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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Thinking About Music History: An Introduction to Marxism

Abstract: This essay introduces Marxism as an analytical method for thinking about music history, arguing that musicology’s longstanding idealist orientation has limited its ability to grapple with capitalism, class, and material power. Beginning from the author’s own position as a disciplinary “outsider,” the essay situates Marxist analysis alongside familiar musicological engagements with gender, race, and sexuality, highlighting the field’s relative neglect of political economy. It outlines key Marxist concepts (such as the means of production, private property, labor, wage relations, ideology, and materialism) and explains how these ideas offer a framework for understanding music not as an abstract realm of ideas but as a set of practices embedded in historical relations of power, exploitation, and social reproduction.

The essay then demonstrates the usefulness of a Marxist approach through a case study of racism in U.S. classical music institutions, focusing on how idealist diversity initiatives obscure the material histories and ongoing functions of elite cultural spaces. Drawing on theories of racial capitalism and urban redevelopment, the essay shows how institutions like Lincoln Center have been implicated in displacement, wealth extraction, and racialized inequality, even as they position themselves as agents of cultural inclusion. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the article argues that Marxist analysis clarifies the structural limits of institutional reform and redirects attention toward broader material conditions that shape musical life. Ultimately, the essay positions Marxism as a flexible, evolving toolkit that enables music historians to ask new questions about labor, value, race, and power across musical repertoires and historical contexts.

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