Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 24, Issue 4, Pages 399–410

Introduction: Audio Work: Labor, Value, and theMaking of Musical Aesthetics

Jesse Weaver ShipleyHaverford College

Marina PetersonOhio University

This special issue on music, labor, and value comes out of ongoing conver-sations between the editors about the troubling relationship between ahistor-ical notions of aesthetics and scholarly analysis of performance and music.Broadly speaking, we are concerned with how to productively interpretmusic as a social practice. The theoretical intent of this volume is to linkexpressive practices to their contexts of production and circulation throughmethodologies of analysis. In the process, we show the ways that contextsand musical texts are mutually constitutive. That is to say, we are interestedin the work that goes into making sounds into music and the ways in whichmusic then reflects back onto the social worlds from which it is understoodto be emergent. What follows should be read in the spirit of a polemic oreven rant meant to provoke dialogue on how to conduct rigorous researchon aesthetic practices in context.

In our own work, we engage with labor and value in part to achieveparticular conceptual goals related to what we see as impasses in the scholar-ship on art, performance, and music (Shipley; Peterson). As anthropologists,we see labor and value as ethnographic, textual, and historical issues that arecritical for teasing out aspects of music that have been largely occluded. Inan age of technological production and reproducibility, thinking about valuemeans examining the various kinds of work that go into producing music,the digital and electronic media that circulate music and shape the affectivepublics emergent through popular genres, and the registers of belonging andmodulations of value afforded through song. In other words, labor is crucialto understanding changing audio technologies and the circulation of sound.It goes without saying that labor is not opposed to idealized notions of pureaesthetic practice (Bourdieu). Indeed, music is always caught up in markets,commerce, and laboring bodies, while its relationship to these forces is oftenobfuscated to foreground the notion of music as pleasurable experience. But

C© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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the production of this musical aesthetic relies upon the ways practitionersnegotiate the pulls of various value-producing registers and institutions. Inpresenting a collection of essays on the theme of music, labor, and valueby historians, anthropologists, cultural studies scholars, and ethnomusicol-ogists, we intend that the cases and analyses will be productive in their ownright, and that similarities—and differences—between them might resonateacross place and time.

Ethnography of AestheticsMany critics continue to fetishize aesthetic practices as exceptional.

Ethnography offers an important modality for contextualizing art practicesthat is relevant for a number of disciplines. Since Boas’s work Primitive Artthe study of various artistic forms has been an important, if marginalized,part of the field of anthropology. However, the anthropology of art, whilecontextualizing cultural production within specific sociocultural worlds, hastended to ignore the ideological implications that underlie the category ofart itself. Anthropological studies of art have relied on a notion of cul-ture against which art is reflected as exceptional. Instead of showing howan expressive/sensory phenomenon is created and understood in specificcontexts, some ethnographies have made the mistake of blurring local ex-pressive styles with analytic categories through an unproblematized idea ofart, accepting without question formal generic categories of sonic, visual,and performance arts; or even worse, projecting their own tastes and ideasof what is and is not art onto the social field.

Recently, anthropologists have begun to more fully explore the fluidrelationships among sounds, images, and performances and discourses ofWestern aesthetics (Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010). At the same time,ethnographers largely rely upon the opposition between cultural producersand everyday life. Rather than foregrounding the processes through which artdiscourses are implicated in the construction of these oppositions, they reifythe ideology of aesthetics by focusing on the objects of cultural production.

Anthropologists have yet to provide an adequate critical analysisof various worlds of art production and consumption. Marcus and Myers’sTraffic in Culture offers insightful studies of the intersection of local cul-tural productions and a “postmodern global” world. It opens up a dialoguebetween discourses of anthropology and Western art. However, by focusingon the dynamics of how “global systems” articulate with local lifeworlds,the volume leaves the given oppositions of modernity intact. They explore

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the ways in which the ideology of modern art structures non-Western objectsrather than questioning the construction of this ideology in specific socialcontexts to query how the notion of modernity is predicated upon privilegingcultural producers. Other recent work argues for an affinity between anthro-pology and modern art, positing ethnographers as artists who organize andpresent aesthetic content comprised of non-Western lives.

