Kunstreligion in a global New Age

Somewhat paradoxically, Tan has often used icons of Western culture as part of his project of thinking ‘outside of boundaries’. One of the early instances of this comes in his 1994 piece Ghost Opera, for string quartet and pipa, which brought Tan wider attention through its performances by the Kronos Quartet with pipa player Wu Man. Ghost Opera is partly based on quotations from Well-Tempered Clavier and The Tempest, using Bach and Shakespeare as lodestars while interspersing them with quotes from the Chinese folk song ‘Little Cabbage’. In a similar vein, but reaching even further, the texts for 2000 Today include those by Lao Tzu and Li Po, along with the Bible, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Dante. While, contra Lau, Tan has in fact been perceived as a globalized and transnational composer, his combining of such canonic Western references and a West-friendly idea of Chineseness has largely served him well. Yet that same combination may have imposed limitations on how seriously he could be taken by classical or new music culture; musicologist Mina Yang writes, ‘Tan has built a worldwide reputation … on a signature style that incorporates elements of Chinese and Asian vintages that are recognized as expressive of an Oriental essence. Yet he seems to understand that the very exoticism that appeals to the mass market may keep him out of the pantheon of great composers extending back to Bach.’Footnote ¹² The idea of a ‘pantheon of great composers’ has no more currency than that of musical universalism in music scholarship, but Tan has in fact used references to the most central and historically canonic composers for their existing associations with claims about ‘universal’ musical meaning or significance.

Tan often uses references to canonic composers for their existing associations with ideas about ‘universal’ musical meaning or significance.Footnote ¹³ In an interview about the premiere of Water Passion After St. Matthew, for example, music critic Claus Spahn (from the German newspaper Die Zeit) focused on Tan's relationship with Bach's music, and Bach's role in Tan's musical life and output. Tan displayed a well-honed ability to address an audience with the language of classical music's Kunstreligion, the religion of art, drawing on the long-standing notion of Bach as a healer, and contrasting the emotional and spiritual effect of Bach's music with Beethoven's. Even while appealing to this insider's discourse, however, Tan also polished his own image as a musical outsider and innocent – an enigmatic Other whose late discovery of Bach after a childhood disrupted by the Chinese Cultural Revolution was an example of the universal dimensions of great German music. Describing his first experience of hearing classical music around 1977, Tan said, ‘Beethoven struck me at the time as a kind of cleansing material, like a strong coffee. But Bach was medicine … [I understood that] it was about hope and deep faith … The structure, the form, the order – it is sounding architecture.’ Spahn responded, ‘What you're saying speaks directly to the cliché image of Bach as the artist for all living conditions, from whose music a universal strength flows, which can bring comfort even to the furthest corners of the earth.’ Rather than speaking or objecting to the label of ‘cliché’, Tan simply responded, ‘Isn't it so? His music doesn't just speak to the Western art tradition. It also speaks to the humane.’Footnote ¹⁴

With this kind of discourse, Tan reanimates the old ideology of Kunstreligion, art-religion, a term coined by Schleiermacher and defined by musicologist Elizabeth Kramer as the idea that ‘art is thought to enunciate divine ideas and feelings, artistic experience is compared to religious ritual, and artistic works are seen as divine presences on earth’.Footnote ¹⁵ Though Kunstreligion may be largely moribund, its traces can still be found in public concert life, where, among other things, they contribute to the evangelizing nature of many musical ‘outreach’ efforts. This includes giving justification to the El Sistema programme in Venezuela, whose controversial founder, the late José Antonio Abreu, was famous for his pronouncement that ‘the huge spiritual world that music produces in itself … ends up overcoming material poverty. From the minute a child is taught to play an instrument he is no longer poor.’Footnote ¹⁶

It is also Kunstreligion that makes classical music the ongoing standard for symbolically or historically weighty occasions. Public commemorations of 9/11, musicologist Peter Tregear has shown, have demonstrated the still-extant power of the musical canon to imply a unified public space, and by extension, a unified public.Footnote ¹⁷ For many such occasions, especially celebratory moments, it is Beethoven who continues to be a predictable choice, in particular the Ninth Symphony. While the symphony in its entirety remains a concert-hall staple, it is the ‘Ode to Joy’ alone that has become ‘universally adaptable’, as Nicholas Cook, Slavoj Žižek, and others have demonstrated.Footnote ¹⁸ Adapted by states with ideologies as disparate as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and white-supremacist Rhodesia, the People's Republic of China also had use for the symphony and the ‘Ode to Joy’ between the Great Leap Forward and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.Footnote ¹⁹ Canonic music has been used to stand in for now-obsolescent liturgical music, solemnizing occasions while avoiding the political risks of seeming to ‘officially’ elevate one religion over another.

