For several years, scholars have called for centering race, gender, and colonialism in musicology pedagogy. Margaret Walker, for example, has argued that “working towards a decolonized university music history curriculum is a necessary endeavor and should be embraced by North American schools of music.”¹ A main issue, identified by Walker, is the complex and potentially overwhelming nature of confronting systemic injustice in core music courses.² This article suggests one possible route to clarifying our curricular agendas: centering capitalism. Placing capitalism at the core of our engagement with music history provides a useful way to connect intersecting issues of race, class, and gender while avoiding overly reductive approaches that misrepresent one form of marginalization as implicitly more important than another. This also demonstrates historical continuities between different forms of musical activity, while accounting for ruptures and changes in understandings of what music was, is, and could be.

My approach to teaching musicology explicitly foregrounds music’s roles in social, political, and power relations. It therefore unmasks the ideological underpinnings of arguments for music’s alleged autonomy or intrinsic altruism. Music, as Benjamin Teitelbaum has argued, is not intrinsically good. Rather, it is bound up in the system of ethics of its cultural context.³ Centering capitalism in musicology reinvigorates the value of music studies more generally by demonstrating the performative nature of social relations, identifying capitalism as one such system of social relations, and calling attention to the ways that different people have sought to critique capitalism through music making.

With one notable exception, calls for decolonizing music history curricula have treated capitalism only peripherally.⁴ This, despite the well-documented impact of capitalism on human societies and natural environments. There is an overwhelming amount of scholarship that identifies capitalism as a major cause of contemporary problems, including global warming, gendered and racialized forms of discrimination, the expansion of precarious labor markets through geographical transformations, and mass migration.⁵ The failure to unequivocally acknowledge capitalism as a central issue for curricular “decolonization” signals the field’s general lack of attention to classical arguments about capitalism. Historically, capitalist critique has not been part of musicological training,⁶ and capitalism has only recently become a major concern of musicology.⁷ In this journal, for instance, only one scholar, Kristen Carithers, has advocated for musicological pedagogies that interrogate labor relations.⁸ Historians of capitalism, however, have long treated colonialism in the early modern era as inextricably linked with forms of extraction and exploitation that prefigured or realized capitalist forms of accumulation.⁹ In classical Marxism, “capital accumulation” identifies methods for the acquisition of wealth. In this process capital is invested in the means of production (including labor power) with the goal of selling commodities to produce more capital. A primary method of capital accumulation is the separation of the worker from the value their labor adds to resources in the creation of commodities. Because theft of lands, resources, and people created new social relations for the generation of wealth, Karl Marx also historicized colonialism as an early source of capital accumulation.¹⁰ Indeed, Marx’s work demonstrates that colonialism was deeply enmeshed with capitalism, and that racialized and gendered forms of exploitation were—and remain—bound up in the social relations required for capitalist accumulation. 10

I argue that music studies ought to take scholarship of capitalism seriously. After all, capitalism has directly impacted musical industries around the world, the consumption of music, the ways music functions in various workplaces, and the spread of neoliberalism in musical higher education.¹¹ In traditional surveys of music, as Carithers has argued, issues of money, markets, incomes, and expenses figure only peripherally.⁸ While some readers may not share Marx’s critical view of capitalism, all can benefit from incorporating Marx’s theories in efforts to “decolonize” music curricula.¹² If we really care about ending racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice in our classrooms, then we must dig more deeply into their historic causes. Central among them is capitalism.¹³ 14

In this article, I outline my experiences centering capitalism in a non-major senior-level seminar on the music history of Chicago. Titled “Chicago’s Music: Crossroads of History, Race, and Culture,” this course centers capitalism in its synthesis of perspectives from the arts, humanities, social sciences, and history to apprehend how music in Chicago has both affirmed and critiqued the city’s social systems. To organize these various perspectives, I engage Chicago’s musical histories through theories of capitalist accumulation, specifically Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation.”¹⁴ Primitive accumulation historicizes the ways that colonizers and aristocrats first seized lands and resources from peasants and then re-organized those lands and their former inhabitants toward the social relations of capitalist accumulation. Primitive accumulation places processes of dispossession, the creation of proletarians dependent upon the owners of capital, and the relentless drive for economic gains at the heart of major historical changes. To better connect primitive accumulation with racial and gendered discrimination, I draw on recent scholarly developments of Marx’s original argument to demonstrate how processes of colonization and dispossession have historically required difference making and thus complemented racist and sexist constructions.¹⁵ Beverly Skeggs’s construction of the “accumulative self” synthesizes Marx’s theories with Bourdieu’s three forms of capital and Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse.¹⁶ Within capitalist societies, Skeggs argues, dominant epistemologies treat forms of knowledge, habits, skills, and social relations as forms of capital (economic, cultural, social). The individual achieves social advancement by acquiring these forms of capital and deploying them advantageously. In “Chicago’s Music,” then, accumulation accounts for the theft of land, the exploitation of workers, and the formation of bourgeois identity, the latter of which, in turn, promoted specific kinds of musical production and consumption while demonizing others (such as Native American music). 17

In the first part of this article, I outline my theoretical approach, explaining how I first introduce Marx’s primitive accumulation and then connect it to perspectives on music and sound. In the following section, I present examples of the “accumulative self” from Chicago’s musical histories and reflect on how these examples lay the groundwork for broader critical inquiry. Finally, I suggest ways these ideas could be incorporated into music history courses that focus on other locations, time periods, or case studies. In sum, my aim is to demonstrate the pedagogical potential of naming and critiquing issues of power, exploitation, and resilience in music within anexplicitly acknowledged capitalist hegemony.

