and wane, over time. Thus, an important aspect of the field is its degree of autonomy from the field of power, and the necessity of protecting itself from the incursions of other fields. One issue, however, concerns the question of culture. Bourdieu was writing more from the perspective of a sociologist than an anthropologist (or ethnomusicologist), and his concern was more about the nature of individuals and society than individuals and culture. It is thus necessary to culturalize Bourdieusian practice theory, as Sherry B. Ortner (Ortner 1996 and 2006) and William Sewell (Sewell 2005) have been working toward. Ortner, for example, draws on a Geertzian conception of culture but updates it with practice theory. For her, culture is “(politically inflected) schemas through which people see and act upon the world and the (politically inflected) subjectivities through which people feel—emotionally, viscerally, sometimes violently—about themselves and the world” (Ortner 2006, 18). My concerns here are much the same. Those students of music who have drawn on Bourdieu on the field have also offered useful critiques and updates, especially helping to make field theory more useful to those who study large-scale or mass fields of cultural production (Hesmondhalgh 2006). Notably, Jason Toynbee’s contribution theorizes creativity by updating Bourdieu on the question of the space of possibles, or the array of positions available to be taken, by adding another consideration, the likelihood of the selection of possibles. Prominent in this space, Bourdieu writes, is “the hierarchy of genres, and within them the relative legitimacy of styles and authors” (Bourdieu 1996, 89). Toynbee offers the notion of the “radius of creativity,” in which social actors hear possibles “according to a)  the perceptual schema of her/his habitus and b)  its point of intersection with the creative field” (Toynbee 2000, 40). Toynbee believes 129

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that the most possibles are clustered near the center of the radius, and that they decrease in number as one moves out. Toynbee’s main point is  that not all possibles are equally likely to be chosen by musicians, that musicians’ habitus, position-takings, will point them in one creative direction rather than another. Also relevant is sociologist Motti Regev’s Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity (Regev 2013), which employs a Bourdieusian framework to theorize what he calls “aesthetic cosmopolitanism.” His term captures the complex processes today in which certain pop-rock musics (his first examples are Argentinean rock and Cantopop) are caught up in projects of nationhood and signification of the nation to its subjects (Regev 2013, 13). Regev makes it clear that he is not talking about “cultural globalization” or world music, but is rather concerned with pop-rock music around the world as a single field (Regev 2013, 23–24). However, his use of field theory in understanding the globalization of popular musics is useful and I will rely on it below. Positions and Forms of Capital in the Rock Field Before proceeding to a discussion of world music as a field, I want first to consider rock music. Here certain positions and forms of capital became salient, and became available to be deployed in the world music field, even though the rock field was more “organic” than the world music field. By this I mean that the rock field was the result of the workings of musicians with and against each other, and with and against the fields of power and economics as represented in certain quarters of the music industry, which itself contains people whose primary motivation is profit and others whose primary concern is artistic. I begin at what might not appear to be the most illuminating place, the rise of literature as art in the nineteenth century, which Bourdieu discusses in detail. In his examination of the “conquest of autonomy” of the literary field in France in the nineteenth century, Bourdieu identifies historical phenomena such as the development of the press, Bohemianism, the invention of a new way of living, and the rupture with the bourgeoisie as assisting the achievement of autonomy of the literary field in the nineteenth century. Bourdieu argues that the creation of a new position in a field can result in a new subject position more generally. For example, the rise of “the pure aesthetic,” the notion of art for art’s sake, “is inseparable from the invention of a new social personality,” the great artist, a professional who is liberated from bourgeois norms (Bourdieu 1996, 111). The creation of the bohemian, anti130

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establishment, countercultural figure (to use later and perhaps more familiar terms) has resonated throughout Western history and beyond since the nineteenth century, with members of subsequent generations finding their own way to live, their own social personality in their fields of cultural production. Since the nineteenth century, there have been structural oppositions to what was considered to be mainstream bourgeois culture in both Europe and the United States. An important and immediate precursor to rock musicians were the jazz musicians in the 1950s, some of whom viewed themselves as hip and their audiences as square (Becker 2008). Rock music ideologies emerged from this antibourgeois movement, associated with the Beats in the 1950s and continuing through baby boom counterculture in the following decade. Rock music, like literature in the nineteenth century, opposed itself to what was thought to be bourgeois, the Broadway and Tin Pan Alley composers of the day. What counts as capital in the rock field as well as in the world music field is various forms of authenticity—though authenticity is a concept with many dimensions and something of a moving target. A variety of authenticities broadly understood can coalesce in a particular form in a particular field where they can become adapted and deployed as forms of capital. Authenticity is thus a kind of floating ideology that has congealed in various ways, in various fields, for decades. Musicians in the rock field have historically deployed various authenticities as a way of demonstrating their autonomy from the broader field of popular music, in a manner similar to the restricted fields studied by Bourdieu. But if rock couldn’t be made to appear to be separate from the market, it could at least be made to appear apart from that music that was the most transparent in its pursuit of fi nancial success —pop. And rock could claim to be anti- establishment, even as its (successful) musicians cashed large checks issued by the mainstream music industry. Rock’s pretension to being anti- establishment was accomplished through long and concerted attempts to establish a variety of authenticities, for they are several, usually conceptualized as binary oppositions against pop: rock is “true,” whereas pop is fabricated; rock is sincere, pop is, well, fabricated; rock singers believe in what they sing, whereas pop singers are merely performing for money; rock songs come from the heart, pop songs come from the desire to profit. Doubtless one could go on but the point, I hope, is made: rock in various ways attempted, as it continues to do, to distance itself from pop by relying on a number of ideologies of authenticity, authenticities that are familiar from students of the Beats, or earlier European bohemians. 131

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Distancing itself from pop meant cozying up to art. Rock musicians attempted, as many still do, to ally themselves with art—and, therefore, perceptions of its autonomy from commercial concerns—by tackling great themes, which they borrowed from folk musicians such as Pete Seeger (Frith 1983, 30); and by distancing themselves from their musical roots in various African American musics—utilizing the familiar mind/body split to characterize African American musics as distinct from the artiness of rock, the former is danceable but not reflective enough to be considered art (Frith 1983, 20–21). Frith writes of the move toward individuality in rock music, spearheaded by Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, which meant that listeners were to focus not on emotional effects but literary ones (Frith 1983, 21). Rock lyrics increasingly became seen as poetry, and following the success of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the 1960s, other bands began to recognize the importance of writing their own songs. Originality became another important aspect of the rock music field, just as it had been for the last couple of centuries in the various artistic fields. By the 1970s, the status of rock music was increasingly explained not as folk music, or countercultural music of youth, but as art. Today, it is clear that ideologies of art have taken hold quite strongly in the rock field. The language used to describe what many popular musicians do is a language of art: not just artist, but genius, masterpiece, and songwriting as creation. One can find these ideologies all over popular music but they occur in their most exalted—and protected—form in rock music. As in most fields of cultural production, influential critics played an important role in helping to define and delimit the field, as well as its forms of capital. In the case of rock, critics interpreted the authenticities of rock and promulgated various ideologies of authenticity to their readers. Steve Jones and Kevin Featherly write of the different notions of authenticity in rock as articulated by Nat Hentoff, Robert Christgau, and Lester Bangs. For Hentoff, rock was about expression, it was “fundamentally a release of feelings” (Jones and Featherly 2002, 33); for Christgau, rock’s authenticity was located in its vitality and in its rejection of the values of other contemporary musics; and for Bangs, it was the brutal honesty and grittiness of some rock that made it real, and important (Jones and Featherly 2002, 34).3 Thus, the rock field, as Regev points out, essentially created its own ways of interpreting and evaluating its products (Regev 2013, 61), in other words, creating its own field drawing on certain means of conferring prestige from the artistic fields. Influential publications, sections in weeklies such as The Village Voice, and knowledgeable and influential critics, all contributed 132

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not only to the establishment of the rock field as a field, but also to its mechanisms of the generation of prestige akin to that of art. The rock field devised its own ways of interpreting and evaluating its products, or stated differently, contributed to its constitution as a field by drawing on certain means of conferring prestige based upon the artistic fields. The main axis of authenticity in rock music thus concerns assumptions about the music’s autonomy from commercial concerns. These assumptions can only be held and maintained if rock musicians, critics, and fans work to authenticize rock music in the same way as art in a field of restricted production. Rock music is obviously commercial music, capitalist music, which means that authenticities, and commonalities with restricted (artistic) cultural production, are paramount. Regev identifies several means by which pop-rock musicians have attempted to claim autonomy: by ignoring the industrial nature of the production of the music and focusing on the music itself; by emphasizing musicians and groups who work in the avant-garde sector of the field; and by playing with pop-rock conventions as a way of demonstrating creativity (Regev 2013, 72–75). I would characterize the varieties of authenticity—which serve as the most important forms of capital—circulating in the rock field thus: authenticity as authorship (the musician really wrote his/her own songs) and authenticity of autonomy (the music/musician works against perceptions of being commercial, which seems to be less important in the post-grunge era). But it is not my aim here simply to offer a taxonomy of authenticities in the popular music field; such a list would always be incomplete and out of date, since, as I am arguing, not only are conceptions of authenticity always in flux, positions in a field are neither fi xed nor stable, either. Rather, I want to argue that authenticities constitute some forms of capital in the rock (and world music) fields. But, as authenticity is, as I have said, a floating ideology, conceptions of authenticity can be illusory, can transform and be transformed endlessly. And different forms can combine or disarticulate. Rock musicians, critics, and fans did not invent these authenticities. What congeals in a field as a form of capital is already circulating in the wider culture. It is a particular ideology, concept, idea, bias, that is captured for deployment in a particular field. That is, social actors in a field do not necessarily create the forms of capital that are available to them in a field, though they certainly inflect, shape, and interpret them. But these processes are directed at ideologies that are already known and circulating, finding specific uses in particular fields. 133

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Some rethinking of Bourdieu’s position on the question of the autonomy of the fields of cultural production is necessary at this point, since it is clear that a restricted field is not just an artistic one; forms of expression that make use of popular styles and genres can exist in restricted fields as well. One of the most important observations about the cultural industries in the last couple of decades is the trend toward production in small batches (see Harvey 1989), even at the same time as the major players pursue blockbusters. Thus, it is important not simply to equate restricted fields with artistic production and large-scale with “popular.” There are also degrees of autonomy in any field. While it has been frequently noted that Bourdieu failed to pay much attention to massproduced forms of culture, it needs to be pointed out that he similarly paid scant attention to the economic field as it relates to the fields of large-scale production. If, for him, the field of restricted production was “the economic world reversed,” the field of large-scale production was, by inference, simply the opposite. A restricted field is not automatically autonomous from the fields of power and economics, and individual actors in large-scale fields can experience different relationships to the fields of power and economics. There are many strategies, or, rather, positions and position-takings to be found in the economic field of large-scale production; there is a dynamism in both the restricted and large-scale fields between degrees of autonomy and degrees of encroachment of the economic field. In the large-scale fields, one can seek mass success, or success in a niche market, or engage in multiple projects over time that have variable relationships to the fields of power and economics, as do some film directors who move between the fields of Hollywood and independent film (see Ortner 2013). And there are many well-known examples of individual musicians or bands achieving great financial success and then using that success to negotiate a greater level of independence from their record label and thus, the fields of economics and power. Some stars in the rock field, because of their success in the economic field, can become less mindful of it, and they can produce music that is stylistically more adventurous, more like what is heard in restricted fields. Thus, while Bourdieu defines the fields of restricted and large-scale production by their degree of autonomy from the economic field, it is necessary to point out that some sectors of the field of large-scale production have historically had some degree of autonomy from the economic field, depending in part on the genre (the pop field is believed to

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be more about making money than the rock field, as I have said), and on the status of the individual musician or band. What is clear today, however, is that this variable degree of autonomy is diminishing as the realms of “commerce and content” (as they are increasingly characterized) come closer together (see Taylor 2009). It is also the case that fields are not immune from external pressures. The music (or other culture) industry can exert powerful forces on listeners’ perceptions of music. The music industry enforces the rock category as an overwhelmingly white and male “genre.” For example, even though there are plenty of women and people of color who aspire to be included in it (see Mahon 2004), the music industry has engaged in racist practices of segregating sound (Miller 2010) for nearly a century. Additionally, fans’ discourses and expectations can motivate or prohibit particular behaviors by musicians that can affect perceptions of a musician’s claim to authenticity, and fans’ perceptions of it. Fans want to see musicians exerting themselves onstage, working, not indifferent, which can contribute to impressions of a musicians’ authenticity and thus, possession of a form of capital.

World Music as a Field of Cultural Production According to Bourdieu, genres are created in fields. But what if a “genre” is an invention of a cultural industry that is imposed on cultural producers? All music genres—at least, all those that the music industry pays attention to—are managed by that industry through a system of media (Negus 1999, 29), as well as critics and retailers, whether brickand-mortar or online. World music is such an invented, imposed, “genre,” which, in this case, led to the creation of a field. While I don’t believe that world music is a genre (like the classical music non-“genre,” it is composed of many disparate musics), we can nonetheless observe its constitution as a field, and we can examine this process to ask questions about the role played by musicians, the music industry, and fans and critics, as well as raising questions about how “possibles” may circulate in a space that is still under construction. I am also interested in what role forms of capital may play in the formation of a field. All of these are complex questions, however. A musician who chooses to attempt to be placed in the world music field instead of a different field has taken a position. But it is more often the case that a world music artist attempts to place him- or herself in a field other than the world

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music field, but the music industry nonetheless consigns them to the world music field. In the world music field, autonomy continues to matter, perhaps more so than in the rock field, which was more organic and not imposed from above; the rock authenticities at play in the world music field are also forms of capital (see Frith 1991). In the world music field, as in, I would argue, any field, there can be frequent complications and confusions over just what is a form of capital and what is a position and position-taking. A musician who is seen to possess a certain type of authenticity can augment or undermine it with a position-taking (I will discuss this more below). In the world music field, authenticities and positions are mainly about language and sound. Even though authenticities in the world music field matter greatly, perhaps the most important position concerns the choice of language. Record labels and radio stations in the early days of world music were leery of non-English lyrics. The language question is frequently a difficult one for musicians, who don’t want to alienate their original audiences, but who often want to attract and cultivate bigger ones. Youssou N’Dour said early in his career, “we’ve printed the lyrics to some of the songs on the album covers, and if people are interested, maybe I can add some English words later” (Hudson 1988, 25). Today, some musicians project translations on screens at their live shows. Most world music artists must grapple with the question of what language to sing in throughout their performing lives. Angélique Kidjo, for example, has taken a number of positions in her career. Early on, she said: I talked about the idea of having English lyrics with a few people but we didn’t think my music could take it. Take the words out and put in English lyrics and it won’t sound the same. It will be completely new. My voice is very rhythmic, like an instrument. Take it away and you’re losing an important part. (Sutton 1994)

A couple of years later, when discussing her album Fifa (1996), her position was more indulgent. “I do what pleases me. I do the music I like. I don’t know if it’s going to be English or French or some African dialect. Music is music, it’s all about communication” (Brand 1996, G10). A couple of years later, her position had altered again: “Music is about expression. It doesn’t ask for color or language. I perform music that speaks to me and that is in my heart. Most music critics have never set foot in Africa. How would they know what African music is really like?” (Oppelt 1998, D1). Kidjo articulated what is her current 136

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position in 2006, when asked about how she decides which language to sing in: Most of the time, it is the music itself. If I wake up in the morning and the music that I have is still in my head, I have to sing it. When I started singing in Benin, I sang music in the indigenous language, of course. But I also sang in Cameroonian and Zairian languages, and many other languages from Africa but I copy them phonetically. And then you have English too, and Spanish and Portuguese, and many different languages. The thing that matters to me is the beauty of the song, how it makes me feel happy and how I can give it back to people. (Baah 2006)

I chronicle these shifting position-takings not to make Kidjo appear to be fickle about language or incapable of adhering to a single position, but to show, rather, just how complex and changing the world music field is—as are all fields of cultural production, which by definition are constantly in flux—and how the world music field can change as the market changes, and as the musician’s fame, and thus, clout in the industry, changes. Kidjo’s position-takings demonstrate how she negotiates the shifting field of cultural production of world music. In Global Pop (Taylor 1997), I identified and discussed three forms of authenticity I believed were circulating around world music at that time: authenticity of positionality, emotionality, and primality. The first refers to Western expectations that a world music artist come from poverty, oppression, or a premodern life or hardship in general. The second, emotionality, refers to expectations that world music artists articulate their supposed hard life experiences in their music: it is supposed to be raw, real. And authenticity of primality refers to Western expectations that world music artists were closer to nature, closer to the earth. To a certain degree, these authenticities have waned since the rise of the “world music” term in the music industry in the late 1980s —waned, or became more closely affi liated with authenticities in the field of rock music. Most musicians in the world music field still need to demonstrate their autonomy, real or not, from popular music and the fields of power and economics, and they thus employ different forms of authenticity to accomplish this. World music artists need to include enough (but not too much) sounds of otherness to make it audibly clear that they are Others in the world music category. If they sound too “Other,” too exotic, they won’t find an international audience, which many seek. If they sound too American or European, they run the risk of accusations of seeming to have sold out to commercial interests and betraying their heritage. 137

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Authenticity as sound is therefore really a set of authenticities. Musicians can derive substantial amounts of capital from various kinds of authenticity they are seen to possess. A musician from a region known for music possesses capital; a musician from a well-known family of musicians can possess capital; in some kinds of music, a musician who has won a prize, as in the All-Ireland competitions on various Irish traditional instruments, possesses capital; a musician who sings or plays in a particularly notable local or regional style possesses capital; a musician who is from a remote village can possess capital as a result of others’ assumptions of her distance from the modern world. “Traditional” can also be signified by the use of non-Western instruments, or even instruments that are unusual in Western popular musics. Musicians can take positions to sound “traditional,” in whatever sense that may be for their own background (but, perhaps more importantly, Western expectations of what traditional is), and how much to sound like Western popular music. And musicians can also take a position to employ a producer who could add sounds or manipulate sounds to render musicians’ work more or less “traditional,” or more or less popular. High production values can signify a greater level of Westernization. Forms of capital and the variety of positions available in a field thus exist in a complex and occasionally volatile dynamic. What generally changes only rarely is the musician’s singing style, which is the main sonic signifier of his/her otherness, his/her nonpoppiness. To alter one’s singing style would be the surest sign that the singer is attempting to jettison some form of authenticity. The sound of the singing voice is the single most important sonic signifier of a world music artist’s authenticity as a non-Western Other—it is not altered, even if the singer sings in English. Last, there is also politics. While Western audiences no longer expect rock musicians to articulate anti- establishment themes as a matter of routine, it is still the case that rock is assumed to be anti- establishment; rock musicians no longer have to articulate a politics in their music to be thought of as rebellious. Non-Western musicians, however, seem to be taken more seriously if they sing about politics in their work (Taylor 2004a). In a sense, this is part of the “authenticity of positionality” as I discussed in Global Pop (Taylor 1997): the musician is a “real” postcolonial subject, a real victim of apartheid, a real neocolonial subject, a real victim of sexism or misogyny, a real victim of neoliberal economic policies, or a subaltern or even a victim in some other sense.

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Brands So far I have been attempting to sort out the relationships between genres and Bourdieusian fields of cultural production, particularly with respect to world music. In the rock and world music fields of cultural production, various ideologies of authenticity are constantly circulating and can be captured for use in a particular field. Positions can be created by actors in fields, or imported from other, pre- existing fields. Fields of cultural production in Bourdieu’s sense are becoming increasingly influenced, even dominated, by the economic field in the neoliberal capitalism of the last few decades. Fields are made in complex social systems in which a number of fields operate—the fields of power and economics most importantly; fields of cultural production operate in and sometimes against these fields. Fields, possibles, positions, forms of capital, and more emerge out of a complex dynamic in which these fields interact with others. But what if the fields of power and economics begin to become so dominant that the dynamic shifts in their favor? What if a field is decreasingly, or no longer, “a separate social universe having its own laws of functioning independent of those of politics and the economy” (Bourdieu 1993, 162)? In today’s neoliberal capitalism, I would argue that the rising hegemony of the economic field has led to the growing dominance of the strategy of branding, which is a process participated in by both musicians and those who represent them. The organizing and organizational logic of the field is sometimes infiltrated not merely by the economic field, but by that field’s most culturalized and affect-laden expression, the brand. The function and importance of brands has changed throughout the history of manufacturing, packaging, and marketing (see Moor 2007), moving from simple identifying packaging and logos to what we have in neoliberal capitalism today: the brand as the symbol that encapsulates everything positive that its manufacturer wants consumers to think, and as something that not only possesses value, but is capable of generating value. The ideology of the brand introduces new possibles, new positions that are concerned with the economic more than anything else. Sarah Banet-Weiser observes that branding today isn’t simply a business model, but an ideology that both draws on and produces social and cultural relations (Banet-Weiser 2012, 4). Thus, the ideology, discourse, and language of branding have become so commonplace that they shape considerations of a particular musician’s sound and image. 139

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Conformity to conceptions of a musician’s brand can be more important than that of sound or genre. Musicians still care about genres and fields, of course, but their desires might not survive the aspirations of those who represent them, their record labels, and even the musician’s own quest for success in a crowded commercial marketplace. Competing for recognition increasingly requires a strategy of branding. Questions of brand(ing) have been important for a long time, but I believe that they may be beginning to become dominant, superseding all other organizational logics in neoliberal capitalism. Not surprisingly, there is a vast literature on branding in the advertising and marketing literature, a literature that offers advice on how to add value to one’s product through branding. Alina Wheeler, for example, refers to “brand” without a definite or indefinite article (a common practice in the advertising and marketing industries when a particular concept or phenomenon is given importance and its own agency). She begins her book on the brand with a consideration of “What is brand?”: As competition creates infinite choices, companies look for ways to connect emotionally with customers, become irreplaceable, and create lifelong relationships. A strong brand stands out in a densely crowded marketplace. People fall in love with brands, trust them, and believe in their superiority. How a brand is perceived affects its success, regardless of whether it’s a start-up, a nonprofit, or a product. (Wheeler 2009, 2)

Wheeler argues that brands have three main functions: helping consumers navigate in a crowded marketplace, reassuring them of the quality of the product and the correctness of their purchase choice, and engaging consumers with “distinctive imagery, language, and associations to encourage customers to identify with the brand” (Wheeler 2009, 2). Wheeler contrasts “brand” with “brand identity,” which, she says, is related to the question of engagement: Brand identity is tangible and appeals to the senses. You can see it, touch it, hold it, hear it, watch it move. Brand identity fuels recognition, amplifies differentiation, and makes big ideas and meaning accessible. Brand identity takes disparate elements and unifies them into whole systems. (Wheeler 2009, 4)

In a very real sense, then, the creation of a brand and the branding process are ways of personalizing a product in the sense that a brand can become almost a friend with its own characteristics and qualities.