Tan has frequently been commissioned to write music that builds on this ceremonial tradition. One of the most significant such commissions was for the festivities around the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China. For this occasion, Tan produced a piece titled Symphony 1997: Heaven Earth Mankind, from which an excerpt was performed at the ceremonies themselves. A 1997 bulletin from the Hong Kong Government Information Services office published on 1 July 1997 (the day of the official handover itself) described the piece as involving ‘performances by world-class cellist Yo Yo Ma, Cantonese singing star Jacky Cheung, the Asian Youth Orchestra, Yip's Children's Choir and the Imperial Bells Ensemble of China playing a set of magnificent, bronze chime bells’.Footnote ²⁰ This last was a reference to the bianzhong, a massive set of Chinese imperial bells unearthed in 1978, which Tan would later sample in World Symphony. In Heaven Earth Mankind, the bianzhong stood for a kind of apolitical, but cultural, ‘Chinese’ identity that presumably encompassed Hong Kong people as well as mainland Chinese. Finally, the Asian Youth Orchestra, based in Hong Kong, was founded in 1987 to ‘celebrate the excellence of young Asian musicians’, according to its founder.Footnote ²¹ The orchestra's institutional orientation was thus more pan-Asian than specifically Chinese (or even Hong Kongese), and made it an apt symbol for the handover.

Tan has often deployed Beethoven as part of his universalizing program, and Heaven Earth Mankind refers to the ‘Ode to Joy’ several times. The first such reference comes in the middle of the second movement, ‘Dragon and Phoenix’. A section called ‘Jubilation’ opens with fanfare-style brass and piccolo, and a chanting chorus; as the texture thickens, the chorus chants an almost perfect rendition of the ‘Ode to Joy’ melody itself. In the first statement, Tan alters the phrase slightly at the last second, by eliding the cadence into the next phrase, while subsequent statements vary the theme by repeating pitches within it. These references are underscored by propulsive, syncopated rhythms that are tossed around the orchestra from woodwinds to strings to xylophone – yet despite emerging from such a different musical context, they are unmistakable.Footnote ²² A second ‘Ode to Joy’ reference comes in the final movement, ‘Song of Peace’, which was the excerpt performed at the handover. This movement (which Tan later published as a standalone piece) opens with the sound of the bianzhong, underscored by low strings. This brooding introduction is soon dispelled by the high tessitura of the children's choir, which sings a D major melody that briefly outlines the opening pitches of the ‘Ode to Joy’ (F♯ ascending to A; D ascending to F♯). This second allusion is based not only on pitch, but also on timbre and register. It seems to specifically refer to the massive choral climax that follows the Turkish march and fugue episodes in Beethoven's finale.Footnote ²³

With these references to the Ninth Symphony, Tan creates a musical echo, indicating that his own work is part of Beethoven's lineage. But he creates a political echo, as well. Perhaps the most public and widely viewed performance of Beethoven's Ninth in the decade preceding Heaven Earth Mankind was the one that celebrated the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when Leonard Bernstein conducted the symphony at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The Hong Kong handover marked the onset of political unification for two entities that had long been split, and it is no accident that Tan's allusions to Beethoven evoke the German occasion; indeed, in his extended biography, he openly alludes to it. Tan also names Beethoven in his programme notes for the piece, saying, ‘Every artist searches, everyday, to discover the unity of the eternal and external … Our ancestors thought true concordance was the perfect unification of heaven, earth, and mankind. I believe Li Po and Mahler thought so, and Beethoven and Schiller too.’Footnote ²⁴ Perhaps there was some hope of also evoking the sense of historical resolution that had initially greeted the fall of the Wall (which is precisely what Bernstein's performance celebrated, rather than the formal political unification two years later).

Of Heaven Earth Mankind, critic Mark Swed wrote, ‘I doubt that any composer has ever served quite so many masters – commercial, political and spiritual – so successfully or so exuberantly in a symphony before.’ The subheading of his review said ‘“Symphony 1997” makes the colony's story universal by employing musical styles from around the world.’ As Swed also noted, Tan had a great ability to tap into audience desires for experiences that were ‘spiritual’, without necessarily being doctrinally religious. Tan himself said of Heaven Earth Mankind and the occasion it marked, ‘Everybody is thinking about politics, but to me this is a religious event, an opportunity to talk to the soul.’Footnote ²⁵