Primitive Accumulation in Chicago

My course begins with basic features of Chicago’s history and requires students to give early presentations about musical activities in the city. I encourage them to choose specific instrument makers, ensembles, individuals, or the musical practices of ethnic groups connected to the city. Several intersecting outcomes emerge from these presentations. First, students gain immediate contact with the breadth and depth of the city’s musical histories. Second, they start to see ways that people have used music to form identity, build a community, and earn a living. This fact—the requirement to sell one’s labor power in order to earn money to live—is shown through course readings to be a change in the social relations for people living in the area now called Chicago. Using assorted secondary source readings, I teach this change through the lens of primitive accumulation.¹⁷

Primitive accumulation has been theorized in two general ways: first, as providing a pre-history of capitalism; and second, as describing ongoing processes of capital accumulation. The nuances of this debate are beyond the scope of this article, but in “Chicago’s Music” I treat primitive accumulation not simply as part of a pre-capitalist epoch, but as an ongoing process at the center of capitalist societies. It is also, as I show below, integral to how dominant social groups in the city sought to use music.¹⁸ Primitive accumulation is Marx’s answer to the question of how people were able to accumulate wealth prior to the globalization of the capitalist system.¹⁹ Marx’s argument outlines the ways that English peasants were transformed into proletarian workers. He points directly to British land enclosures. Long held in common, land was a source of subsistence farming and hunting for many peasants until, beginning in the sixteenth century, much of it was seized by the aristocracy, dispossessing the peasantry of their access to sources of livelihood. Members of this dispossessed group were compelled to work their land for the new “owners” or else be branded, in some cases with hot irons, as beggars. Policing emerges as a theme in Marx’s writing and provides a means to interrogate what Judith Butler has called the “state monopoly of violence,”²⁰ an important concept for understanding Chicago’s historic and continued enforcement of segregation and the enduring threat of police violence. From this basic theoretical foundation, students learn that the rise of capitalist relations required the exercise of state power to compel individuals to sell their labor power to earn money to live. This power takes the form of violent force, legal maneuvering, and the ceaseless search for new geographic sites for the development of new forms of industry. 21

Marx’s theory provides a sweeping and rigorous account of capitalism, and his work is well supported by more modern extensions of his arguments.²¹ To better integrate his ideas with the course’s overlapping learning objectives, I assign selections from Sylvia Federici’s 22Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, which places race, class, and gender in the context of capitalist development.²² Federici’s introduction is especially useful in accounting for the ways that the proletariat, formed by social relations of primitive accumulation, was shaped by racialized and gendered divisions of labor. Women were, over time, increasingly relegated to the home to “support” the male proletariat. 23

Primitive accumulation provides a critical frame for interrogating the history of Chicago. The city’s founding was premised on the dispossession of Native Americans from the lands around Lake Michigan. The area was regularly visited by the Miami, Illinois, Winnebagoes, Menominee, and Potawatomi.²³ From 1795 to 1833, the US government used treaties and violent force to remove most of these people from the marshy lands that now make up Chicago. This expropriation is core to Marx’s argument; an area once held loosely in common was seized, its former inhabitants expelled, and the land reconfigured to facilitate capitalist accumulation—in Chicago’s case as a hub for the transportation of goods. This devastated Native American forms of cultural expression, including what we would call music. Primitive accumulation implicitly critiques popular historical treatments of the city, which can omit historical facts about Native Americans and their impact. While many popular histories describe Native Americans as somehow “in the past” or absent from Chicago, the city remained home to small groups of Native Americans in the nineteenth century and was regularly visited by touring performers and dignitaries. 24

In “Chicago’s Music,” I assign two readings about the city’s early history: a chapter from Rosalyn LaPier and David Beck’sCity Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago 1893-1934(2015) and chapters from Irving Cutler’sChicago: Metropolis of the Mid-Continent(2006).The latter describes Native Americans as dangerous and violent tribes threatening white settlers in the early eighteenth century then dedicates about 250 words to their presence in the city in the twentieth century. Beck and LaPier, in contrast, posit that the 1812 Fort Dearborn “Massacre” was a defining myth that shaped how dominant settler groups have imagined the city’s identity, as evidenced in part by the Chicago flag (one of the stars represents Fort Dearborn) and by a statue commemorating the event. As Beck and LaPier argue, “By the end of the nineteenth century, American Indians would be viewed as both insiders and outsiders to the city—as people who had once lived in the area, and as new migrants to the city.”26This dual positioning reproduced a “noble savage” construction. Central to the “noble savage” were (and are) descriptions of Native American forms of sonic expression as “noisy” or “demonic.” At the same time, Native Americans in Chicago were often described in romantic terms as pre-civilized “nobles” unfamiliar with modern technologies. Within the first week of class, my course places sound within a specific racialized form of capital accumulation. Through this analysis, I aim to sensitize students to the ways that histories of Chicago’s musics can circulate the values of dominant groups.City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago 1893-1934 (2015) and chapters from Irving Cutler’s Chicago: Metropolis of the Mid-Continent (2006).²⁴ The latter describes Native Americans as dangerous and violent tribes threatening white settlers in the early eighteenth century then dedicates about 250 words to their presence in the city in the twentieth century. Beck and LaPier, in contrast, posit that the 1812 Fort Dearborn “Massacre” was a defining myth that shaped how dominant settler groups have imagined the city’s identity, as evidenced in part by the Chicago flag (one of the stars represents Fort Dearborn) and by a statue commemorating the event. As Beck and LaPier argue, “By the end of the nineteenth century, American Indians would be viewed as both insiders and outsiders to the city—as people who had once lived in the area, and as new migrants to the city.”²⁵ This dual positioning reproduced a “noble savage” construction. Central to the “noble savage” were (and are) descriptions of Native American forms of sonic expression as “noisy” or “demonic.” At the same time, Native Americans in Chicago were often described in romantic terms as pre-civilized “nobles” unfamiliar with modern technologies. Within the first week of class, my course places sound within a specific racialized form of capital accumulation. Through this analysis, I aim to sensitize students to the ways that histories of Chicago’s musics can circulate the values of dominant groups.

