Music and the Use of the Profits of the Anglo-American Slave Economy (ca. 1610–c. 1810)

During the era of the Anglo-American slave trade ca. 1610–ca. 1810, music itself offered few opportunities for immense financial gain. By contrast, the slave trade (transatlantic, intra-coastal, and local) and the use of slave labor (not just on plantations but also in manufacturing, small businesses, and domestically) provided profits to owners who put some of that surplus into fostering musical activities such as purchasing lessons, instruments, and scores; subscribing to opera and concert seasons; hiring musicians; and even buying a musical prodigy—Muzio Clementi—from his father in Rome. In addition to considering the opportunities afforded individual owners and families by slave-derived wealth, this chapter brings to the fore theories of the commercialization of consumption, capitalism, and the development of empire. It points to the use of slave-related products such as ivory on musical instruments. It demonstrates how significant slavery’s investors were to the establishment of the Royal Academy of Music in London, the first opera company to be chartered as a business. It identifies professional and amateur musicians who were slave owners. These previously unknown or disregarded links between slavery and the musical world of the nascent British empire are laid bare for the first time.

Vocal Virtuosity, Value Creation, and the Transformation of Contemporary Gospel Music

This chapter argues that virtuosic gospel vocal performance constitutes a medium of spiritual value creation that produces communal power and facilitates what can be described as a trade of musicality—of commercial exchange centered around sacred music. Dorinda Clark Cole is a renowned gospel vocalist. In this chapter, Clark Cole’s concert at the Samsung Experience showroom in the Time Warner Center at the Columbus Circle area of New York City provides a productive site from which to examine the commercialization of gospel music because it involves exchange relations between a musical community and a corporate sponsor. A closer focus on the relationship between gospel music and capitalism in this context challenges a dichotomized notion of how gospel music circulates in varied sacred and secular arenas that seemingly represent incommensurate, even contrasting, systems of value. Through a musical analysis and an exploration of corporate interests in the concert, value creation through musical performance in a commercial setting is shown to forge social relations and produce power that sustains the regenerative nature of gospel music.

Music in the British Workplace: From Voice to a Technique of Control?

This chapter examines music in the British workplace. It considers whether it is appropriate to see the history of music in the workplace as involving a journey from the organic singing voice (both literal and metaphorical) of workers to broadcast music appropriated by the powerful to become a technique of social control. The chapter charts four key stages in the social history of music in British workplaces. First, it highlights the existence of widespread cultures of singing at work prior to industrialization, and outlines the important meanings these cultures had for workers. Next, it outlines the silencing of the singing voice within the workplace further to industrialization—either from direct employer bans on singing, or from the roar of the industrial noise. The third key stage involves the carefully controlled employer- and state-led reintroduction of music in the workplace in the mid-twentieth century—through the centralized relaying of specific forms of music via broadcast systems in workplaces. The chapter ends with an examination of contemporary musicking in relation to (often worker-led) radio music played in workplaces.

The Moral Economy of Music in Tenganan, Bali

This article discusses the relationship of economic, aesthetic, and economic life in the village of Tenganan, Bali, Indonesia. Music in Tenganan (primarily the slonding gamelan ensemble) is part of a complex cultural fabric weaving together the village’s aesthetic, ethical, and economic life, dynamically interconnected through both material and immaterial dimensions. I first outline a general concept of “goods” and “the good” that informs my analysis of the intersections of economic, ethical, and aesthetic life in Tenganan. I then describe communitarian life in Tenganan through a quick overview of the social history and organization of the village. Next I analyze the village’s material and immaterial economies. Ceremonial exchange, within which music is an important component, is the primary engine of the village economy. Finally, I describe ethics in Tenganan, explaining how different ethical regimes concretsely impact ceremonial, and therefore economic, practice.

Musical Economics of Urban Poverty: City Redevelopment and Gentrification in the Financing, Organization, and Interpretation of Music

In this chapter, I consider the impact of urban redevelopment on the financing, organization, and interpretation of local, urban musics. I focus on gentrification, which refers to the redevelopment of a socio-economically depressed urban neighborhood during which urban poor are displaced as it becomes reconstructed for and by the middle and upper economic classes. I argue that gentrification has specific relationships to the formal organization of music-making in a neighborhood—which financing and infrastructure patterns are found there, as well as which musical styles and representations occur. Often success with gentrification positively correlates with the flourishing of (performing) arts districts, and so-called creative economies to be consumed by the affluent. Which economic and social forces lead to gentrification, and what is gentrification’s relationship to music-making? During gentrification, which kinds of musical activities and expressions tend to be economically supported, and which left out, by formally organized music initiatives?

