Please join us for “Music in need of some explanation: Social Media as Labor in Contemporary Classical Music” with John Pippen (CSU Music faculty) on Wednesday, April 23 at 5 pm in LSC 304-06.

For the past thirty years, social media has been integral to how contemporary classical ensembles made their music valuable. My paper places social media in an ethnographic and historical context to consider how musicians produce value through their labor. In the 2000s, such media fed optimistic narratives of musicians as people doing what they loved, in a sense not “working” at all. I argue that musicians use social media to create “production-tracking use values.” Such use-values are distinguished by making consumers aware of the method of production. I historicize social media as functioning like program notes, as media that foreground the human labor power of musical production. Ensemble members appear as small business owners deeply involved in crafting musical art. In this way they reproduce long standing contradictions about music as both work and as somehow not work. Analyzing social media posts as creating production-tracking use values explains how musicians can convincingly cast themselves as ideal workers. In contemporary capitalism, the contradiction between doing what you love and working for a living has been generalized as ideal for all people. Studying musical labor demonstrates how people reproduce enduring fantasies about work in capitalism.

John Pippen is assistant professor of Ethnomusicology at Colorado State University. His primary research has been an extended ethnographic study of the new music scene in Chicago. Blending approaches from labor studies and aesthetic theory, Dr. Pippen writes about struggle in the classical music scene in the United States.