Composing on Commission: Entrepreneurship and the Changing Social Basis of Popular Music Collaboration in Postsocialist Tirana, Albania

Abstract

Since the 1990s, economic reforms in postsocialist Albania have reorganised the social basis of popular music production. Administered within a state-subsidised economy during socialism, production has been transformed by the penetration of economic capital into relations between composers and singers. This essay analyses how composers conceptualise and manage their careers in order to examine more broadly how neoliberalism contributes to the reshaping of artistic subjectivities in one postsocialist context. Celebrated locally as a withdrawal of government, the postsocialist state's desubsidisation of popular music has, I argue, shifted new obligations for self-government on to agents. In pursuing entrepreneurship, composers selectively adopt socialist-era ideas and practices in order to manage their conduct within the postsocialist music economy. Composers' cultivation of entrepreneurial strategies in neoliberalising Tirana demonstrates how market logics do not simply efface preexisting aesthetic dispositions, but rather repurpose them toward new ends.

Acknowledgements

I thank Jane C. Sugarman, Frederick Moehn, David K. Blake, Keri-Ann Tochka, and the journal's two anonymous referees for their suggestions on this material. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2010 Second International Dissertation Workshop, ‘New Directions in Ethnomusicology’ in Hannover, Germany and the Society for Ethnomusicology 2010 meetings in Los Angeles, CA. I also gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments I received at these presentations.

Notes

¹ In cases where publication might potentially damage the business or personal relationships on which my interlocutors depend, I employ pseudonyms or alter minor identifying details. I mark the first usage of a pseudonym with an asterisk where it occurs in the text. This essay derives from ten months of ethnographic and archival research in Tirana, Albania funded by an American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship in East European Studies during 2009–2010. In researching the political economy of popular music-making in state-socialist subsidy and its transformation by capitalism, I conducted interviews with composers, singers, lyricists and producers, observed first hand the organisation of a singing contest, and followed several other televised festivals closely through the popular media.

² Following Verdery (in Asad et al. 1997), I approach the former eastern bloc as an opportunity for ‘describing the penetration of capital into noncapitalist ways of organizing the world’ (716); I employ the term ‘music economy’ after Perullo's usage, as it ‘usefully captures the commercialization of music without relying on preconceptions and customs associated with an industry’ (2011: xvi).

³ Legislation allowing rural households small vegetable plots and some livestock was passed only following agonistic debates in 1988, a full decade after such reforms would have eased widespread food shortages (Progni 2010: 35–45). On informal music economics elsewhere in the eastern bloc, see Rice (1994: Chapter 9), Taylor (2006), and Zhuk (2010).

⁴ Each example derives from March 1993 articles published in Tirana's arts newspaper, Drita, by author Faruk Myrtaj and film director Rikard Ljarja.

⁵ ‘Government’ after Michel Foucault's usage (1991) may be broadly understood as any ‘activity aiming to shape, guide, or affect the conduct of some person or persons’, a ‘zone of research’ that examines ‘government as an activity [that] could concern the relation between self and self, private interpersonal relations involving some form of control or guidance, [and] relations within social institutions and communities’ (Gordon 1991: 2–3).

⁶ In this respect, my approach below diverges from scholarship on postsocialism that has examined, in Elizabeth Dunn's phrasing, the ‘failure’ of neoliberal policy as its techniques are ‘blunted, transmuted, or compromised’ by actors drawing on socialist-era resources (1999: 126).

⁷ The relationship between Tirana's local music economy and an emerging, transnational Albanian-language mediascape, especially as anchored by Prishtina, Kosova (Sugarman 1998), lies beyond the scope of this article. While producers and singers in both Tirana and Prishtina collaborate with one another, Tirana-based composers often told me they lacked contacts with Kosovar Albanians.

⁸ One private song contest is notoriously skewed toward a small ‘clan’. Of 57 songs broadcast at a festival in November 2009, for example, five individuals produced 44% of the total tracks, wrote 30% of the lyrics, and composed 42% of the compositions.

⁹ When we met, the father was in discussions with a prominent producer to secure his daughter a prize at a private singing festival, which would require, he groused, a significant additional fee.

¹⁰ Retrieved from http://www.instat.gov.al/al/home.aspx.

¹¹ At the time of my fieldwork few authors even registered works with the local performing rights organisation, Albautor, believing no political will existed to enforce royalty agreements. Anecdotal evidence suggested to me that many composers either misunderstood what rights they held as producers of intellectual property, or simply felt powerless to assert these rights.

¹² Socialist-era programs formerly provided a graded series of activities through which singers passed, evaluated at each step by members of the music field. Televised singing contests following a format derived from the British program Pop Idol have largely replaced this far-reaching apparatus. Composers view these amateurs somewhat favorably, understanding them to have a measure of training and a ready-made fan-base. Fashion models, beauty competition ‘misses’, or reality show contestants comprise a second segment of the singers' market. Assumed to be poor vocalists, a notion fueled by several notorious ‘showgirls’, these women are seen as too aggressively self-promotional, and concerned with image, fashion, and fame rather than ‘art’.

Additional information

Nicholas Tochka received his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Stony Brook University in 2012 and is currently instructor in ethnomusicology at Northern Arizona University. His research examines the relationship between identity, cultural institutions, and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since 2004, he has conducted ethnographic and archival research on socialist and postsocialist Europe and, in particular, the nation-state of Albania.