Sound and Sociality in Modern Markets: Three Perspectives on Music and Commoditization
Chair(s): Duncan William Reehl (Boston University), Brian Barone (Berklee College of Music), Carlos Cuestas (CUNY Graduate Center)
Discussant(s): Marié Abe (University of California, Berkeley)
Across cultures and since at least the nineteenth century, commodities and markets have stalked music and musicians. The various ways of commodifying music—and the markets this commodification creates—puts pressure on and reshapes sonic practices, even as it opens new possibilities for practitioners. Thinking with the concept of the commodity implicates technology, from print to streaming apps. Considering the market opens up issues of circulation and the production of meanings. Explicitly and otherwise, such topics have been of longstanding interest in ethnomusicology, especially of the overlapping subjects of the “World Music” and music technology industries (e.g., Feld 1988; Théberge 1997; Meintjes 2003; Greene and Porcello 2010; Taylor 2014). This session returns attention to the commodity and the market as basic concepts, asking how they might serve economic ethnomusicology today. With three papers and a response, it highlights different perspectives for understanding commoditization and the market. The first paper addresses how commoditized spiritual goods affect religiosity when Japanese Buddhist priests–more or less ambivalently–participate in New Age spiritual marketplaces as an “experimental” practice for finding new parishioners as their temples face looming economic and demographic instability. The second paper addresses how son jarocho practitioners navigate the challenges of the music’s commodification–not least that a reputation for anticommercialism has become a trope of its marketing. The third paper lends a historical angle by using the case of nineteenth-century Cuban contradanza to suggest ways of thinking beyond the commodity in theories of music and value under capitalism.
Presentations in the Session
Sounding Japanese Buddhism in the Attention Economy and Spiritual Marketplace
Duncan William Reehl
Boston University
Scholars such as Jonathan Nelson and Anne Allison have examined how Japanese Buddhist priests adapt to social and technological shifts through innovative practices such as establishing temple cafés and restructuring mortuary rites. While sound surfaces peripherally in such studies, its role in mediating religious change remains under-theorized. This paper asks: How do shifts in sounding, musicking, and listening within Buddhist revitalization efforts illuminate broader transformations in religiosity? I argue that Japanese Buddhism’s blending with transnational “spiritual marketplaces” (Roof 1999; Shimazono 2007) via commodities, technologies, and discourses tied to New Age spirituality (Heelas 1996) and the “California Ideology” (Barbrook and Cameron 1995) reveals how cybernetic systems modulate affective processes of transcendence. Through ethnography with experimental Buddhist practitioners and a case study of an event called Zen 2.0, I trace phenomena such as healing music, sutra NFTs, meditation apps, and sound baths that align institutional Buddhism with techno-spiritual self-optimization. These sonic phenomena actively reconfigure religious experience. By examining how sound articulates Buddhist traditions with neoliberal discourses of privatized spirituality and techno-utopianism, this paper demonstrates: (1) the rise of algorithmic soteriologies, where priests rebrand transcendence as passive, palliative “healing”; and (2) the unintended neoliberalization of Buddhist affect, shifting soteriology from communal self-effacement to individualized emotional management. While traditional practices persist intergenerationally, the valorization of techno-spiritual palliation risks naturalizing a future where transcendence is untethered from communal ethics. In short, this paper shows how sound plays a role in institutional innovation, and how the circulation of commodities produces religio-spiritual meanings in the 21st century.
Strumming Against Capital: Decommoditizing Son Jarocho through Radical Collectivities
Carlos Cuestas
CUNY Graduate Center
“Why do you play son jarocho?” asks Sael to son jarocho practitioners (jaraneros) willing to engage in conversation. Sael is a senior member of the Colectivo Altepee in Acayucan, Veracruz. His question implies the common yet unspoken knowledge of son jarocho’s commoditization. Common because many jaraneros use this genre to form bands, record, tour, and earn money. Unspoken because son jarocho’s discourses of resistance, community, and anticaptitalism are often used as marketing.
Sael’s question is a confrontation. It critiques how son-jarocho-as-genre coopts its capacity for community organizing through sounding in exchange for participating in the music market toward individual gain. It recognizes how the commoditization of son jarocho infiltrates the collective consciousness of the practice, defanging its political potentials. Through ethnographic research, this paper analyzes how the Colectivo Altepee in Veracruz and the Jarochicanos in Chicago answer Sael’s question. I argue that these two collectives deliberately and outspokenly work to decommoditize son-jarocho-as-genre through resignifying its collectivity. By eliminating the commercial telos from their positioning as collectives, I explore how their approach to son jarocho’s communal episodes (workshops, fandangos, rehearsals) are turned into a gateway toward larger political consciousness. Such consciousness, I argue, stems from integrating into their practice Indigenous knowledges, Zapatista values, affective attachments, the ethos of labor organizing, and a reconfiguration of relations between the human and natural worlds. In sum, this paper demonstrates how the Altepee and Jarochicanos forge radical collectivities through a practice of son jarocho that eschews commoditization in search for transcending political and communal possibilities.
Domesticating Cuban Contradanza: Music, Social Reproduction, and the Value Form
Brian Barone
Berklee College of Music
Any answer to the puzzle of music’s value under capitalism would seem to run through an analysis of the commodity form. However, recent work on music and value has taken different approaches: from arguments that the value of musical commodities is ambiguously connected to “music” per se (e.g., Beaster-Jones 2016, Marshall 2019) to analyses that build from anthropological, ecological, and other theories of value (e.g., Steingo and Moreno 2016, Morcom 2020, Taylor 2024). This paper contributes to these discourses via a case study at the dawn of Cuba’s popular music industry. In that context, it argues, music’s relationship to value was less about commoditization than it was about music’s role in the social reproduction of the hierarchies of class, gender, and race that sustain the value form in the first place. This argument unfolds through a study of contradanza: a dance form originating in the social life of colonial Cuba’s black and mixed-race artisan class, but which, starting in the 1830s, became strongly associated with the domestic pianism of white, bourgeois young women. This “domestication” of contradanza answered elite anxieties over public dancing as an opportunity for class, gender, and race mixing. And although the process was largely mediated by printed sheet music, such scores rarely circulated as commodities, more often functioning as advertisements or tokens of social relations. Thus, this paper ultimately argues for a theory of music and value that integrates music’s role in social reproduction with its relation to value through production and circulation.
