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Working Musicians

Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production

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Book

Pages: 264

Illustrations: 1 illustration

Published: April 2023

Author: Timothy D. Taylor

In Working Musicians Timothy D. Taylor offers a behind-the-scenes look at the labor of the mostly unknown composers, music editors, orchestrators, recording engineers, and other workers involved in producing music for films, television, and video games. Drawing on dozens of interviews with music workers in Los Angeles, Taylor explores the nature of their work and how they understand their roles in the entertainment business. Taylor traces how these cultural laborers have adapted to and cope with the conditions of neoliberalism as, over the last decade, their working conditions have become increasingly precarious. Digital technologies have accelerated production timelines and changed how content is delivered, while new pay schemes have emerged that have transformed composers from artists into managers and paymasters. Taylor demonstrates that as bureaucratization and commercialization affect every aspect of media, the composers, musicians, music editors, engineers, and others whose soundtracks excite, inspire, and touch millions face the same structural economic challenges that have transformed American society, concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.

Praise

“This is a wonderful book, written by a leading scholar of the music business who blends theoretical and empirical work on the relationship between professionalism and work for hire in a dynamic and readable way.” - Toby Miller, author of Greenwashing Culture

“Timothy D. Taylor conveys the intricacies of how working musicians in Hollywood learn to manage social, symbolic, and economic practices that sustain, disturb, or (momentarily) undermine the entrenched hierarchies that produce soundtracks. Working Musicians skillfully reveals the gulf between how creative work is meant to proceed and how it actually functions today.” - Louise Meintjes, author of Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid

"Timothy Taylor develops both his own work about capitalism... and contributes to the growing study of popular musicians as workers. He does this via an account of the working lives and practices of musicians who work as composers of film, television and computer game music. The result is a book which is never less than interesting and often compelling." - Martin Cloonan, Popular Music

"Working Musicians makes for an excellent deep dive into the world of contemporary composers working in the television and film industries." - Michael L. Siciliano, American Ethnologist

"Written in clear, straightforward prose, Working Musicians is a worthy addition to the expanding literature on cultural and media production studies and the anthropology of neoliberal capitalism, understood as a ‘social form’. More than a method to gather data, ethnography emerges as a place where description, analysis, and interpretation converge to deliver social theory, critique, and hope." - Sofia Sampaio, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Association

"The use of labor theory is . . . a major strength, making Working Musicians indispensable for the study of musical labor. Taylor’s writing is, as always, entertaining and engaging. He presents us with several new ways to analyze this labor, and by extension musical labor in other settings." - John R. Pippen, Notes

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Timothy D. Taylor is Professor of Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, and Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of many books, including Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World, also published by Duke University Press, and Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present.

Table Of Contents

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Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: Working Musicians  1
1. Group Production, the Collective Laborer, Supply Chains, and Fields  19
2. Creativity  48
3. Composers’ Labor  81
4. The Music Supply Chain after the Composer: Adding Value  119
5. Challenges  138
6. It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World  156
7. Neoliberalization as (Self-)Exploitation  177
8. “Thousands of Guys Like Me”  212
Notes  217
References  231
Index  245

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Related Links Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1987-9 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-1717-2 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-2444-6 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478024446