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Nowhere in the ethno/musicological literature is the process of the creation of a brand and brand identity clearer than in Louise Meintjes’s illuminating book (Meintjes 2003) on the production of mbaqanga music in South Africa, where studio decisions are made based on conceptions of the South African musical brand more than anything else. Music produced in the South African studio she studied was clearly conceptualized as a commodity—something made to be exchanged in an international market—but, as Meintjes shows, producers and musicians work diligently to produce an identifiable set of sounds that signify the South African musical brand. Meintjes writes of the studio as a space of “creative elaboration” and “commodity standardization,” which augments and thins out mbaqanga style. This, she writes, results in a unique authenticity: “On the one hand, mbaqanga is black music made within the context of a power- contested (white) state; on the other, it is a circulatable, repeatable, sensuously flowing icon of blackness, embodied in voices, languages, and grooves and in their concomitant material signs” (Meintjes 2003, 105). The idea I would like to emphasize here is that this process produces mbaqanga as a music that is not just made by real people with their own politics and interpersonal relations in a real place, but as a South African musical brand. But brands do not supplant commodities (see Lash and Lury 2007), or ideas that musicians themselves have about their music as a style or genre. They co- exist, and not always in an easy relationship. Meintjes writes: In composing and recording music in the studio, the music-makers are selfconsciously fashioning a particular image of themselves for a domestic and world music market. In terms of the desired international market, they are fashioning an image in sound and visual presentation of an African Other. It is an African Other emplaced in South Africa. For the domestic market, they are carving out a regional and ethnically specific niche. (Meintjes 2003, 161)

What Meintjes is describing is still a field of cultural production—and a fairly restricted one at that—but it is a field that produces musical brands, at least for the international market. Positions in the field of mbaqanga become positions about the making (or unmaking) of the South African mbaqanga brand. This is an example of how musicians and producers in studios can conceptualize their labor and sound as a brand. Record labels have a great influence on branding processes as well. Early recordings of world

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music, and books about it, tended to feature crazy fonts, many bright colors, and occasionally “primitive” art styles, all as a way of emphasizing what was thought to be the fun and playful aspect of world music. The many releases by Putumayo provide the best example of this iconographic strategy of the construction of the celebratory aspects of world music (see Feld 2000). Branding for musicians and types of music has thus become important in neoliberal capitalism in a number of ways. Musicians can also take advantage of efforts made by their home countries by participating in country branding (one of Wheeler’s types of branding). Countries are increasingly branding themselves as a way to increase tourism, lure businesses, and more. Miriam Makeba might have been the Voice of South Africa during the apartheid era, but today, as South Africa continues to attempt to improve its international reputation after apartheid by, for example, hosting the World Cup as it did in 2010, the Voice of South Africa is much more likely to be the branded sound produced in studios such as the one studied by Meintjes. Critics can play a role in the branding process as well, championing one musician over another, one sound over another, proclaiming a particular musician’s sound or style to be better or more authentic than another, commenting on musicians’ popularity or record sales as a way of demonstrating his or her discernment in order to generate capital for themselves in the world music field (see Taylor n.d.b). As some musics are genericized, they can increasingly become viewed as brands; and some particularly capacious “genres” such as world music can become what I will call brand warehouses. “World music” is a brand warehouse that contains other brands such as “Gypsy” or “Celtic” music. The latter is signified through displays of green, Celtic crosses, and faux-“Gaelic” fonts. Once a musician or music or genre is branded, different conceptions of authenticity can come into play, thus changing the forms of capital operating in a field. Musicians aren’t necessarily held to those standards of authenticity as discussed above, but to the expectations listeners have to a brand image of a music or sound or place or ethnicity. It matters not if what is labeled “Celtic,” for example, has any real connection to Ireland, Wales, Brittany, the Isle of Man, or Cornwall (the ancient Celtic nations), only that sound and image correspond to what consumers expect the Celtic brand to be. Music is increasingly produced for market expectations of brand conformity more than musical or generic expectations. I am not arguing here that the logic of the brand has replaced the logic of the genre as conceived by musicians or the field as theorized by Bourdieu in some wholesale, across-the-board 142

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fashion, or that musicians’ own beliefs about genre no longer matter. But it is clear that all cultural production in neoliberal capitalism is increasingly implicated in, and subservient to, the workings of capital, and this development cannot be without profound ramifications, in which the making of fields and genres on the ground faces growing pressures of genrefication and branding from above.4

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Neoliberal Capitalism, UNESCO, and the Reenchantment of Culture It is by now commonplace to make references to the high level of interconnectedness most people in the developed world enjoy (or decry). Some of the most prominent ways that contemporary scholars describe the present moment focus on the network, whether it’s Manuel Castells’s “network society” (Castells 1996–1999) or Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s “connexionist world” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). For these and other scholars, today’s networked world exists because of capitalist processes, though studies of capitalism in the last couple of decades seem to have taken a back seat to studies of what are thought to be its effects, whether one calls them network society or globalization or something else altogether. Yet capitalism, as I have written elsewhere (chapter 9), ought to be the transcendent category of analysis, as it was for so many classic social theorists beginning, of course, with Marx. Neoliberal capitalism is marked by global interconnectedness through new digital technologies; deregulation; dependence on a defense economy based on permanent war; the decline of the influence of the labor movement; the growth of debt; new forms of colonialism; the global growth of monopolistic and oligopolistic pursuit of massive profits; increasingly polarized wealth; heightened consumption; an international division of labor; and more. Socially and culturally, neoliberal capitalism has rendered 144

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culture ever more important (as I will detail below), that is, the production of culture is more important to capitalism than in the past. For musicians in the West, one result of the increased interconnectivity of the world is that more and more musics from outside of the West have found their way to the West, and with increasing speed. Musics, almost from the beginning of the phonograph in the late nineteenth century, had traveled from Western metropoles to many places around the world, but it wasn’t until the 1980s when musics from the West’s Elsewheres began to travel to Western metropoles, resulting in the rise of what has come to be known as “world music” as a generic category (see Taylor 1997). Now, through the Internet and cellular phones, recorded music can travel around the world almost instantaneously. These new digital technologies that have resulted in dramatic shifts in the production, dissemination, and production of music occurred in a historical moment when the concept of culture has become increasingly popular, increasingly organizing people’s experience in their own lives and their relationships with others: if one has greater and faster access to other people’s cultural forms, this frequently makes one seek to characterize and often differentiate one’s own culture from another’s. The global success of the anthropological concept of culture has given people around the world a way to conceptualize practices and beliefs that were formerly, to them, just the way things were. But capitalist globalization and the travel of people, media, and information have done much to relativize the world. “Culture” has become a way to seek stability, and, as such, has become a resource; in George Yúdice’s words, culture “is increasingly wielded as a resource for both socio-political and economic amelioration, that is, for increased political participation in an era of waning political involvement, conflicts over citizenship, and the rise of . . . ‘cultural capitalism’” (Yúdice 2003, 9). Or, in the words of the great Senegalese musician Youssou N’Dour, emblazoned on a promotional T-shirt from the 1990s: “The most important thing we own is our culture. don’t trade away your culture for anything in the world.” The idea of “owning” culture in this sense is a fairly recent development, an ideology not found before the advent of neoliberal capitalism. “Culture” has become closely linked to conceptions of identity, and this is another concept that has emerged in the last couple of decades that plays a profound role in shaping people’s self- conceptions and social relations. I have written elsewhere of the rise of the concept of identity as we in the US currently understand the term, a kind of project in the Sartrean sense of self-fashioning that is socially based, fre145

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quently ethnically or racially inflected, and reliant on practices of consumption (Taylor 2007). And Castells notes the seeming contradiction between, on the one hand, global interconnectedness through new informational technologies and, on the other, the trend in the 1990s and beyond toward constructing identities based on history and geography, sometimes in a search for meaning which can be spiritualized (Castells 1996, 22). For Castells, identity has become an important, perhaps dominant, source of meaning in today’s network society (Castells 1996–1999, 3).

Intangible Cultural Heritage and UNESCO There has long been an impulse among many in the West to seek to preserve traditional cultural forms and practices that are perceived as being in danger of disappearing through processes of modernization, or Westernization, or now, globalization. Musicians’ practices, and the nearly global reach of the increasingly monopolistic music industry— preceded by earlier processes of globalization, marketization, and Westernization that began after World War II—resulted in many countries beginning to become concerned about cultural imperialism, or the replacement of local cultural forms by those from elsewhere. Some countries have established laws that mandate that radio broadcasts must contain a certain percentage of musicians from that particular country as a way to preserve and encourage musicians within that country’s borders (see Taylor 2012b). In Japan, in particular, there was a growing awareness of the importance of preserving cultural forms that were being threatened by the importation of popular cultural forms from Europe and the US, resulting in a “Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties” in 1950 (“Japan —Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties” n.d.). South Korea followed in 1962, followed by still more countries such as Taiwan in 1982. These countries were influential with UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), which passed several declarations early in the new millennium on intangible cultural heritage, including devising a new designation of “masterpieces of the intangible heritage of humanity.” UNESCO believed that “traditional knowledge and practices lie at the heart of a community’s culture and identity but are under serious threat from globalization” (UNESCO, “Knowledges and Practices Concerning Nature and the Universe” n.d.c). Earlier forms of protection had been of “tangible” things such 146

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as buildings and monuments, so countries with oral traditions were greatly affected. These declarations had a massive impact in Asia, parts of Latin America, parts of Europe, and much of Africa (Rees 2010a).1 The rise of the UNESCO conceptions of intangible cultural heritage gives evidence of the increased importance of culture in today’s globalized capitalism. In order to conceptualize “intangible cultural heritage,” participants in UNESCO’s various conferences that led up to these conventions had numerous discussions of culture. In 1982, the World Conference on Cultural Policies convened in Mexico City, and “redefined” culture to include not just arts and letters but “modes of life, the fundamental rights of the human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs” (UNESCO 1982, 1). This “redefinition” “stated that heritage now also covered all the values of culture as expressed in everyday life, and growing importance was being attached to activities calculated to sustain the ways of life and forms of expression by which such values were conveyed.” The conference also approved a new definition of “cultural heritage,” which included both tangible and intangible works through which the creativity of people finds expression: languages, rites, beliefs, historic places and monuments, literature, works of art, archives and libraries. . . . [E]very culture represents a unique and irreplaceable body of values since each people’s traditions and forms of expression are its most effective means of demonstrating its presence in the world. In this sense . . . cultural identity and cultural diversity are inseparable. (UNESCO n.d.b, “1982–2000: From Mondiacult to Our Creative Diversity”)

Since music is considered to be in the domain of intangible cultural heritage, UNESCO and the International Council for Traditional Music—the only international non-governmental organization (NGO) devoted to the study of music—have developed formal consultative relations. The ICTM received a high ranking from UNESCO, so it is now the first stop when UNESCO needs to make a formal consultation about musical matters (Seeger 2010; see also Seeger 2009). But, since there are people and networks around each piece of intangible cultural heritage, and since people move, the ICTM’s view of music doesn’t always articulate well with the more nation-focused model of UNESCO (Seeger 2010). Since UNESCO is a prestigious organization, the effect of the intangible cultural heritage conventions, and in particular the designation of a particular cultural practice as a masterpiece, can have profound consequences. The ethnomusicologist Helen Rees told me that 147

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in China, constructions/representations of traditional musics as being backward and unscientific were suddenly reversed: a new term was invented, “original ecology folk song.” Old, folklorized performances of music were jettisoned for peasant music, but not the earthiest of peasants, so these newer performances are somewhat sanitized. Folklorized music survives in conservatories, whose denizens were never interested in traditional music before (Rees 2010a). UNESCO was well aware of the risks inherent in declaring something to be intangible cultural heritage worthy of recognition and protection, such as “political conjuring” that could turn complex cultural forms into “simplified messages about cultural identity.” This could lead to, among other things, “an increasingly artificial demand for dramatizations and ritual enactments of cultural traditions, which are often celebrated out of context in the form of dress, music, dance and handicrafts” (UNESCO n.d.b, “1982–2000: From Mondiacult to Our Creative Diversity”). There were worries during the meetings about the convention that cultural forms such as music and dance that are transmitted orally and visually and thus change over time and from place to place could become institutionalized and fi xed. And UNESCO now has to be aware of nominations for masterpiece status to make sure they weren’t motivated by a government’s desire to increase tourism (Seeger 2010).2 UNESCO was also concerned with financial repercussions, such as commodification of works, which “will have a disruptive impact on folk- culture itself” (UNESCO n.d.b, “1982–2000: From Mondiacult to Our Creative Diversity”). This concern was well founded. The impetus behind Japan’s and other countries’ desire to attempt to protect their indigenous cultural forms was based on an older notion of identity, rooted in unitary conceptions of nation and culture. Today’s identity is much more individualized. The UNESCO masterpiece designation is rooted in this older conception of identity, but at the same time cannot avoid being part of this increasingly networked, marketized world, which is much more marked by importance and rapid changes than what has gone before. Castells writes of the new ephemerality of social movements, often based on a single issue, sometimes “flaring up for just an instant around a media symbol” (Castells 1996–1999, 3)—or, one could add, a masterpiece designation. For example, ethnomusicologist Helen Rees told me that the designation of the qin (a kind of Chinese zither) as a masterpiece of the intangible heritage of humanity in 2003 has markedly changed the role of the instrument in China. When Rees first went to China in 1987, she 148

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wanted to learn the qin and really had to press her host to allow her to do so. Cities and regions that had little or no tradition of qin music now host several qin studios. Rees bought a qin for about $60 on the first visit, and it is now worth 30,000– 50,000 yuan (i.e., appreciating about ten times in value); she also told me that a Hong Kong– based musician bought a qin in the late 1970s for $10 and it’s now worth about $250,000 (Rees 2010a).3

“Culture,” “Identity,” “Creativity” Now let me attempt to historicize and deconstruct some of the ideologies that frequently appear in UNESCO’s official documents, which are rife with terms such as “culture” and “identity” and “creativity” that are used in the most glowing fashion. These documents reveal an enchanted view of many of the world’s cultures. This sentence, for example, appears on the back of all of UNESCO’s publications on intangible cultural heritage: “Intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity” (UNESCO n.d.d, “Convention for the Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage 2003”). But the question of “identity” is extremely complex, as I have written elsewhere (Taylor and Gillespie 2009; Taylor 2007). There are national identities, cultural identities, group identities, individual identities, and more. Each type of identity has its own history, and each type has many, many local forms and variations that are unique to a particular place and time. Not every country in the world, for example, has had a stable conception of itself throughout its history, and not every country in the world came into being at the same moment. In particular, individual identity, frequently today simply unqualified as “identity,” is a fairly recent development rooted in postwar US culture, though the concept has traveled remarkably quickly (Taylor 2007). Questions of “identity” in UNESCO’s sense are complicated by the simple fact that people and cultural forms move. As a longtime student of Irish traditional music, I studied the flute with a septuagenarian Irishman who immigrated to the US in 1947. Irish traditional music was clearly a large part of his sense of Irishness, but, at the same time, there was a long period in his life when he hardly played the music at all. What of his identity then? Was he somehow “less” Irish? Such situ149

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ations are not unusual; on the contrary, they are the norm. People’s relationships to cultural forms produced in their own culture are more complicated than simply validating a monolithic and rigid conception of an identity that is indexed to a particular cultural form or practice. UNESCO’s conception of identity seems to be something of a set of nesting dolls, the largest being “national identity,” next “cultural identity,” and then “individual identity.” But all sorts of factors come into play, such as (beginning with the Irish example) political divides and religious conflicts, including also gender, and geography. And generation, a particularly important complicating factor, perhaps especially among diasporic peoples, as children born in one place attempt to identify with the birthplace of their parents. For example, a dynamic that has emerged in the US among diasporic South Asians is that immigrant parents, whose main stance toward US culture was to assimilate, are providing ways for their children to juggle more complicated reactions to and against America, and India. In voicing these reactions, South Asian American youth rely on their parents’ knowledge and experience of India in order to make musics and identities that resonate both with the US and with their ancestral homes. This reliance on the parents’ knowledge and experiences is illustrated in this scene with Queens, New York– based DJ Lil’ Jay and his mother, who occasionally brings him Hindi film music tapes to sample for his remixes: “Who is that, Ma?” Jay says looking up from his tape deck. It’s a melodramatic Hindi ballad jammed into a middle of a boisterous 11-minute house mix, one of nine tracks on Lil Jay’s coming album. She holds up her right index finger, squints up at the ceiling. “Disco Dancer, na?” she guesses. “Must be Amit Kumar or Kishore. Yes, Kishore. 1982.” She hands her husband his milky tea. (Sengupta 1996, §13, p. 11)4

“Identity,” therefore, far from serving the stable, grounding, function that UNESCO seems to ascribe to it, is a constantly shifting, endlessly inflected mode of self- conception and self-fashioning. A particular cultural form doesn’t simply register a social group’s or individual’s identity, it is, in part, how identity is made, unmade, negotiated, represented, performed, understood, and more. On to “culture.” In order for culture to be mobilized as a resource in Yúdice’s sense, it has to be understood in the essentialized and reified way mentioned earlier. UNESCO’s documents reveal understandings of culture in this sense. And, indeed, UNESCO’s language in the many 150

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documents it has produced about intangible cultural heritage is full of terms that assume an enchanted, unspoiled culture, particularly in its usages of “culture,” “identity,” and “creativity.” Yet the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, signed in Paris on 17 October 2003, states, quite simply: The “intangible cultural heritage” means the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills—as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith—that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity. (UNESCO n.d.d, “Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage 2003”)

This idealized and romanticized conception—which could apply to Hindi remix music discussed above, and which even mentions people’s relation to nature, as though their cultural production was “natural” as well—reveals fairly old-fashioned, pre-network society notions of the production of culture. One of UNESCO’s documents, which chronicles the road to the 2003 convention, describes several international seminars that debated questions surrounding the question of intangible cultural heritage. Language of “culture” and “identity” seemed to suffuse these meetings. A UNESCO report on a meeting in Bogotá in 1978 writes that this meeting stipulated that cultural authenticity is based on recognition of the components of cultural identity, whatever their geographic origin and however they have mingled, and that every people or group of peoples has both the right and the duty to determine independently its own cultural identity, based on its historical antecedents, its individual values and aspirations, and its sovereign will. (UNESCO, n.d.a, “1946–1981: First Steps”)

“Creativity” has a similarly complicated ideological history in European and North American thought, emerging in a period when the patronage system was declining in the late eighteenth century, forcing composers to become freelance musicians instead of employees of a church or aristocrat. “Creativity” (and “art,” for that matter) are ideological complexes that emerged in this moment in European history 151

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when cultural production associated with social elites was becoming increasingly marketized, drawn into the capitalist system (“The artist was born at the same time his work went on sale,” writes Jacques Attali in a favorite quotation [Attali 1985, 47]). And Christine Battersby, in a book that remains exceptionally useful, describes how the concept of genius by the end of the eighteenth century became closely linked to creativity, that it was creativity that made men (not women, as she makes clear) superior to others, even godlike (Battersby 1989, 2).5 This was a historical moment in the history of capitalism in which knowledge was stored and transmitted mainly through print—print capitalism (Anderson 1991). Networks of publishers, distributors, retailers, and consumers were instrumental in spreading the notion of creativity and genius that we employ today—ideologies that became closely linked by the end of the eighteenth century (Williams 1976)— for it wasn’t until this network existed that it was possible for Europeans to learn of musicians or other artists in far- off places through published reports, and to play and hear their published music. UNESCO uses the concept of “creativity” in precisely this late eighteenth/early nineteenth- century way. Its definition of “masterpiece” is Based on the fact that any culture may hold masterpieces and without restriction by any specific historical and cultural reference, a masterpiece (in the field of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity) is understood as a cultural manifestation of exceptional value, defying any formal rules and not measurable by any external yardstick, which conveys the freedom of expression and creative genius of a people. (UNESCO 2005, 211)

This is a serviceable definition of masterpiece in the realm of artistic field.

