Music and/as Work

Abstract: This essay examines music through the lens of work, arguing that musicology has been inconsistent (and often evasive) in its engagement with labor as a conceptual and material category. Drawing on the author’s experiences as a trained musician and scholar, the essay begins by addressing the contradiction between the immense value placed on music as an aesthetic object and the frequent disparagement of music-making as legitimate work. Treating “work” as a contested discursive concept rather than a stable definition, the article situates debates about musical labor alongside broader discussions of gender, capitalism, and social reproduction. Building on feminist and Marxist scholarship, it emphasizes how capitalist social relations shape what counts as work, how labor is valued, and how musical activities are positioned as leisure, vocation, or profession.

The essay then develops a historical framework for understanding music at work and music as work. First, it traces how music has structured labor in preindustrial settings, how industrial capitalism separated music from work, and how music was later reintegrated into workplaces as a tool for productivity and control. Second, it examines three major forms of musical labor relations—patronage, guilds (and later unions), and independent musicianship—demonstrating how each reflects shifting social hierarchies, power relations, and definitions of artistic autonomy. Rather than resolving tensions between music as art and music as labor, the essay argues that these contradictions are central to understanding musical life under capitalism. Ultimately, the article contends that recognizing music as work clarifies how musicians navigate compulsion, pleasure, creativity, and precarity, and provides a framework for interrogating how value is assigned to music, musicians, and cultural labor more broadly.

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Racialized Ornament in the Exotic Musical Imagination: Reflections on Framing and Decoloniality

Abstract: This essay uses the idea of ornament to work towards re-imagining long standing biases in music teaching and scholarship. Focusing on issues of race and gender, Bhogal explores how Western philosophy has tended to marginalize ornamentation or decoration through negative descriptions that invoke an objectified exotic other. Drawing on both sonic and visual examples from Western classical music and Indian classical music, this essay challenges decorative gestures traditionally viewed as superficial and meaningless. The range of examples includes rare sound recordings by Ustad Imdad Khan, Coimbatore Thayi, and M. S. Subbulakshmi, as well as compositions by George Frideric Handel, Maurice Delage, and Maurice Ravel. Ornament serves as a catalyst for de-colonizing approaches where inter-cultural and inter-epistemological dynamics are privileged as models for teaching and research.

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Jenny Lind and the Making of Mainstream American Popular Music

Abstract: This essay about Jenny Lind’s mid-nineteenth-century American concert tour is a case study for these ways of thinking about musics embedded in culture and the legacy of historical musical-cultural processes. Lind’s status as “ideal” grew from the cultural discourse about her singing voice as gendered, raced and classed. These aspects of identity help us gain a more complete picture of Jenny Lind’s embeddedness in mid-nineteenth century American culture, as well as her appeal as a musical celebrity.

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