Understanding primitive accumulation as an ongoing process helps students recognize both the nineteenth-century dispossession of Native groups and their reintegration into the city in the twentieth century. From several course readings, including James LeGrand’sIndian Metropolis: Native Americans in Chicago 1945-75, students learn how in 1953 the Federal government eliminated support for formerly protected Native American land.²⁶ As a result, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) began a relocation program that encouraged many people on reservations to move to major cities, including Chicago. The BIA rationalized this as integrating Native Americans into a “modern” capitalist work society and into white culture. However, many Native Americans found little support from the BIA, and encountered poor housing conditions, segregation, and low-status jobs. Marx’s theory usefully provides students a way to first recognize 27why the Federal Government would desire such integration and then to link eighteenth- and nineteenth-century processes of colonization to twentieth-century patterns of migration—a clear example of people dispossessed, characterized as an underclass prone to violence, and a government attempting to “civilize” them through compulsory reintroduction into an urban capitalist work society.

Because Chicago is home to several initiatives that seek to educate the public about the area’s historical and current Native American residents,²⁷ the students in “Chicago’s Music” also study Native American cultural activities from the nineteenth century through the present—an opportunity that allows them to experience firsthand the centrality of music to people’s negotiations of change. Focusing on the city’s American Indian Center and its annual powwow, students learn how Native Americans, dispossessed of land, had to rearticulate identity and community in the modern city. Indeed, the songs and dances of powwows remain crucial for thousands of Chicago’s residents.²⁸

Students regularly incorporate primitive accumulation into their presentations on the city’s musical histories. This often includes studying the people who worked the granaries, canals, shipyards, and railroads of Chicago. These jobs were staffed by formerly rural farmers from the United States, from Europe, and eventually from Asia and Central America. Chicago grew rapidly from a small trading post in the late eighteenth century to a sprawling metropolis of over 1. million in 1900.²⁹ Most of these people performed relatively low-status “unskilled” labor. In terms of the class structures of capitalism, they became the proletariats of the city. The history of Chicago is thus a study in primitive accumulation. Through processes involving the violent dispossession of land, a transition from agrarian to industrial capitalistic relations, the formation of a proletariat, and a radical transformation of natural landscapes whose effects persist to the current day, what is now Chicago was transformed from a marshy trading area into a major hub for the manufacture and distribution of commodities.

For the people of Chicago, music was necessary for surviving radical geographic and American. Parades and holiday celebrations were designed by middle-class organizers to support the United States. However, many working-class immigrants preferred to emphasize the traditions of their homelands to the effect of diminishing emphasis on United States history. Musical repertoire, such as European-language renditions of US patriotic songs, figured in the complicated presentation of immigrant identity. To introduce students to how nineteenth-century European migrants expressed complicated notions of loyalty for two homelands at the same time, I assign an article by Ellen Litwicki. This article considers holiday celebrations such as the Fourth of July. She writes:

On these occasions ethnicity and assimilation not only coexisted, they were interdependent and even mutually reinforcing. They constituted the intertwined products of the traditions and history of immigrants’ homelands and their responses and adaptation to life in the United States. Ethnic celebrations of American holidays stood at the intersection of ethnic and American cultures, and thus can illuminate the dialectical relationship between ethnicity and assimilation.³⁰

The contradictory performances of middle- and working-class immigrants usefully illustrate how music was at the heart of articulations of identity. Communal musical performances, both necessary and contested, reveal how people in the city negotiated between their practical experiences and their shared ideals to construct a sense of themselves and others. In their presentations, students historicize musical venues around the city, such as churches, community centers, concert venues, parks, and other spaces where immigrants gathered to build a life for themselves.

From Primitive Accumulation to the Accumulation of Identity

Building on the analysis of race and capital accumulation outlined above, I incorporate theories of self-construction within capitalist societies. One major theoretical frame comes from Beverly Skeggs’s model of a middle-class self that must accumulate resources (including skills, knowledge, habits, and social relations).³¹ Class, race, and gender are formed, she argues, by portraying one group as properly mobile and another group as somehow limited. The students in “Chicago’s Music” read excerpts from Skeggs’s work in class and then apply her arguments to representations of race in early Chicago radio. 32

I also assign research by media scholar Derek Vaillant that shows how Chicago radio programs between 1921 and 1935 commonly emphasized the breadth of ethnic identities available to white-identifying migrants while, in contrast, portraying African Americans through a much narrower range of identities.³² Immigrants of European ancestry could enjoy a variety of programming, including church services, live broadcasts of dance-bands, and group singing. African Americans, however, were confined by the collection of stereotypes depicted in minstrelsy. Vaillant analyzes these contrasting constructions to argue that “early Chicago radio produced a hegemonic racial formation—a sound of whiteness—relying on the presence and absence of African Americans and music and cultural forms of expression to sustain itself.”³³ This sound of whiteness reproduced European identities in line with Europeans’ own self-constructions, while using minstrelsy to implicitly define that whiteness through its “other.”³⁴ African Americans in the city ran only one show, WSBC’s weekly “Negro Hour,” which offered an alternative to minstrelsy on the radio in Chicago. 35

In course writing assignments, students apply Skeggs’s concept of mobility and fixity to account for the ways that whiteness is constructed through the devaluing of Blackness. From this frame, students see racialization as a process shaped by the accumulation of specific stereotypes and the application of those stereotypes to specific groups. Accumulation, then, is not just an economic process but also a sonic-social process that extends into the realm of mediatized identity formation.