While canonic classical music has often taken this public spiritual role, other genres have also served audiences’ spiritual desires. World music in particular has often filled a similar function, as Steven Feld and Timothy Taylor have shown.Footnote ²⁶ In world music, the desire for non-specific ‘spirituality’ was often attached non-Western musicians; Taylor writes, ‘Mostly, listeners’ demands for authentic spirituality apply to Others, whose perceived enigmatic qualities are often interpreted as spiritual.’Footnote ²⁷ Late twentieth-century concert culture also saw a surge in what Richard Taruskin dismissed as ‘sacred entertainments’, an implicitly kitschy category including the Passion 2000 works, John Adams's oratorio El Niño, and pieces by James MacMillan, Philip Glass, and Arvo Pärt. Most of the works in question foregrounded their ‘multicultural’ content, which Taruskin (referencing the New York Times columnist David Brooks) argued was a predictable element in a late twentieth-century process of forging ‘personal authenticity, constructed not in terms of a wholly original world view but in terms of eclecticism – an individual selection from among the unlimited choices on the global cultural and spiritual menu’.Footnote ²⁸

Unlimited global choices – musical, spiritual, and cultural – are Tan's bread and butter. His ready use of an array of ‘world’ instruments and techniques exploited the existing spiritual associations many listeners had with world music. The recurring use of Tibetan overtone singing samples, for example, may have appealed to those listeners who had already made multiphonic or overtone singing unexpectedly popular in the 1990s. Among the best-known performers were the Tibetan Gyuto monks, who gained widespread attention for their 1986 release on the New Age label Windham Hill, and again in 1995, when they recorded the album Supralingua with the drummer Mickey Hart's ensemble, Planet Drum. In Taylor's analysis of the monks’ success, he again demonstrates the connection between Western spiritual pursuits and their attachment to non-Western sounds. As packaged for Western listeners, Taylor argues, the monks’ music left the sounds ‘so decontextualized and deritualized that they are evacuated of the meanings of their own surroundings, and of little interest to a western listener as music. But these sounds are made interesting in the way they are packaged for consumption as the essence of ancient, eastern spirituality.’Footnote ²⁹ Tan has often used similar language in talking about his personal background and beliefs, connecting them with vague notions of the mystical and timeless, and presenting himself as – if not a representative – at least a bearer or transmitter of ‘ancient eastern spirituality’.

New Age music, New Age thought

Tan's connection with the spiritual desires of listeners does not end there. His music also shares a great deal with the more explicitly spiritual, though still non-doctrinal, New Age music and philosophy.Footnote ³⁰ While for many composers of the late twentieth century, the idea that their music ‘sounded New Age’ would have been a mortal insult, Tan has never spoken out against use of this term to describe his music, although it is a regular part of critics’ response. Mina Yang describes the presence of New Age sounds in Tan's Water Passion, and it is clear that she intends this as criticism, writing that this style produces ‘a piece less than transcendentally sublime and rather more suggestive of New Age music … [creating] a generalized spiritual ambience’.Footnote ³¹ In Yang's analysis, insofar as he sounds New Age, Tan falls short of his quasi-religious universalizing goal. By contrast, I propose that Tan's aesthetic is precisely intended to evoke ‘spiritual’ responses – indeed, that a ‘generalized spiritual ambience’ is a desirable outcome – and argue that both the philosophical and the political foundations of New Age complement Tan's artistic programme neatly.

Sociologist Paul Heelas's widely cited book on New Age notes consistencies among the many definitions of New Age, finding it widely concerned with ‘the human (and planetary) condition and how it can be transformed’.Footnote ³² One of the key transformations anticipated in New Age thought is a dissolution of borders and the uniting of the world. Richard Kyle writes, ‘Global unity is central to New Age political thought. New Agers believe that there is to be a new world order characterized by internationalism – nations are to be united politically and economically … If god, humanity, and nature are all one, it follows that there should be no boundaries between nations.’Footnote ³³ For Tan, this aspirational boundaryless state can be anticipated in his music, where countless styles, cultures, aesthetics, languages, and other markers of place and identity are thrown together.

