In 1965, a short article entitled ‘On the Performing Arts: An Anatomy of their Economic Problems’ appeared in the American Economic Review, the flagship journal of the American Economic Association.Footnote ¹ Written by two Princeton-affiliated economists, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, the article laid out in eight short pages a powerful explanation for why the operating costs of so many performing arts organizations consistently overran their earnings, and why this tendency had become more pronounced over time. The problem was not that lavish budgets were being spent on productions, nor that musicians’ unions had wrung too many concessions from management. Rather, the problem was more prosaic, having to do with ‘differential rates of growth in the economy’.Footnote ² To illustrate the argument, Baumol and Bowen asked readers to perform a thought experiment: ‘Think of an economy divided into two sectors: one in which productivity is rising and another where productivity is stable.’Footnote ³ For the sake of simplicity, they explicitly assumed a number of useful fictions: that labour can easily and frictionlessly move between the two sectors; that wage increases across the board will keep pace with productivity growth (a standard if problematic assumption in modern economic theory);Footnote ⁴ and that the monetary supply is sufficiently controlled to maintain overall price stability. What, given these assumptions, is the outcome of such a stark split in the economy? In the productive sector, the increase in wages that workers receive will be offset by increased productivity. In the stagnant sector, wages will rise but output will not. And if an organization is to avoid bankruptcy, the only way to do so is by raising prices to cover the rise in labour costs. (Remember, one of Baumol and Bowen’s working assumptions is that wage increases will keep pace with productivity growth, in both productive and stagnant sectors.) Yet this solution to the problem creates another one, since over time prices in the unproductive sector will increase at a much faster rate than those in the productive one, making the products of the former unaffordable to an increasing number of workers.

Given the title of their article, it comes as no surprise that the performing arts represent the stagnant sector par excellence. In the greatly expanded book on the topic they were commissioned to write for the Twentieth Century Fund, they offer a straightforward example to illustrate the point: a Schubert string quartet. ‘Human ingenuity has devised ways to reduce the labor necessary to produce an automobile,’ the two authors write. But the problem for live music and the performing arts more generally is that, ‘No one has yet succeeded in decreasing the human effort expended at a live performance of a 45-minute Schubert quartet much below a total of three man-hours [sic].’Footnote ⁵ At issue is a fundamental difference between the production of ordinary goods and musical performances. For the former, labour is a means to an end, the end being the finished product. For the latter, however, the labour of the musician is both means and end.Footnote ⁶ Less constrained in the context of the longer book-length study, they underline a number of possible responses to the economic dilemmas that arise from the stagnancy of the performing arts, beyond a straightforward rise in labour costs translating into a corresponding rise in ticket prices. One possibility is to curb price inflation by suppressing artists’ pay (a possibility that has all too often been realized in practice). But given the historical moment in which both their article and their book were published, there was still another possible response that garnered the most traction: namely, that some combination of public subsidy and/or philanthropic support might fill the gap between earnings and expenditure, allowing wages to rise without prices following automatically.Footnote ⁷

Few publications as vital for understanding the changing situation of concert music over the past few centuries have received as little attention in musicology as has Baumol and Bowen’s work on the ‘cost disease’, to use the somewhat unfortunate name by which the phenomenon of unbalanced productivity growth they identified has since come to be known. Its importance is not just substantive; it is also historical. Besides the fact that their research became the cornerstone of a novel discipline (cultural economics), it also (and more importantly) provided at the time of its publication much needed support for policymakers, arts advocates and philanthropic groups looking to justify broader investment in the performing arts. It is therefore a very welcome development that three recent books – Michael Sy Uy’s Ask the Experts, Eduardo Herrera’s Elite Art Worlds and William Robin’s Industry – have begun to grapple with the implications of what Baumol and Bowen called the ‘economic dilemma’ confronting art music (and new music especially),Footnote ⁸ along with the varying responses this dilemma has elicited from the 1960s to the present. Together, the three books have taken the first steps towards outlining a history of contemporary classical music’s changing political economy. And while the three books are squarely centred on the situation in the Americas, their significance reaches far beyond the confines of the Western hemisphere.