Skeggs’s theories of social class also inform my approach to teaching classical music history. Here, the accumulation of knowledge and habits can be understood as the acquisition of symbolic forms of capital. “Chicago’s Music” focuses specifically on the creation of the Chicago Auditorium Building in 1885. Initiated by Ferdinand Peck, the Chicago Auditorium was built with the goal of elevating the city’s musical profile.³⁵ The building was designed by Denkmar Adler and Luis Sullivan to encourage, Peck hoped, the proper appreciation of the highest class of music, namely European concert music and opera. From 1891 to 1904, the auditorium was home to the Chicago Orchestra (renamed the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1913), founded by Theodore Thomas. Like Richard Wagner’s vision for Bayreuth, the massive performance space (able to seat over four thousand patrons) was designed to emphasize focused musical listening. To that end, it limited box seating and used a state-of-the art stage construction to expedite scene changes, both of which were intended to suppress impromptu socializing by patrons. 36

While in some ways designed according to “democratic principles,” as Mark Clague has called them, the building and its music in fact reproduced the divisions of capitalist society. Clague argues: “Rather than a social revolution (and the certain disruption of the base of power held by Chicago’s industrial barons), Peck’s strategy built upon the status quo by creating space for a broader segment of Chicago’s public. [. . .] Thus, the Auditorium was intended to help resolve class tension without eliminating class difference, in effect serving to justify and perpetuate class hierarchy while ameliorating certain features.”³⁶ The space of the Chicago Auditorium thus contributes to the accumulation of the proper habits of a self who adheres to the class politics of a capitalist society. 37

Skeggs’s theory of the accumulative self helps students in “Chicago’s Music” understand how class relations shape the most intimate aspects of life, including the construction of the self and its musical habits. The following excerpt from her work provides a productive starting point for class discussion:

The self is part of a system of inscription, exchange, perspective and value-attribution. It is a product of and is shaped by the dominant symbolic that contains and leaks the energies of accumulation, loss and practice through affectivity, dispositions and characteristics. It is always historically and spatially located, especially via national spaces. Yet only some people can accumulate the required cultural capital to become a self, only some people can acquire the right dispositions to become the selves that can be reflexive, and only some selves are seen as capable of acquiring the knowledge for self-monitoring and self-responsibility.3838

While classical music in Chicago never truly achieved the kind of mass popularity sought by Thomas or Peck, it was certainly part of the “dominant symbolic” order of the late nineteenth century city. This dominant symbolic included the set of personal behaviors and values deemed “proper” and the methods of acquisition for learning these behaviors and values. Accumulation of the value of this dominant order required both knowledge of the (new) canon and acquisition of proper listening habits and musical skills to consume this canon in the correct way. Disciplined listening was, as several scholars have shown, an important tactic among the middle and upper classes to portray oneself as properly civilized.³⁷ The etiquette of classical music, its performance aesthetic of a restrained and skillful body, and the hierarchy of the genius composer and subservient performers were all connected to classed discourses of the body. Accumulating the proper perspective on such music and demonstrating one’s body as correctly disciplined, then, was to perform social class in keeping with the capitalist status quo. In this way, musical consumption reproduced class strata in a capitalist society and rationalized inequality as part of a natural order. Understanding how musical practices participate in class politics helps students extend the idea of accumulation toward a fuller theorization of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century self-construction through music.

These values also informed constructions of race in Chicago, especially among members of African American neighborhoods. During the Great Migration, for instance, members of Chicago’s Black communities attempted to use the dominant symbolic as a way to show themselves as proper according to the ideal of this capitalist society. Though Thomas emphasized the white composers of the newly institutionalized classical canon in performances by the Chicago Orchestra, Black middle-class groups used classical music to present themselves as knowledgeable of the highest art music. The way music was covered in theChicago Defender, the city’s first Black newspaper, provides a compelling example of this phenomenon.³⁸ Widely circulated throughout the United States, the 40Defender was a major voice in calls for early twentieth-century uplift. It positioned education, self-improvement, and service to community as ways to fight racism and improve African Americans’ social standing. As Lawrence Schenbeck notes, “uplift” deeply informed how the Defender’s writers covered musical events in the city:

Whereas, for [Defender founder Robert] Abbott, popular music drew its significance from its economic utility and broad appeal, classical music was important because it facilitated “uplift”—was linked to moral improvement and racial “evolution”—and because it conferred social status. In fact, the latter was often cited as proof of the former: racial uplift ideology promoted class distinctions among Blacks as a sign of race progress. For the Black aristocracy, the demonstrated existence of a “better class” of African Americans could be used to refute racist views of them as biologically inferior and unassimilable.³⁹

Here, although clearly bound up with the stakes of racial oppression, the disciplined nature of classical music functioned largely in accordance with the goals of Peck or Thomas. By promoting classical music performers and events, the newspaper could show African Americans as active in “proper” appreciation for the dominant symbolic.