Fair Trade Music?: Ethical Consumerism and the Political Economy of Digital Music

This chapter explores how the music creators group Fair Trade Music International (FTMI) applies the ethos and methods of Fair Trade in attempts to reform how, and how much, music creators are paid for digital music sales. The term “Fair Trade” has since the 1980s become synonymous with “ethical consumerism,” a set of ideals and practices that seek to mitigate the deleterious effects of “unethical” capitalism. Yet the overall effects of “ethical consumerism” itself are debatable: on the one hand, it often improves the material conditions of producers, especially in the “global south.” On the other hand, it does so within—and therefore reinforces—the existing political-economic structures that produce what it seeks to mitigate. How does this paradox manifest in the context of digital music sales?

The Political Economy of Nonlife: Biopower, Ontosecurity, and the Shamisen Skin Trade in Japan

This chapter examines the ways in which the trade in raw cat and dog skins and processed goods in the shamisen (Japanese three-stringed lute) industry has changed in the last five decades. It employs Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics in order to analyze the causal relationship between the changing systems of governance through life and the historical trajectory of shamisen skin making and trade. Biopolitics, it argues, is not merely a means to incorporate different forms and modalities of life into political discourse, tactics, and rationalities, but it can also operate to marginalize the political presence, existential vitality, and ontosecurity of nonlife—individuated entities, such as the shamisen, that are conceived as “inert,” “inorganic,” or “nonliving” in society. This chapter approaches the political-economic history of music by closely examining the distribution and exercises of biopower and their effects on specific economic activities that surround the making of the instruments in historical times.

Maintenance and Destruction of an East Side Los Angeles Indie Rock Scene

This article is based on an ethnographic study of the independent (indie) rock scene in the east side Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park. There is very little money derived from music circulating in this scene (musicians are routinely paid only about $35–40 for a show), and musicians, indie label owners, and others attach symbolic values to certain amounts of money, which are viewed in terms of what they can help the musicians purchase, such as gas for the band’s van. People in the scene also produce and exchange value in a number of ways that aren’t capitalist, from generalized reciprocity to several forms of patronage. This article ultimately argues that scenes such as this are simultaneously maintained and destroyed by capitalism: maintained because capitalism needs a reserve army of those who operate outside of it but destroyed because such scenes are deprived of their ability to reproduce themselves given how little money circulates.

Music, Exchange, and the Production of Value: A Case Study of Hindustani Music

This chapter uses Hindustani music as a case study, developing anthropology’s theoretical work on value and exchange toward the analysis of music. It focuses on the action-based theory of value devised by Nancy Munn (1986) and later developed by David Graeber (2001). Rather than something residing “in the music,” value is viewed as entirely social, and ephemeral, generated by acts and the codification of acts into distinctive patterned aesthetic forms. The chapter refines the analysis through Annette Weiner’s concept of “inalienable possessions,” that is, things which are not necessarily costly or of any objective value, but have gained immeasurable and irreplaceable value to particular groups in particular times and places through “keeping while giving,” and which inscribe lineage, heredity, and history. This enables an exploration of how history and transmission operate in value creation in the context of music and performing arts. The chapter also develops theoretical work on exchange to analyze musical performance, where what is “given” or “received” is intangible and highly subjective, making it particularly unpredictable in its value and with potential for immense excess and thereby implications for obligations, attachments, or even devotion. Thus, the chapter explores how the complex web of behaviors, discourse, knowledge, and skills variously continued, adapted, and discontinued from the past, and with new strands woven in, constantly re-create Hindustani music as an inalienable possession for middle-class audiences, for whom basic templates of value are in many ways radically opposed to those of the original patrons and performers.

The Value of Music in Melanesia: Creation, Circulation, and Transmission Under Changing Economic and Intellectual Property Conditions

This article examines the principles governing the ownership and circulation of music in Melanesia. It demonstrates how musical practice is part of what connects people in kin-based, local, and regional systems of reciprocity, recognition, and social reproduction. The article outlines the principles that underlie these systems and shows how they are often starkly at odds with assumptions about value and transaction in capitalist, commodity-focused economies. The contrast is epitomized in the differences between connections forged under Melanesian political economy and those in western intellectual property law, specifically copyright. The article makes the case for understanding the value of contemporary as well as traditional forms of music in this frame, focusing on relationality and obligation in both rural and urban contexts.