The Reenchantment of Culture Terry Flew has written of the three main ways of coordination of behavior among social actors: hierarchies, markets, and networks (Flew 2009). Markets occasionally recognize local cultural forms and lift them up into the view of a broader public, as in the case of, say, Irish step dancing thanks to the success of Riverdance; or Paul Simon’s popularizing of South African isicathamiya music on his Graceland album of 1986. The UNESCO halo effect is similar in a sense, acting as a kind of nonmarketized way of recognizing the local in the name of preserva152

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tion. Yet, as I have shown, the ideologies that drove UNESCO’s adoption of the idea of intangible cultural heritage and masterpieces all emanate from capitalist processes. I employ the term “enchantment” in the classic Weberian sense here, a term that Weber used to describe magical thoughts and practices thought to be common in the premodern world that were slowly being eliminated through the rise of rationalization and bureaucratization; in his words: “One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service” (Weber 1946, 139). In designating something as intangible cultural heritage, or, especially, naming something a “masterpiece of the intangible heritage of humanity,” UNESCO is actually conferring upon a particular cultural form or practice a kind of reenchantment that gives it privileged status in today’s commodity culture, however ephemeral that status may be; it is taking someone’s cultural practice and placing a halo over it. Colin Campbell (1989), George Ritzer (1999), and others have discussed a reenchantment provided by modern consumer culture in which consumers exist in a kind of fantasy world, a dreamlike state in which desire for commodities constitutes a large part of people’s lives. In many Western countries, particularly in the US, stores are increasingly temples of consumption; advertising seems to impart all sorts of special properties to commodities that they don’t actually possess, as many scholars of advertising have noted (see, for one example, Jhally 1990). By agreeing with Campbell and Ritzer, I am not departing from Weber here, for I believe he was quite right about the corrosive effects of rationality. I am conceptualizing enchantment here as akin to a structure of feeling, to invoke Raymond Williams (1977), that rationality didn’t destroy. Rather, it emptied it out, and this structure was refilled with new modes of enchantment provided by the consumer culture that emerged in the eighteenth century (Campbell 1989). But I am speaking here of a kind of reenchantment provided by consumption in a capitalist, marketized, globally networked world. I think that reenchantment can occur not only through the workings of markets, but also networks such as those with UNESCO as the key node. UNESCO, through its identification of intangible cultural heritage and designation of some practices, musical instruments, languages, and other cultural forms as “masterpieces of the intangible heritage of humanity,” is valorizing those practices and forms according to nineteenth- century ideas of creativity, genius, and more recent concep153

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tions of culture and identity. That is, to come full circle, nineteenthcentury print capitalism produced certain ideologies that are still with us, but our own globalized, networked capitalism has produced others, and has found new ways to (re)use some of these older ideas. All now coexist, though in ways that are quite complex. If UNESCO’s way of protecting “intangible cultural heritage” is fraught with so many problems, is there a better way? I don’t believe so. There is no longer any way to be “outside” capitalism, only the ongoing necessity of devising ways of taming its more virulent tendencies. This, I am sure, is what UNESCO is attempting. As much as the designation of intangible cultural heritage owes to the workings of EuroAmerican capitalism and the ideologies it has engendered since at least the end of the eighteenth century, it may be that the only way to attempt—attempt—to preserve certain cultural forms and practices from what now seems to be the inexorable march of capitalism around the globe is to insulate them from capitalist processes of commodification. While UNESCO is currently the most prestigious node in a network that recognizes intangible heritage, there is a growing number of small and not-so-small private foundations that also fund and promote traditional arts. These operate locally and regionally, as well as nationally. Many do good work that isn’t well known outside of their own area. For example, here in southern California, the Durfee Foundation promotes the maintenance and furtherance of traditional musics by funding, generously, a teacher and a student to foster the transmission of traditional musical skills (see http://www.durfee.org/programs/music/ overview.html). Programs such as this can plant seeds and foster marginal musicians. In this way, some musics and musicians can attempt to go relatively unnoticed, perhaps escaping the catapult into today’s networked, globalized capitalism that UNESCO recognition seems to produce.

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Globalized Neoliberal Capitalism and the Commodification of Taste It always comes down to taste.

RICK RUBIN

Looking back, the period of the late 1980s– early 1990s was an extraordinarily exciting intellectual moment. The “cultural studies” boom was influencing more and more disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and beyond; anthropologists were increasingly studying their own cultures; various kinds of social and cultural theory were becoming the lingua franca for many scholars; and there were extremely productive debates about the nature of the present. Was it “postmodern”? Or a moment best characterized by a change in capitalism, identified by terms such as “late capitalism,” “disorganized capitalism,” and “post-industrial capitalism,” or post-Fordism, or “flexible accumulation”?1 Or was the present an information age? A  network society? Or transnational? Global? Postcolonial? Later, Richard Sennett (2006) and others employed the term “new capitalism.” While I prefer the term “new capitalism,” for, like “late capitalism,” it preserves something of the historical dimension of the different phases of capitalism, “neoliberal” capitalism has become more common and I have reluctantly adopted that term. But despite the flurry of interest in these (and still other) theories of the present, and the vast amount of 155

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writings on such phenomena as postmodernism, most of these theories and approaches gave way to one—globalization, which seems to have subsumed or supplanted the others and assumed the dominant position remarkably quickly, a symptom mistaken for the cause. This chapter considers the rise of globalization as a discourse about the present and how it has missed some of the underlying processes of neoliberal capitalism with respect to cultural production. As theorized by scholars of the present utilizing a number of different frameworks, there has been a proliferation of signs of all kinds—including those from non-Western Elsewheres. What this has meant in the realm of cultural production, however, is that navigating through this welter of signs has changed the nature of cultural production. Producers of media that employ music (such as television and film) have increasingly come to rely on “music supervisors,” people who have marketable tastes in music that can add cachet to films or broadcasts in which their chosen music appears. They and everyday listeners increasingly depend on various online “collaborative filtering systems” or “recommendation systems” (such as the service at amazon.com that recommends items to customers) to find what they want. Thus, although the cultural importance of “taste” has a long history in the West, I will argue that taste as a faculty in globalized neoliberal capitalism has taken on a new importance and, at least in the realm of cultural production, has become newly commodified, both in the new profession of the music supervisor and in the form of recommendation systems.

Globalization as Cover [The term “globalization”] operates both as a password and as a watchword. . . . PIERRE BOURDIEU

Globalization was part of some of the 1980s and 1990s considerations of the present.2 But it quickly began to emerge as its own discourse of the contemporary, and this discourse frequently paid little attention to other ways of thinking about the present. This tendency is perhaps most pronounced in one of the most widely cited early writers on globalization, Arjun Appadurai, who founded one of the main discourses about globalization—it is about “flows,” about various -scapes, as he wrote in the early 1990s (Appadurai 1996); his and others’ considerations of other contemporary trends, including new modalities of capitalism, were not always part of such analyses. Appadurai’s and many 156

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other writings on the subject of globalization have been extremely influential, not only in their useful insights, but in their relative lack of attention to the workings of globalized neoliberal capitalism that were so central to some other works on the contemporary moment appearing around the same time. Indeed, a random check of some readers on globalization shows that capitalism as a theme prominent enough to be indexed appears infrequently; one volume contains a reference to “capital mobility” with a few references; another also has “capital mobility”; “capitalism: consolidation” is the other, with some references; another has only a few references.3 Additionally, globalization as a media term, a word in everyday conversation, and on university campuses seems to trump all other ways of describing the contemporary these days. Globalization is routinely offered as an explanation for something current, not as a historical condition, and is treated as an agent of change, not as a particular facet of today’s capitalism.4 It was striking to hear Anthony Giddens deliver a lecture on globalization a few years ago; where it had once been a component of the late modern world that he described so cogently in books such as The Consequences of Modernity, it has now taken on a life of its own in his estimation. Globalization is rarely seen now as a salient feature of late modernity, or even as one narrative among many about late modernity; it has become its own reality with its own agency. What Pierre Bourdieu wrote about capitalism and economics could be extended to globalization: “Economic theory has allowed to be foisted upon it a definition of the economy of practices which is the historical invention of capitalism . . .” (Bourdieu 1986, 242). To the extent that economic matters still figure into academic discussions of globalization, or the present more generally, they have most commonly come to be seen as effects of neoliberalism, that set of ideologies originating in the 1950s that took off in the 1980s and advocated deregulation, privatization, the withdrawal of the state from many of its former responsibilities to its citizens—all facilitated by the rise of new communications technologies.5 For some authors, “globalization” is the effect of neoliberalism and its policies; Bourdieu, who in his later writings frequently uses the terms interchangeably, writes that globalization “is merely . . . the imposition on the entire world of the neoliberal tyranny of the market and the undisputed rule of the economy and of economic powers” (Bourdieu 2003, 9). I would argue, rather, that neoliberal ideologies and policies have become hegemonic, and must be understood as part of this wide-ranging historical system; “in a general way,” writes Bourdieu elsewhere, “neo157

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liberalism is a very smart and very modern repackaging of the oldest ideas of the oldest capitalists” (Bourdieu 1998, 34). Yet most intellectuals’ discourse about neoliberalism shares the same features as those of globalization: it is seen as inevitable, all- encompassing, and runs the risk of being fetishized, unconnected to broader trends within historical capitalism. Additionally, focuses on neoliberalism can be reductionist; Theodor Adorno’s comment on studies of industrial society works just as well in this more recent context: one cannot deduce the nature of contemporary society by focusing only on neoliberalism (Adorno 1987, 241). Marx, after all, did not attempt to understand merely the capitalism of his era but capitalism as a wide-ranging historical system. Something is lost when capitalism as a historical system is removed from the equation, replaced by neoliberalism as its most recent incarnation, and/or globalization. Like other terms that delineate a small slice of history (such as “postmodernity”), it becomes too easy to reify that slice, to disconnect it from the history that produced it.

Neoliberal Capitalism and Cultural Production/ Consumption Today: Introduction Thus, I view globalization, and neoliberalism for that matter, as not only narratives of observable phenomena—with histories, of course— but as symptoms of neoliberal capitalism today. Or, more precisely, globalized neoliberal capitalism, which is a historical development of capitalism that is extremely globalized—but not newly globalized—via neoliberal policies, new communications technologies, and other wellknown developments. Capitalism—neoliberal capitalism—is the primary framework for analysis. It is the transcendent category. Since studies of capitalism largely fell by the wayside since the heady days of the early 1990s, for the purposes of this chapter I have had recourse to refer back to a seminal writing on the subject of late capitalism, Ernest Mandel’s book of that title from 1980, and I will take a moment to recapitulate his major arguments here. Discussions of it will sound familiar to most readers, since many of the same features of the contemporary are included in other analytical rubrics, such as globalization itself, or neoliberalism, or postindustrial society, or other such frameworks listed above. The “late” in late capitalism refers to most Marxists’ belief that capitalism as an economic system is neither natural nor inevitable, and will someday end, though it has proved to be endlessly adaptable. Nonetheless, it is possible to periodize capital158

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ism into different stages, the last of which, late capitalism, is marked by a number of different traits according to Mandel: the declining importance of the state; the global growth of monopolistic and oligopolistic pursuit of massive profits; the increased concentration of capital in huge corporations; the defeat or decline of labor and other kinds of oppositional movements; the globalization of fi nancial capital; the rise of transformative new technologies such as personal computers; an economy increasingly dependent on the defense industry; the growth of debt; new forms of colonialism; an increasing polarization of wealth; heightened consumption; and, according to some scholars, still more. But there have been important writings on capitalism since Mandel, such as Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, published in English in 2005. Adopting more of a Weberian than a Marxian perspective as is evident from their title, they argue that capitalism since the 1970s has become less hierarchically organized, successfully absorbing and adopting the critiques leveled at it during the various uprisings of the 1960s for being bureaucratic, uniform, and inflexible. Boltanski and Chiapello carefully mine the management literature for signs of a shift to a new phase, embodying a “connexionist” perspective that values networking, diversity, and social capital. A powerful symptom of this shift is the advertising industry’s cooptation of the hip and the cool to sell goods.6 Today’s capitalist heroes are less entrepreneurs than geeks such as Bill Gates, or cooler geeks like Steve Jobs. Both perspectives are useful for understanding today’s capitalism. It is important to emphasize, however, that comprehending the present as shaped by a new form of capitalism instead of something else is more than analyzing it with a list of trends and traits. It asks that certain themes associated with Marxian and Weberian understandings of capitalism remain in the foreground: first and foremost, of course, is the centrality of capitalism itself, but there follows from this commodification, social class, and forces of production. Adopting these viewpoints also is a way of insisting that cultural production is not something apart from economic forces. Last, it helps to historicize the present moment by thinking of it in broader terms: How is today’s capitalism different from that of earlier eras? If we think of world music—and the music industry more generally —as being caught up in the processes of globalized neoliberal capitalism and not simply globalization, what can we learn? What does the foregoing have to do with the production of cultural forms such as music? The main effect of the globalization of capitalism on music has been simply that more musics from the West’s Elsewheres have been 159

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coming to the West’s metropoles, entering the commodity system and consumer economy of neoliberal capitalism. This is a commonplace observation and does not need to be elaborated upon here, except to note that this is part of the globalization script itself: that is, our world of plenitude is ascribed to globalization. Otherwise, however, the more recent changes in the world of music are more attributable to the workings of neoliberal capitalism than globalization. While there are a number of shifts in the culture industry one could explore, some of which had been widely reported in the media, what I would like to focus on here is an examination of new computerized forces of production that have led to, among other things, the informationalization and commodification of taste.

The Informationalization of Music and Musical Taste in Neoliberal Capitalism Most readers are probably most familiar with Fredric Jameson’s widely cited and influential essay “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” first published in 1984, which did more than any other single work to advance the framework of late capitalism. Jameson’s contention that late capitalism manifested itself in terms of style, about which he wrote at great length, however, represents one of the problems of the argument. Style was and remains the main locus of the bourgeois study of high culture; it is assumed to be the essence of a particular individual, transmuted into what Jameson calls the “objectal form” of an artwork. But if we think instead in terms of the means of the production— and distribution—of culture, it is immediately clear that the individual, artisanal nature of the production of artworks remains much the same as ever. It may be that in the realm of artistic cultural production, style as the essence of the individual creator could be seen as the locus of the workings of neoliberal capitalism, though it is always difficult to locate the machinations of capitalism—or any large-scale system—in a single work by a single individual. What has changed dramatically since the advent of the “age of mechanical reproduction” is less the means of production of artworks than their distribution. Artistic cultural production, while not having changed much over centuries, relies on more recent modes of dissemination, distribution, and marketing, and it is there that shifts in the workings of capitalism can be better located. 160

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Distribution in the Internet age, however, has made available more commodities than ever before. Many have written of the huge variety of goods accessible to Western consumers today, a variety that anthropologist Grant McCracken has termed plenitude: more commodities are more easily available than ever before, including commodities from abroad such as various kinds of music (McCracken 1997). But in a world suffused with goods it becomes increasingly difficult to find what one wants, and thus, means of searching have become increasingly important. The stock value of the most popular search engine on the Internet, Google, is many tens of billions. Said one observer on the problem of searching for classical music online, which is a more complicated search than for popular music, “niche search technology is one of the hottest areas of technology developing at the moment” (Seno 2007, 33). The importance of searching is such that Advertising Age (the main weekly chronicle of the advertising industry in the US) began in 2007 to include a special annual section entitled “Search” in one of its issues, including a conversation with their resident guru, who said that “marketers understand search is more important” (“Pioneer Bullish on Local, Video, Google” 2007, S3). “Search”—it has become its own category. Later, the magazine began to include a special supplement simply entitled Search; the first issue noted that “search composes 40% of online ad spending” (Klaasen 2007, 3). Even with the onset of the Great Recession in that year, search-marketing spending continued to increase; estimates from early in 2010 held that spending would increase from $13 billion in 2009 to $26 billion in 20147 (Lyons 2010). Thus, while the culture industry continues to seek blockbusters to minimize production costs and maximize profits, retailers are increasingly moving to what has been called a “long tail” model of sales: warehousing a vast inventory and selling only a few of each item (Anderson 2006). In this kind of retail environment, finding the product one wants has become all-important. If world music in the past was sucked into the commodifying world of capitalism as songs, or portions of songs as I have written elsewhere, now it is as bytes: digitized, informationalized, databased—fodder in the machine of neoliberal capitalism.8 The Advent of the Music Supervisor The explosion of music in digital form, this plenitude, has given rise to a new worker in the culture industries, the person who can navigate skillfully through the vast labyrinth of recorded music for use in film and broadcasting. Producers of a film or television program may de161

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cide to hire a music supervisor—someone who is hired for her taste in music—to select music for a film or television program along with engaging someone to write music. The music supervisor, the person with “taste,” can now compete with cultural creators themselves for prestige and authority. Elsewhere I have discussed the rise in importance of the music producer and his (they are virtually always men) auteurization (Taylor 2007). This process wasn’t confined solely to the music producer, and has been extended to the non-musician and non-technician on the axis of taste. In a growing jumble of sounds, the one who has taste is king. As the epigram to this chapter states, “It always comes down to taste” (legendary music mogul Rick Rubin, quoted in Hirschberg 2007, 49). Distinction isn’t made anymore just for differentiating one social group from another, though of course this still matters:9 it is a necessity in today’s world; in popular music, someone has to navigate all of the world’s sounds. The placement of effective music, including world music, in film and television soundtracks has become a lucrative business. The profession of the music supervisor arose with the profits that were realized by the sales of soundtracks to such films as The Big Chill (1983); people in the industry realized that it was possible to garner substantial profits from such collections. Music supervisors, labeled by one industry insider as “the purveyor of the playlist, the idolater of iTunes, the search engine- ear” (Rabinowitz 2008, 17), began to boom in the early 1990s and can wield extraordinary power in deciding what music appears in films or broadcasts to the extent that they are sometimes referred to as the new A&R (artist and repertoire) people (Kraft 2007).10 Said one, “if your band is successful locally and you are playing a great gig that gathers a large crowd, and you look out into the audience and ask yourself if there might be someone in that audience who might help your career, it’s more likely that a music supervisor is out there scouting than a record company executive” (Levine 2007, 82). This music supervisor also says: What will work for me and my film will also work for those artists in their careers. Obtaining a film placement or a television placement is a very valuable and positive step in a live musician’s career. It’s kind of like what getting on the radio meant in 1955. . . . [A] lot of [television] shows are music driven. A huge percentage of the people who are of record-buying age buy their music based on what they’ve seen on television. The people who are selecting music for television shows are trusted; their taste is trusted by the watchers of those shows. So in a weird twist of fate, I am able 162

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to function in much the same way that, say, Wolfman Jack did back in 1970—by finding songs and helping people discover new music. (Levine 2007, 80)

While, according to one industry insider, the music supervisor boom seems to be over (Kraft 2007), the phenomenal success of the soundtrack to the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, with music supervision by T-Bone Burnett, has ensured the longevity of some; Business Week called music supervisors “Hollywood’s new power players” (Lowry 2006, 80). One such player formed her own record label after enjoying massive success choosing songs for use on the hit television series Grey’s Anatomy (Garrity 2007). Music supervisors’ chosen tracks can appear on CD compilations that can sell extremely well; Warner Bros. released five compilations of music from the television series The O.C. that sold cumulatively a million copies (Trakin 2006, S9). As a result of successes such as these, music supervisors have come to be seen as music professionals even though they aren’t always musicians themselves.11 And, as one television music composer told me, with some indignation, music supervisors’ names can be listed on movie posters, a tangible sign of legitimacy and influence; and I have seen an increasing number of films in which the music supervisor is credited before the composer of original music. The practice of using popular songs in television programming has grown to the extent that on US television, many programs now employ them at the conclusion of the broadcast without dialogue. Interested viewers/listeners can visit the program website to find out what song it was, view playlists from other songs heard on the program, fi nd out more information about the music heard on that broadcast, and in some cases, follow a link to iTunes to purchase it. The cachet of this field seems to have grown to the extent that my university’s extension arm now offers a course called “Music Supervision.” For $415, students can take 18 hours of a course that introduces them to music supervisors, composers, filmmakers, producers, music licensing executives, and executives. The course promises to “defin[e] the role of the music supervisor in drawing on the combined resources of the film and television communities to marry music and moving images.” In such an environment, any music is fair game. Music supervisors are tapping into what is a growing preference for the use of world music in film scores, whether written by a composer who uses a nonWestern instrument, or a sample, or a licensed pre- existing recording. For reasons familiar to scholars of world music—a desire for local color, 163

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“freshness,” and others—some of these world music tracks appear in rather incongruous places in films. One of the most spectacular uses of “world music” in a film was Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006), which uses “Chaiyya Chaiyya,” a Hindi film music song by A. R. Rahman, in its opening credits. But it was probably the music by David Robbins— credited both as composer and music supervisor—for Dead Man Walking (1995) that alerted most listeners to the use of world music in films, with its extensive use of singing by the late Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. One composer has even remarked upon “the increasing prevalence of what might be called a ‘world music sensibility’ in modern fi lm scoring, where an Armenian duduk is as likely to be heard under dialogue as a saxophone, and it’s clear that the film-music melting pot is once again on the boil” (Bond 2006). Music supervisors view world music in much the same way as the rest of the mainstream music industry—it can be seen as fresh, different. In films and television programs, it can add a touch of local color. An article touting some unknown bands says that the musicians considered in its article “have strong ethnic components to their sounds, and each could add world-music flair to a score or soundtrack” (Crisafulli 2006). Composers will occasionally work with music supervisors to try to capture a particular sound for a film or scene. For the 2006 film Babel, the director Alejandro González Iñárritu was said to collaborate with the composer, Gustavo Santaolalla (who “composed” some world music), and the music supervisor: “Iñárritu worked closely with Santaolalla, Anibal Kerpel (Composer and Music Editor) and Lynn Fainchtein (Music Supervisor) to capture the traditional sounds of both Marrakech and Tijuana via the music of Gnawa and other traditional Arab musicians in Morocco and various Norteño sounds from Mexico” (“Babel Soundtrack to Resonate with World Music” 2006). But most music supervisors tend to use search tools such as MySpace, YouTube, and iTunes (Crisafulli 2007). The conventional music industry is catching on, however; late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, BMG launched an online search website, MovieTunes, aimed at filmmakers and music supervisors seeking music for use in video productions (Gallo 2008, 4).12 Music supervisors are human search engines and taste machines, scouring the web for music, employing online search engines that allow them and others in the entertainment industry to search for music by genre, style, and, sometimes, mood, fulfilling their rule as music tastemakers in the world of globalized neoliberal capitalism, a world in which commercial interests have per164