Discussions of classical music were further inflected with gendered divisions of labor. Women did much of the work required to produce classical music in the city’s Black communities, such as organizing and hosting social clubs, recitals, and receptions for visiting performers, among them Marian Anderson. The editors of theChicago Defender regularly identified these women with classical music, as their construction of the ideal feminine was connected to art music, a non-commercial sphere, and activities like hosting. In “Chicago’s Music,” I return to theories of primitive accumulation to further sharpen students’ understandings of how gender, class, and music interact. Federici’s argument serves to reposition primitive accumulation as bound up within intimate social relations, including the gendered organization of the middle-class home. The weaving together of discourses about domesticity with discourses of classical music, along with the public celebration of those practices in the Defender, reinforced the bourgeois norms of capitalist society.⁴⁰ 42

While the examples discussed above show some of the ways that people in Chicago’s capitalist society used classical music to reinforce the dominant status quo, there are also many examples of classical music in the city that critique or nuance such utility. In “Chicago’s Music,” a 1927 performance of Mendelssohn’sElijah by left-wing Jewish singing societies provides a counterexample to the alignment of classical music with pro-capitalist groups. As Michael Ochs’s research has shown, this performance revised the libretto of the popular oratorio to show that the struggles of Jewish people result not from their own failings but from the exploitation of outsiders, as evident in the significant alteration of “Take all the prophets of Baal”:⁴¹

44 4444

Ochs notes that “while the biblical Elijah asks merely to have the Baalites slain, the Yiddish Elijah wants their very structures wiped from the earth and no trace of the traitors themselves left behind,” a substantial amplification of the animosity expressed in the original text.⁴² Students are often surprised by this example, as it complicates their understandings of classical music as a cultural practice. Where the examples about Peck and Thomas show classical music as part of the dominant symbolic, the example of the Jewish societies show how people can appropriate classical repertoire and change its meanings as part of social critique.

A 46 Price’s professional life tells a story of amazing accomplishments—the performance of her Symphony in E Minor by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933 is but one among many. But despite such high-profile successes, Price struggled to expand her career beyond the African American social networks oriented toward promoting art music. To imagine a more expansive and inclusive version of what classical music could be, students in “Chicago’s Music” read Samantha Ege’s essay on Price’s music, including the 46Fantasie Negre no. 1 in E Minor for solo piano (1929) which casts gospel songs in a virtuosic piano style. This work, Ege argues, “aligns [Price’s] approach with an Afro-modernist aesthetic” and places Price in a large Black arts movement in Chicago that rivaled the much more widely known Harlem Renaissance.⁴³ To address such counterexamples, I again turn to Skeggs’s theory of the accumulative self and, in particular, to her concept of “leakage.” As Skeggs argues, “it is the ability of energy to leak beyond its inscribed containment that makes a class struggle. The refusal to accept inscription and be bound by its value is a significant act in challenging the dominant symbolic order.”⁴⁴ Students in “Chicago’s Music” find “leakage” to be especially helpful in understanding how classical music can contain so many seemingly contradictory perspectives on race, labor, and capitalism.⁴⁵

I also employ both Marx’s and Skeggs’s theories when teaching the history of Chicago blues and the city’s attempts to rebrand itself as the “Home of the Blues.” As a movement of people from economically ruinous conditions in the agricultural South to cities in the North where they were often able to find industrial work, the Great Migration itself serves as a useful case of primitive accumulation. Shifting to case studies about music, students read Amy Absher’s scholarship about the Great Migration and the multiple forms of music—including but not limited to jazz, blues, and gospel—that African Americans performed in the city.⁴⁶ These examples demonstrate Skeggs’s processes of inscription as necessary to the formation of the dominant symbolic that frames music of African Americans as somehow lesser than music of white Americans. We then employ Chicago’s long history of segregated musical communities⁴⁷ as a frame to interrogate the racialized commodification of the blues. Historical blues studies demonstrate that, while popular, the genre was considered a low-status music for much of the twentieth century.⁴⁸ Indeed, for much of the 1920s and 1930s, the 52Chicago Defender separated the blues from the narrative of racial uplift in part for fear of reinforcing harmful stereotypes, focusing instead almost exclusively on gospel, church music, and classical music.⁴⁹ In class we read excerpts from Jeff Titon’s study of “race records” (i.e., blues records), which were often marketed with racist myths about Black men and women.⁵⁰ “Chicago’s Music” outlines how, though the 54Defender came to embrace blues, white-authored discussions of the city’s blues clubs either ignored them or presented them in strongly racist terms.⁵¹ White people regularly attended such clubs but employed the perspective of “slumming it” as a way to depict their consumption of blues music as excitingly dangerous.⁵² 56

In “Chicago’s Music,” we analyze the changing treatments of the blues through the capitalist logics of tourism. Discourses around the blues started to change in the 1960s. Here, Skeggs’s notions of inscription again help illustrate the enduring nature of certain aspects of blues practices while also accounting for mainstream white consumers’ broader acceptance of the blues. Students read chapters from David Grazian’s history of Chicago blues clubs and their shifting status. Neighborhoods on the North Side, such as Old Town, positioned themselves as bohemian centers offering a variety of music including Dixieland, experimental jazz, folk music associated with musicians such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and various types of blues. These neighborhoods began to gentrify in the 1970s, and venues increasingly catered to tourists from the white suburbs, from out of state, and eventually from around the world. Blues, by the 1970s, had gained a strong reputation as presenting “authentic” culture, in which the Black bluesman, stereotyped as a gravelly voice singing lyrics about loss, was a representative of an idealized, fictitious past. This representation, Grazian argues, has remained part of the racist caricatures offered in several of the city’s blues clubs since the late 1990s.⁵² The city’s Blues Festival and its tourism of Black neighborhoods similarly reinforce the positioning of the blues as part of a mythical rural past, often (though not always) constraining working musicians to present audiences with a limited range of musical selections and racial tropes. Students come to understand how racialized constructions are used to accumulate both symbolic and economic capital for a few club owners, a handful of investors, and Chicago’s municipal government. 57

