Valuing Music

Timothy D. Taylor (Professor of Ethnomusicology, UCLA)

Ph.D. Musicology, University of Michigan; M.A., 20th Century Music, Queen's University of Belfast; M.M., Clarinet, Yale School of Music; B.A., Music and Northern Studies, Middlebury College 

 

Event details and registration

 

How can we understand the value of music? Economic theories of value sometimes help us understand the value of cultural goods such as music, yet there are also non-economic forms of value associated with music. This lecture offers a theory of non-economic forms of value of musical goods.

This presentation departs from the common ideas that the labor that produces cultural goods is somehow special, or that cultural goods themselves are special sorts of goods. Instead, it insists that our focus should be not on making taxonomies of labor or types of goods, but, rather on how cultural goods such as music are valued. Drawing on anthropological theories of value, some of which are derived from Clifford Geertz’s demand that analysis should focus on what is meaningful to people, this paper argues that there are different regimes of value in which cultural goods can be located, an older regime that emphasizes the exchange value of cultural goods, and, today, a new regime in which the digital distribution of music has given rise to forms of value that accrue from users’ curation of music, as represented in the creation and sharing of playlists through social media and popularity on YouTube. Following David Graeber, I argue that this sort of value derives from what I call meaningful action.
 

 

 

Biography

Timothy D. Taylor is a social and cultural theorist of music whose interests include capitalism, globalization, technology, and anthropology. He is the author of Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (Routledge, 1997), Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture (Routledge, 2001), Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Duke, 2007), The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture (Chicago, 2012), Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio (Duke, 2012), co-edited with Mark Katz and Tony Grajeda, and numerous articles on various popular musics, classical musics, and social/cultural theory. He recently completed Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present for the University of Chicago Press. He has received a fellowship from the National Humanities Center, as well as a junior fellowship and the Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. As an avid performer of Irish traditional music on the flute, he is the director of UCLA’s Irish Music Ensemble, and can be heard regularly at sessions in southern California.