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vaded virtually—virtually—all arenas of cultural production. They are what Boltanski and Chiapello call “managers,” one of a new kind of service provider whose “talent for sniffing things out” is increasingly common (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, 444). Everybody Search Now While the advent of the music supervisor is a fairly recent development, it would be difficult to ascribe their rise as an effect of the neoliberal capitalism; they are taste arbiters in a recognizably old-fashioned way: they are individuals, selling their labor. What is new in the neoliberal capitalism, however, is the use of new forces of production in the form of computers and complex algorithms, which are employed as search systems, known as recommendation systems or collaborative filtering systems. These complex algorithms provide users with recommendations based on their previous purchases and those of others, with which frequenters of amazon.com and other commercial websites are familiar. Such systems postdate the rise of the personal computer and the World Wide Web, and were designed to bring to the attention of users in small groups documents that might interest them based on the systems’ compilation of data of users’ earlier searches. These systems have somewhat different genealogies and work in different ways. One of the earliest systems, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became known as Firefly, which was sold to Microsoft in 1999.13 The main researcher behind the development of this software described such systems as “electronic word of mouth”14 (Patton 1999, G22). Some of these systems are for active searches; one surfs to a website that specializes in making recommendations. One early example of this type was called Mubu, for “Music Buddha.” This site, which is no longer active, was launched in 2000 and was described by its creator thus: “It’s like having a friend who knows what kind of music you like.” The system’s developer said, “we want it to be the consumer’s best friend. We’re not going to push Metallica at a jazz fan” (Hartigan 2000, D8). The site’s database was compiled by hundreds of characteristics for thousands of songs, characteristics such as instrumentation, tempo, feel, and mood. On the website, users chose from a variety of music categories such as Anarchy, Ambient, Gospel, Evil, and rated a number of song clips. After clicking on a button that said “Enlighten Me,” Mubu recommended recordings. A more recent British service called The Filter, backed by rock mu165

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sician Peter Gabriel, makes recommendations of films and music. Gabriel says that “one of the many joys of the Internet would be freedom of choice, but many of us are now drowning in an ocean of options. An intelligent filter can remove the burden and boredom of choice”15 (Hayes 2008, 6). The system works, as they all do, by employing complex mathematics that allow the site to become “smarter” as users make more and more choices. Another example is not a website, but a feature in Apple’s iTunes called “Genius,” which makes playlists of songs similar to those selected by the user. It works by analyzing the tastes of millions of users around the world, and makes guesses for individual users. According to Apple’s Steve Jobs, “With Genius, you can automatically make playlists from songs in your music library that go great together with just one click. It could help you to rediscover music in your library and make a playlist of songs you wouldn’t normally put together.” Genius examines what one already has in one’s collection looking at genres, number of songs and albums by a particular artist, ratings user has given them, and characteristics of the song itself. It takes this information, renders it anonymous, and communicates it to Apple, which allows the company to build playlists based on all of this collected information (Beaumont 2008, 20). It is probably Amazon’s system that has received the most attention. A writer in the Wall Street Journal in 2002 said that Amazon’s recommendation system had come to rival his music aficionado brother for sound advice. Amazon’s system culls purchase data from its millions of consumers and pools it anonymously, and matches each consumer with others who have similar purchase histories, making recommendations for purchases. Rating an item tweaks one’s profile (Frangos 2002, R15). Other systems are based not on people’s purchases, but the nature of the music itself; users can seek music they like based on characteristics of databased music. One of the more sophisticated of these recommendation systems, originally called Savage Beast, is now Pandora, the Internet radio service launched in 2005 that employs the “music genome project.” The developers categorized music by its “genomic” traits unique to individual songs; songs are thus turned into stored, searchable, information. The company’s CEO said in 2005, “we were interested in having trained musicologists analyze an enormous number of songs based on anywhere from 150 to 350 ‘genomes’ per song. It was a way of understanding and matching music to consumers’ tastes, as opposed to a simplistic recommendation some of the consumer sites were 166

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offering” (Kubal 2005, 48). Another source says that the “genomes” are identified by “a team of analysts, musicians who have studied music formally for at least four years and regularly play professionally. They listen to songs and rate them using up to 400 individual parameters,” the development of which was aided by a Stanford University music department lecturer with a Ph.D. in musicology (Bradbury 2005, 47). He said, “you look at melody and harmony and form and rhythm and texture and instrumentation to see how all of these fit together to make a composite piece of music.” Other parameters include the voice employed, gender, high, low, smooth, or gravelly (Bradbury 2005). As of early 2006, they had a database of over 70,000 songs by more than 10,000 artists; by the end of the year, the database contained over 500,000 songs (Lupton 2006, 5; Leeds 2006, §2, p. 1). Today, the company doesn’t list the size of its database, but simply says, “the Music Genome Project is updated on a continual basis with the latest releases, emerging artists, and an ever- deepening collection of catalogue titles”16 (www.pandora.com/corporate/mgp). The company’s founder hoped to realize the “long tail” theory of sales in the Internet age, enabling purchasers to find their way among millions of individual songs (Bradbury 2005). To use Pandora, one surfs to the website, where one is prompted to type in a favorite artist’s name or song title. This generates a response that the system is creating a “station” with that artist’s music, or, if none is in the database, music similar to that artist’s. Not surprisingly, world music artists’ representation in such systems is spotty at best, though it has improved. Typing in “Angélique Kidjo,” I received the latter message, followed by an explanation: “To start things off, here’s a track that’s musically similar to Angélique Kidjo called ‘Amore (Sexo)’ by Santana, that features Latin influences, extensive vamping, a busy horn section, minor key tonality and a vocal- centric aesthetic.” What, actually, a Beninoise singer has in common with a guitar hero isn’t clear. Underneath, there is a link that says, “Why we’re not playing Angélique Kidjo” that takes one to Pandora’s FAQ, which simply says that they haven’t licensed the music for playback on their system. Searching Youssou N’Dour brought up Sarah Brightman on the first try; the second (from another computer, for the system recognizes one’s searches after a first attempt) resulted in a track called “Flying Saucer” by Astronaut Wife, “that features electronica influences, paired vocal harmony, prominent use of synth and many other similarities identified in the music genome project.” Another pointless comparison, for N’Dour sounds nothing like these other musicians. (N’Dour was later added 167

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to Pandora’s selections.) If Pandora has the requested artist’s music, the track played comes with a brief description as above. Some names, such as Lata Mangeshkar, result in a message saying that she’s not in the database. Late in 2007, Pandora became available on AT&T cellular phones. It is currently one of the most- downloaded apps from Apple’s App Store. Other systems classify music by genre and its seemingly infinite subdivisions. Genres are tagged, creating “tag clouds” that can contain many subgenres or other categories of music thought by programmers to be related. Last.fm, a website that offers streaming music “based on what you listen to,” according to its website, proffers world music genre tags such as these: ethnic funk rock lesser known yet streamable artists stick it to the man trippy va va silvermine woodstock gurus (www.last.fm/music/ World+Music/+tags)

Clicking on one of these links takes users to a selection of musicians, as well as a list of “genres” thought to be related.17 These systems don’t always work to customers’ satisfaction, of course. Developers say that determining what consumers do not want is difficult. Said one, “the holy grail is to be able to capture all the customer’s interactions in detail and get smarter about what not to recommend. We can recommend very well. Knowing when not to bother someone is much harder” (Guernsey 2003, G1). A 2002 survey of such systems said that “users felt that recommendations from online were often new and unexpected, while items recommended by friends mostly served as reminders of items users had already planned to pursue,” according to one researcher (Ryan 2003, E13). And there is the problem of immensely popular musicians such as the Beatles, whose songs are likely to be found in many people’s music collections. This is known as the “popularity effect”: developers don’t want their systems to recommend items that users might already have, or make recommendations that seem to be unimaginative (Guernsey 2003). An anthropologist friend some years ago bought a copy of my book Global Pop from Amazon and was annoyed for some months that their system kept recommending 168

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other music books, for he had purchased my book out of friendship rather than an interest in the subject.18 There is also the problem that systems could be manipulated by content producers so that they recommend a certain publisher’s books over another’s. Of course, more systems have been developed to find such instances (“United We Find” 2005). And there is the inevitability that people’s tastes change. Despite their drawbacks, such systems are dramatically changing the music business. Late in 2006, a senior vice president for digital strategy and business development at Warner Music said, “you now have music fans that are completely enabled as editorial voices. You can’t fool those people. You can’t put out an album with one good single on it. Those days are over” (Leeds 2006, §2, p. 1). Thus, these systems are still being employed, and refined. After Pandora, the next major phase was to pool information from more than one website, combining social networking with music recommendation systems. By late 2006, some fans were beginning to demand better recommendation systems; others were turning to music- oriented social networking sites such as Last.fm and MOG (“a place for musical nourishment,” according to the latter’s website), where they could make recommendations to like-minded users. MOG finds the music files stored on users’ computers and analyzes those that have been played the most, and posts this information in users’ profiles; MOG members can examine others’ profiles (Bruno 2006a, 18). The first such system was called MyStrands, originally MusicStrands, which required users to download a small application to their computer that tracked their music purchasing and listening habits. The data it collected was compared to other users listening and purchasing habits in order to make recommendations (Tarzian 2006, 3). Another new trend is the employment of an algorithm that searches the web for reviews of books and recordings, analyzes the communities that made the comments, and uses the collected data to make recommendations to its customers (Tham 2008). Yet another strategy has been to hire high-profile musicians as “critics” who assemble playlists and make recommendations in other ways, such as David Bowie, who was named the “godfather” of Nokia’s service (Bruno 2006b, 26). In the spring of 2008, MySpace Music appeared. Billboard magazine heralded this event with the sentence “years from now, when the pundits talk about the turning point for digital music, they will point to the launch of MySpace Music.” This venture was a partnership between the social networking powerhouse and the music industry. MySpace Music improves on some of the earlier services by combining advertisingsupported streaming and Digital Rights Management–free download169

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ing (music files with DRM can only be shared a limited number of times and are thus unpopular with most listeners). Users can also access concert tickets and merchandise. Billboard reports that the CEO/Chairman of Warner Music Group issued a press release marking the website launch that said, “this venture may provide a defining blueprint for this next important stage in the evolution of social media, benefiting consumers, artists and music companies alike.” Billboard’s author thought that the “warehouse model” of Amazon.com and iTunes would begin to fade away in favor of such social networking models; and he thought that subscription services such as Rhapsody were in an even more precarious position (Bruno 2008, 10). Though it is still operating as of this writing, MySpace Music didn’t fare as well as these rosy predictions had it, fighting off competition from several newer social networking and music sites.19 And MySpace has been hemorrhaging fans who have been heading toward Facebook, which is becoming increasingly hospitable to bands.20 MySpace Music has, however, partnered with search giant Google, which added a music search feature in the autumn of 2009. Users who search a particular musician or song can find a link to the song, which is streamed by MySpace Music; an option to purchase the mp3 is also offered.21 In September of 2010, the biggest music retailer in the US—Apple— launched Ping, a “social network for music” as Steve Jobs said repeatedly in his introduction. “It’s like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes,” said Jobs.22 Ping was embedded in Apple’s iTunes and was also available as an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Ping allowed users to follow artists, follow their friends’ recommendations and favorites, and more. Ping was phased out in September 2012, but the idea of combining social networking with music as the main business model for users searching for music has only strengthened with the more recent entry of Facebook into the realm of the social experience of music, pairing with music streaming service Spotify.

The Commodification of Taste While the rise of the music supervisor is a reasonably familiar extension of the realm of the taste arbiter into new arenas, the advent of extremely complex algorithms to make wanted or unwanted recommendations to listeners and viewers represents another kind of development. The rise of the music supervisor is an old form of the commodification of taste, extended into previously unknown places such 170

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as choosing music for television programs or films: music supervisors are still people whose expertise is thought to be necessary. With algorithms, information about music and films and books stored in people’s heads is replaced by a database.23 “Knowledge” about music becomes informationalized and commodified, employed to sell music. Clearly influenced by Paul Virilio and other theorists of technology and the information society, sociologist Scott Lash has written that “in a very important way it may no longer be commodification that is driving informationalization, but instead informationalization that is driving commodification. Information explodes the distinction between use value and exchange value. . . . But then it is recaptured by capital for further commodification” (Lash 2002, 3). Lash is making a distinction here between an older manufacturing economy, in which power was tied to commodities, in contrast to today’s world in which physical commodities are increasingly informationalized—made to be hip, cool, desirable, or what have you—and profit is increasingly tied to intellectual property rather than physical goods. Lash also revisits Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “the medium is the message,” saying that the message is “the paradigmatic medium of the information age” (Lash 2002, 2). But what matters in the era of the neoliberal capitalism is not simply the “medium”; it is, rather, the means of the delivery of various media, the iPods, personal computers, and websites that help people find content. Yes, this content is informationalized, and commodified as individual songs, or bits of songs as samples. But finding and storing them are what users care about, and these means, both in terms of hardware, and service in the form of recommendation systems, are socially and culturally more important than bytes. Lash argues that the manufacturing capitalism of the past was propelled by the contradiction between use value and exchange value, commodification (exchange value) and its critique (use value). But, he says, informationalization is entirely different: it is not driven by this conflict, but, rather, “explodes and partly marginalizes the exchange value/use value couple” (Lash 2002, 9). That is, for example, the experience of culture today is no longer between a listener and a work of music, a viewer and a painting; rather, there is a whole host of people and technologies and networks that mediate between people and cultural forms that have rendered those forms as informationalized objects, no longer as transcendent works, and, I would argue, increasingly in competition with the machines and technologies of their distribution for cultural significance. 171

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The distinction between exchange value and use value has become harder to discern as the two have moved closer together in the informationalized world of neoliberal capitalism, perhaps especially with respect to cultural commodities such as music. At the same time, however, what has become clear is that manufacturing capitalism with respect to cultural commodities is doing well, whether it involves the production of iPods, cellular phones that can play music and videos, Blu-Ray DVD players, or something else. Devices that can deal with information still matter; and delivery systems more generally, be they hardware or software, also matter. Theodor Adorno, writing in the late 1930s about music reproduction technologies of his day, mainly radio and phonograph, said that “music  .  .  . serves in America today as an advertisement for commodities which one must acquire in order to be able to hear music” (Adorno 2002, 295). Today, the pace of development of such technologies—including music recommendation systems—has increased to the extent that there is now a continuous rhythm of their release, muddying the difference between music (with whatever use values one believes it to have, a complicated question with respect to cultural commodities that I won’t address here, see chapter 10), and the devices that purvey it, with their exchange values. Despite the omnivorous nature of neoliberal capitalist commodification and the growing informationalization and databasing of music and taste for music, world music artists are no less marginal than they were a decade or two ago. I have written elsewhere of the world music audience being much the same as the audience for classical music in terms of educational and cultural capital, but it is difficult to imagine that these people will search as assiduously for world music musicians; or that a sophisticated search engine for them to use will be devised (Taylor 2012b). The discourses of globalization, academic and otherwise, have been helpful in understanding the flow of musics around the world—its speed and reach—but they have been less useful, if indeed they have been useful at all, in explaining what is done with those musics when they travel to the metropolitan centers of the West, where they become quickly informationalized, databased, and incorporated into a complex game of taste, whose anointed possessors can become influential and powerful cultural arbiters. The latest phase of globalization is an effect of today’s capitalism, not something in and of itself. Cultural production in today’s globalized neoliberal capitalism owes some aspects to the current modality of globalization, but not everything can be explained by it. Because 172

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of the plethora of goods, the importance of “taste” has risen to the extent that people with it can be considered to be as necessary and important as cultural creators, while at the same time everyday people’s taste is increasingly gathered through commercial means and stored in databases. In the world of globalized neoliberal capitalism, it all comes down to taste, informationalized, databased, and commodified.

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Valuing Music This final chapter returns to Clifford Geertz, in a way, by tackling questions of value of cultural goods, whether or not they are commodities. I understand value as another way of taking Geertz’s focus on meaning seriously. But I am no less concerned with capitalism in this chapter, both historically and in the present. My main concern in this chapter is to broaden Geertz’s focus on meaning to encompass questions of value, particularly that of cultural goods. Geertz’s insistence that the locus of analysis should be on what is meaningful for social actors was, and remains, compelling. What people find to be meaningful is what they have invested themselves in, something that resonates with their beliefs, their view of the world, the things that matter to them. Value is a more precise way of attempting to understand meaning.1 Concerning ourselves with social actors and their understanding of meaning—and value—and their actions based on these beliefs helps us move beyond functionalist explanations of social behaviors, which are still quite common in ethno/ musicology. The question of the value of cultural goods has been a frustrating one for decades. Most who have tackled the question have tended to rely mainly on Marx and Marxian notions of use value and exchange value, though these have their limitations, as I will discuss. Or, there have been vague platitudes about the redemptive value of art, or functionalist interpretations of how music reinforces community beliefs or makes identity. All these might be true enough in certain social groups and certain historical 174

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moments. But I think we can find a better way to theorize the value of cultural goods that complements economic theories of value such as Marx’s and those following his lead. If productive labor in Marx’s thinking is productive because it produces surplus value for capitalists, surely labor or other sorts of action considered to be unproductive can nonetheless produce sorts of values other than those theorized by Marx. I am not concerned here with arguing that the labor that produces cultural goods is somehow special, as so many authors are today (e.g., Florida 2002; Hardt and Negri 2000 and 2004; Lazzarato 1996). I agree with Marx on the question of labor as either productive or unproductive, even when that labor results in cultural goods. Marx’s labor theory of value was, after all, a theory of value; endless analyses of types of labor, the nature of labor, or taxonomies of labor or taxonomies of cultural commodities (e.g., Miège 1989) can be interesting, but we must keep our focus on questions of value: How are certain forms of labor valued compared to others, and how are the results of labors, such as cultural goods, valued compared to others? I have found the anthropological literature on value to be useful in sorting out questions of the value of cultural goods such as music. Historically, there have been two main ways of understanding value in this literature: Marxian conceptions of use value, exchange value, and (unmarked) value, determined by the amount of socially necessary labor time expended in the making of a particular commodity. The other main theory of value stems from the influential work of Marcel Mauss and concerns the cultural conceptions of value that obtain through the complex cultural practices of gift exchange (Mauss 1990). Most anthropological treatments of questions of value tend to veer back and forth between these two paradigms, although some authors have attempted to bring them closer together, as I will discuss. What interests me at this point in this chapter, however, is Arjun Appadurai’s argument about “regimes of value” for goods, different regimes that exist in time and space (Appadurai 1986). Goods circulate among specific social groups in specific times and places and have certain meanings, values, for those people in those regimes. For Appadurai, the term “does not imply that every act of commodity exchange presupposes a complete cultural sharing of assumptions, but rather that the degree of value coherence may be highly variable from situation to situation, and from commodity to commodity” (Appadurai 1986, 15; emphasis in original). Regimes are relatively stable, though they can change over time. Appadurai’s thinking on value figures importantly in Fred Myers’s 175

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exceptionally useful overview on the subject of value (among another things) in his introduction to Empire of Things (Myers 2001).2 Myers observes that art objects exist in more than one regime of value or value production (Myers 2001, 28). And, drawing on the work of Annette Weiner, Myers argues for the importance of understanding how individuals and social groups create value in objects, whether those objects are commodities or treasures to be protected (Myers 2001, 9). “An object’s value,” he writes, may shift through time as individuals or groups are forced or elect to enter treasures into the marketplace or as an ordinary commodity becomes revered by a collector or family members and takes on the value of an inalienable possession (one that cannot be replaced by another). (Myers 2001, 9)

Myers also notes that the value “possessed by” (I would say, given to) objects “is subject to slippage and therefore is problematic. It must be sustained or reproduced through the complex work of production” (Myers 2001, 6), production by social actors operating in various regimes. Myers identifies two regimes of value relevant to questions of cultural production, one defined by the opposition between art and the commodity, which he calls “market framing,” and the other defined by ethnic and national identity (Myers 2001, 31). And he makes a useful demand for further work, arguing that the market is not a separate domain but a “structure of symbolic transformation” that “does not necessarily erase all the distinctions embodied in objects.” Other value systems can coexist with the market. And, he writes, [W]e must imagine that commodities and commoditization practices are themselves embedded in more encompassing spheres or systems of value production. Such systems not only recognize the existence of distinct regimes of value but also combine and reorganize the activity from these various contexts into more complex mediations . . .

or, he says, “culture-making” (Myers 2001, 59– 60). That is, even if something is produced as a commodity, it exists in other regimes of value; commodities can become gifts, and they can become commodities again in never- ending processes of the circulation of goods. These moments of value transformation can be especially illuminating about the careers that goods can take, and I will examine a few such historical moments later in this chapter. 176

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The history of musics, especially non-Western musics, is littered with stories and studies of how a particular type of music, formerly outside the capitalist system or ignored by it, becomes sucked into it. But it is rarely the case that a previously uncommodified music simply becomes a commodity; all social systems have their own conceptions of value for music (and everything else), and the movement of music to a different social system with different values—those of the commodity in a system of capitalist exchange—is seldom clear- cut. And older values don’t necessarily disappear. Regimes of value can, and do, coexist and compete.