As Yang argues, Tan's music uses many of the sonic markers of New Age music, as well. Dennis Hall's study of New Age music identifies five generic attributes: a constantly shifting character; a deliberate blurring of boundaries between genres, especially ‘between classical music and mood music’; playfulness, irony, and a ‘penchant for quotation’; aggressive multiculturalism; and a sense that the music is ‘anti-intellectual in its stance yet devoted to learning’.Footnote ³⁴ For Hall, New Age music's dominant quality – implied already by its name, and in keeping with Heelas's analysis – is that it is presented as an agent of either transition or transformation.Footnote ³⁵

Susan Grove Hall also surveyed the sonic landscape of New Age, describing it thus: ‘Perceptions of the natural environment dominate titles of the music. Sounds of ocean surf, bird song, crickets whirring, often introduce or interweave within the music.’Footnote ³⁶ This has immediate applications to Tan's work, which often calls for performers to splash water, hit stones together, and do other things that are both aurally and visually associated with nature; his titles often make such references as well, including Earth Concerto, Piano Concerto: The Fire, Yi1: The Intercourse of Fire and Water, and more. Helfried Zrzavy identifies ‘the incorporation of environmental sounds’ as ‘one of the hallmarks of the New Age sound’. Zrzavy's stylistic catalogue also includes improvisation, cyclic structures, and the ‘infusion of ethnic stylings from a wide variety of cultures’.Footnote ³⁷ Taken together, these descriptions circumscribe a repertoire based in sounds of nature, cyclic in construction, generically omnivorous, and making claims to a spiritual experience, all of which are regular features of Tan's oeuvre as well. While Tan's rhetoric encourages listeners to associate his music with the Austro-German canonic lineage, at least in part, his actual musical style thus suggests an equally robust alignment with the ideological and aesthetic principles of New Age, and a music designed to offer generally spiritual, rather than specifically religious, experiences.

Interest in non-religious spirituality was apparent outside of music as well. One notorious example was a craze for elaborate typologies of angelic protectors in the 1980s and 1990s. Harold Bloom described the angel trend as part of a widespread ‘endlessly entertaining saturnalia of ill-defined yearnings’, a description which has a great deal in common with Taruskin's ‘sacred entertainments’.Footnote ³⁸ In her study of this angel craze, Emily Bauman identifies two post-war ‘flurries of interest’ in pseudo-Christian angelic lore: the first begins immediately after the Second World War; the second, she writes, ‘begins around the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall … Angels usher in the Cold War and usher it out again, presenting before us the threshold of an unknown order’.Footnote ³⁹

The ‘unknown order’ of the post-Cold War period, and its unique combination of historical triumphalism and uncertainty, may have contributed to listeners’ desire for music with a spiritual dimension. Taruskin writes, ‘In the super-affluent, triumphant post-Cold War decade audiences sought through art the monumentalization of their own experience’, adding that during this period of ‘gross materialism and commercialism’ classical music ‘was being marketed for its powers of “uplift” to a guiltily affluent audience’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Outside of classical music, there were also the ‘crossover’ successes of the 1990s, such as the 1994 ‘Chant’ (a recording of Gregorian chant). Also released in 1994 was a heavily promoted recording, Vision: The Music of Hildegard von Bingen, which all but completed the appropriation of Hildegard's legacy into the genre and political thinking of New Age.Footnote ⁴¹

Tan's Water Passion, too, was ‘spiritual’ without being religious. In his interview with Spahn, Tan identified the use of water in his Passion as ‘the most important element, standing not only for baptism, but also for renewal, rebirth, the cyclical … the sound of water in my composition is like a passacaglia theme, it is always present’. Spahn challenged Tan's easy ecumenicism, saying ‘None of this really sounds like the Christian meaning of the gospel’, to which Tan responded pragmatically: ‘But I come from another culture … sometimes I go to the (Buddhist) temple and sometimes to church. My past is the East, my present the West. From these two life-worlds, a very special faith has developed for me.’Footnote ⁴² Here, in a nutshell, is New Age syncretism as a universalizing artistic programme.

This distinction between the spiritual and religious is especially pronounced in Tan's Water Passion because of its putatively religious foundation. The piece is animated by a self-serious sense of ritual, which, by being unanchored to any specific religious practice, helps convert the specifically Christian Passion into the generally spiritual Water Passion. The piece opens with a sense of ceremony that exemplifies this conversion, as three percussionists, carefully lit, enter through the audience and walk to the stage while playing waterphones. Once arrived, they form three points of a triangle, taking places downstage right, upstage centre, and downstage left: a simple evocation of a trinity. The process of abstraction through which Tan puts the Passion story begins here, with one of Christianity's core precepts and symbols converted into a stylistic and visual element – the trinity is evoked, while its religious, liturgical, and doctrinal meanings are stripped from it. Tan does this kind of abstracting throughout the piece, compressing texts and musical gestures so that they become less closely linked to the particular narrative at hand, and more multivalent for listeners.