All these examples, from the description of Native Americans as sonically “demonic” to Chicago’s attempts to rebrand itself as the “Home of the Blues,” demonstrate how capitalist forms of accumulation interact with sonic/musical histories of the city. They provide a rigorous analysis not only for the fact of racial and gendered oppression but also for the cultural logics that motivated oppression in the first place. Sound and music, in this frame, emerge as crucial forms of social formation wherein the values of a capitalist society shape social structures in ways that are not always immediately obvious to students.⁵³ 58

Conclusions

Incorporating critical treatments of capitalism into musicology pedagogy reveals musical practices in capitalist societies as dynamic—rife with inequities yet still able to challenge hegemonic structures. This dynamism is in fact core to Marx’s theory of capitalism. Many of his more famous writings emphasize this, but dynamism especially permeates Marx’s theorization inCapital of the exchange of commodities. For example, in Chapter 2 he argues that commodities’ “guardians must place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and alienate his own, except through an act to which both parties consent.”⁵⁴ In other words, people (i.e., “guardians”) perform capitalist exchange through intentional choices; commodities only have the value that is recognized in them by the seller and the buyer; and these parties are in a social relation that can change. I emphasize Marx’s language here because it brings the whole point of critique—and by extension the whole point of teaching capitalism in a music history course—into focus. Marx was not simply accounting for the nature of social relations within capitalism. He was attempting to provide the means for 59changing those relations. While capitalism is a dominant social relation, it is also a human activity and is, therefore, subject to change. Indeed, Vanessa Wills lands forcefully on this idea: “As social beings, all that human beings are is made by us, and could be made otherwise. This, its emphasis on how and under what conditions we make our lives, is Marxism’s central insight and key contribution to struggles against oppression.”⁵⁵ The framing of Chicago’s music history with capitalist critique thus not only charts ways that people have worked for a more just world in the past but also empowers students to envision a more just world for their own future.

Further, embracing Marx’s economic and social theories in a musicology course invites students to engage in interdisciplinary projects that build on the disciplinary work of their own primary areas of study. The final project in “Chicago’s Music,” for instance, is an original research paper, and I will briefly describe one student’s research by way of example. An environmental sciences major studied how poorer neighborhoods and neighborhoods with a larger Black population have higher rates of pollution and industrial noise. She connected noise not just with negative health outcomes but also with the history of racist noise ordinances in Chicago. Specifically, she combined her non-musical expertise with Vaillant’s research on how minorities have long been woven into myths of sonic dysregulation and excess⁵⁶ to critique the ways that capitalism reproduces inequality. 61

Finally, there is considerable city-based musicological research that embraces capitalist critique, much of which is appropriate for undergraduate non-music majors. I offer two recent examples. Timothy Taylor’s recent study of Los Angeles music businesses demonstrates how gendered and classed forms of exploitation and identity-making mediate musical work.⁵⁷ This research places the social relations of music making within a broader context of capital accumulation.⁵⁸ And Chris Gibson and John Connell’s research on tourism and identity formation in Memphis demonstrates how capitalism shapes the city’s musics.⁵⁹ Instructors could expand upon tourism studies by assigning students to research their own cities or hometowns to learn about local music histories. But more to the point, for any topic that involves a major modern city, we can encourage students to research where it was built, why, and by whom. They may then consider how that city’s musical cultures developed in tandem with its racialized, gendered, and classed structures. Instructors could then continue to examine the musics of specific places within the city and the time periods in which it developed while enriching those investigations by engaging with capitalist critique. Capitalism is even easily incorporated into the traditional chronological “Western Art Music” survey. To offer but one tangible example, students could be asked to compare the working relations of musicians in contrasting socio-economic systems.⁶⁰ 65

In hope of inspiring further conversation, I conclude with a question and share some preliminary thoughts on answering it. Why has capitalism not been more centered in musicology pedagogy? I wonder if one contributing factor is a failure to follow through with the force—and requisite action—demanded by our own analyses. If, to offer but one pressing example, minstrelsy was a defining feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical life in the United States, one that circulated horrific stereotypes, justified racial violence, and that continues to inform musical tourism in Chicago, then surely we ought to provide students with ways to not only identify and analyze these wrongs but to combat them as well. Foregrounding capitalism in our teaching may empower students to imagine a better world and give them the critical tools to bring it into being.