Value of Cultural Goods in Consumption and Production This section surveys some of the key writings on the question of value of cultural goods, particularly music. It is necessary to do so since values of cultural goods are seldom discussed, at least in the music fields, and because value of cultural goods is thought to be inchoate, ineffable, or as I have said, interpreted in a functionalist framework. The following discussion begins with Marx, but before proceeding, it is important to remember Marx’s overall project, usefully summarized by David Graeber: Marx’s theory of value was above all a way of asking the following question: assuming that we do collectively make our world, that we collectively remake it daily, then why is it that we somehow end up creating a world that few of us particularly like, most find unjust, and over which no one feels they have any ultimate control? (Graeber 2013, 222)

The point of parsing Marx on the question of value, then, is not to quibble over technical questions about value, but to attempt to understand just how, in this world few people much like, value is socially created, understood, and negotiated. In attempting to address questions of value of cultural goods, it is useful to distinguish consumption and production, even though this distinction isn’t easily made; after all, Marx’s understanding of exchange value was that one couldn’t know what it was until a commodity was exchanged—exchange value is thus dependent on consumption. And use value, of course, is just that, the value that a commodity has for someone who has a use for it and is willing to pay for it. The relationship between use value and exchange value is dialectical. None177

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theless, theories of cultural goods tend to emphasize one or the other, and separating them is useful for understanding the writings on the subject. Values in Consumption The use value of cultural goods is notoriously difficult to grasp and characterize. What is the value of a sonata, a poem, a television program to its listener, reader, and viewer? While there are many beliefs about the value of art with which we are all familiar—art is uplifting, it is ennobling, educational, pleasurable, critical, and more—these are values for art that cannot really be captured in a single theory. They need to be studied historically, sociologically, ethnographically, so that the question becomes a specific set of questions about particular social groups and specific forms of cultural goods in particular places and times. Such studies exist, of course, with Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction still perhaps the most famous and influential (Bourdieu 1984). Marx’s conceptions of use value and exchange value aren’t of much use in considering the value of cultural goods that are commodities. Marx makes it clear in his writings that the use value of cultural goods is a simple matter of enjoyment that lasts only as long as the music is heard, the poem read: Some services or use values, the results of certain activities or kinds of labour, are incorporated in commodities; others, however, leave behind no tangible result as distinct from the persons themselves: or they do not result in a saleable commodity. E.g. the service a singer performs for me satisfies my aesthetic needs, but what I enjoy exists only in an action inseparable from the singer himself, and once his work, singing, has come to an end, my enjoyment is also at an end; I enjoy the activity itself—its REVERBERATION in my ear. These services themselves, just like the commodities I buy, may be necessary or merely appear necessary, e.g. the service of a soldier, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or they may be services which provide me with pleasure. (Marx and Engels 1994, 139– 40; emphases and uppercase in original)

Exchange value expressed as price can appear to be a simpler matter, but it can’t account for the wildly variable, even irrational, prices charged for various cultural goods, millions of dollars spent for one painting, tens spent for another of the same size that took the same amount of labor time to produce. Will Vermeer paintings decline in value now that it is more than plausible that the Dutch master em178

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ployed the high-tech devices of his time to paint his works, that they are less the products of a unique imagination? (see Anderson 2013). But it has been long understood that cultural goods can signify status or communicate socially in other ways. For theories of the value of cultural goods stemming from a perspective of consumption, we can go back at least to Thorstein Veblen, whose famous conception of “conspicuous consumption” in Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899 during the first modern phase of American consumer culture—the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries—has been widely cited and probably doesn’t need to be rehearsed, save to recall a single key sentence: “The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods” (Veblen [1899] 1994, 84). Theodor Adorno and other Marxish theorists for much of the twentieth century were also concerned with questions of the value of cultural goods as signs that communicated socially. Adorno’s position was relatively stable over the many years he considered the question: use values of cultural goods had been eclipsed by exchange value, and that cultural goods were now produced simply for the purposes of exchange value. The pleasure or enjoyment of listeners, viewers, readers, is not use value, it is simply a fetish. I will have more to say about this in a later section. In one of the most important commentaries/updates/critiques of Marx since the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools, though scarcely departing from the former in many ways, Jean Baudrillard considered the importance of commodities in everyday life, writing that people in “the age of affluence” are “surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in all previous ages, but by objects” (Baudrillard 1998, 25; emphasis in original). Baudrillard thought that what consumer products signify had become more important than the products themselves. Baudrillard offered an influential advance on Marxian thought by arguing that there is more to understanding value than Marxian exchange value and use value. Drawing on, and extending, Veblen’s influential arguments about conspicuous consumption, Frankfurt School Marxism, and the writings of Roland Barthes, Baudrillard argued, Outside the field of its objective function, where it is irreplaceable, outside the field of its denotation, the object becomes substitutable in a more or less unlimited way 179

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within the field of connotations, where it assumes sign-value.  .  .  . In the logic of signs, as in that of symbols, objects are no longer linked in any sense to a definite function or need. Precisely because they are responding here to something quite different, which is either the social logic or the logic of desire, for which they function as a shifting and unconscious field of signification. (Baudrillard 1998, 76–77; emphasis in original)

Sign value is no less complex than use value or exchange value, and its understanding no less dependent on attending to the practices of specific social groups in particular times and places. Some people buy a washing machine because they need one. Some people buy a particular brand of washing machine not simply because they need it, but because it has cachet. The same is true for cultural goods such as music recordings. The hippest indie rock CD on one’s shelf has sign value, at least for certain social groups; Simon and Garfunkel’s Concert in Central Park does not. Or, rather, it did at one time for specific social groups, and may yet again for them, or for others. A particular good can have different sign values for different social groups at the same time in different regimes of value. I am reminded in this context of the cartoon in the New Yorker that simply showed the entrance to Elvis Presley’s Graceland, with two ticket windows, one marked “Ironic,” the other, “Non-Ironic.” All goods can have different sign values depending on habitus, context, point in time, geography, etc.: all exist in regimes of value. Baudrillard also offers a particularly useful discussion of the question of value at an art auction. Here, he attempts to explicate “the immense process of the transmutation of economic exchange value into sign exchange value,” the process of “consumption considered as a system of sign exchange value,” consumption as “the conversion of economic exchange value into sign exchange value” (which, presumably, can be converted back) (Baudrillard 1981, 113; emphases in original). Baudrillard’s argument in essence is that art auctions are a sort of aristocratic ritual in which parity and the community of privilege is instituted. There is no interplay of supply and demand. Use value and exchange value are no longer correlated to an economic calculation during the bidding process; anticipated use value does not increase during the auction. Economic exchange value and symbolic value become satellites of sign value. The value of a painting is its semiological value, the artist’s signature, etc.—in a word, its provenance. Paintings circulate among the aristocracy and accumulate prestige. A kind of surplus value is produced in this circulation, but it is very different from 180

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economic surplus value. The only real values in the participating caste are those produced and exchanged within the caste. The caste knows that its status derives from its manipulation of works of art as the material of sign exchange, disdaining “universal” values of “art,” “culture,” and so forth. “Aesthetic enjoyment, spiritual commerce with the works, and the values labelled ‘absolute’ are all that is left to those who cannot aspire to the privileged potlatch,” writes Baudrillard (Baudrillard 1981, 121). The kind of social labor involved that transforms economic value and surplus value into sign value is a sumptuary operation. In this social world and regime of value, the ownership of the means of production is replaced by the “mastery of the process of signification” (Baudrillard 1981, 116). Baudrillard’s thinking on the question of value of paintings is useful as far as it goes, though outside the realm of high art and the exchange of unique objects such as paintings, his ideas do not readily transfer. However, his arguments, as dependent as they are on the ritual, the existence of the auction, the participation in the auction, are a kind of Graeberian analysis since they are concerned with various forms of public action (Graeber 2001), a position I will discuss and extend presently. Distinction

To Fred Myers’s two types of regimes of value of cultural goods earlier, I would add a third, what I will simply call distinction, which could be considered to be an aspect of Myers’s “market framing,” but the cachet that certain individuals or works can enjoy can take value as expressed by price very far from value as determined by socially necessary labor time, and it therefore seems to me that breaking out this category is justified. (Indeed, it is worth thinking about adding distinction to the value types of commodities and gifts, though that would have to be a project for a different time.) I need to make it clear that I am not referring to Bourdieu’s distinction here, but the creation of value through the enhancement of a product’s distinction in a market. We do not possess much of a sophisticated and rigorous theoretical framework by which to understand how this form of value creation works, though some early social scientists—Werner Sombart and Gabriel Tarde in particular—have offered useful beginnings. Sombart’s (1967) concern was the origins of capitalism and, contra his contemporary Max Weber, believed these origins to lie in the consumption of luxury goods in the aristocratic courts beginning in France in the 181

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thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which was slowly generalized to the rest of the aristocracy and beyond by courtiers’ Parisian mistresses, creating a culture of the consumption of fashionable goods that ultimately gave rise to capitalism across Europe. In a sense, we are talking about a form of sign value before Baudrillard’s, but what interests me here is how certain goods and their sign values become fashionable, objects of ephemeral trends. Arjun Appadurai (1986) spends some time with Sombart, making much of his arguments (especially as filtered through Mukerji 1983). He argues that luxury goods should be seen “not so much in contrast to necessities . . . but as goods whose principal use is rhetorical and social, goods that are simply incarnated signs” (Appadurai 1986, 38; emphases in original). Luxury is a special “register” of consumption, he believes: The signs of this register in relation to commodities, are some or all of the following attributes: (1) restriction, either by price or by law, to elites; (2) complexity of acquisition, which may or may not be a function of real “scarcity”; (3) semiotic virtuosity, that is, the capacity to signal fairly complex social messages (as do pepper in cuisine, silk in dress, jewels in adornment, and relics in worship); (4) specialized knowledge as a prerequisite for their “appropriate” consumption, that is, regulation by fashion; and (5) a high degree of linkage of their consumption to body, person, and personality. (Appadurai 1986, 38)

I would add, crucially in this context, that cultural goods are frequently “luxury” goods as well in this sense, serving many if not all of the same communicative functions that Appadurai enumerates above. Values in Production Let me turn now to an examination of value in production, beginning again with Marx and the Marx- oriented authors. Marx himself had little to say about cultural goods, and his few mentions of them are notoriously insufficient. For example, he wrote in several places, including Capital, that the builder of a musical instrument is a productive laborer but the player of that instrument is not, meaning that the commodity produced by the labor of the former possesses value and will yield profit for capitalists, but the labor expended by the latter is neither productive nor profitable.3 This is not particularly satisfactory, as Raymond Williams once pointed out (Williams 1977, 93). Nonetheless, Marx’s labor theory of value does capture much, even

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most, of the labor of the production of cultural goods. Musicians who are paid to union scale, composers who are paid to pre-arranged fees comprise the vast majority of the world of working musicians; rock or other sorts of stars are a tiny minority. For workaday artists at the moment when a cultural good is produced, Marx’s labor theory of value seems to be in effect almost everywhere: painters are paid by the size of the canvas, composers by the length of the work and the size of the forces employed. The New York City chapter of the American Federation of Musicians posts this table on its website (table 10.1). And Meet the Composer, a New York– based foundation that fosters commissions for composers, publishes on its website a booklet that includes its recommended commission fees (table 10.2). Table 10.2 lays out the relationship between labor as time as measured by the length of the work, and labor as time spent as writing for a number of instruments. Yet there is still a good deal of wiggle room; the range between some figures is variable but large; some high figures are nearly five times the low figures for a single commission type. This variability, and the well-publicized deals made by major artists, indicate that it is not always the artist’s labor that determines value. Whatever the value of a cultural good is, it cannot be captured by economic theories alone; value is economic, cultural, social, situational, and more. While I view Marx’s labor theory of value as immensely useful, it could never encompass all forms of value creation, which is why the anthropological literature on value considers questions of noneconomic value to be so significant. And, since Marx’s time, the rise of the advertising, marketing, and now, branding, industries have, in various ways, attempted to create, or add, value to commodities. These other sorts of value creation can augment the labor theory of value to

Table 10.1 American Federation of Musicians, Local 802 (New York City chapter), Theatrical Motion Picture Agreement, Effective April 3, 2016, to April 1, 2017 Basic (3- hour) Session 4% Vacation Pay:

with 4%

without 4%

Overtime (per 15 minutes) with 4%

without 4%

Schedule A: 35 or more musicians

$287.79

$276.72

$23.98

Schedule B: 30 to 34 musicians

$302.17

$290.55

$25.18

$23.06 $24.21

Schedule C: 24 to 29 musicians

$316.54

$304.37

$26.37

$25.36

Schedule D: 23 musicians or less

$330.99

$318.26

$27.58

$26.52

Source: http://www.local802afm.org/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/motion_tv_film.pdf

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Table 10.2 Meet the Composer, fees and practices by genre (concert music and jazz) Instrumentation Solo or Duo Piano Solo or Duo with instrument or voice

Under 10’

10–25’

Over 25’

$2,000–$4,500

$3,000–$14,000

$8,000–$18,000

$2,500–$6,500

$5,000–$13,000

$9,000–$26,000

Tape or Electronic Solo

$2,500–$10,500

$7,000–$21,000

$12,000–$32,000 $12,000–$32,000

Trio or Quartet

$4,000–$10,000

$6,000–$22,000

Ensemble of 5 to 10

$5,000–$13,000

$7,500–$23,000

$17,000–$32,000

Chorus

$4,000–$14,500

$6,500–$25,000

$14,000–$35,000

Small Chamber or Jazz Orchestra or Band (10–22 players)

$6,000–$14,000

$10,000–$26,000

$17,000–$31,000

Large Chamber or Jazz Orchestra or Band (22– 40 players)

$8,000–$19,000

$10,000–$42,000

$22,000–$58,000

$9,000–$24,000

$13,000–$60,000

$28,000–$95,000

Full Orchestra Concerto or chorus: add 20–30%

Note: When solo voice or a substantial electronic part is included in any of the above ensembles, add 20–30% to the indicated fee. Source: (http://0811cfea5b73eeefcfbd- d1823d6f516b5299e7df5375e9cf45d2.r22.cf2.rackcdn.com/ 2012/10/New- Music- USA- About- commissioning- music- guide-91812.pdf)

increase the exchange value of cultural goods, though I will have to consider this issue elsewhere (Taylor n.d.a).

Some Regimes of Value of Music I opened this chapter by noting that the history of music around the world offers many examples of the problem of shifts in regimes of value and it is time we examine some specific cases. I am particularly interested in historical moments when an older regime is faced with a new one, sometimes being supplanted by it, sometimes competing with it; regimes can, and do, coexist. My main examples will concern economic value. The three such junctures that are perhaps the most illustrative are the Western transition from feudalism to capitalism and its ramifications for musical production and consumption in the late eighteenth century, the rise to dominance of exchange value in the late capitalism of the mid-twentieth century, and the present, in which old modes of commodifying music—creating exchange value for it by recording it for mass distribution—are faltering, and new mechanisms of the creation of value for those musical goods are emerging, some of which are non- economic values that can be converted to economic ones. 184

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Music and Value in the Late Eighteenth Century The transition from feudalism to capitalism was as massive as it was slow and uneven and geographically distinct, and I do not intend to address this transition and its ramifications for musical production in any sort of comprehensive way here. This would require many books. I am instead focused on the crisis of use value of instrumental music. What was this music for, if it was no longer for the entertainment of the nobility? The expression and representation of the feudal order, of the power of an employer (whether aristocratic or church) over an employee? The entry of musical works into the marketplace and the creation of exchange value for them called into question the use value of musical works. I have addressed a version of this issue before in a different context (see Taylor 2007). Here, I want to focus on this problem as a question of value. During the feudal era, music that was subject to being exchanged in a market was mainly for entertainment or worship; its use value was clear. But with the rise of capitalism and the entry of music into the marketplace, use value was not always easy to understand. Operas and ballets had stories, plots; songs had words—they contained textual or plot meanings, were all “about” something. Instrumental music, however, was another matter: If it had been entertainment or background music or dance music for the nobility in the past, what was it now? At the moment that exchange value was being created for music in the marketplace, there was a crisis of use value. This problem surfaced in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de Musique from 1767, in which, under the entry for “sonata,” Rousseau wrote: in order to know what all these jumbles of sonatas mean, one would have to be like a crude painter who must write above his figures; this is a tree, this is a man, this is a horse. I shall never forget the flash of wit of the famous Fontenelle, who, finding himself overburdened with these interminable Symphonies, cried out in fit of impatience: Sonata, what do you want of me? (Rousseau [1767] 1969, 452; emphases in original)

The solution to the problem of use value at the time of the advent of exchange value for music was the rise and embrace of a discourse that held that musical and other artworks did not have to have any function at all—they existed for their own sake. This is the discourse of aesthetics, or art for art’s sake, which was inaugurated, tellingly, by Adam Smith. Contemplating the thorny problem of instrumental 185

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music, Smith attempted to account in various ways for how it might signify in an essay published in 1795 entitled “Of the Nature of That Imitation which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts,” in which he wrote: That music seldom means to tell any particular story, or to imitate any particular event, or in general to suggest any particular object, distinct from that combination of sounds of which itself is composed. Its meaning, therefore, may be said to be complete in itself, and to require no interpreters to explain it. What is called the subject of such Music is merely, as has already been said, a certain leading combination of notes, to which it frequently returns, and to which all its digressions and variations bear a certain affinity. (Smith 1980, 205)

After comparing music to painting, Smith continued: The melody and harmony of instrumental Music, on the contrary, do not distinctly and clearly suggest any thing that is different from that melody and harmony. Whatever effect it produces is the immediate effect of that melody and harmony, and not of something else which is signified and suggested by them: they in fact signify and suggest nothing. (Smith 1980, 205– 6)

Instrumental music was thus an empty vessel, though one that has been frequently filled by later ideologies. Art, a relatively recent ideological construction, emerged only when it had fully entered the marketplace. Once artists had to compete against one another in a capitalist marketplace, proclaiming themselves to be artists (then, later, geniuses) was a way to attempt to stand out in the market. Perhaps the most (in)famous statement of this history appears in Jacques Attali’s Noise, in which he argues that music’s values before it entered the marketplace were values or meanings in ritual, values in church and court: use values (and these values still obtain in preindustrial cultures). But after Western European music entered the marketplace, it had to have a monetary, or exchange, value since it was going to be sold in ways that it hadn’t been sold before. Attali writes that the process of valuation “took place in opposition to the entire feudal system, in which the work, the absolute property of the lord, had no autonomous existence” (Attali 1985, 51). Attali discusses the process of assigning values at length. For my purposes the most important of these was the introduction of effective copyright laws, which emerged in the late eighteenth century and which were the first laws protecting the rights of composers, who 186

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were among the new owners of musical commodities. Once composers could profit from their music, the old system of patronage had effectively been broken, necessitating valorizations for the new musical object—giving rise, in other words, to modern aesthetics. Aesthetics was a way to explain the meaning of art, to create a kind of value for it that was apart from both earlier feudal values and current economic ones. Art became thought of as not only set apart from the marketplace and economic values, but autonomous, aloof from the quotidian. This remains a common view among those in the classical music world, most of whom continue to believe that great works are autonomous, standing above and apart from society, having nothing to do with everyday concerns, even those of the composers who wrote them. This assumption of the “real” condition of autonomy is far from Bourdieu’s careful explication and historicization of the hard-fought levels of autonomy in the fields of cultural production he examines in Bourdieu (1993) and (1996). The use value of art had become its supposed distance from society, which gave it a vantage point from which to critique society. Neoliberal Capitalism and the Dominance of Exchange Value On to the second historical shift, following the rise of what we would now call the music industry beginning in the nineteenth century, an era dominated by sales of sheet music. Such sales began to be so profitable that by the end of the century in the US, there was a major industry centered in New York City that was dedicated to the composition and sales of sheet music, primarily to stage performers, whose popularity, it was hoped, would influence sales of sheet music to the general public. New York publishers hired “song pluggers,” whose job it was to give away their companies’ products to stage performers. Every effort was made, and no expense was spared, it seemed (see songwriter Charles K. Harris’s vivid description in Tick and Beaudoin 2008). Popular song structures became simpler, vocal lines became written more and more for average voices, and the vocabulary used in lyrics was also simplified, all so that anyone at home could play and sing almost any popular song. In songwriting advice offered to a journalist in 1920, the great songwriter Irving Berlin focused as much on making songs singable—and thus sellable—as advice about the craft of songwriting, concluding that “the song writer must look upon his work as a business, that is, to make a success of it he must work and work, and then WORK” (Sears 2012, 176; emphases and upper case in original). 187

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The advent of recording processes in the late nineteenth century, in the form of player piano rolls and phonograph recordings, produced new sorts of musical goods—recorded sound.4 Later, radio, and then sound film, served to disseminate the products of the music industry even more. The industrialization of the production of popular music as both sheet music and recorded sound, and the hawking of it not just by song pluggers but by the advertising industry, which had emerged around the same time as this industrialized music industry in the late nineteenth century, resulted in increasingly standardized musical products. These new cultural goods were the cause of a good deal of consternation among artists and intellectuals, particularly in Europe, who keenly felt what they believed to be the threat of mass culture. For these intellectuals, conceptions of the value of these cultural commodities began to shift. Exchange value increasingly came to be seen as more important than use value. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and others believed that late capitalism, as they often called it—midtwentieth- century Western capitalism—represented a new form of capitalism in which the value of cultural and other goods was changing. While artworks previously were commodities most of the time, in late capitalism, they deliberately proclaim their commodity status (Horkheimer and Adorno 1990, 157). Previously, the use value of artistic commodities, as Adorno makes clear in many of his writings, was to employ its autonomy from society to critique society, to make an argument. But in late capitalism, only exchange value remains, Adorno believed. In some of his earliest publications, Adorno addresses questions of the value of cultural commodities industrially produced for the purpose of exchange in a large market. Writing in “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening” in 1938, Adorno claimed, “the more inexorably the principle of exchange-value destroys use values for human beings, the more deeply does exchange-value disguise itself as the object of enjoyment” (Adorno 2002, 296). Elsewhere, he argued that “today music is considered ethereal and sublime, although it actually functions as a commodity. Today the terms ethereal and sublime have become trademarks. Music has become a means instead of an end, a fetish” (Adorno 2009b, 137). Later, Horkheimer and Adorno tackled questions of value in Dialectic of Enlightenment in their famous chapter on the culture industries, making some of the same points: No object has an inherent value; it is valuable only to the extent that it can be exchanged. The use value of art, its mode of being, is treated as a fetish; and the 188

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fetish, the work’s social rating (misinterpreted as its artistic status) becomes its use value—the only quality which is enjoyed. (Horkheimer and Adorno 1990, 158)

Horkheimer and Adorno incorporated something of a recognition of what we now would call sign value in their assessment: “What might be called use value in the reception of cultural goods is replaced by exchange value; in place of enjoyment there are gallery-visiting and factual knowledge, the prestige seeker replaces the connoisseur” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1990, 158). Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument that exchange value had replaced use value, and that use value is really a fetish, was, for them, not simply an argument about the cultural industries, but an argument about the nature of late capitalism in general in which exchange value was all that mattered. Among those concerned with questions of the value of cultural goods, Adorno’s position on the question of value largely remains intact, though it has not gone entirely uncontested (see, e.g., Haug 1986). Horkheimer and Adorno’s employment of the term “fetish” in the foregoing quotations is not Marxian, as Adorno made clear in a draft version of “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” included in Adorno (2009): “something adored without no [sic] immediate relation to its actual being” (Adorno 2009, 137, footnote m). Marx’s conception of commodity fetishism was not about displays of status but rather was a way of conceptualizing and labeling how the diffuse and hidden labor of many was masked by the commodity form; as he famously put it, “to the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labors appear as what they are, i.e., they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things” (Marx 1990, 165– 66). The fetishism-as-adoration that Horkheimer and Adorno described has taken many forms. It can serve as a marker of social status, as they noted; knowledge of it contributes to cultural capital. And today, one can encounter all sorts of platitudes used to describe the function of classical music—it is uplifting, educational, ennobling. Years ago, when I was a classical record reviewer for a small magazine, I found myself in a heated argument with my editor, who insisted that the lives of poor, urban African Americans would be better if they listened to classical music. All of these ideas about classical music, about art, could be considered to be values in the sense I will explicate the concept below, 189

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though they would need to be studied specifically—values for which social groups, when, and where? But, for Adorno, any activity other than the philosophical apprehension of a work’s critique is a form of fetishism, and not really use value.

