Contemporary Capitalism and Contemporary Ensembles: Branding, Autonomy and the Value of New Music Labour

This article interrogates the influence of capitalist ideologies on new music in the United States. Following Karl Miller (Citation2008. “Working Musicians: Exploring the Rhetorical Ties between Musical Labour and Leisure.” Leisure Studies 27 (4): 427–441.) I focus on labour as a way to interrogate branding and autonomy, specifically in the work of three Chicago-based new music ensembles, Eighth Blackbird, Ensemble Dal Niente, and Third Coast Percussion. At regional, national, and international levels, all three ensembles are widely respected in new music. Drawing on both public facing labour and on my ethnographic fieldwork, I show how new music ensembles use brands to market new music and accumulate symbolic and economic forms of capital. New music ensembles’ branding demonstrates their embrace of profit motives. This constitutes a shift in new music’s ideologies of work. A strict art versus commodity distinction no longer dominates in the United States scene that I study, though it continues to shape how people evaluate new music and the privileging of notions of autonomy. This shift stems from changes within new music and from changes in capitalism associated with neoliberalism. I argue that critically interrogating brands reveals that the work culture of new music is highly amenable to exploitation and that this indicates a limit to autonomy. New music work thus overlaps with and differs from other capitalist forms of labour.