Uy’s book provides an excellent starting point for this history. Its subject is what his earlier dissertation had dubbed the ‘big bang’ of music patronage in the USA,Footnote ⁹ the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s when the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, followed by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), injected an unprecedented amount of money into the country’s classical music sector. As Uy makes clear, the factors that led to this remarkable development were multiple. If Baumol and Bowen’s formulation of the cost disease ‘supplied an economic theory justifying the necessity of arts funding’ (p. 9), it did not act in isolation. Also important were the influx of musicians fleeing the rise of fascism in Europe and the Second World War, whose emigration to the USA profoundly reshaped its cultural landscape; the post-war geopolitical position of the USA as the undisputed capitalist hegemon, and the intensified rivalry with the Soviet Union that resulted from this; and above all the growing prominence of large, heavily endowed foundations – most notably Ford and Rockefeller – whose influence was felt not just in the USA but also abroad. The last two institutions are key to Uy’s narrative. While not-profit foundations are not necessarily a uniquely American entity, the outsized role they play in shaping public policy in many respects is; and this is because foundations in the USA can reasonably be described as creatures of the US federal tax code. In addition to the fact that foundations themselves are granted tax-exempt status, the donations that fund them are tax-deductible, providing ample incentive for charitable giving.Footnote ¹⁰ At the same time, the considerable increase in individual and corporate tax rates coming out of the New Deal and the war effort provided a major spur to the growing size and influence of private foundations in the USA after 1945. With the highest marginal rate on individual households reaching 92% in the early 1950s, foundations became an attractive destination for surplus wealth.Footnote ¹¹

Foundations do not depend on money alone, however. They also require personnel to carry out their stated missions. And it is the composition, dispositions and qualifications of this personnel that preoccupy Uy in Ask the Experts. As its title indicates, a major concern is expertise: who was seen to possess it, who was seen to lack it and how this uneven distribution of status shaped decisions about which kinds of musicians, institutions and genres received funding – and which did not. Indeed, the pivotal role played by such experts in deciding how and to whom the substantial resources of institutions like the Ford and Rockefeller foundations were to be allocated makes Uy’s close consideration of these figures, at both biographical and sociological levels, a worthwhile pursuit, even if it is unsurprising in its findings. Most were white; most were men; most came from an upper-class or upper-middle-class background; and many (though not all) were either based in or had strong ties to the north-east USA (p. 54). Given this demographic profile, it is not surprising either that their funding choices would skew in a particular direction: towards Eurocentric art music, and especially the particular brand of university-based new music that the critic Winthrop Sargeant notably dubbed ‘foundation music’. It is not that funding agencies entirely ignored questions of pluralism. Rather, as Uy points out, the problem was the narrow way in which pluralism was defined. What foundations and the NEA prioritized was the need for arts organizations to secure a diverse set of funding sources, using a system of matching grants to encourage a multiplicity of donors (pp. 76–7). The working assumption was that an organization and its offerings would necessarily reflect the diversity of its patrons. But as Uy points out, this belief failed to register two core truths: that the organizations best positioned to line up matching grants were those that were already well resourced; and that those donors best positioned to give were homogeneous, both in terms of demographics and aesthetic proclivities (p. 97). This point becomes painfully apparent in Uy’s discussion of the NEA’s Treasury Fund Grant programme. Initiated in 1970, the programme allowed individual taxpayers to earmark money for specific organizations, as a way of allowing citizens a hand in determining how arts funding should be directed. The NEA would match this earmarked sum, on condition that additional donors were secured to match both the NEA’s and the initial donor’s contributions (which meant that for every dollar granted by the NEA, three additional dollars would come from private sources; p. 87). Far from democratizing arts funding, as the programme purported to do, Uy observes that it had the opposite effect: ‘By trying to level the playing field, the NEA ended up giving more resources to those who were already playing, not to those who sat outside of institutional power structures’ such as ‘jazz groups, or folk and other ethnic groups’. His conclusion: ‘The pursuit of pluralism in funding sources […] reinforced a conservative bias, bolstering the status quo. It did not come to represent a cultural pluralism in grant recipients’ (p. 90).

If the key figures involved in US arts policy during the period in question were broadly lacking in diversity, one place where differences did surface was in the particular form of expertise they wielded. Drawing on the work of the sociologists Harry Collins and Robert Evans, Uy identifies two types of expert knowledge at work within both foundations and the NEA. One is ‘interactional expertise’, whose possessors may be fluent in the discourse of a particular field and capable of translating it into more widely accessible terms without being practitioners themselves (think of music critics or researchers). The other is ‘contributory expertise’, which describes the kind of hands-on, practical knowledge that accrues to someone actively participating in (and contributing to) a particular field of activity (p. 25).Footnote ¹² Corresponding to these kinds of expertise, in Uy’s account, were two kinds of actors involved in the decision-making process at Ford, Rockefeller and the NEA: full-time staff, whose positions demanded a highly developed form of interactional expertise, versus the outside consultants (musicians, composers and other practitioners), who were selected to serve on the panels that evaluated proposals. There were a few instances of friction between the two groups, as noted by Uy, who also highlights some of the techniques that foundation and endowment administrators used to nudge panellists in one direction or another, but the stress laid on ‘collegiality’ would seem to have minimized open conflict. More importantly, staff were the ultimate arbiters of who was invited to evaluate proposals and on what grounds; outside experts who delivered the ‘wrong’ evaluation, or delivered it with the ‘wrong’ tone, were simply not invited back (pp. 64–5).