Value as Meaningful Action So far I have been relying mainly (though not exclusively) on theories derived from Marx to explore conceptions of value of music as a cultural good. Now I want to begin to tease out other concepts of value that are not based on economic theories, so I will return to some of the anthropological theorizations of value that will help with this argument. I will theorize what I will call meaningful action as a way that value is created, apart from economic value. I derive this concept both from Geertz’s concern for meaning, and from other anthropologists such as David Graeber and Michael Lambek, who view action as productive of value, but not just action that is considered to be labor in Marx’s sense. Graeber, for example, writes, “value is the way our actions take on meaning or importance by becoming incorporated into something larger than ourselves” (Graeber 2005, 451). Continuing, First, value is the way actors represent the importance of their own actions to themselves as part of some larger whole. . . . Second, this importance is always seen in comparative terms. Some forms of value are seen as unique and incommensurable; others are ranked. . . . For yet others, such as money in market systems, value can be calculated precisely, so that one can know precisely how many of item A are equivalent to one item B. Third, importance is always realised through some kind of material token, and generally is realised somewhere other than the place it is primarily produced. (Graeber 2005, 451–52)

Graeber later summarized his thinking on value by advocating that we return to an older tradition stemming from Herder, “one that understands human beings as projects of mutual creation, value as the way such projects become meaningful to the actors, and the worlds we inhabit as emerging from those projects rather than the other way around” (Graeber 2013, 238). Michael Lambek makes a distinction between economic value (production, making something) and “ethical” value (i.e., doing something), which he says are both important forms of value but are not the same thing, for the latter cannot be objectified and thus circulated. 190

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Lambek wants to bring together the material and the ideal, which means it is important to attend to values as activities—acts, work, practices, and objects. Lambek’s overall argument is to make a distinction between values “internal to a practice and those external to it,” for example playing a violin for its own sake or playing to make a living (Lambek 2013, 142). Here, it is useful to distinguish between what Marshall Sahlins has, in a different context, called “conventional values” and “intentional values” (Sahlins 1981). “Conventional values” are those that are dominant, hegemonic. But individual social actors have their own ideas, projects, and so employ “intentional values.” These are derived from conventional values, yet at the same time can influence them. Sahlins concludes by writing: The dialectics of history, then, are structural throughout. Powered by disconformities between conventional values and intentional values, between intersubjective meanings and subjective interests, between symbolic sense and symbolic reference, the historical process unfolds as a continuous and reciprocal movement between the practice of the structure and the structure of the practice. (Sahlins 1981, 72)

David Graeber draws on the idea of intentional values by arguing that people’s actions take on meaning for them; whatever things and acts people invest themselves in possess value for them. But in order to understand value, we need to pay attention to it historically, culturally, and sociologically, for what one social group in one place and time finds valuable may not be the same thing that that same social group invests in a different place and time, since there are regimes of value, which one could consider to be akin to Sahlins’s conventional values. Understanding value means understanding particular social groups and their practices, and the ways that regimes of value can be hierarchized according to various systems of power, as we have learned from feminist scholars (e.g., Zelizer 2011), postcolonial scholars, and others who study structurally oppressed groups.5 This is a conception of value that works for both cultural producers and consumers. Value is determined by people’s actions, which both reveal and confer meaning. Meaningful action is a source of meaning, a repository of meaning, a currency of meaning. And we continue to require Appadurai’s and Myers’s emphasis on the concept of regimes of value, or Sahlins’s conventional values—not just for cultural goods, which undergo changes in their careers, but for social actors, who change as they age, move up or down the class ladder, or possess shift191

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ing volumes of various forms of capital in Bourdieu’s sense. What people find to be meaningful, what they value, shifts as their postionalities shift. All this greatly complicates Adorno’s conception of value, of course, with which I am largely in agreement as a theory of the value of cultural goods produced by the mainstream cultural industries. But if one attends to real social actors in real places in real times, complexity appears, and quickly. Value in consumption is shifting and negotiated, dependent on a work’s or cultural good’s presence in one social group rather than another, in one geographical location rather than another, in one historical moment rather than another, in one culture rather than another, in one regime rather than another. Value is volatile because cultures are never static and there is more than one social group in the world. When value appears fi xed or stable or hegemonic—conventional—it is only because there are many people and institutions working to keep it that way. An easy example is the way that Western European classical music is continually ensconced in the upper echelons of value of cultural goods, through a vast apparatus of classical music critics, music departments, and a seemingly always-growing number of “music appreciation” textbooks; for some, even many, their support of this music takes on the fervor of religious devotion. And, there are others working to increase or diminish the value of a particular work or cultural good in the promotion of their regime of value over others’. Struggles, contestations, battles over value are thus social.

Emergent Regimes of Value for Music in Neoliberal Capitalism Now let’s move to a consideration of a sort of value of musical goods. If the transition from feudalism to capitalism created a crisis of use value for cultural goods (at least those commonly consumed by social elites), followed by the rise to dominance of exchange value over use value in mid- century Western capitalism, then the transition in the past few decades to a globalized, digitalized, and financialized form of capitalism that is usually called neoliberal has created a crisis in exchange value of musical goods, since it is now easy to obtain them for free. I would not characterize today’s musical goods as “gifts,” however; just because someone doesn’t pay for something doesn’t mean that it’s a gift; discourses of sharing, piracy, and others have proliferated in recent years as commentators have attempted to grasp the different ways of exchanging goods.6 But the vast majority of recordings that people 192

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download are still conceived and produced as commodities, after all, even if many people don’t pay for them. Digitalization, as has been much discussed, has also made it easier for musicians to realize exchange value from their own labor by selling directly to fans over the Internet, though there remains the problem of drumming up a large audience willing to pay for recordings. According to Courtney Holt, a former executive at MySpace Music and head of Maker Studios, “once you have an audience, you can make money” (Knopper 2013). But generating an audience remains difficult without a major recording label with deep enough pockets to pay for marketing, advertising, promotion, and branding (see Taylor 2016a). Much has been written about the difficulties faced by the recording industry in the past decade or so, for it has been unwilling or slow to adapt to the changing reality of music consumption. The industry has attempted to find ways to continue to sell its products, whether as a manufacturer of physical recordings to be sold at (rapidly disappearing) retail record stores or online venues such as iTunes, or, increasingly, acting as a rentier by licensing copyrighted material for use in advertising, broadcasting, and film, and to streaming services such as Spotify. Old capitalism, or, perhaps better put, old-think in the recording industry, is in what seems to be a perpetual game of finding and generating new revenue streams as sales of recordings decline. The industry has assiduously sought, even created, economic value by exploiting its back catalogue, issuing CDs with bonus tracks, hiring DJs to remix classic tracks, releasing massive boxed sets of a single musician or band accompanied by a lavish booklet (the 2014 unveiling of the complete Beatles in mono in vinyl, a limited edition, naturally, selling for well over $300, serves as a good example, one of the sorts of valued items mentioned by Myers in the quotation above). These and other measures demonstrate the ways that the recording industry has attempted to convert the devotion of fans—the value that fans and fan groups have for certain musicians, bands, and recordings—into economic value.7 Such an example helps point out how much value is always never static, unlike in Attali’s thinking. The recording industry still attempts to profit from cultural production, though there has been a lot of questioning about how this might be done. There are many discussions of how to “monetize” digitalized music (as well as many other online activities). A Google search for “monetize” and “music” results in nearly six million results. Many websites offer advice for musicians on how to “monetize” their music through digital and other means. 193

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If it is true that neoliberal capitalism is a form of capitalism that can commodify anything its agents desire (see Harvey 2005; Taylor 2016a), commodification as the creation of exchange value is obviously still with us. But it must nonetheless be acknowledged that other forms of value creation of cultural goods are arising under neoliberal capitalism. I would argue that we are currently witnessing a new sort of the creation of value of cultural goods, measured less by exchange value and more by viral popularity, as registered by YouTube and various social media platforms, or through the creation and sharing of information about music through playlists (a list of links to songs compiled by users) and other means. These represent two sorts of value creation, both of which are new in neoliberal capitalism (though with historical antecedents in practices such as the creation of mixtapes to give to friends). YouTube popularity is a kind of collective pooling of approbation, but on a massive scale; the creation and sharing of playlists is a much more individual way to create value, though playlists can be shared, or viewed, by many followers on social media. Let’s take the first sort first. Everyone by now has heard of the YouTube video of a musician or band that has “gone viral,” with views numbering in the millions, sometimes tens or hundreds of millions, even over a billion.8 This, I am arguing, represents a new sort of value creation. This new sort of value creation represents what is believed to be a more “organic” way of finding music and expressing approbation for it, along with millions of one’s fellows, out of the curatorial control of the music industry (see Wikström 2013). This is a form of value that is not measured by sales, though it can be converted to economic forms of value. On the question of viral popularity and value, I have found, like some other recent scholars, the writings of the French jurist and sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904), a competitor of Emile Durkheim, to be useful. Tarde, however, refused the idea of society (or culture as we now understand it), which I find to be a problematic position (though many seem quite happy to set aside or ignore such concepts, e.g., Latour 2014; Latour and Lépinay 2009). The lack of a concept of society, however, meant that Tarde offered a more robust set of interrelated theories of influence, person to person, through imitation (2013), motivated by conversation, newspapers, and opinion (Tarde 1989). Tarde’s theories about the importance of imitation, opinion, and conversation are still useful in today’s world, with a mass media much more massive

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than experienced by Tarde, as well as the rise of social media. Opinion can be articulated and disseminated much more widely, generating eddies and currents and pools of value. Conversation was crucial in the creation of value, affecting language, and the language arts, religion and its spread, and politics. Even in the economic realm, conversation matters, for it standardizes judgments of the utility of various riches, creates and specifies the idea of value, and establishes a scale and system of values. Thus, superfluous chatter, a simple waste of time in the eyes of utilitarian economics, is actually the most indispensable of economic agents, since without it there would be no opinion, and without opinion there would be no value, which is in turn the fundamental notion of political economy. (Tarde 1969, 313)9

Value can thus be created from person to person and beyond, today almost infinitely multiplied through social media. This sort of value, like all forms, can be “translated” (Tsing 2015) to economic forms in capitalism, which has always been drawing upon these other modes of the creation of value in order to create exchange value. In the case of YouTube views, there are services that one can sign up for to generate YouTube traffic such as the brazenly named YouTubeViewsBuy, which offers 1 million “real views” for $900) (youtubeviewsbuy.com).10 And such services compensate employees based on the labor theory of value. Sometimes YouTube sensations result in recording contracts; it is increasingly the case that a record label will wait to see how much value a musician can create on social media before offering her a recording contract. Popular acclaim for an artist or recording on YouTube can result in a number of ways of generating exchange value for musicians or copyright holders. An article in Rolling Stone online spelled out these strategies, which I represent below in tabular form (table 10.3). Clearly, the creation of value in today’s digital world is not a simple question of the production of salable commodities. Multiple strategies of the creation of exchange value exist, harvested from newer forms of value creation in social media. Before the digital sharing of music became widespread, the main way that the music industry tracked the success of recordings was through retail sales. Billboard magazine, the main chronicle of the music industry in the US, began publishing charts based on sales data in 1936. But the music industry has come to recognize other forms of

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Table 10.3 Seven ways musicians are making money from YouTube (from Knopper 2013) Artist and Video

Method

Money Made (estimated)

# of Views

Note

Robin Thicke: “Blurred Lines” (2013)

Monetization

$350,000

76 million

Video is accompanied by advertisements

Baauer: “Harlem Shake” (2012)

Content ID

$400,000

(unreported)

Video is accompanied by music, paid for by ads

Miley Cyrus: “We Can’t Stop” (2013)

Vevo

Unknown

211 million

Vevo is a partnership between YouTube and record labels

P!nk: “Give Me a Reason” (2012)

Music sales

$4.5 million and counting

—

Link to retailers so users can purchase

OK Go: “Needing/ Getting” (2010)

Sponsorship

$1 million

26 million

Brands sponsor videos

Jason Mraz: “The Woman I Love” (2012)

Merchandise annotations

Unknown

(unreported)

Annotations within video linking to merchandise page

Angie Johnson: “Rolling in the Deep” (2011)

Kickstarter

$36,000

(unreported)

Fans contribute to Kickstarter to cover cost of recording

value as registered in popularity not measured by sales. In December 2010, Billboard introduced a new chart, indeed, a new sort of chart, the “Social 50” chart. This chart, according to Billboard, incorporates the following metrics: weekly additions of fans across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram; reactions and conversations across Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook; and views to an artist’s Wikipedia page, according to music analytics provider Next Big Sound. (http://www.billboard.com/charts/social-50)

According to Billboard’s chart director Silvio Pietroluongo, “the Social 50 provides a weekly snapshot of the artists that music fans engage with the most in the social arena, which in today’s world is a significant validation of their investment in an act” (“Billboard Debuts New Chart, the Social 50” 2010).

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Users are also deciding what is popular interactively, beyond just visiting websites. With YouTube and other websites and applications, it is possible to know how many others are participating; and it is possible to write comments for others to view on YouTube’s site. And there are other ways that users can generate value, ways that are more individual. The creation of a playlist that is shared is also a way of creating value, the creation of a kind of token; value creation through action needs to be stored in some way (Lambek 2013), and a shared playlist is one such storage mechanism. It is no accident that after many fits and starts, the music search and/or streaming services that seem to be the most successful are those that combine social networking with music (see Taylor 2016a). One can create playlists in Spotify and share them with friends, for example, and one can permit Spotify to notify Facebook friends about what one is currently listening to. All of the major music streaming platforms (Spotify, Google Play, and Apple Music) make it easily possible to share a selection or a playlist with friends on various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and others, as well as sharing with friends who are exclusive to that application. Some platforms include listener comments. Software designers are increasingly building such social networking mechanisms into a variety of applications so that users can share their playlists, their tastes, with others. All this is part of the much-remarked-upon commodification of social relationships under neoliberal capitalism, but users are also creating value for themselves in finding new ways to share the music that they like. Finding and sharing in today’s world of digital plenitude increasingly matter. With the bewildering variety of music available to stream, to download, searching and finding what one likes, and more music based on what one already likes, has become a driving force in the music industry (see Taylor 2016a). Streaming music services place a premium on users being able to find more of what they already like. Some, such as Pandora, ask users if they like a particular selection, and if so, attempt to find more similar to it. Last.fm and iTunes Radio allow users to create a personalized “station” that plays what they like. Last.fm ’s website’s splash page says, “discover more music[.] Last.fm is a music discovery service that gives you personalised recommendations based on the music you listen to” (www.last.fm).11 All of this searching, finding, and sharing is a form of curation, a term I am deliberately using in a broad sense. But what about people who simply like what they like? one might wonder, without anybody’s influence. Or is it that simple? We like what we like in part because

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of  the tastes of others we know—our parents, siblings, partners, children, friends, students—as well as tastes of others we don’t know— trusted DJs, critics, valued indie labels, music supervisors. Somebody, somewhere, has invested time and energy—labor—in locating, collecting, organizing, categorizing, and presenting music that others find to be meaningful. There was curation in the old music industry as well, of course, since record labels employed A&R men (“Artist and Repertoire”) to seek and find new musicians to record, and radio station DJs decided what to broadcast (sometimes; today this function is increasingly the province not of DJs but of executives). Today, however, curatorial authority is much more diffuse, available to anybody with access to a computer or tablet or smartphone and the Internet. This form of curation is one way of creating value in today’s neoliberal capitalism—in which different modes of value coexist—value as meaningful action in curation as people take time finding, championing, and sharing the music they like with others. But as with anything social, there are and will continue to be struggles over what is valued and what isn’t, what particular representatives of non- economic forms of value are translated into economic forms, and more. Value can thus be created (or be thought to be created) in a variety of ways—through socially necessary labor time, but also through other means, whether through gift exchange, or conceptions of Sombartian fashion or Tardian imitation (buttressed by conversation). These modalities of the creation of value coexist, intermingle in complex ways.

Conclusions The problem with many discussions of the value of cultural goods is that the theory is frequently too broad. Practices of production and consumption are too varied, in space and time, among different social groups, for a one-size-fits-all argument—there are too many cultures, too many different social groups. Any and all of the theories of value previously discussed can be useful, depending on the time, place, social group, and situation. Cultural goods are produced under widely varying circumstances, from the lone individual in a room with paint and canvas, or computer and word processor, or piano and staff paper, to film or television with dozens, even hundreds, of people working together. There are different fields of cultural production, different ways of laboring, different modes of dissemination, different strategies of marketing with wildly variable amounts of money spent. And 198

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modes of consumption can be even more varied than those of cultural production. In keeping with Geertz’s insistence that ethnography and analysis should be focused on individual social actors in order to attempt to understand what is meaningful for them, considerations of value must be concerned with real people living in real times and places and who are parts of real social groups and cultures. Otherwise we will simply be rehashing old functionalist arguments about the value of an activity or practice (the value of music in ritual, say), or old, technical Marxian arguments about the value of commodities (such as easy assumptions of popular music as being just a commodity). I am not simply making an argument for specificity here, but an argument about it. Any study— study, not theory—of value needs to be situational, paying attention to culture, history, and the social, and the particular social groups that find, or fail to find, value in whatever cultural goods they consume. There cannot be a one-size-fits-all theory of the value of cultural goods beyond what I have amplified and offered here, the realization that value is the result of action, and that people continually make it and remake it in ways that are meaningful to them.

199

Notes CHAPTER ONE

1. 2.

3.

4.

2017 Preface: This paper was the result of an invitation to speak at a conference at the University of Amsterdam in honor of Wim van der Meer, the International Conference on Cultural Musicology: Premises, Practices, and Prospects, January 2014. Thanks to graduate school mentors Judith Becker and A. L. Becker, I had long been a fan of Geertz, but it wasn’t until I began teaching an introductory course on social theory for first-year graduate students at UCLA that I really began to grasp the significance of his work. The most recent edition of this textbook no longer offers a discussion of this particular concerto. For other treatments of this concerto similar to the orientation of Wolff and Rosen, see Girdlestone ([1948] 1964) and Flothuis (2001). What is perhaps most remarkable in all of this is that it occurs within the context of a theme and variations, perhaps the most predictable form of this era, and one that is mostly designed to show off the performance skills of the soloist. This is the Hungarian folk tune “Kondástánc,” played by Kisar zenekar, on Szatmári Bandák (Hungaraton HCD 18192, 1991).

CHAPTER T WO

2017 Preface: This article is mostly a result of my long frustration with neuroscientific studies that either tell us what we already know about music and the brain, or so completely elide culture, history, and the social that they are useless to anyone who cares about such things. Every-

201

NOTES

1. 2.

3. 4.

body has a brain, and every culture has music. What is interesting is the particular forms that music takes, and the particular forms of people’s relationships to it. I am grateful to Tamara Levitz for this reference. There are a couple of capsule histories (Garrido and Davidson 2013; and Cook and Dibben 2010). And there are plenty of philosophical treatments of the question, however, such as Bicknell (2009); Budd (1985); and various articles collected in The Routledge Companion to Music and Philosophy (Gracyk and Kania 2011). But all of these assume that music and emotional responses go together and don’t attempt to culturalize the relationship between music and the emotions, when this relationship is thought to exist. For another example, see St. John Chrysostom (c. 347– 407), Exposition of Psalm 41, included in Treitler (1998). Mattheson inserts a footnote here: “‘Harmony can express, personify, and articulate everything, even without the help of words,’” quoting J. B. Louis Gresset, Discours sur l’harmonie (Paris: 1737, 72). He continues: “One can see from this that the wise French are also of my opinion in this respect: as if we had come to agreement about it.”

CHAPTER THREE

1. 2. 3. 4.