Ideas of “primitive” expression have been crucial to the developmentnot only of modernism but also art history, ethnomusicology, performancestudies, and anthropology. The figure of the primitive continues to providean often unspoken counterpoint to notions of modernity and modernism.Over twenty years ago, scholars such as James Clifford, Sally Price, andMarianna Torgovnick showed how signs and objects are constructed as“primitive” through the discourse of art and conversely how “the primitive”acts to construct “art” as a category. Structurally, art and the primitive standin a similar position in relationship to modernity. Art and the primitive are,in different ways, on the margins of modernity, in the process defining socialvalue at its center. Tropes of the primitive continue to ground modern aes-thetics and its analysis across various realms. This comes out in the study ofmusic when it emphasizes the ethnographic study of exotic sounds and gen-res, thereby reinforcing an imagined social landscape in which the primitivebecomes a space for art as social—the space of the “ethnographic”—whilemodern art remains opposed to sociality. We want to use ethnographic, his-torical, and textual analyses to examine the processes through which artconstrues itself as asocial and the related ways in which the contexts fromwhich art is removed are concomitantly imagined.

This “ideology of the aesthetic,” as Terry Eagleton dubbed it, groundsmodern art practices in bourgeois ideology embedded in specific forms ofcommodification, public life, and individuated productive subjectivities. Ea-gleton writes, “[t]he emergence of the aesthetic as a theoretical category isclosely bound up with the material process by which cultural production, atan early stage of bourgeois society, becomes ‘autonomous’ . . . of the vari-ous social functions which it has traditionally served.” Thus, art becomesan “isolated enclave within which the dominant social order can find anidealized refuge from its own actual values of competitiveness, exploita-tion, and material possessiveness.” While at the same time “[T]he idea ofautonomy . . . a mode of being which is entirely self-regulating and self-determining—provides the middle class with just the ideological model ofsubjectivity it requires for its material operations” (Eagleton 8–9). Eagle-ton’s sweeping explanation of the ideology of the aesthetic gives us a starting

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point from which to consider the relationship of subjectivity and art. At thesame time, it is incomplete insofar as it only looks at art in relation to cultureand capitalism within the metropole. The aesthetics of modernity around theworld are necessarily shaped through the multitude of local articulations ofcapitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff).

The autonomy of art, the notion of “art for art’s sake,” is, as manyhave pointed out, historical (Bourdieu; Horkheimer and Adorno). It takes alot of semiotic work to maintain the idea that cultural products are separatefrom daily life, institutions, and processes of circulation. Similarly to theways that a gallery or a museum appears to be a neutral space for the displayand contemplation of images, musical contexts are occluded, foregroundingthe idea of music as meaningful in and of itself. Moreover, analysts oftenreproduce the logic of autonomous art when examining music, when causalrelationships between music and other social spaces (i.e., politics) are de-manded (and at the same time doubted), or when it is asked what makesmusic “special.” All of these operations presume and produce art as sepa-rate from “the social.” Autonomy haunts the anthropology of art and music,which ultimately has not figured out how not to buy into modernist epis-temologies. It should be requisite for analysts of art (and music) to engagewith the particular logic of autonomy with which Euro-American art is sad-dled. Autonomy as such is a kind of black hole for anthropology: seemingly,there is no “there” there. We want “the world.” But already “the world” isconstrued as different and separate from art. Here, we are faced with theimpasse of the autonomous art object, a division that, in buying into the logicof our subject, gives us two options—art as separate from “society” or artin service of social ends. Anthropological analysis offers a way to examinethe processes through which autonomy is produced and naturalized and, inthe process, how the social contexts of aesthetic distancing are themselvesmade.

In most contexts, historians and anthropologists are good at pay-ing attention to social and cultural conditions supporting modes of meaningmaking, even ones carried by regimes of value over time. But studies of artis-tic genres seem to have trouble recognizing the relationship between text andcontext. Here, we suggest that a more productive approach is to considerhow the arts are entangled in “the world” in rich and complex ways thatrequire a reconfiguration of the mutually constitutive relationship betweenthe two. While we might productively acknowledge the social significanceof a notion of “art for art’s sake,” we must not rely on this to gain analyticpurchase. And rather than simply examining “arts in context,” which further

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naturalizes a separation between artistic products and the surroundings inwhich they are situated, we consider the semiotic practices through whicha notion of artistic autonomy emerges, maintaining art as a separate aes-thetic realm and the surrounding social worlds and their power dynamics asmundane contextual background. Daily life as formal context therefore isproduced semiotically by art and music, through imagining themselves astransportable texts understood as formal content.

Modernist SoundsJohn Cage famously argued that “all sounds are music” (Gann). Even

more celebrated is his belief that there is no such thing as silence; this washis conclusion after going into an anechoic chamber and hearing two sounds,which he was told were his nervous system and the blood moving throughhis veins. With these statements, Cage made legible (and is now given creditfor) certain strands of work in twentieth century European and Americancomposition that opened “musical” sound to that of the world around usand brought sounds of everyday objects and processes into composition. Asothers have pointed out (Samuels, Meintjes, Ochoa, and Porcello), record-ing technology was central to developing this work, allowing sounds “in theworld” to be captured, manipulated, and replayed for a range of composi-tional practices from the abstractions of musique concrete to the idealism ofacoustic ecology, and much in between. In particular, anthropology showsthat the relationships between sound and music must be understood in socialcontexts within which participants produce and contest aesthetic genericboundaries.