1. Margaret E. Walker, “Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 10, no. 1 (2020): 5.[↩]
2. Walker, “Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum.” A rich literature considers numerous issues found in less critical forms of musicology pedagogy. Melanie Lowe, “Rethinking the Undergraduate Music History Sequence in the Information Age,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 5, no. 2 (2015): 65–71; Michael A. Figueroa, “Decolonizing ‘Intro to World Music?,’” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 10, no. 1 (2020): 39–57; Travis D. Stimeling and Kayla Tokar, “Narratives of Musical Resilience and the Perpetuation of Whiteness in the Music History Classroom,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 10, no. 1 (2020): 20–38; Loren Kajikawa, “The Possessive Investment in Classical Music: Legacies of White Supremacy in US Schools and Departments of Music,” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines, eds. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, et al., 155–74 (Oakland, CA: UC Press, 2019); Philip Ewell, “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” Music Theory Online 26, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10./mto….illinois press.[↩]
3. On music’s alleged intrinsic altruism, see Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, “Music and the Immorality of Ethnography,” in The Routledge Companion to Ethics and Research in Ethnomusicology, ed. Jonathan P. J. Stock and Beverley Diamond (New York: Routledge, 2023).[↩]
4. Kirsten L. Speyer Carithers, “Music History as Labor History: Rethinking ‘Work’ in Musicology,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 12, no. 1 (2022).[↩]
5. On climate change and capitalism, see Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson, Climate Capitalism: Global Warming and the Transformation of the Global Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Jonathan T. Park, “Climate Change and Capitalism,” Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development, no. 14 (2015): 189–206, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26188749; A classic argument about race and capitalism can be found in Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). On the intertwined relationships among gender, race, and class, see Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017); Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism,” New Left Review 86, no. 86 (2014): 55–72; On geography and capitalism, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1990); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). For discussions of migration and capitalism, see Andrea Komlosy, Work: The Last 1,000 Years, trans. Jacob K. Watson and Loren Balhorn (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2018).[↩]
6. Henry Klumpenhouwer, “Late Capitalism, Late Marxism and the Study of Music,” Music Analysis 20, no. 3 (2001): 367–405, http://www.jstor.org/stable/854476.[↩]
7. Timothy Taylor and Anna Morcom, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Economic Ethnomusicology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Marianna Ritchey, Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019); Javiar F. León, “Introduction: Music, Music Making, and Neoliberalism,” Culture, Theory, and Critique 55, no. 2 (2014): 129–37, https://doi.org/10./14735784..; Dagmar Abfalter and Rosa Reitsamer, eds., Music as Labour: Inequalities and Activism in the Past and Present (New York: Routledge, 2022); Judith Lochhead et al., “Boundaries of the New: American Classical Music at the Turn of the Millennium,” Twentieth-Century Music 16, no. 3 (2019): 373–455, https://doi.org/10./S1478572219000288; Older sources have often implicitly considered capitalist relations but have not explicitly themetized capitalism itself as impacting music. See, for example, William Weber, ed., The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914: Managers, Charlatans, and Idealists (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).[↩]
8. Carithers, “Music History as Labor History.”[↩][↩]
9. Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, The Modern World-System; with a New Prologue, 4 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Komlosy, Work; Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).[↩]
10. Marx’s original arguments in The Communist Manifesto and in Capital consider aspects of colonialism at length. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto: With Selections from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Capital by Karl Marx, ed. Samuel H. Beer (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1955); Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990); For readers new to Marx, a very accessible modern language version of his basic arguments can be found in Hadas Thier, A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2020). For a modern consideration of these arguments in relation to colonialism, see Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Holmwood, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2021).[↩]
11. I offer here a selection of older and newer works simply to highlight the main point that capitalism is a part of musical practices. Timothy D. Taylor, Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Russell Sanjek, David Sanjek, and Russell Sanjek, Pennies from Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the Twentieth Century (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996); Jon Stratton, “Capitalism and Romantic Ideology in the Record Business,” Popular Music 3 (1983): 143–56, https://doi.org/10./S0261143000001604; J. Scott Goble, “Neoliberalism and Music Education: An Introduction,” Action, Criticism, & Theory for Music Education 20, no. 3 (2021): 1–18. John R. Pippen, “Hope, Labour, and Privilege in American New Music,” in Music as Labour: Inequalities and Activism in the Past and Present, ed. Dagmar Abfalter and Rosa Reitsamer (New York: Routledge, 2022), 81–96; Jeremy Wade Morris, “Artists as Entrepreneurs, Fans as Workers,” Popular Music and Society 37, no. 3 (2014): 273–90, https://doi.org/10./03007766..; Regula Bucrkhardt Qureshi, ed., Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002); David Blake, “Musicological Omnivory in the Neoliberal University,” Journal of Musicology 34, no. 3 (2017): 319–53; Eriksson Maria et al., Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019). Katherine M. Sadler, “A Critical Assessment of Entrepreneurship in Music Higher Education,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 20, no. 3 (2021): 132–55; Marek Korczynski, Michael Pickering, and Emma Robertson, eds., Rhythms of Labour: Music at Work in Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Marek Korczynski, Songs of the Factory: Pop Music, Culture, and Resistance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).[↩]
12. For a similar argument about the sociology of music education, see Vincent C. Bates, “Capital, Class, Status, and Social Reproduction in Music Education: A Critical Review,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 22, no. 1 (2023): 54–82, https://doi.org/10./act22…[↩]
13. For a fuller elaboration on the argument that capitalism causes intersecting forms of oppression, see Federici, Caliban and the Witch; Vanessa Wills, “What Could It Mean to Say, ‘Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?,’” Philosophical Topics 46, no. 2 (2018): 229–46; Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory.[↩]
14. Marx, Capital, 1.[↩]
15. See especially work from feminist Marxists such as Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory.[↩]
16. Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).[↩]
17. Major theorists have dealt with extensions of the idea to contexts beyond those initially explored by Marx. The topic remains a major area of debate in the present. See David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register 40 (2004): 63–87; Federici, Caliban and the Witch; Jim Glassman, “Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession, Accumulation by ‘Extra-Economic’ Means,” Progress in Human Geography 30, no. 5 (2006): 608–25, https://doi.org/10./0309132506070172.[↩]