202

2017 Preface: This article began life as something more theoretical that wouldn’t distract from the narrative history that I wanted to tell in my book about music and advertising (Taylor 2012a), but it quickly became its own historical project. It was awarded the Jaap Kunst Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2008. For more on the industrialization of music in this period, see Frith (1992); Hamm (1983); Suisman (2009); and Waring (2002). I have Olivia Bloechl to thank for the Solie reference. Thanks go to Alessandro Duranti for his insight on this point. Not everyone was uniformly in favor of these new machines, of course. I have been presenting the dominant view here—that player pianos made music indistinguishable from humans. For dissenting voices, see Bryan (1913); “Piano-Players, Human and Mechanical” (1913); “Discriminating Player-Pianos” (1913); “Piano-Players and Player-Pianos” (1913). This negative sentiment was part of a larger movement against “mechanical music,” to employ the title of a famous article by bandleader and composer John Philip Sousa, one of the leading musicians of the day (Sousa 1906). See also Abbot (1925); Adams (1930); Braine (1932); “Music ex Machina” (1913); Schauffler (1914); Schauffler and Spaeth (1927); and Whiting (1918/1919). Thanks are due to Mark Katz for these references. Craig H. Roell (1989) provides a good overview of this controversy, and so there is no need to repeat it here. The main point is that while

NOTES

5. 6.

there were powerful discourses mustered in favor of the player piano (and phonograph and radio) as music technologies, the voices against were also very strong. But these voices were marginalized fairly quickly—it was hard to argue against claims of the democratization of music and against providing children access to good music. Even Sousa changed his mind. See “A Momentous Musical Meeting” (1923); “Sousa Joins Ranks of Radio Artists” (1929); “Sousa Confesses Why Radio Won” (1929); and “Programs Lauded by Bandmasters” (1926). Thanks are due to Mark Katz for the fi rst of these references. Thanks are due to Anthony Seeger for sharing his knowledge of the music publishing industry in this era. A useful source for reproductions of phonograph ads is Weber (1997). Thanks go to Mark Katz for suggesting this book. Whiting (1918/1919) comments on this mode of advertising of player pianos.

CHAPTER FOUR

1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

2017 Preface: This chapter was originally written at the invitation of James Deaville and Christina Baade for their coedited volume on music and the radio. My study of music and advertising (Taylor 2012a) resulted in a vast amount of materials collected on music on the radio (some of which were reprinted in Taylor, Katz, and Grajeda 2012), and I noticed the running thread of opera, especially in the earlier articles. For more on the issue of democratization, see Katz (2010); Taylor (2007); and Taylor, Katz, and Grajeda (2012). See also Goodman (2011). Some examples of these “music appreciation” texts include Hubbard (1926), Keith (1926), and Marek (1937), among many others. For a brilliant critique of these sorts of approaches, see Adorno (1994). Published before there was a radio press devoted to programs, the article appeared in the technically oriented publication Electrical Experimenter. For more on telephone music services, see Taylor, Katz, and Grajeda (2012, 255– 57) and Sterne (2003, 192–94). Amelita Galli- Curci (1882–1963) was a celebrated Italian coloratura soprano. A. H. Meyer’s Pabst Harlem Music Hall and Restaurant, at 243– 51 West 124th Street, east of 8th Avenue, operated for the first few decades of the twentieth century. Macbeth (1891–1966) was a soprano associated mainly with the Chicago Opera. See, for example, Ponselle (1923); and Ruffo (1923). For example, Le Massena (1922). This was subject to an editorial the next day, “Radio Music Will Be Better” (1925).

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10. See, for example, Starch (1928), which revealed that only about 11% of farm families liked opera, with the high figure of almost 32% of large- city families. Many polls did not seem to have inquired about listeners’ preferences for opera. 11. The figure of 4,000 is from Advisory Council of the National Broadcasting Company, February 1932, National Broadcasting Company Archives, Wisconsin State Historical Society, box 107, folder 6. 12. Metropolitan Opera International Radio Broadcast Information Center 2014, http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/ broadcast/operainfo .aspx, last accessed 6 April 2014. CHAPTER FIVE

1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

204

2017 Preface: This article was solicited by Witold Wachowski for the Polish journal AVANT as part of an issue commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps. See, for example, Brown (2000) on Bartók; Morton (1979) and Taruskin (1980) on Stravinsky; Howat (1995) and Mueller (1986– 87) on Debussy; and Burkholder (1995) and Taylor (2007) on Ives. See Funayama (1986) for a discussion of Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics; see also Watkins (1994). “Un peu plus loin est l’Exposition des Colonies. Elle se compose d’un palais principal entouré de pavillons où l’Indo- Chine, l’Annam, Madagascar, la Guyane, la Guadeloupe, le Gabon exposent leurs produits. Nous pouvons, à volonté, nous arrêter dans un village taïtien, sénégalais, cochinchinois canaque et examiner les indigènes: le tour du monde, non plus en quatre-vingts jours ni en quatre-vingts heures, mais en une heure ou une heure et demie, et sans risquer d’être massacré, ni dévoré, ce qui est bien quelque chose. Bien mieux, nous avons un restaurant annamite, un café annamite, un théâtre annamite, avec une troupe de danseuses venues en droite ligne de Hué. Inutile de vous dire que la chorégraphie de ces jeunes personnes ne ressemble en rien à celle qu’on enseigne à l’Opéra. Mais elle n’en a pas moins son charme pour certains amateurs.” See Taylor (2001) on the musique concrète composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. There were, of course, plenty of other European and American composers who were operating against the dominant formalist position, composers such as Henry Cowell (1897–1965), and Lou Harrison (1917–2003), famously influenced by gamelan music, and, in Europe, Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), among many others. The minimalists, however, were more influential because they were part of a group, however loosely affi liated.

NOTES CHAPTER SIX

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

2017 Preface: This paper was originally written for the Sing a Simple Song colloquium, Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel/Institut d’ethnologie, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, September 2011, at the invitation of Yann Laville. “Les organisateurs de l’exposition coloniale avaient, dans la conception de leur œuvre, obéi à une double préoccupation: ils avaient voulu montre les colonies à la France et montre la France aux coloniaux.” All translations are by the author. “Oui. . . . C’est un idée. . . . Mais il faudrait peut- être mieux remettre cette partie-là à une autre année. Ce qu’il y a d’amusant à Londres, c’est de faire shopping à Regent-street ou à Piccadilly et justement nous sommes allés visiter la section anglaise à l’Exposition, et nous y avons vu tout ce que nous pourrions trouver d’intéressant dans les magasins de Londres.” This was not the beginning of a consumer culture in Europe, though certainly the beginning of its modern incarnation. For earlier regimes of consumption, see Campbell (1989) and Sombart (1967). Conceptions of genre are not unique to capitalism, but they are necessary in it. Music is a good example as it is not sufficient in itself. To be marketed on a large scale, it takes much more than some people playing and some others enjoying it. In a capitalist view, a whole host of infrastructural shifts and accommodations are necessary: new sounds must be recorded, produced, turned into goods; goods need to be distributed; they also need to be advertised, on all medias; audiences must be raised. . . . And genrefication is a peculiar, necessary way to brand the new product, even though it sticks to clichés. Diversity has become such an important buzzword to describe the composition of the workplace, the classroom, bodies of elected officials, and more (at least, in the US) that it is commonly employed to describe all kinds of assemblages and juxtapositions.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1. 2.

2017 Preface: I originally wrote this article having come up against a theoretical problem while working on my music and capitalism book (Taylor 2016a). It would have been a digression in that book to tackle this question, so it became a separate article in its own right. For more on music and genre, see Brackett (2002 and 2005); Fabbri (1982); Frith (1996); Holt (2007); and Lena (2012). The scene (see Straw 1991 most importantly) encompasses musical production and other forms of production such as style, but will not be a focus of my investigation here.

205

NOTES

3.

4.

For more on the role of criticism and the ideologies of rock, see Atton (2009) and McLeod (2001). I am indebted to Eric Schmidt for these references. Bourdieu himself was concerned with the threats to the autonomy of the artwork (see the postscript in Bourdieu 1996 and 2003).

CHAPTER EIGHT

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

2017 Preface: This chapter was the result of an invitation by Madeleine Herren to speak at a conference she organized at the University of Heidelberg in October 2010 entitled Networks in Times of Transition: Toward a Transcultural History of International Organisations. Most of the attendees were from fields such as political science or international relations. One of these attendees, a fellow American, came up to me after I presented this paper to compliment me, and to thank me for reminding him that it is good to keep “some of you cultural types” around. I am indebted to Rees (2010a and 2010b) for this capsule history. For a study of UNESCO, intangible cultural heritage, and tourism, see Di Giovine (2009). For more on intangible cultural heritage and the qin, see Rees (2010b) and Yung (2009). See also Maira (2002). And, Battersby notes, women were increasingly excluded from the category of genius and creativity, even as male creators were praised for their “feminine” qualities (Battersby 1989, 3). “Creativity,” Battersby writes, was “displaced male procreativity: male sexuality made sublime” (Battersby 1989, 3), emphasis in orginal.

CHAPTER NINE

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

206

2017 Preface: This chapter was written at the invitation of Philip V. Bohlman, editor of the Cambridge History of World Music (Bohlman 2014). These terms come from Mandel (1978) and Jameson (1991); Lash and Urry (1987); Bell (1973); and Harvey (1989). See most importantly Giddens (1990); Hall (1991); and Jameson (1991). Held and McGrew (2004); Inda and Rosaldo (2002); and Ong and Collier (2005). See Tsing (2005, 3) for a similar critique. For an overview, see Harvey (2005). For trenchant critiques, see Ferguson (2002) and Klein (2008). See Frank (1997); Taylor (2007) and (2012a). Last accessed 29 September 2010. See Taylor (1997) and (2007). See Coulangeon (2004, 59– 85).

NOTES

10. This could only happen in an era when there is less and less music played on the radio in the US, as a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allows companies to own more than one radio station in the same market, with the predictable result of the standardization of playlists and lessening of songs broadcast. For useful discussions of the Telecommunications Act, see the series of articles by Eric Boehlert for salon.com (Boehlert 2001a, 2001b, 2001c) and Paoletta and Newman (2006). 11. See Farinella (2001, 4) and Levine (2007). 12. A music publisher, Primary Wave Music Publishing, has entered the fray as well; see Christman (2008, 15). 13. A useful history of the development of these systems is in “United We Find” (2005). See also Lyons (1997). 14. These systems are extremely technical, the subject of many scientific papers; for one example, see Zhu et al. (2006). 15. See also Wollenberg (2008). 16. Last accessed 6 October 2011. 17. There is a large and growing technical literature on the nature of genre for the purposes of classifications to be used in online search systems. See Aucouturier and Pachet (2003); Aucouturier and Pampalk (2008); and Lambiotte and Ausloos (2005). 18. For a discussion of other problems, see Flynn (2006). 19. See “Turning It Up to 11” (2009). 20. See “Social Networks” (2010). 21. See Bruno (2009). 22. The quotations from Jobs were from a press conference on 1 September 2010, available at http://www.apple.com/apple- events/september-2010/, last accessed 21 September 2010. 23. See Poster (1995) on databases. CHAPTER TEN

1. 2. 3. 4.

2017 Preface: After kindly reading a draft of an article for me, Steve Feld recommended reading the introduction to Myers (2001). Before I got to it, Steve read something else for me and offered the same suggestion. I finally read Myers’s introduction, which led to many other useful readings on questions of value, questions that I continue to pursue in other publications. Shipley (2013, 19) quotes an unpublished paper by Terence Turner in which Turner draws on Marx to emphasize the meaningfulness of labor. Thanks are due to Steven Feld for recommending this book. See Marx (1971, 1990, and n.d.). For more on the music industry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Suisman (2009).

207

NOTES

5.

I am indebted to Jessica Cattelino for this last point and for the Zelizer reference. 6. Thanks are due to Jessica Cattelino for this point. 7. I am indebted to Steven Feld for this point. 8. Thanks are due to Steven Feld for pointing this out. I would also like to thank Jonathan Sterne for making a similar observation. 9. Tarde treats the question of value at some length in Tarde (1902). 10. Thanks are due to Dave Wilson for this observation. 11. See chapter 9 for a discussion of recommendation systems.

208

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231

Index abstraction: fi nancial capitalism and, 100–103; in postmodern cultural production, 111–13 Adorno, Theodor, 3– 4, 15–16, 50, 54; on Beethoven, 38; on culture industries, 97, 158; on genre, 115; on late capitalism, 188–90; on music, 105; on Stravinsky, 106; value of cultural goods and, 179, 191–92 advertising industry: advertisements for radios, 82; branding and, 140– 43; commodification of music and, 72–73; educational role of, 63, 75–76; fetishism of player pianos in, 68–72; ideologies about music in, 58– 62; music and affect in, 46– 48; opera used by, 82, 84– 85; player piano and, 55– 58; reification in player piano advertising and, 62– 68 Aegidius of Zamora, 32 Aeolian Organ and Music Company, 55– 58, 66 aesthetic cosmopolitanism, field theory and, 130 aesthetics, regimes of value and, 186– 87 affect: in commercial music industry, 45– 48; in early modern era, 33– 39; history of Western music and, 29– 32; micromanagement of, 43– 45; personal experience as, 37– 39; Romanticism and, 38– 39;

sound reproduction technology and, 39– 43; tonality and, 33– 39; Western music and, 26– 49 African American music, rock music and, 132 agency, affect as personal experience and, 37– 39 Allanbrook, Wye J., 19 Amazon, search and recommendation system, 166 American Federation of Musicians, 183 Ampico Library, 63 animal studies, affect and, 26 anthropology: culture and, 13–14; Geertz on, 17; value of cultural goods and, 175–76, 190–92 Appadurai, Arjun, 156– 58, 175–76, 182, 191–92 Apple: iTunes “Genius” feature, 166; Ping feature, 170 Aristotle, 31 Arrighi, Giovanni, 97– 98, 100 Ars Musica (Aegidius of Zamora), 32 art, society and, 17 “Art as a Cultural System” (Geertz), 16–17 art auction, value of culture and, 180– 81 Art of Strict Musical Composition, The (Kirnberger), 37 Atlas (Monk), 108–9 Attali, Jacques, 152, 186– 87 Atwater-Kent Hour, 89 audience, regimes of value and role of, 193

233

INDEX

Audion tube, 80 “aura,” sound reproduction technology and concerns over, 42– 43 auteurization, music production and, 162– 65 authenticity: genrefication of music and, 117–20; in rock music, 131– 34; in world music, 135– 38 autonomy: of rock music, 133– 35; in world music, 135– 38 Aylesworth, Merlin H., 87– 88, 93 Babbitt, Milton, 107 Babel (fi lm), 164 Banco de Gaia, 109–10 Banet-Weiser, Sarah, 139– 40 Bangs, Lester, 132 Barthes, Roland, 179– 80 Bartók, Béla, 94, 108 Barton, Bruce, 63 Battersby, Christine, 152, 206n5 Baudrillard, Jean, 179– 81 Beatles, 107, 132 Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, 48 Beats Music service, 48 Becker, Judith, 1–2 Beethoven, Ludwig van, Adorno on, 38 beliefs and practices, affect and music and, 28–29 Berg, Alban, 101 Berger, Peter L., 28–29 Berkeley World Music Festival, 118, 120 Berlioz, Hector, 38 Bicknell, Jeanette, 28–29 Big Chill, The (fi lm), 162 Billboard magazine, 169–70, 195–98 Birmingham School, 115, 179 BMG, 164 Boethius, 31– 32 Boltanski, Luc, 144, 159, 165 Bori, Lucrezia, 89 Boulez, Pierre, 107 Bourdieu, Pierre, 13–14, 128– 31, 134– 35, 156– 58, 178 Bowie, David, 169 Brackett, David, 116 Brahms, Johannes, 38 brain function, music and affect and, 27–29 brands, cultural production and, 139– 43 Braque, Georges, 101

234

Braudel, Fernand, 97 Brightman, Sarah, 167 broadcast technology: affect and, 39– 43; education of public about, 75–76; opera and problems of, 4, 78– 82; rise of radio and, 74– 93; transmitter attenuator, 91–92 Bronarzyk, Marie, 90 Burnett, T-Bone, 163 Business Week, 163 Cage, John, 106–7 Campbell, Colin, 121–22, 153 Capital (Marx), 52 capitalism: consumer capitalism, 120– 22; fi nance capitalism and, 95–100; globalization and, 156– 58; music in, 1– 8; rock music and, 130– 35; value of cultural goods and, 174–76 Caruso, Enrico, 80, 88 Cassiodorus, 31– 32 Castells, Manuel, 144, 146, 148– 49 Cavalleria Rusticana (Mascagni), 80 Cavicchi, Daniel, 43 Chaliapin, Feodor, 89 Chanan, Michael, 50 Chiapello, Ève, 144, 159, 165 Chicago Civic Opera, radio broadcasts by, 77–78, 87, 91–92 Chicago Daily Tribune, 86 Chicago Grand Opera Company, 85– 86 China, cultural preservation in, 147– 49 Chopin, Frédéric, 38 Christgau, Robert, 132 Christianity, music in early church, 32 Citron, Marcia J., 23 class: genrefication of music and, 116–20; value of culture and, 191– 92 Classical episteme, Foucault’s discussion of, 34 classical music: democratization ideology concerning, 87– 88; genrefication of, 116–20; radio broadcasts of, 74–75, 79– 82 Clifford, James, 2 Cohen, Lizabeth, 122 Columbo, Russ, 41 commercial music industry: branding and, 139– 43; digital technology and, 110–12; dominance of exchange value in, 187–90; genrefication of music and,

INDEX

116–20; music supervisors in, 161– 65; regimes of value and, 193– 98; rock music and, 133– 35; search and recommendation systems and, 167–70; sonic affect in, 45– 48; world music and, 127–28 commodification of music: advertising industry and, 72–73; branding and, 141– 43; consumer capitalism and, 120–22; distribution technology and, 161–70; exchange value and, 187–90; fi nancial capitalism and, 101–2; intangible cultural heritage preservation and, 148– 49; mechanical music era and, 50–73; music supervisors and, 162– 65; player piano and, 54– 58; reification of music and, 63– 68; sound reproduction technology, 4; taste arbiters and, 170– 73; of world music, 5– 8; world music and, 127–28 communication technology, cultural production and, 6– 8 compartmentalization of knowledge, affect and, 28–29 Complete Music Director, The (Mattheson), 35 composers: affect in music and role of, 37, 204n5; language of emotion and, 46– 48; minimalist composers, 107; music supervisors and, 164– 65; use of non-Western music in early modern era by, 102–13; value of production by, 182– 84 Concerto no. 17 in G Major, K. 453 (Mozart), 18–21 connexionist perspective: neoliberal capitalism and, 159– 60; world music and, 144– 46 Consequences of Modernity, The (Giddens), 157 consumption: distribution technology and, 161–70; fi nance capitalism and, 109–13; genre and, 120–22; neoliberal capitalism and, 158– 60; value of cultural goods and, 177– 84, 190–92 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 151– 52 Cosmopolitan magazine, player piano advertisements in, 55– 58 counterculture movement, music in, 107–12

Cowell, Henry, 204n5 Crafts, Susan D., 43 Cravath, Paul D., 93 creativity, intangible cultural preservation and, 149– 52 crooning, affect and, 41– 43 cult of domesticity, player pianos and, 57– 58 cultural production: commodification of, 128; field theory and, 128– 35; fi nance capitalism and, 95–97, 101–13; genre and, 115–23; global interconnectivity and, 144– 46; globalization and, 156; informationalization of, 160–70; neoliberal capitalism and, 3, 156, 158– 60; in postmodern era, 111–13; value of, 174–76, 182– 84, 190–92; of world music, 135– 38 cultural studies, emergence of, 155 culture: affect and, 26–29; dominance of diversity in, 124–26; ethnography and, 10–14; fi nance capitalism and, 98–99; forms in music and, 14–25; global conceptions of, 145– 46; history and, 20– 21; individualism and, 9–10; intangible cultural preservation and, 149– 52; occlusion of, 12–14; overview of, 1– 8; radio and sacralization of, 74, 81– 82, 86– 88; reenchantment of, 152– 54 curation, regimes of value and, 197– 98 Darcy, Warren, 23 Darwin, Charles, 103 David-Néel, Alexandra, 108–9 Davidson, Jane, 31 Davis, Agnes, 90 Dead Man Walking (fi lm), 164 Debussy, Claude, 4, 94, 108 de Forest, Lee, 4, 76– 82, 93 Deleuze, Gilles, 26, 111–12 democratization ideology: in player piano advertising, 58– 62; rise of radio and, 74–75, 82, 86– 88 DeNora, Tia, 44– 45 Destinn, Emmy, 80 deterritorialization, cultural production and, 111–12 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), 188– 89 diasporic cultures, 150– 52 Dictionary of Music (Rousseau), 36, 185– 86

235

INDEX

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Wagner), 91 digital technology: commodification of taste and, 172–73; global interconnectivity and, 144– 46; regimes of value and, 193–98; world music and, 109–12 dissonance, composers’ embrace of, 101 Distinction (Bourdieu), 13, 178 distinction, value of cultural goods and, 178, 181– 82 diversity: cultural dominance of, 124–26, 205n5; as cultural dominant, 124–26; of world music, 114–26 DJ Lil’ Jay, 150 Doctrine of the Affections, 35– 36 “Doctrine of the Humors” theory, 31 domestication, ideologies of, genrefication of music and, 117–20 Don Giovanni (Mozart), 24 Douglas, Susan J., 75 Dowd, Timothy, 50 Dunlap, Orrin E., Jr., 91 Duo-Art player piano, 69 Durfee Foundation, 154 Durkheim, Emile, 194– 95 Dylan, Bob, 132 early modern era: cultural production in, 103–13; dissonance in music of, 101; music and affect in, 33– 39 educational role of advertising, 63, 75–76 Eighteenth Brumaire, The (Marx), 97 Elektra (Strauss), 80 emotion: commercial music and language of, 46– 48; music as language of, 35– 39 Empire of Things (Myers), 176 Engel, Johann Jakob, 36– 37 Engels, Friedrich, 97 Enlightenment philosophy, Haydn’s music and, 24–25 Ernani (Verdi), 78 Essay on the Origin of Languages, which Treats of Melody and Musical Imitation (Rousseau), 36 ethnography, culture and, 10–14 “ethos” doctrine, 30 Evans, Edwin, 66 Evans, Wilbur W., 90 exchange value: commodification of taste and, 172–73; of cultural goods, 178– 84; in early modern music, 102–13; fi nance

