On the Production of Alternative Music Places: Im-materiality, Labor, and Meaning

Abstract

This article critiques emphases on materiality to the exclusion of immateriality, and vice versa, in the study of place-making. It limns materiality in relation to immateriality, offered as im-materiality, in the creation of artist-initiated venues. On the one hand, musician-cum-venue proprietors harness labor not simply for economic expediency but also to make places commensurate with a web of ideology, belonging, and aesthetics predicated on distinction. On the other, the processes they enlist illustrate that fashioning sites entails im-materiality. The article argues for a fluid understanding of materiality and immateriality in the production of alternative music places that attends more fully to the symbiotic nature of motivations, labor, and social, political, and economic domains, with implications for a variety of arts contexts, scenes, and genres.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Brian Drye, Sylvie Courvoisier, Rema Hasumi, Ikue Mori, and John Zorn for generously granting the interviews and written communication quoted in this article; Miki Kaneda, Ofer Gazit, and Tyshawn Sorey for their insights and feedback; and the numerous other New York-based musicians and cultural actors who have taken the time to speak to her informally about these issues. Finally, the author thanks this journal’s anonymous reviewers for providing insightful feedback.

Notes

1. Janet L. Abu-Lughod asserts that the Lower East Side’s cycles of investment and disinvestment illustrate a wider concern for the disputation over contemporary urban spaces (1–15). Similarly, Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso argue that contemporary studies of place illuminate “power struggles or…displacement as histories of annexation, absorption, and resistance” (5).

2. An exception to this is Stanbridge’s observation that, in Toronto, cultural subsidies fund spaces and buildings, rather than artists and cultural production (184–96).

3. While beyond the scope of the present article, it should be noted that artists have often been complicit in their role in neighborhood reinvestment, which has frequently led to the displacement of long-time, local minority residents. For a critical examination of this issue in the Lower East Side, see Mele. The author would like to thank one of the journal’s anonymous reader’s for emphasizing this point.

4. Tracing the chasm between aesthetic ideology and place-making in large-scale cultural institutions, Born’s and Wilf’s writings have figured considerably in my thinking through these issues.

5. Hardt and his autonomist Marxist colleagues have been criticized for being overly optimistic (downplaying problems of exploitation and inequality) and their inattention to gender and materiality. For an overview and response, see Hesmondhalgh and Baker (159–61). My point is not that such criticism does not warrant merit, but that the work may still be mined for the insights that it does offer.

6. I follow Drott’s assertion that even seemingly distant theoretical perspectives allow for the possibility of “disclos[ing] each other’s blind spots” (3).

7. This critique relates to that located by Hesmondhalgh and Baker: “The idea of immaterial labour is not really based on any adequate theoretical or empirical engagement with the specificity of culture, or of cultural production” (159–60, emphasis added).

8. Taylor’s conceptualization of the music-commodity as “always in flux, always caught up in historical, cultural, and social forces” (282–83) has relevance for my topic as well. While I examine neither the music-commodity nor commodifying per se, a consideration of economy and labor must also attend to context, or, as he observes, “whatever the music-commodity is, it is utterly dependent on the circumstances surrounding its commodification” (283).

9. Sources for these institutions and scenes are, in order: Gann 24; Hendricks and Mead 184–85; Banes; Flynt 65; Beal; Piekut; Potter; Morrissey; Heller; Iyer; Barzel, New York; Currie.

10. Rather than map the particular lineages of these new performance spaces and their ilk, an aim that is beyond the scope of this article, the purpose here is to acknowledge that musician-proprietors’ latest efforts have been preceded by numerous interventions by artists across several overlapping scenes and genres.

11. This quotation is taken from an online reception survey that allowed for anonymous responses.

12. Lamb largely acts as a financial partner for Ibeam, so this account represents Drye’s perspective on its management. Unless otherwise stated, monetary data and ethnography reflect a period of field research from June 2009 through December 2011.

13. All quotations by Drye are taken from this interview.

14. For a discussion of performance versus presentational music and a scintillating critique of this taxonomy, see Turino and Manuel, respectively.

15. Drye noted his participation and performance of “everything from an improvising chamber group, my own…quartet [for] guitar, trombone, drums, and trumpet…a big band called the Four Bags...I also play a lot of world music [and] a lot of klezmer music.”

16. Scholarship on Zorn has largely consisted of formal (J. Brackett, John Zorn; New York Noise 86–144) and critical analysis, rather than considering him in relation to economy, labor, and the cultural industries.

17. At the time of this correspondence, Zorn was nearly in the black on his investment due to meticulous management (Correspondence…Author). Unless otherwise stated, monetary data and ethnography reflect a period of field research from June 2009 through December 2011.

18. Over a ten-year period, the building housing the Stone has increased in market value from $310,000 for 2004–05 to $1,291,000 for 2014–15 (see New York City).

19. The sale of limited edition products is not new to consumers of musical material culture. In 1993 and 2004, for example, Steinway employed a similar sales strategy with positive results, offering 140th anniversary and star-performer (Roger Williams) pianos. Their competitor, Yamaha, followed suit, offering the Elton John Limited Edition Signature Series Red Piano in 2006 (Balachander and Stock 336).

20. The Stone website began to specify a $20 benefit concert entry fee in 2006, which it later raised to $25 in 2011.

21. They also affirm Shelemay’s assertion that, as much academic discourse is opaque in nature, “the term ‘community’ provides an opportunity…to have a conversation that does not require translation” (350) for non-specialists.

22. Previously this was a paid position held by multi-instrumentalist-composer Matthew Welch.

23. As David Brackett reminds us, “One Marxist critique of mass entertainment maintains that in a capitalist society, a work of art masks its ideology by effacing the means of its production: in other words, hiding the means of production serves to ‘naturalize’ the text” (312).