This points to perhaps the most important factor in ensuring the smooth operation of these institutions: the fact that a small, select group of musicians were repeatedly called on to serve as consultants. An illuminating figure in Ask the Experts (p. 39) shows how a handful of luminaries circulated through the panels assembled by Ford, Rockefeller and the NEA, including Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss and Isaac Stern. One problem, as Uy notes, is that expertise tends to be self-reinforcing: ‘Expertise’, he writes, ‘grew every time an expert utilized it’ (p. 43). Another was that members of this cenacle tended to recommend one another for panels, resulting in a form of ‘social closure’. Thanks to these ‘tight social networks’, a narrow range of voices (and tastes) was amplified, while other voices were excluded (those of ‘laypersons, people without strong organizational attachments, and, significantly, women and minorities’; p. 43). Yet as important as the question of who were identified as experts – and who, as a result, decided where the money went – was the question of where the money came from in the first place. To say, as I did above, that the tax code in the USA incentivizes giving by making it tax deductible is not wrong. But if we leave it at that, then we risk occluding the question of who, ultimately, ends up bearing the cost of charitable giving. This is a question that Uy addresses only towards the end of his book. Citing the work of the political scientist Rob Reich, he notes in the epilogue that wealthy households which finance foundations ‘are not donating just their own money’, since the ‘federal government subsidizes their philanthropy’ by way of the tax revenue that is thereby forgone (p. 195). Money that might otherwise fund public services – including but not limited to those provided by the NEA – is redirected towards whatever pet projects the donor class wishes to invest in. Meanwhile, those who are less well-off pay twice over, not only because the diminished public sector that resulted from a diminished tax base disproportionately harms those who depend on the support it provides, but also because the burden of funding government services shifts to those who do not (or cannot) reap the benefits of this particular form of government subsidy.

Given the status of the USA as a superpower (read: neo-imperial hegemon) during the 1960s and 1970s, it is not surprising that its brand of semi-privatized public policy had effects that extended well beyond the country’s borders, via the direct interventions of foundations in other nations’ affairs, or else via the adoption of the foundation model abroad. Both processes are in evidence in Eduardo Herrera’s history of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM), a graduate programme in composition that was part of the Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires during the almost ten years of its existence (1962–71). Like that of Uy, Herrera’s study is driven by an interest in institutional infrastructures: specifically, that of an institution which supported the production of new music by supporting the production of composers of new music, as part of an effort to cultivate a musical Latin Americanism increasingly seen as counterhegemonic. And like that of Uy, Herrera’s book is intensely concerned with the actors who sustained such institutions. In a clear statement of his guiding philosophy, Herrera bemoans the fact that in many studies of philanthropy, ‘What is missing […] is the recognition that all these perceived spheres – the public, the private, and the mediating philanthropic institutions – are peopled’ (p. 64). This is a lapse for which Herrera’s book cannot be faulted. It provides vivid portraits of a number of key actors involved in the creation and day-to-day operations of CLAEM. These include Alberto Ginastera, whose experience as the director of a music conservatory in La Plata and rise to international prominence following the success of his String Quartet no. 2 at the First Inter-American Music Festival in 1958 made him ideally suited to serve as the resident ‘expert in action’ (to use one of Uy’s terms); John Harrison, a historian of Latin America by training and from 1956 to 1961 a member of the Rockefeller Foundation’s administrative staff whose support for the proposed centre was instrumental in securing start-up funding (pp. 46–7); Fernando von Reichenbach, an engineer responsible for developing a number of ingenious devices that maximized the resources available in the electronic music studio attached to CLAEM; Graciela Paraskevaídis, a student composer from Uruguay who, along with Coriún Aharonián, took the experience of CLAEM as inspiration for the Cursos Latinoamericanos de Música Contemporánea, a series of ‘itinerant, nonprofit, non-institutionalized, free, intensive summer courses’ for musicians across the region that she helped to run from 1975 to 1989 (pp. 124–5); and many others besides.