236

capital and, 96–97, 101–2; history of, 185–90; late capitalism and dominance of, 187–90; of music, 4; value of cultural goods and, 175–76; for world music, 108–12 expression, in music, 15 Facebook, music on, 170 Fainchtein, Lynn, 164 Featherly, Kevin, 132 Feld, Steven, 108, 125–26 festivals: genrefication of music and, 116– 20; world music genre and, 123–26 fetishism: exchange value of culture and, 187–90; Marx on, 64; player pianos and, 68–72; value of cultural goods and, 179 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 24–25 field theory: branding and, 139– 43; music and, 128– 35; world music as cultural production and, 135– 38 fi lm soundtracks, profits from, 162– 65 Filter search engine, The, 165– 66 Finance Capital (Hilferding), 95 fi nance capitalism, 95–101; cultural production and, 100–113; early twentiethcentury use of non-Western music and, 102–13; world music and, 108–13 fi nancialization of cultural production, 3– 8 Firefly system, 165 Fischer, Michael M. J., 2 Flew, Terry, 152– 53 Flying Dutchman, The (Wagner), 91 folk music: intangible cultural heritage preservation and, 147– 49; music supervisors’ use of, 164; rock music’s separation from, 132– 35; Stravinsky’s use of, 102–12 forms and formalism: cultural emergence of, 21–25; Mozart’s theme and variations technique and, 18–21; in music studies, 14–25 Foucault, Michel, 34, 37– 39 Frankfurt School, 179; homology and, 15–16 Freud, Sigmund, 103 Frith, Simon, 115 functionalist interpretation of art, 15–17 Fundamentals of Music (Boethius), 31

INDEX

Gabriel, Peter, 166 Galeazzi, Francesco, 22 Galli- Curci, Amelita, 89 Garden, Mary, 74, 85– 86 Garrido, Sandra, 31 Gatti- Casazza, Giulio, 93 Geertz, Clifford, 1– 3, 10–14; on affect and culture, 27–29; on art in/as culture, 16–17; on cultural production, 129; functionalist interpretation critiqued by, 15; on meaning, 190– 92; value of cultural goods and, 174–76 gender: cultural identity and, 150– 52, 206n5; evolution of concept of, 22–25; player pianos and role of, 57– 58 Genius, iTunes recommendation tool, 166 genre: branding and, 139– 43; consumer capitalism and, 120–22, 205n4; ideologies of otherness and, 116–20; music classification systems and, 168–70; perspectives on, 115–23; of world music, 114–26, 123–26 genrefication, processes of, 123–26 Gentle, Alice, 83 geography: affect and, 26; cultural identity and, 150– 52 Gernsback, Hugo, 83 Giddens, Anthony, 13–14, 157 Gigli, Beniamino, 89 Glass, Philip, 107 globalization: commodification of taste and, 6– 8, 172–73; cultural production and, 3– 8, 156–73; early discourse on, 156– 58; intangible cultural heritage preservation and, 147– 49; Rice on culture and, 13–14 Global Pop (Taylor), 137 Goa trance, 111 Google, 161 Graceland (Simon), 108, 152 Graeber, David, 7, 177, 190– 92 Gramit, David, 50 Great Britain, imperialism and fi nance capitalism in, 98–99 Great Depression, 121–22 Great Recession of 2007–2009, 122, 161 Greenhill, Pauline, 123–24 Grey’s Anatomy (television series), 163 Gross, Terry, 110 Grundrisse, The (Marx), 51

Guattari, Félix, 26, 111–12 Gulbransen player pianos, 59– 62 Gwiazda, Henry, 110–11 Habsburg monarchy, Mozart’s music and, 20–21 Hall, Stuart, 53, 121 Hänsel und Gretel (Humperdinck), 92– 93 harmony, tonality in music and, 34– 39 Harris, Charles K., 187 Harrison, Lou, 204n5 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 24 headphone technology, evolution of, 42– 43 Hegelian dialectic, formalism and, 24–25 Heinich, Nathalie, 17 Hentoff, Nat, 132– 33 Hepokoski, James, 23 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 190 highbrow culture, rise of radio and, 74–75, 78– 82, 87– 88 Hilferding, Rudolf, 4, 95–99, 101, 112 “hillbilly music,” 121–22 Hilmes, Michele, 75 Hippocrates, 31 history: culture in context of, 20–21; early twentieth- century music and, 94–95; emergence of forms in context of, 21–25; Marx on, 9; regimes of value in, 185–90 Holt, Courtney, 193 Homer, Louise, 90 Homily on the First Psalm (St. Basil), 32 homology, forms in music and, 15–16 Horkheimer, Max, 188– 89 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 92–93 identity, intangible cultural preservation and, 149– 52 ideologies about music: branding and, 139– 43; genre and ideologies of otherness, 116–20; intangible cultural preservation and, 149– 52; in player piano advertising, 58– 62; rock music and, 132– 35 immigrants, preservation of cultural identity and, 150– 52 imperialism: early twentieth- century music and, 94–95; fi nance capitalism and, 98– 99

237

INDEX

Iñárritu, Alejandro González, 164 individualism: culture and ideology of, 9–10; fi nance capitalism and role of, 98–100, 103; player pianos and role of, 63– 68 industrialization, of music, 53– 54 Inside Man (fi lm), 164 intangible cultural heritage: reenchantment of culture and, 152– 53; UNESCO initiatives in, 6– 8, 146– 49 intentional value, 190–92 International Arts Festival, 124 International Arts Foundation New Orleans, 124 International Council for Traditional Music, 147– 49 international exhibitions: consumer capitalism and, 120–22; genrefication of music and, 116–20 intimacy with music, sound reproduction technology and, 42– 43 Introductory Essay on Composition (Koch), 37– 38 Iovine, Jimmy, 48 I Pagliacci (Leoncavallo), 80 isicathamiya music, 152 Istituzioni armoniche (Zarlino), 34 iTunes: “Genius” feature, 166; Ping feature in, 170 Ives, Charles, 94–95 Jameson, Fredric, 4, 98–103, 111–13, 160 Japan, cultural preservation in, 146 Jobs, Steve, 166, 170 Jollivet, Gaston, 117–18 Jones, Steve, 132 Keil, Charles, 43 Keller, Helen, 39– 41 Kelley, Mrs. Edgar Stillman, 90 Kerpel, Anibal, 164 Khan, Nusrat Fateh Ali, 164 Kidjo, Angélique, 127–28, 136– 37, 167 Kirnberger, Johann Philipp, 37 Knox, Andrew, 46 Kobbé, Gustav, 59, 62 Koch, Heinrich Christoph, 37 labor theory of value, and cultural production, 182– 84 Lambek, Michael, 190–92

238

language, world music and issue of, 136– 38 Laqueur, Thomas, 22 Lash, Scott, 171 Last.fm website, 168– 69 late capitalism: cultural production and, 3– 4; dominance of exchange value and, 187–90; informationalization of music and, 155, 158– 60; value of cultural goods and, 3– 4, 7, 184 Late Capitalism (Mandel), 4 “Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties” (Japan), 146 Lee, Spike, 164 Lenin, V. I., 96– 97 Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 80 Le Sacre du printemps (Stravinsky), 94, 102 Levine, Lawrence, 77, 87 literature as art, Bourdieu’s discussion of, 128– 31 “live” events, sound reproduction technology and, 42– 43 Loesser, Arthur, 57 “long tail” sales theory, 161, 167 Long Twentieth Century, The (Arrighi), 97–98 Luckmann, Thomas, 28–29 Lukács, Georg, 64 “luxury” goods, cultural goods as, 181– 82 Maisonneuve, Sophie, 50 Makeba, Miriam, 142 Mandel, Ernest, 4, 158– 59 Marcus, George E., 2 Mario, Queena, 83 market framing: distinction and, 181– 82; reenchantment of culture and, 152– 53; value of cultural goods and, 176 Marks, Toby, 109–10 Marx, A. B., 22–23 Marx, Karl, 9, 51– 52; on fetishism, 64; Hilferding and, 96– 99; on history, 103, 158; labor theory of value and, 182– 84; reification concept of, 53; value of cultural goods and, 174–76, 177– 84 Marxism and Literature (Williams), 115–16 Mascagni, Pietro, 80 mass culture, rise of, 103 Massumi, Brian, 26 masterpiece, creativity and Western defi nitions of, 152

INDEX

“Masterpiece” designation, intangible cultural heritage initiatives and, 6– 8 Mattheson, Johann, 35 Mauss, Marcel, 175–76 Mazarin, Mariette, 80 mbaqanga music of South Africa, 141 McCormack, John, 89 McCracken, Grant, 25, 161 McDonald, E. F., Jr., 77–78 McLuhan, Marshall, 171 meaning: in culture, 16–17; Geertz on centrality of, 27, 190–92 meaningful action, value as, 190– 92 mechanical music production, commodification of music and, 50–73, 202n4 Meet the Composer foundation, 183– 84 Meintjes, Louise, 141 “Metropolis and Mental Life, The” (Simmel), 98–99 metropolitan life: cultural production and, 103–12; Simmel’s discourse on, 98–100, 103 Metropolitan Opera, radio broadcasts of, 88–93 micromanagement of mood, sound reproduction technology and, 43– 45 Middle Ages: music and affect in, 31– 32; regimes of value in, 185– 90 middlebrow culture, rise of radio and, 75 middle- class culture, player pianos and, 57– 58 Milhaud, Darius, 204n5 Milton, John, Marx on, 51 minimalist composers, 107 modernism, early twentieth- century music and, 94– 95, 103–13 MOG website, 169 Monk, Meredith, 108– 9 Monod, Emile, 117 Monteverdi, Claudio, 34 Monteverdi, Giulio Cesare, 34 mood, micromanagement of, 43– 45 MovieTunes, 164 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 18–21; introspection in music of, 38 MS-PRO service, 48 Mubu (Music Buddha) search engine, 165 multiculturalism, as cultural dominant, 124–26 music: affect and, 26–29; in early modern era, affect and, 33– 39; genrefication

of, 114–15; informationalization of, 160–70; player pianos and valorization of, 63– 68; regimes of value in, 184– 90, 192–98 Music and Capitalism (Taylor), 1 music appreciation texts, ethnographic analysis of, 18–21, 203n2 musicology: formalistic approach in, 18– 21; gender and, 22–25; tonality in, 33; tonality in music and, 34– 39 Musicovery website, 45 music studies: forms in, 14–25; occlusion of culture in, 12–14, 16–17 music supervisors: emergence of, 161– 65; language of emotions and, 48; as taste arbiters, 170–73 Myers, Fred R., 176, 181, 191– 93 MySpace Music, 169–70 MyStrands website, 169 National Association of Broadcasters, 76–77 National Broadcasting Company, 87, 89–90 nationalism, early twentieth- century music and, 103 “National Radio Auditions,” 89–90 N’Dour, Youssou, 136, 167– 68 neoliberal capitalism: branding and, 139– 43; commodification of taste and, 171– 73; consumption and, 122; cultural production and, 3– 8, 156, 158– 60; diversity as trope of, 125–26; fi nance capital and, 97; globalization and, 157– 58; informationalization of music and taste and, 160–70; interconnectivity and, 144– 46; regimes of value for music in, 192–98; search technology and, 165–70 networking, cultural production and, 144– 46 neuroscience, affect and, 26–28 Newman, Ernest, 61– 62, 66 New Spirit of Capitalism, The (Boltanski and Chiapello), 159 New York Times, 80, 88– 89, 91–93 nineteenth- century composers, nonWestern music and, 4 Noise (Attali), 186– 87 non-Western music: early twentiethcentury music and, 94–95; minimalist composers use of, 107; nineteenth-

239

INDEX

non-Western music (continued) century composers’ dismissal of, 4; Stravinsky’s use of, 102–12; value of, 176–77 objectivist theory of commodities, 52 O Brother, Where Art Thou? (fi lm), 163 O.C., The (television series), 163 Offer, Charles, 90 One Tree Hill (television drama), 48 On Painting in Music (Engel), 36– 37 “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening” (Adorno), 188– 89 opera: as advertising vehicle, 82, 84– 85; broadcast technology and, 4; Chicago broadcasts of, 82– 88; de Forest’s championing of, 77; growth of radio broadcasts of, 88–90; rise of radio and, 74–93 Ortner, Sherry B., 2, 129; on culture, 11–14 Oswald, John, 111 otherness, ideologies of, 116–20, 124–26; world music and, 137– 38 Ottoman Empire, Mozart’s music and, 20–21 Pandora, 166– 68 Paradise Lost (Milton), 51 Paris International Exhibition (1889), 117–18 paternalistic capitalism: democratization discourse and, 87– 88; elite support of arts as, 77 Peary, Robert, 57– 58 Peralta, Francesco, 83 performers: affect in music and role of, 37– 38; on radio, 41– 43 personal experience, affect as, 37– 39 “personality,” player piano and, 64 Petrushka (Stravinsky), 106 pharmaceutical model of music, 29– 32 phonograph: consumer capitalism and, 121–22; early resistance to, 54; radio’s advantages over, 78– 82 Piano and Organ Purchaser’s Guide for 1919, The, 69 Picasso, Pablo, 101 Pietroluongo, Silvio, 196– 98 Ping network, 170 Plato, 30– 31

240

player piano: commodification of music and, 53– 54; fetishism and, 68–72; ideologies behind advertisements for, 58– 62; reification discourse concerning, 62– 68; sales of, 57– 58; as transition, 54– 58 playlists, as form of value, 197– 98 plenitude, ideology of, in player piano advertising, 60– 62 plunderphonics, 111 politics: cultural identity and, 150– 52; world music and, 138 Pop-Rock Music (Regev), 130 popularity effect, music classification and recommendation systems and, 168–70 popular music: counterculture and, 107; exchange value and industrialization of, 187–90; genrefication of, 121–22; rise of radio and, 74–77, 81– 82; rock music’s separation from, 132– 35; tonality in, 33– 39; world music as, 127–28 positionality, authenticity of, 138 postmodern cultural production, 111–13 “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (Jameson), 4, 160 postwar era: consumer capitalism in, 122; cultural production in, 105–13 practice theory: cultural production and, 129; music studies and, 13–14 Pribaoutki (Stravinsky), 102 prima prattica (fi rst practice), 33– 39 Prince Be, 110 print capitalism, cultural preservation and, 152 protectionist policies, cultural production and, 6– 8 Protestant Ethic, The (Weber), 8 Pulcinella (Stravinsky), 102 Putumayo label, 142 Pythagoras, 29– 30 qin (Chinese zither), 148– 49 race, genrefication of music and, 116–22 “race records,” 121–22 “Radiating Culture,” 86 radio: consumer capitalism and, 121–22; de Forest and rise of, 78– 82; exchange value and emergence of, 187–90; funding of broadcasts, 81; growth of opera broadcasts, 88–90; opera and rise of,

INDEX

74–93; as social and cultural force, 39– 43 Radio Opera Contests, 89–90 Rahman, A. R., 164 Rajaraman, Shiva, 45 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 34– 35 Reagan, Ronald, 122 recommendation systems, search technology and, 166–70 Reed, Marian, 63, 69 Rees, Helen, 148– 49 reflection, culture and, 15 Regev, Motti, 130, 133 regimes of value, 175–76; in music, 184– 90, 192–98 Reich, Steve, 107 reification: Marx’s concept of, 53; player piano and role of, 62– 68 relativization of knowledge, affect and, 28–29 religious confl icts, cultural identity and, 150– 52 Renaissance, theory of “kinds” in, 116 reproducing piano, 64; fetishism concerning, 68–72 Republic, The (Plato), 30– 31 review comments, search engine inclusions of, 169 Rice, Timothy, 13–14 Riemann, Hugo, 23 Ritzer, George, 153 Riverdance, 152 rock music, capital positions and forms in, 130– 35 Roell, Craig H., 58, 202n4 Rolling Stones, 132 Romanticism, affect in, 38– 39 Rosen, Charles, 19–21 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 36, 185– 86 Rubin, Rick, 155, 162 Ryle, Gilbert, 10–11 Sahlins, Marshall, 191–92 sampling practices, digital technology and, 109–12 Santaolalla, Gustavo, 164 Satie, Erik, 38 Saturday Evening Post, 59– 62 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 103 Savage Beast, 166 Schafer, R. Murray, 108

Schauffler, Robert H., 58 schizophonia, 108 Schmidt, La Rue, 90 Schoenberg, Arnold, 101, 105– 6, 112–13 School of Clavier Playing (Gottlob), 37 Schumann, Robert, 38 Schwartz, David, 47– 48 science fiction movies, music in, 111 scientific management, commodification of music, 53 Scotti, Antonio, 83 search technology: informationalization of culture and, 161–70; music supervisors’ use of, 164– 65; neoliberal capitalism and, 165–70 seconda prattica (second practice), 33– 39 Second Viennese School, 101, 105–7, 112–13 Seeger, Pete, 132 selfhood: ideology of, in player piano advertising, 61– 62; reification and, 62– 68; sound reproduction technologies and, 42– 43 self-reflexivity, culture and, 13–14 semiotics, art and, 16–17 Sennett, Richard, 155 Sewell, William, 13, 129 sexuality, crooning on radio and, 41– 43 sign value, of cultural goods, 180– 81 Simmel, Georg, 98–100, 103 Simon, Paul, 108, 132, 152 Sloboda, John, 30 Smith, Adam, 52, 185– 86 Smulyan, Susan, 75 Social Construction of Reality, The (Berger and Luckmann), 28–29 “Social Critique of Radio Music, A” (Adorno), 189 sociology: art and, 17; practice theory and, 13–14 Sombart, Werner, 182 sonata-allegro form: historical context for, 21–25; in Mozart’s music, 18–21 Songza app, 45 Sony Walkman, affect and rise of, 42– 43 sound quality, radio vs. phonograph, 54, 78–79 sound reproduction technology: affect and, 39– 43; commodification of music and, 4; early twentieth- century music

241

INDEX

sound reproduction technology (continued) and influence of, 101; exchange value and, 187–90; micromanagement of mood and, 43– 45; player piano as transition in, 54– 58 South Africa, mbaqanga music of, 141 South Korea, cultural preservation in, 146 Spinoza, B., 26 Spotify app, 45 St. Basil, 32 Stereomood website, 45 Strauss, Richard, 80 Stravinsky, Igor, 4, 38– 39; Adorno’s critique of, 106; folk music and compositions of, 94–95, 102–12 Straw, Will, 50 streaming platforms, as indicators of value, 197–98 subject- centered musical ethnography, 13–14 subjectivity, in music, 38 Suisman, David, 68 Symphony no. 88 (Haydn), 24 Tarde, Gabriel, 194–95 taste: commodification of, 170–73; globalization and commodification of, 6– 8; history and conceptions of, 20–21; informationalization of, 160–70; music supervision and auteurization of, 162– 65; rise of radio and polling of, 74–75 Taylor, Deems, 59 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 53 Telecommunications Act of 1996, 207n10 television programming, music supervisors for, 163– 65 text, tonality in music and role of, 33– 39 Thatcher, Margaret, 122 Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen), 179 thick description, Geertz’s characterization of, 10–14 Thoroski, Cynthia, 123–24 Three Japanese Lyrics (Stravinsky), 102 Tibetan Buddhism, world music and, 108–9 Timaeus (Plato), 30 Tin Pan Alley, commodification of music and, 53 tonality, affect and, 33– 39 Toynbee, Jason, 50, 129– 30

242

transistor radios, 42 transmitter attenuator, 91–92 trauma, affect and, 26 Treatise on Harmony (Rameau), 34– 35 Türk, Daniel Gottlob, 37 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization): identity, creativity, and culture in initiatives of, 149– 52; intangible cultural heritage initiatives and, 6– 8, 146– 49; reenchantment of music and, 152– 54 urbanization: cultural production and, 103–12; fi nance capitalism and, 98–99 users’ meaningful action, value of cultural goods and, 7– 8 use value: commodification of taste and, 172–73; of cultural goods, 178– 84; in early modern music, 102–13; history of, 185–90; of music, 4; value of cultural goods and, 175–76 Vallée, Rudy, 41 value of cultural goods, 7– 8, 174–76; consumption and production and, 177– 84; distinction and, 181– 82; future challenges concerning, 198–99; meaningful action and, 190– 92; in production, 174–76, 182– 84; regimes of value of music and, 184–90, 193–98 VanCour, Shawn, 75 Veblen, Thorstein, 121, 179 Victor Talking Machine Company, 88–90 Virilio, Paul, 171 visual art: early modern technological innovation and, 101–2; regimes of value for, 186– 90; value of, 180– 81 Vogler, Georg Joseph, 22 Wagner, Richard, 38, 91 Warner Bros., 163 Warner Music Group, 169–70 WEAF radio station, 88–90 Weber, Max, 8, 99, 153 Weber, William, 116 Webern, Anton, 101 Welte-Mignon reproducing piano, 69–72 Western music: affect and, 26– 49; commodification of, 50– 51; in early twentieth century, 94–95; history of affect

INDEX

and, 29– 32; tonality in, 33– 39; world music and, 108–13 Wheeler, Alina, 140, 142 Whiting, Arthur, 62 Williams, Raymond, 15, 17, 103– 4, 115–16, 153, 183 Williams, Rosalind, 104– 5, 118–19, 124 Williams, Sidney A., 90 Wilson, D. Miller, 62, 66 Wolff, Christoph, 19 Wolfi ngton, Lindsay, 48 world music: cultural production and, 135– 38; emergence of, 5– 8; in fi lms, 163– 65; genrefication and diversity of, 114–26; global interconnectivity and,

144– 46; neoliberal capitalism and, 159– 60; rise of, 107–13; search and recommendation systems and, 167–70 World of Music and Dance (WOMAD), 120 World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago), 116–17 world’s fairs, consumer capitalism and, 120–22 Young, La Monte, 107 YouTube, as indicator of value, 194– 98 Yúdice, George, 145, 150– 51 Zarlino, Gioseffo, 34

243