Musical Labor and the Nashville Studio System

Many of the most iconic recordings of the Nashville Sound era gained popularity not simply because of the recording artist whose name appeared on the labels of the singles and albums that contained them, but because of the contributions of Nashville’s session musicians who crafted arrangements and “hook” motifs. Yet, for the most part, these session musicians were never credited and received only a seemingly small one-time fee for their efforts. This chapter considers the creative impact of Nashville’s session musicians through a careful examination of several chart-topping Nashville Sound–era recordings, exploring the ways that the arrangements and “hook” motifs that they created shaped the works. Moreover, this chapter suggests that, although session musicians were seldom credited for their work, many of them presented clear artistic identities that are anonymously visible across a wide spectrum of recordings.

Exnominating Turk, Hypernominating çingene

The dramatic political shift from the Ottoman Imperial polity to that of an ethnonational state was implemented by creating the “Turk” as the singular subject citizen of the new Republic. To shore up a new national identity through contrast against non-Turkish others, culture power holders deployed musical discourses that effectively folded in qualities and attributes of “non-Turkish others” into the representations of çingene and negative evaluations of Romani musical labor. This strategy enabled “others” to disappear on the one hand and to hypermark çingene as the epitome of alterity against which Turkish music could be positively valued. This complex set of processes enabled the creation of Turkish folk and classical genres as legitimated categories, which formed the basis of a national musical canon. Against these structural political and cultural transformations, a critical reading of biographies and melancholy reminiscences about Romani artists Nasip Hanım and Tahsin Bey discloses the extraordinary and yet everyday contributions of professional Romani musicians. These artists mediated class and ethnic differences while maintaining musical practices that were undergoing dramatic cultural management.

Business, Transnationalism, and Patrimony

This article examines how musicians involved in the government sponsored music scene in Recife, the capital of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, (meta)musically perform different versions of the ‘entrepreneurial self,’ a form of neoliberal subjectivity. Through comparing specific musicians’ practices and narratives, I argue Pernambucan state sponsorship is a mechanism which redefines citizenship on entrepreneurial terms and reinforces structural inequality. As government programs provide new opportunities to formalize and professionalize their labor, musicians face more bureaucratic and socioeconomic challenges that require them to broaden their musical labor to include skills like social media marketing and grant proposal writing. These expectations are difficult enough for middle-class, educated musicians to meet, but even harder for marginalized, lower-class, and racialized citizens to manage. By comparing how three musicians construct themselves as business-oriented, transnational, or patrimonial entrepreneurs, the article makes explicit what similar studies suggest, but often leave implicit: professionalism and entrepreneurialism are increasingly interdependent. Furthermore, while the entrepreneurial self is predicated on autonomy, these musicians' autonomy paradoxically depends on a combination of social networks and state sponsorship. In sum, the article reveals how individuals are creating new subjectivities to adapt to changing economic conditions.

Schumann and the Economization of Musical Labor

Chapter 4 details Robert Schumann’s evolution from an eager and fluent improviser into a composer who advocated writing music away from the piano entirely. His evolution demonstrates the growing polarization between improvisation and composition, modes of music-making that were generally viewed as mutually beneficial until the 1830s. His early, piano-centered output provides clues into how certain transitional and rhetorical strategies were rooted in keyboard improvisational practices, but consciously invested with a “depth” or “psychology” that gave them a romantic cast. The chapter’s interpretive lens is then broadened to consider how Schumann’s anxiety over improvisation was shaped by an “ethos of economy” then common to the educated classes. Improvisation thrived on certain anti-economic impulses—a dilated sense of temporal unfolding, a strenuous type of performer training, a risk of inefficacious communication—that ran counter to bourgeois ethical codes such as the containment of excess and the rational ordering of available resources.