Apart from Ginastera, perhaps the two key figures in Herrera’s history are the Di Tella brothers, Torcuato S. and Guido, whose motivations for founding the Di Tella Institute are among the book’s central subjects. The sons of an Italian immigrant turned industrialist (Torcuato père), the brothers self-consciously used the institute as a means of converting the family’s accrued economic capital into cultural capital, thus facilitating their accession to lofty perches within Argentine society and government.Footnote ¹³ At the same time, the brothers were heavily influenced by developmentalist paradigms championed by US economists and political scientists in the 1950s and 1960s, with Guido even working under the guidance of Walt Rostow, one of the main exponents of developmentalism, while pursuing graduate studies at MIT in the late 1950s. From this perspective, the Di Tella Institute was conceived as an instrument that would help Argentina make the transition from an allegedly underdeveloped and ‘traditional’ society into a fully modern one; as Guido remarked in one document that Herrera cites, the institute’s purpose was ‘to promote the cultural modernization of the country, with the hope of untying the cultural knot that slows its development’ (p. 88). That the so-called underdevelopment of the Global South was a feature, not a bug, of the capitalist world-system was a reality on which this paradigm ran aground as the 1960s progressed, calling into question the premisses upon which the institute was founded. But the erosion of one of the institute’s key ideological supports simply clarifies that its actual purpose and effects may not have coincided with its stated objectives. Key in this regard is the way in which the institute responded to another factor that Herrera highlights, namely the class dynamics specific to Argentina, which set arriviste industrial capitalists like the Di Tella family against the entrenched power of landholders, the country’s historic ruling elite (p. 82). From this perspective, the Di Tella Institute and its promotion of socio-economic and cultural modernization may be seen as a weapon wielded within an intraclass struggle that pitted one set of the country’s elites against another.

There is a certain tidiness to Herrera’s history of CLAEM, reflecting the fact that the centre had a clear beginning and an equally clear end. Increasingly starved of funds, the Di Tella art institute was wound down at the turn of the 1970s. This was the result of a confluence of factors, including the anticipated end of the Rockefeller Foundation’s initial start-up grant and an unanticipated downturn in the fortunes of the Di Tella family business. But it was also bound up with changes in national politics. The Révolución Argentina pursued by the de facto president Juan Carlos Onganía once he assumed power following a coup d’état in 1966 was characterized among other things by its cultural conservatism. While it is unclear whether he was responding to pressure applied by the government, or simply attempting to curry favour pre-emptively with the new regime, by 1969 Guido Di Tella had made the decision to close the Di Tella Institute, with CLAEM ceasing operations in 1971. This timeline offers another point of comparison between Herrera’s and Uy’s books. For both, the 1970s mark the end of an era, as the generous funding that had fuelled the post-war cultural expansion in the USA, Argentina and many other countries was gradually withdrawn. Yet while the causes for CLAEM’s demise are clear-cut, they are somewhat more opaque in Uy’s account of the Rockefeller and Ford foundations. Uy cites a number of factors: the US–Soviet détente, changes in federal tax laws governing non-profits, turnovers in staffing and, perhaps most importantly, the economic slump of the 1970s. In addition to treating these factors in isolation from one another, rather than as being inextricably linked, Uy presents them as if they were all of equal significance. But the sputtering US economy of the 1970s surely exerted an outsized influence on how much major foundations were willing or able to give, and to whom. On this last point, it would have helped if Uy had dwelt a little more on the causes of this crisis, as well as its consequences for foundations, government arts support and the balance sheets of non-profit music organizations. Something similar may be said of Herrera’s brief discussion of the collapse of the Di Tella family business: while Herrera notes the Argentine government’s decision to ease restrictions on foreign competition in the automotive market shortly after the company had made a major (and very risky) gamble on this sector, exactly why the government decided to lift these protectionist measures and move away from a policy of import substitution is left unexplained.

To be sure, neither author can be faulted on this count, since the standard practice in musicology has long been to treat macroeconomic conditions as another bit of context, a background feature that no doubt needs to be mentioned, but only in passing. The problem with this way of treating the ups and downs of the business cycle is that it not only makes them appear as if they were wholly external to music, but also makes them resemble nothing so much as the weather, as something that just happens, which we have no choice but to endure. Yet there is nothing more political than stripping the politics from political economy; and this is precisely the sort of perspective promoted, whether or not intentionally, by musicology’s default manner of dealing with macroeconomic conditions. At the same time, reluctance to delve too deeply into these shifting economic forces is understandable in as much as it threatens to lead one far afield from the ostensible focus of musicology – music and musicians. But one of the key lessons to be drawn from Baumol and Bowen’s theory of the cost disease – a lesson that music scholars should take to heart – is that developments on the far side of the economy have unexpected but nonetheless profound impacts closer to home.

