When the soprano singing Floria Tosca, the titular character in Puccini’s opera, flings herself off the set piece to her fictional death at the work’s conclusion, scene shop foreman John Del Bono’s work begins. After making sure the soprano lands on thick foam, he helps her onto a board with wheels and rushes her downstage for her bow. Historically, Del Bono’s performance in this moment would hardly be considered a manifestation of the opera equal to that of the soprano he is pushing. In this presentation, however, I argue attending to the work of Del Bono and his stagehand colleagues at the San Francisco Opera illuminates an alternative mode of operatic performance in which materiality, genre, and invisible labor are intertwined. Drawing on ethnographic work with the San Francisco Opera, my paper examines how stagehands redefine the genre of opera through backstage performances before, during and after the opera itself is sung. I argue these contributions should be understood as stand-alone representations of each opera itself, meaning that the stagehand’s experience might be understood as equivalent to a score or production. While operatic performance has drawn the attention of ethnographers (Atkinson 2006, Steigerwald Ille 2021; 2024, Sikau 2023), such work has focused on the work of singers and directors, not those technicians whose labor offers another lens on contemporary US opera. In putting studies of materiality in dialogue with the embodied experience of operatic labor, I offer new conceptualizations of how different types of musicking are defined, constructed, and valorized.

Despite the two activities having little overlap, a significant number of singers of Sacred Harp music are also rabid dancers on the Contra Dance scene. The experiences are fundamentally different (most Contra dancers do not play in the instrumental band and Sacred Harp singers sit and sing a capella), and the genres have no common repertoire. This paper considers theoretical avenues to describe a common phenomenological experience practitioners of these performance arts experience in the moment of performance, explored through interlocutor’s testimony gathered from fieldwork sites across New England. Dance scholars, like Tomie Hahn and Cynthia Jean Cohn Bull, have investigated the affective properties of dance, a part of the anthropoidal “sensory turn.” Music educators have explored the experiential knowledge transmitted in pedagogical situations, though mostly focusing on instrumentalists and invoking strands of ANT and Mediation theories to study the organology of these encounters. Some ludo-musicological articles, such as those by Kiri Miller, have considered the phenomonology of solo musical acts. This paper will apply these frameworks to communal musical and danced activities in order to describe a common affective complex inherent in their mode of participation. This literature suggests that the rules of performance have an inherent ‘meaning’ or ‘truth’ experienced by participants. Instead of seeking an abstracted truth content, my ethnographic research explores how contemporary participants make meaning for themselves in dialogue with narratives established by revival activists. When revived, these narrative echoed New Left social values which modern participants update to contemporary sexual and gender politics.

Barbershop harmony is a form of four-part a cappella singing practiced by around 70,000 singers worldwide. The rise of modern barbershop singing closely follows the timeline for late-stage capitalism and subscribes to its market logics; namely, success, competition, meritocracy, and self-improvement (Verhaeghe, 2014). From its 1930s reinvention as a formalised “genre” (Döhl, 2014), barbershop has positioned a complex contest system at its centre and included a plethora of educational events that centre on upskilling its members. Through a combination of auto-ethnographic and ethnographic examples, this paper explores the neoliberal logics at play in three types of barbershop events: conventions (where competitions happen), “harmony brigades” (weekend quartetting events), and “afterglows” (informal party after an event). We make two central arguments. Firstly, drawing on scholars such as Harvey (2005), Verhaeghe (2014), and Wilson (2024), we demonstrate the ways barbershop organisations and their members subscribe to the neoliberal focus on self-improvement and success. Secondly, we highlight how some barbershop events and activities (such as afterglows) can challenge neoliberal market logics. As such, this paper provides a vital contribution to the study of ethnomusicology: while we focus specifically on the barbershop style, this paper can provide a greater understanding of the neoliberal influence on other styles of musicking that also centre around competition and upskilling. Overall, we argue that, while barbershop provides a great sense of joy and community to its singers, these effects will remain limited so far as they subscribe to the market logics of success and self-improvement.