In ethnomusicological discourse, “music” is routinely dismissed not only for its coloniality, but also for its abstraction. However, the discipline’s “reproach” (Osborne 2004) of music’s abstractness may have been too hasty. This paper argues that a re-thinking of “music” via the theory of “real abstraction” (Sohn-Rethel 1978, Toscano 2008) can allow the concept to regain critical purchase. For real abstraction theorists, abstraction is not a process of thought, but a product of social practice. By adopting this view, this paper argues for an account of “music” as emerging out of increasing exchange and interaction of diverse sonic practices from around the globe across a long and continuing modernity. Far from being a mere abstraction imposed by the West, music comes to be understood instead as precisely a real abstraction that crystallizes out of colonialism, racial capitalism, and globalization. Through examples drawn from circuits of exchange between West Africa, Iberia, and the Caribbean, this paper outlines the process of music’s constitution through real abstraction, highlighting in particular its tendency toward ceaseless material and conceptual growth. Re-cast in this light, it becomes clear that the problem with music is not simply its abstractness, but its voracious appetite toward the whole world of sounded practice (Robinson 2020). Ultimately, recognizing this monstrous (McNally 2011) aspect of “music” and its alliance to growth establishes a new basis for a critical approach to music and social theory.

Climate catastrophe, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, labor exploitation, and colonial appropriation: capitalism's infinite growth model is driving systemic inequality and environmental collapse by imposing a single, finite, and destructive one-world ontology on the “pluriverse” (Escobar 2018). In response, post-growth studies has emerged as a transdisciplinary field that investigates ecological and equitable limits to capitalism’s inherent demand for endless growth, in ways that I suggest are productive for ethnomusicologists. In this paper, I argue for more directly integrating post-growth approaches from degrowth studies into ethnomusicology. Doing so will enable us to further develop inquiries, theories, and methods toward fostering alternatives that contest unequal and unsustainable systems of endless growth. I begin by introducing degrowth and its associated models and movements. I next discuss the work in economic and ecological studies on mass mediated music and its relevance for understanding and critiquing capitalism’s growth imperative. I then shift attention to a multidisciplinary review of music studies that discuss decolonial, decelerated, non-productivist, and non-consumerist ideas and practices, with a heightened consideration of ethnomusicology’s role in this discussion. I conclude with a call for an ethnomusicology that more seriously engages with its own history as a resource-intensive discipline, and that proceeds in ways that better support our living worlds.

In the south of Veracruz, women's labor contributions in community fandangos and in the circulation of son Jarocho as a commercialized genre are consistently undervalued in musical and academic spaces. Notably, many all-women groups have, in recent years, formed in response to the absence of women in positions of creative and economic authority in the region, with women-dominated performance groups emerging as early as 2007. In this paper, I consider how two of these contemporary groups highlight their (re)productive labor contributions in the fandango, in performance, and to son Jarocho as a genre by not only exercising their creative and improvisatory capacities in performances and recording sessions, but also by centering examples of female productivity and land management in their lyrics. I first dissect how they frame and situate their creative and care-based labor within a standardized set of repertoire, while also considering how they reimagine their reproductive work as productive, visible labor. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and Marxist feminist writings on social reproduction, I argue that these all-women groups are revealing a labor of care that permeates and sustains musical practice in southern Veracruz, but that is underrepresented in the music's spatial, corporeal, sonic, and poetic manifestations. I further consider the role of socially reproductive labor and care work in the process of genre formation, canonization, and commercialization, specifically through a Mexican nationalist framework, questioning what we might observe when songwriting and performance are treated as a form of reproductive labor that sustains communities instead of capital.

What can music studies contribute in the face of climate catastrophe, cannibalistic capitalism, and rising fascism? These world-destroying threats may seem too great to be fought with music. However, as Judith Butler (2024) reminds us, we require practices of imagination—like musicking—to create a “counter-imaginary” of a world in which we all can live, love, move, and breathe without fear of destruction. In this paper, I merge ethnography with plant ecology to model a new approach for valorizing the counter-imaginaries that jazz musicians offer for contesting capital’s limitless appetite. As a participant-observer in the St. Louis jazz community since 2018, I have found that musicians labor according to “jazz values,” such as collectivity, interdependence, and intergenerational care. These values are rooted in Black knowledge ways and also embraced by scholars of degrowth and social reproduction. Indeed, musical collectivities have long operated alternative value systems that “open possibilities towards imagining and enacting alternative post-capitalist, degrowth futures,” in other words, that are “postfigurative” (Muñoz-Sueiro and Kallis 2024). I suggest we nurture these radical possibilities, for they are the seeds of alternative futures. Considering the prairieland as interlocutor, instead of growth, I propose spread as a form of dissemination that embodies the tough resilience of Missouri’s prairie grasses and flowers that spread so exuberantly in poor, disturbed soil, putting down deep soil-saving roots. The prairie ecology thus offers a method for embracing the imaginative practices already in our midst and spreading their anticapitalist lessons to postfigure a different future into being.