How might we go about addressing the causes of the downturn, and its consequences for music funding in the 1970s? For the sake of space – and because it is a context with which I am more conversant – I will stick to the USA in what follows (though as it was the leading force within the capitalist bloc, what happened in the USA had effects that reverberated throughout the entire global economy). The first thing to note is that the USA’s economic crisis in the 1970s was partly a result of the country’s own geopolitical successes, as the reconstruction of the German and Japanese economies undertaken after the Second World War eventuated in an increase in foreign competition, and along with it a squeeze on US corporate profits.Footnote ¹⁴ Meanwhile, the oil shocks of the 1970s sparked a rise in the rate of inflation that proved hard to tame; and this was due in no small part to the relative strength of labour coming out of the 1950s and 1960s, which gave it sufficient leverage to compel employers to match rising prices with a commensurate rise in wages. Now inflation at any level – not just hyperinflation – has become something of a bogeyman in US politics since the 1970s, cast as a pernicious force, morally as well as economically.Footnote ¹⁵ But its effects are not distributed evenly. As long as workers’ incomes keep pace with price increases, inflation for them is not a major issue. Likewise for those on benefits that have automatic cost-of-living adjustments built in.Footnote ¹⁶ Rather, the group whose interests are most clearly harmed by inflation are holders of financial assets of various types which depreciate in inverse proportion to the overall increase in inflation across the economy (and it is for this reason that a somewhat higher rate of inflation actually helps to redistribute wealth from capital and asset holders to labour).Footnote ¹⁷ Small wonder, then, that one of the main constituencies to push for a more aggressive policy response to the inflationary spiral was finance. Small wonder also that the Rockefeller and Ford foundations began to withdraw support for music and the arts as the 1970s progressed, as their capacity to give was directly tied to the value of the assets that made up their endowments – a value that a combination of weak financial markets and inflationary pressures steadily eroded over the course of the decade.

The relatively high inflation of the 1970s, then, was more of a problem for elites than it was for other groups. And curiously, one group that seemed to emerge in good shape from the decade’s inflationary cycle was performing arts organizations. Why this should be the case puzzled economists at the time, so much so that an entire conference was convened to ponder the question.Footnote ¹⁸ Participants at the conference (which included Baumol) mooted a number of potential explanations for the somewhat surprising resilience of music and arts groups in the face of price inflation, especially given that most observers expected that the latter would only exacerbate the sector-specific inflationary tendencies provoked by the cost disease. Some of the theories posited to explain this enigma included improved efficiencies (orchestras reducing the number of rehearsals), reduced artist pay and other belt-tightening measures, and increased public subsidies at the local and state level. But another potential explanation, floated in a roughly contemporaneous article co-written by Baumol and his wife Hilda, merits special attention. Recalling that the cost disease arises out of the inability of a labour-intensive sector to share in the kind of productivity gains enjoyed by manufacturing, the Baumols take note of a different feature of the economic downturn of the 1970s, one that the long shadow of inflation has tended to obscure. ‘As we all know,’ they write, ‘in the last decade productivity growth in manufacturing has slowed drastically.’ And this meant that, ‘It is no longer so difficult for the arts to keep up in the race.’Footnote ¹⁹ Or, in more colloquial terms, the Baumols conjecture that after centuries of lagging behind, at last, ‘The tortoise may […] be outpacing the hare.’Footnote ²⁰