For anthropologists of sound, these compositional practices “sound”like what we do, providing a means of engaging with the world aurally. Butlocating an anthropology of sound in compositional practice relies on anaesthetic form that insists on the autonomy of art. Cage was not interested inthe social life of Sixth Avenue, or the political economy of natural resources,when he listened to the traffic, but rather aimed to abstract what he heard,taking it as “sound as such.” Hence, what sounds like “the world” to us is,for Cage, already an abstraction, one formulated through modern musicaldiscourse.

Along these lines, scholarship on expression needs to be carefulnot to treat “the world” as content for ready framing within an idiom ofcontemporary art; any cultural signs from any contexts can be drawn in andgiven equivalent meaning and value in the context of modernist composition.

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As we describe above, not only are everyday sounds abstracted, they are putin the service of compositions that are part of a Euro-American aestheticin which art (and music as an art form) is framed as “autonomous.” (Feldcame to similar conclusions regarding the soundscape work of Schafer, butaimed for a synthesis in approaches.)

It is relatively common to take Cage’s statements out of context,drawing on them as general definitions that help direct one’s aural atten-tion to the sonic environment. Such reliance on compositional precedenceprecludes an anthropology of sound that listens with an ethnographic earrather than an aesthetically tuned one; one that pays attention to the socialprocesses of production, circulation, and reception through which aestheticvalue is made rather than assuming that soundscapes are framed by similargeneric structures, tastes, and notions of value. Instead of taking modernmusical genres and their critiques as creative inspiration for social inquiry,we propose investigating the social practices through which sounds areorganized and made meaningful. Ethnography that relies upon modernistcompositional practices are missing two crucial opportunities to show thatexpressive practices must be understood in relation to how practitionersforeground them from their specific contexts of production, circulation, andreception (Silverstein and Urban): first to examine the sociohistorical con-texts within which modern art has maintained itself as a separate sphereof aesthetic composition; second to examine sonic expressive forms thatoffer different ideologies of expression from the standard Euro-Americanmodernist one.

We ask, what might an anthropology of sound be that does not takemodernist aesthetics as foundational? We might start by listening, and lis-tening to how people listen. Listening is a way of paying attention and beingpresent, both by participants and researchers. Sound has a duration (thoughit is not necessary to make an ontological claim for this to be meaningful inpractice). We might listen anew to the ethnographic, considering the rolesthat listening plays in and for our research. Sound is, in fact, banal andeveryday, and an anthropology of sound might productively engage withhow social actors orient themselves via the aural, how expertise is enactedthrough listening, and how social attachments of kinship and friendship co-here around an attunement to sounds. Listening is a practice that peopledo already as a way of knowing about things. This might provide a uniqueway of knowing something (i.e., the mechanic who can diagnose an engineproblem by its sound) or an entirely commonplace (and hence general) wayof being in the world (as in everyday conversation). In the study of music

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as a kind of sound, it is especially difficult to avoid modernist assumptionsand problems of “autonomy.” But by starting with this approach to sound,and using labor and value as frames, we hope to point to some newly pro-ductive ways of understanding musical practice, or music as practice. Wepropose that analysts should begin with the ways various forms of labor arecoordinated to make, organize, and distribute sounds and shape the subjectpositions of those involved in these processes.

Lastly, as analysts of music as a social practice, we are, it seems,blinded by tautologies of scale, which, like other modernist myths, hidetheir own particularities. Scale is an equally self-fulfilling prophecy, asnotions of music’s ubiquity become the basis for any number of claimsabout its universality. We need to find ways to take our tools for analyzingparticularities of so-called “local” social and cultural phenomena and scaleup, not buying into logics of universality.

Labor and Value in Musical GenresThe authors in this volume examine music through the lens of value

as made, circulated, and experienced in specific performance and insti-tutional contexts and labor as a form of embodied practice that creates,challenges, and transforms value, as expressive practices invoke various so-cial and historical registers. We endeavor to show that aesthetics and theway that people understand them are made and contested in sociohistori-cal context. A crucial way that music, across a variety of locales, operatesis to produce itself as separable from mundane social life. We examinehow aesthetic genres, that claim to be separate and separable from theirsocial worlds, are made as such, in the process producing the landscapesthey inhabit as contrasting mundane social contexts (Duranti and Goodwin).Foregrounding labor and value in relation to music is our way to engage withthe longstanding dichotomy that opposes aesthetics to productive labor.