18. As Matt Stahl has shown, recent changes in the recording businesses continue to be shaped by capitalists’ attempts to overcome legal barriers intended to protect music workers. See Matt Stahl, “Primitive Accumulation, the Social Common, and the Contractual Lockdown of Recording Artists at the Threshhold of Digitalization,” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 10, no. 3/4 (2010): 337–55.[↩]
19. See Chapter 26 in Marx, Capital, 1.[↩]
20. Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2020).[↩]
21. For example, Vanessa Willis unpacks the ways that Marx and Engels critiqued gendered social relations under capitalism, but her argument necessarily synthesizes passages from The Communist Manifesto and The German Ideology. Wills, “What Could It Mean;” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 1998); Engels and Marx, The Communist Manifesto.[↩]
22. Federici, Caliban and the Witch.[↩]
23. Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck, City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893–1934 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).[↩]
24. Irving Cutler, Chicago: Metropolis of the Mid-Continent, 4th ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip062/2005031343.html.[↩]
25. LaPier and Beck, City Indian, 15.[↩]
26. James B. LaGrand, Indian Metropolis: Native Americans in Chicago, 1945-75 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).[↩]
27. See Northwestern’s interactive exhibition online at https://www.northwestern.edu/native-american-and-indigenous-peoples/.[↩]
28. John-Carlos Perea, Intertribal Native American Music in the United States: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, Global Music Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Nora Lloyd et al., Chicago’s 50 Years of Powwows (Chicago: Arcadia, 2004).[↩]
29. Cutler, Chicago: Metropolis of the Mid-Continent.[↩]
30. Ellen M. Litwicki, “‘Our Hearts Burn with Ardent Love for Two Countries’: Ethnicity and Assimilation at Chicago Holiday Celebrations, 1876–1918,” Journal of American Ethnic History 19, no. 3 (2000): 3–34, at 6, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27502578.[↩]
31. Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture.[↩]
32. Derek W. Vaillant, “Sounds of Whiteness: Local Radio, Racial Formation, and Public Culture in Chicago, 1921–1935,” American Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2002): 25–66, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30042215. See also Derek Vaillant, Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and Music in Chicago, 1873–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).[↩]
33. Vaillant, “Sounds of Whiteness,” 31.[↩]
34. For a more extended treatment of minstrelsy, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Revised ed. (New York: Verso, 2007); Jenifer L. Barclay, “Disability, Race, and Gender on the Stage in Antebellum America,” in The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, eds. Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 251–68. For a consideration of minstrelsy and musicological discourse, see Matthew D. Morrison, “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72, no. 3 (2019): 781–823, https://doi.org/10./jams…..[↩]
35. Mark Clague, “The Industrial Evolution of the Arts: Chicago’s Auditorium Building (1889–) as Cultural Machine,” The Opera Quarterly 22, no. 3-4 (2006): 477–511, https://doi.org/10./oq/kbn007.[↩]
36. Clague, “The Industrial Evolution of the Arts,” 483.[↩]
37. James Deaville, “The Well-Mannered Auditorzones of Attention and the Imposition of Silence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries, eds. Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer ,56–76 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Christina Bashford, “Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer, 187–206 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).[↩]
38. Lawrence Schenbeck, “Music, Gender, and ‘Uplift’ in the ‘Chicago Defender,’ 1927-1937,” Musical Quarterly 81, no. 3 (1997): 344–70, http://www.jstor.org/stable/742322.[↩]
39. Schenbeck, “Music, Gender, and ‘Uplift,’” 350.[↩]
40. For a different elaboration of the gendering of bourgeois norms through music, see Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).[↩]
41. Michael Ochs, “Welcoming Elijah in 1927 Chicago: Mendelssohn in Yiddish Socialist Clothing,” American Music 29, no. 1 (2011): 85–110, https://doi.org/10./americanmusic…, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10./americanmusic….[↩]
42. Ochs, “Welcoming Elijah in 1927 Chicago,” 97.[↩]
43. Ege, “Chicago, the ‘City We Love to Call Home!’,” 23.[↩]
44. Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture, 13.[↩]
45. “Chicago’s Music” has other opportunities for demonstrating resilience among African American communities. Histories of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) show how African American artists created new communities in direct opposition to commercialized and radicalized barriers. See George Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). For an analysis of how music history textbooks have treated minstrelsy, see Joseph Byrd, “Whitewashing Blackface Minstrelsy in American College Textbooks,” Popular Muisc and Society 32, no. 1 (2009): 77–86. Stimeling and Tokar develop the idea of resilience in music history pedagogy in Stimeling and Tokar, “Narratives of Musical Resilience and the Perpetuation of Whiteness in the Music History Classroom.”[↩]
46. Amy Absher, The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900-1967 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014).[↩]
47. Absher, The Black Musician and the White City.[↩]
48. David Grazian, Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).[↩]
49. Schenbeck, “Music, Gender, and ‘Uplift.’”[↩]
50. Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis, 2nd ed., Cultural Studies of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).[↩]
51. Grazian, Blue Chicago; Vaillant, “Sounds of Whiteness.” See also Chad C. Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).[↩]
52. Grazian, Blue Chicago.[↩][↩]
53. For distinctions between a capitalist economy and capitalist society, see Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode.”[↩]
54. Marx, Capital, 1, 178.[↩]
55. Wills, “What Could It Mean,” 245.[↩]
56. Derek Vaillant, “Peddling Noise: Contesting the Civic Soundscape of Chicago, 1890–1913,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 96, no. 3 (2003): 257–87, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40193997.[↩]
57. Timothy D. Taylor, Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023).[↩]
58. James P. Kraft, Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890–1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Michael James Roberts, Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock ‘N’ Roll, the Labor Question, and the Musicians’ Union, 1942–1968 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).[↩]
59. Chris Gibson and John Connell, “Music, Tourism and the Transformation of Memphis,” Tourism Geographies 9, no. 2 (May 1, 2007): 160–90, https://doi.org/10./14616680701278505; See also Zandria F. Robinson, This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014).[↩]
60. 65. A good example of such a project might compare musical labor in the eighteenth century with labor in the twenty-first century in Great Britain. See Deborah Adams Rohr, The Careers of British Musicians, 1750–1850: A Profession of Artisans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Neil Smith and Rachel Thwaites, “The Composition of Precarity: ‘Emerging’ Composers’ Experiences of Opportunity Culture in Contemporary Classical Music,” British Journal of Sociology 70, no. 2 (2019): 589–609, https://doi.org/10./1468-4446.; Hettie Malcomson, “Composing Individuals: Ethnographic Reflections on Success and Prestige in the British New Music Network,” Twentieth-Century Music 10, no. 1 (2013): 115–36.[↩]