Of course, the good fortune of arts organizations has never been a priority of US policymakers (otherwise the NEA would be much better funded). Rather, the imperative by the end of the 1970s was to curb inflation, seen as necessary for reigniting a sluggish economy – though, as is often the case, boosting the economy in US public policy usually amounts to boosting corporate profits and asset prices. And according to these measures, the policy changes that would usher in the post-Keynesian, neo-liberal regime at the turn of the 1980s had the desired effect. On the one hand, the Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker (appointed by President Carter in July 1979) instituted a sharp rise in interest rates, intentionally inducing a recession that would weaken labour and hobble its ability to compel wage increases. That the ensuing recession might disproportionately affect African Americans and other minority groups in the US did not seem to bother Volcker; nor did the eventuality that higher interest rates might cause a number of countries in the Global South either to default on their debts or to restructure them on unfavourable terms, which is precisely what happened over the course of the 1980s.Footnote ²¹ On the other hand, among the main items on the agenda for the newly elected president Ronald Reagan was the elimination of ‘wasteful’ government spending (that is, social services), along with the lowering of corporate and individual tax rates, the latter in an ostensible effort to spur investment and thereby spur the economy. The effects of these shifts in public policy on funding for music organizations were contradictory. The taming of inflation did indeed reinflate the stock market and asset prices (a tendency that has continued largely unchecked to the present), putting philanthropic organizations on a much firmer financial footing. Yet government-imposed austerity had a directly negative impact on the arts, limiting the nature and the amount of support the NEA could provide. Meanwhile, the lowering of the highest marginal tax rates had an indirect but no less negative impact, reducing one of the most important incentives the wealthy have for giving to non-profit organizations, namely the tax deduction on charitable contributions. On this last point, a comparison of two charts is instructive. Figure 1 shows the rise and fall of the highest marginal income tax rate in the USA from 1913 to 2005. Figure 2 shows the changing rates of charitable giving among the top 10% of earners in the USA for roughly the same period. Caution needs to be exercised in comparing these two charts: correlation, as we are often reminded, does not amount to causation. Furthermore, Figure 2 shows only the changing rate of giving overall, not in terms of specific areas (such as the arts). Even so, the correlation between the two graphs is nothing short of extraordinary, with philanthropic contributions among the top 0.01% – that is, the Rockefellers and the Fords of the country – tracking closely the rise and fall of the top marginal tax rate.

Figure 1

Highest marginal income tax rate for USA, 1913–2005 (source: Federal Reserve Economic Data).

Figure 2

Charitable contributions as a percentage of total income for top income groups, USA, 1917–2005 (from Gabrielle Fack and Camille Landais, ‘Philanthropy, Tax Policy, and Tax Cheating’, Charitable Giving and Tax Policy, ed. Fack and Landais, 61–114 (p. 69).

It was in this new cultural and economic landscape that Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe founded Bang on a Can, the upstart festival-turned-new-music institution that is the subject of William Robin’s book Industry. Yet simply saying that Robin’s book is about Bang on a Can is to sell it short. Better reflecting its ambitious scope is the second half of the book’s subtitle: New Music in the Marketplace. And while the story of the organization’s origins and evolution over the 1980s and 1990s remains front and centre throughout Industry, Bang on a Can also serves as the medium through which Robin examines the broader forces that were shifting the ground beneath the new-music world during the period in question, and to which Gordon, Lang and Wolfe cannily adapted. In chapters such as ‘Funding’, ‘Lincoln Center’ and ‘Record Labels’, Robin offers the reader a panoramic overview of a number of major developments within the world of contemporary classical music in the USA during the twilight of the twentieth century: how the culture wars that social conservatives in the USA waged against liberalism’s alleged affronts to traditional ‘family values’ during the 1980s and 1990s led to a slashing of public funding for music and the arts; how an institution like the Lincoln Center refashioned itself from a more or less passive host for venerable groups like the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera into an active ‘programming force in its own right’; and how the changing business models of the classical music recording industry affected the production and marketing of new music in the 1990s, once the classical divisions of major labels were no longer allowed to bleed money in exchange for the prestige they brought, but were obliged to turn a profit like everybody else. Aiding Robin in his efforts to weave the history of Bang on a Can through these broader vistas are his tremendous skills as a writer, honed through his experience as a professional music critic. The result is a book that is not only illuminating but also a genuine pleasure to read.