By placing labor at the center of the analysis of sound, we hope toshift conversations around music by relinking aesthetic value to its complexmodes of production. Aesthetic value is made and contested through var-ious kinds of work/production. Analysts must take account of the ways inwhich participants make and make sense of sound in relation to establishedgenres and registers (whether musical or otherwise). In order to do so, an-alysts must pay particular attention to the reflexive/self-conscious aspectsof sound and how participants actively make connections between aestheticregisters and labor and economic value. At the same time, in many locales,

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aesthetic valuations are employed to detach assessments of good/bad andpleasurable/uninteresting from the institutional, social, and other contextualrealms in which sounds circulate.

The relationship of labor to music is often obfuscated— for example,as debates over musical value focus on competing notions of the valueof copyright, or in the context of changing notions of composition andproduction as digital audio technology evolves, or as participants considerthe relationship of music to the race, nationality, or spirituality. In fact, legaland economic structures of musical authorship have long obscured music aslabor, whether as organized labor or in a more general sense of practice andperformance.

While labor has been occluded from considerations of musical value,participants in many locales contest whether or not music is a form of la-bor, how it can be quantified, exchanged, and transformed, and who reapsthe benefits of it. The ephemerality of sound makes its transformation intoother media both difficult and full of potential. Indeed, transposing valueamong various realms both technological and symbolic takes work. For ex-ample, circulating songs across airwaves involves labor, as does making andmaintaining the semiotic connections between voice and divinity. Momentswhen music links to commerce and the market are often sources of anxietyabout musical meaning. Considering music as a form of production raisesquestions about under what conditions its value is separable and circulat-able, how various participants, technologies, and institutions contribute toits valuation, and finally, who controls it.

This volume’s musical examples and cases are set in a variety ofplaces and are not simply about pleasurable or aesthetic experiences butillustrate broader points about value, labor, and subjectivity. Vicki Brennan’sethnography of a Nigerian Pentecostal church choir shows the crucial waysin which transpositions of musical value work. Mediation provides a criticalterm for understanding how the circulation of music between immediateand mediated forms is central for music’s role in religious mediation—how,in other words, the use and circulation of recordings help choir membersreach their spiritual goals. Yet, mediation, she suggests, is masked suchthat religious transcendence is achieved through a “labor of immediacy.”Brennan’s article conveys the richly productive imbrication of “live” andmediated sound, and the ways in which both are caught up in particularkinds of musical work—both in terms of the work of making sound, andmodalities of semiotic work that allows music to mean or to help peopleachieve extramusical goals.

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David Gilbert examines black music and James Reese Europe’s ClefClub in New York at the beginning of the twentieth century through examin-ing the changing relationship between musical value and race. In particular,the article is concerned with tracing the transpositions between “profes-sional value” and “cultural value.” Gilbert argues that Europe’s Clef Club isemblematic of the evolution and legitimation of black music in the Americanmusical landscape before World War II. The Clef Club as New York’s firstlabor union for black musicians specializing in popular music opened uppossibilities for black artists to work and be paid as professional musicians.The inclusion of black music and musicians in popular, professional realmsof New York’s music scene sets the stage for later developments in blackmusic. The article shows how the institutionalization of black music bothprovided possibilities for black music while structuring it within a popularAmerican culture industry and its forms of labor and value.

Music, even a specific genre, is neither uniform nor determinativeof value. As Matt Delmont outlines, 1950s rock ’n’ roll was used to sellproducts and support politics of civil rights. While the commercialism ofDick Clark’s American Bandstand has yielded a dominant notion of mid-twentieth-century American popular music and its role in the rise of a“consumer citizen,” Philadelphia DJ Georgie Woods’ work in promotingcivil rights efforts shows how music might be put in service of different(and sometimes overlapping) ends. These examples reflect how scale is pro-duced even as it provides a basis for musical meaning—a national televisionnetwork enabled consumerism to be melded with national identity, whilethe local broadcast range of WDAS enabled political mobilization whilelimiting its import for notions of musical meaning.

Kirstie A. Dorr examines Andean street musicians in San Francisco,describing how an international network of performers and producers bothcapitalizes on and subverts spatial logics of a dominant world music market.Unlike the North American world music industry, the Andean music industryis a grassroots network with recordings produced in small runs, sold onthe street where the musicians play. Its success is grounded in the sonic“otherness” of the panpipe, a semiotically significant instrument in theworld music pantheon, “representing” Latin America. At the same time,sonic space intersects with politics of public space and immigration law,affecting where, when, and how musicians might work.