At the centre of the book are Gordon, Lang and Wolfe, whose trajectory from the graduate composition programme at Yale in the early 1980s, through the early years of the festival in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to institutional consecration in the late 1990s and beyond Robin meticulously documents. Along the way, other key figures come into view: teachers like Martin Bresnick and Jacob Druckman, the latter credited with having instilled an audience-orientated professionalism in his students; long-time collaborators, like Evan Ziporyn, whose work with Gordon and others dated from their student days at Yale; and key influences, like Louis Andriessen, whose blend of minimalist process and modernist dissonance became a template for the three composers’ aesthetic. But perhaps the most important supporting actor within Industry is John Duffy, composer, long-time head of the Meet the Composer programme and indefatigable proponent of market-based solutions to the challenges that contemporary composers confronted. For Duffy, what had once been seen as a problem for new music (the market economy) was now seen as a solution, while what had once been seen as a solution (public and/or philanthropic support that might redress market failure) was now seen as a problem. Singled out for particular scorn was the retreat of new music into the academy; in one text of Duffy’s that Robin cites, he denounces academic composition for having ‘fed on itself rather than on audience response’, a state of affairs made possible by the ‘financially secure’ yet ‘cloistered existence’ composers enjoy in university music programmes (Duffy, cited on p. 51). Duffy’s ideal was to bring composers back into contact with the general public, with the market as the mechanism for achieving this goal: ‘The marketplace’, he explained, ‘puts composers together with people’ (p. 49). And while a non-profit organization like Meet the Composer was a necessary evil in bringing about this hoped-for communion between artist and audience, its ultimate destiny, according to Duffy, was to disappear. Success by this account was a world where composers were out of academia and back ‘in the streets’, emancipated from the existing ‘lace curtain welfare system of grants’. As Robin notes in a muted yet trenchant aside, Duffy’s was ‘a utopian vision, albeit one based in capitalist reality’ (p. 51).

In many respects, Bang on a Can comes across as a group that eagerly took up the challenge laid down by Duffy. Their embrace of the market as a solution to the travails of contemporary classical music expressed itself in a number of ways, some direct, others less so. Among its more overt expressions were the group’s preoccupation with targeting specific audience niches (‘people who check out new theater and new art but normally have no connection at all to new music’, according to Wolfe; p. 82); the care they exercised in crafting the publicity surrounding Bang on a Can; their interest in pursuing branding opportunities; and their unselfconscious willingness to partner with corporate sponsors (including Philip Morris and AT&T; p. 132). But there were also less direct, more mediated expressions of the group’s embrace of the market. Particularly telling was the privileging of action, immediate experience and doing over discourse, intellectualism and what they regarded as purely ideological distinctions having little bearing on artistic quality. A comment of Lang’s is representative: ‘We wanted our audiences to just listen to the music without thinking about where this composer went to school and what prestigious awards that composer had won’ (p. 84) – a seemingly innocuous position, at first glance, but one that disavows the way in which ostensibly immediate musical experience is always mediated by the social field in which it is situated. Concomitant with this attitude was the group’s studied eclecticism, which sat comfortably within the grooves of an ascendant omnivorous taste regime, one of the hallmarks of neo-liberal culture.Footnote ²² Yet, as Robin acknowledges, the group’s self-proclaimed transcendence of reified stylistic divisions (such as the uptown/downtown divide, Bang on a Can’s favourite punchbag) was itself the expression of a particular style, just as the claim to have discarded ideology was itself an ideological stance.

One thing that becomes clear over the course of Industry is the degree to which the group’s embrace of the market in practical terms amounted to an embrace of marketing. The group’s marketing efforts were not addressed solely to prospective audiences, either. Also targeted were governmental agencies and philanthropic bodies. For the latter, one of the group’s main selling points was its ability to sell itself, that is, its self-proclaimed capacity not only to survive but to thrive ‘in the streets’. Ironically, this apparent willingness to operate outside the system of public and/or philanthropic subsidy made Bang on a Can all the more attractive to entities charged with dispensing such subsidies, given that arts funding was increasingly contingent on recipients’ declaring their commitment to pursue audience development, self-sufficiency and the maximization of earned income. To be sure, part of the shift in funding priorities then underway at public agencies like the NEA or the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) stemmed from mounting political and economic pressures. For the NEA, such pressure came in the form of right-wing efforts to defund it, a goal that was partially realized in 1995 when the Republican-led congress cut the agency’s budget by 40%. For the NYSCA, pressure came from austerity measures as well, as the recession of the early 1990s led to a severe reduction in the funding available to new-music groups. Yet, as Robin recounts, a different kind of pressure came in the form of calls to diversify the kinds of arts and audiences that NYSCA supported, in response to the agency’s historic neglect of minority artists and communities. In this tumultuous context, Bang on a Can was poised to satisfy the changing desiderata of funders in a way that few other new-music groups (such as Speculum Musicae) could. And this was due to its substantive commitment to diverse programming on the one hand and its strong rhetorical and practical commitment to commerce on the other.

The foregoing highlights something else that becomes apparent in reading Industry: namely, the limits that the market-orientated approach advocated by Duffy and adopted by Bang on a Can ran up against. Despite the group’s avowed willingness to move ‘away from the patron–artist relationship’ and adopt ‘a for-profit mentality’, and despite their remarkable progress towards achieving self-sufficiency, they never did fully manage to wean themselves from public and/or philanthropic support. Or at least this was true for the period examined in Robin’s book. True, over the course of the 1990s the group managed to increase substantially the percentage of their budget deriving from earned income (ticket and recording sales), to the point that the latter made up roughly 60% of its revenue by 1999 – a relatively high proportion for non-profit performing arts groups. But that still means that roughly 40% came from so-called ‘unearned’ income (foundation grants, government aid, corporate support, individual donations and so on).Footnote ²³ And it is unclear whether the increase in earned income in the late 1990s represented a durable trend or a temporary spike, perhaps resulting from the short-lived economic expansion of the period, or perhaps from the one-off success of the Bang on a Can All-Stars’ crossover recording of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, released in 1998. Judging from the long list of supporters underwriting Bang on a Can’s 2021 programmes, it would seem that the group is still heavily dependent on charitable contributions and public support.Footnote ²⁴ This is a reality not lost on Robin. As he notes towards the end of Industry, the model of ‘post-NEA music’ that Duffy espoused and that has since become dominant in the US new-music scene ‘was not a sustainable vision’ (p. 219). Part of the problem, he observes, comes from the demand side: the group’s expansion from an audience of hundreds in the late 1980s to an audience of thousands in the 1990s, while impressive, did not pose substantial difficulties, being mainly a question of finding larger venues in which to perform. By contrast, ‘finding hundreds of thousands of consumers, as the record industry demanded, was unfathomable’ (p. 218). As the cost disease underlines, however, there are also problems on the supply side, given the difficulties in achieving economies of scale. As long as Bang on a Can’s efforts remained centred on festivals and live performance, with recording a sideline activity, any increase in audience size would be offset by a corresponding increase in labour costs. ‘There were good reasons why new music was primarily a non-profit enterprise,’ Robin concludes (p. 219). Indeed.

As I noted above, the three books discussed in this review article have done much to lay the groundwork for future research on the political economy of contemporary music. Such research could develop in a number of directions suggested by Uy’s, Herrera’s and Robin’s work. In addition to the books discussed in this article, there are other models from which researchers can draw inspiration. One possibility would be to focus critical scrutiny on how changing models and rationales for arts funding have inflected the kinds of music that get produced and performed, along with the ideologies they tacitly embed, a project that Marianna Ritchey pursues in her book Composing Capital. Footnote ²⁵ Another possibility would be to consider how these changing economic conditions have influenced the practices and behaviour of working musicians, developing themes already fruitfully explored by Andrea Moore (on the new community’s embrace of the neo-liberal gospel of entrepreneurialism) or Megan Steigerwald Ille (on the working conditions of musicians involved in the LA-based opera company The Industry).Footnote ²⁶ Still another possibility would be to flesh out further the historical record of foundations and philanthropic entities whose support for new music has been critical to its ongoing reproduction, as Rachel Vandagriff has done in connection with Paul Fromm and the Fromm Music Center.Footnote ²⁷ But there is still another path such research might take. This is an approach that would not consider structural changes in the musical economy simply as background conditions against which the actions of individuals stand out, but that instead treats these conditions as foreground actors in their own right. There is a term for such an approach to history, musical or otherwise: materialism. This is what I have tried to put into practice in this article, albeit in a limited way, by casting the cost disease, inflationary cycles and changes to the tax code as key dramatis personae, whose joint action helps knit together the three books under consideration. And among these actors, the cost disease stands out, at least in relation to the shifting fortunes of new music and the performing arts more generally. This in turn suggests another question that future research might pursue, having to do with how the cost disease has changed over time, along with the responses it has elicited. Making this question all the more urgent is the fact that the downturn in productivity growth that Baumol registered some 40 years ago has persisted, resulting in an increasingly stagnant world economy, with each economic downturn followed by recoveries that are frequently jobless and nearly always more sluggish than previous ones. Under such conditions, the dynamic that has long placed labour-intensive sectors such as the performing arts (as well as education, healthcare and other forms of carework) at a disadvantage may be losing steam. This, too, might provide another, more unexpected explanation for why a group like Bang on a Can has managed to persist and even flourish, in spite of an otherwise inhospitable climate for new music. In an economy marked by declining rates of productivity, the performing arts no longer stand out as an exception. Or, to extend the Baumols’ metaphor, the tortoise has not momentarily overtaken the hare; rather, we are all tortoises now.Footnote ²⁸ Given the longue durée over which a process like the cost disease unfolds, only time will tell whether this convergence of the productive and the stagnant sectors will be a positive or a negative, either for music or for society as a whole.