Shannon Garland examines the relationship between ideologies oflabor and new technologies of circulation in a Brazilian informal musicaleconomy, Fora do Eixo. An independent music production network based on

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Internet circulation, it demonstrates how aesthetic and economic values arebeing reconfigured in the Brazilian context. This research links the makingof a musical aesthetic to changing technologies of circulation. It traceshow digital and Internet technologies reshape the transpositions betweencultural/musical and economic value.

Falina Enriquez also takes up the issue of Brazilian musical circula-tion in relation to objectifications of culture and state discourses of cultura.In focusing on voicings in rehearsals and performances, this article exam-ines how different musical genres intersect with notions of race and culture.In the institutional mediation of music, ideas of culture become ways thatmusical value is produced and contested.

Janice Protopapas’s article shows the links between musical valueand historical memory. It examines performances of Sikh hale da divan or“verses of attack” services as a musical archive of historical conflict andnarration through which subjects position themselves in relation to broadersocial registers. Developed in the context of ongoing fighting against Britishrule in the nineteenth century, the rhythmic and lyrical force of the hymnsboth antagonized the British and provided a point of articulation for com-munity unification. Spiritual responsibility is linked to political rebellion inthe music’s performance. Hymns channel the power of meditation and affectas forms of bodily moral responsibility grounded in the performance. Per-formances transform musical value into narratives of historical and spiritualunity.

Shane Greene’s piece on punk underground in Peru argues that punkis a critical practice that emerges from the dystopic dissatisfaction at “thecenter of capital production, circulation, and consumption.” Greene placeshis work in the genealogy of cultural studies while criticizing their under-standings of popular styles as merely rituals of rebellion. Punk must notbe seen simply as a decontextualized semiotic register or text nor shouldopposition politics be seen only through dichotomies of complacency andrebellion. Rather Greene argues that the lesson of punk is to “under-fuck”the system through inversions and implosions of daily practice and forms ofvalue. Examining punk in Peru from the mid-1980s, this article elaborateson a notion of underness as both material form and a critique of materialproduction. This article not only reflects on punk as critical practice, but alsoitself embodies the author’s formal critiques in its writing and organization.

While perhaps less an explicit concern of these articles, a crucialtheme in thinking about music, labor, and value is sincerity. Performancestances, emotional registers of interpretation, and modes of circulation

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require belief in the power of music. Sincerity points to the way that affectivestances of participants shape music’s potential to mean, be autonomous, orafford alternative social formations. The presentation of music as sincereor irreverent, spiritual or commercial frames the emotional and sociologicalpotential of words and sounds to make and transform value. Articles in thisissue take account of the importance of sincerity/insincerity to the mean-ing of sound and its institutional circulations, from punk’s “fuck-off” DIYattitude to Sikh hymn’s fervent anti-British stances to Dick Clark’s eagercorporate sheen. The tone of music, the inflection of lyrics, the ways thatreverent and irreverent modes of musical delivery give authority to musicand concomitant audiences make it appear as a separable asocial realm foraesthetic contemplation, thereby giving these aesthetic practices authority toshape social subjectivities. Sincerity, then, is an aesthetic modality that canobfuscate relations of labor, race, gender, and power that underlie music’sproduction and circulation, instead presenting performances that reflexivelyclaim a form of transcendence from daily action. Sincerity masks reflex-ivity. It presents a normative idea of social subjectivity masking criticalself-conscious potentials of music and performance that emerge when theypresent and aesthetics of reflexivity. Punk music’s ironic irreverence andactive reflexive subversions and inversions of aesthetic value are equallycritiques of the sincerity of labor’s discipline across bourgeois contexts. Theemotional power of music to evoke sincere sentiments or to critique themis directly connected to how economic labor and aesthetic value are linkedand unlinked.

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Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: U of Chicago P,2009.

Duranti, Allesandra, and Charles Goodwin, eds. Rethinking Context: Language asan Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

Feld, Steven. “A Rainforest Acoustemology.” In The Auditory Culture Reader, eds.Michael Bull and Les Back. Oxford: Berg, 2003.

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Gann, Kyle. No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4′33′′. New Haven: Yale UP,2010.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London:Verso, 1979.

Marcus, George, and Fred Myers. Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthro-pology. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.

Peterson, Marina. Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in DowntownLos Angeles. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2010.

Samuels, David W., Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, and Thomas Porcello.“Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology.” Annual Review of An-thropology 39 (2010): 329–345.

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Shipley, Jesse Weaver. Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship inGhanaian Popular Music. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2013.

Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban, eds. Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago:U of Chicago P, 1996.