Tan's music thus brought to its listeners what Veit Erlmann, writing about world music, called ‘a new aesthetic form of the global imagination’. As with world music and New Age music, Tan's work operated through largely depoliticized representations of difference, which had also caught on in mainstream culture. Erlmann's conclusion about world music was that, despite its ‘celebration of difference’, it ultimately ‘seems to articulate the inchoate feeling expressed by a 1990 AT&T commercial: we are all connected’.Footnote ⁴³

Indeed, this kind of connected universalizing became a staple of marketing and advertising (and remains so today, particularly in the marketing of cloud computing, virtual assistants, and other technologies of surveillance). Tan's market-friendly multiculturalism also bears some resemblance to the massive advertising campaign of the Italian clothing line Benetton, titled ‘United Colors of Benetton’ (now the official name of the clothing line itself). This campaign launched in 1985 with ads that traded in national and ethnic differences, while putting forth what Henry Giroux, in a stark critique, called ‘an appeal to international harmony and a warmed-up diet of liberal pluralism’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the Benetton ads, the categories of difference included everything from nationality to language to flags to sexuality to overt racial markers. An early United Colors television commercial literally segues from one national anthem to another, accentuating nationality through music and ethnicity through image, formulating both as differences around which to unify. At the same time, the quick shifts between anthems suggests that boundaries and borders are, at the least, becoming porous, if not negligible altogether.Footnote ⁴⁵ The dominant theme of the Benetton campaign has been, in the words of sociologists Les Back and Vibeke Quaade, ‘the accentuation of difference coupled with a simple statement of transcendence and global unity’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although Benetton also became known for the use of sometimes shocking political images, its essential message of ‘united colours’ never wavered.

Boundaryless music at the millennium

The year 2000 was good for Tan Dun. In addition to the premiere of Water Passion After St Matthew, he won an Academy Award for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and his most millennium-specific piece, 2000 Today: A World Symphony for the Millennium (World Symphony) (Figure 1) premiered on television. World Symphony was commissioned for the worldwide broadcast titled 2000 Today, a 28-hour trip across the world's time zones that ushered in the year 2000.Footnote ⁴⁷ The piece exemplifies Tan's style, immersing the listener in an aural world where a dizzying array of instruments, sounds, texts, and allusions are thrown together. The titles of the movements are geographically evocative, but mostly non-specific, allowing Tan room to play with whatever implications they might carry: ‘Africa, Africa’, for example, or ‘The East’ or ‘Sunrise’. These movements include, but are far from limited to, Tibetan chant, steel drums, clanking stones, banjos, odaiko drums, and trumpet fanfares, as well as lines on the staff reserved for what Tan labels ‘World Instruments’. According to the score, these are to be understood as follows: ‘1 World Pluck: Pipa, Banjo, and Sita (sic); 1 World Wind: Souna, erhu, Recorder, Tibetan horns, etc.; 1 World Percussion: s/he will lead all percussionists in the orchestra to play world percussion instruments: Odaiko, Tars, Djembes, Stones, water, Native American Drums, Paigu, etc.; 1 Electronic Sampler’ (the last was responsible for the Tibetan overtone singing, among other things).

Figure 1

Cover art, 2000 Today: A World Symphony for the Millennium (Sony Classical-0615292000).

World Symphony is built on a primary theme that recurs across movements, which its liner notes describe as follows:

Listening to World Symphony, it is difficult to discern precisely how this theme is raga-like, or ancient, or taken from gamelan, but it is easy enough to hear how a casual listener, reading that description, could accept it at face value; after all, and crucially, only ‘flavor’ is being claimed, not expertise. Yet it is the suggestion that this music can offer a version of unifying ‘the earth's culture as one’ that speaks to Tan's personal art-religion, articulating a spirit of a renewed and borderless world. And for the listener, it seems clear enough what a musical depiction of borderlessness sounds like to Tan. In the first movement, ‘Beyond Light’, the ‘chant’ enters almost immediately in the strings, and is quickly joined by an assortment of ‘world music’ sounds: a sampled Tibetan monk offers overtone singing, the odaiko drums interject, followed by the paigu drums, and so on. At other points in the piece, the sampler also provides the sounds of didgeridoo, as well reviving the bianzhong.

Crucially, Tan adds elements from Western concert and vernacular music to this stew as well. Lush string sections and trumpet fanfares are regular features of World Symphony, evoking classic film scores, and in the movement ‘Dreams’, Tan combines a set of pulsing ‘Native American’ drums with a trumpet fanfare that, in its register and use of ascending and descending leaps of a sixth or seventh, greatly resembles Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man. In the middle of the same movement, ‘World Instrument I’ takes over; in the recording, it seems to be a sitar, but playing a phrase that is clearly intended to evoke American old-time music and banjo.Footnote ⁴⁹ This amalgamation – Native American drums, banjo, Copland, with the sampler adding ‘Native American chant’ – might suggest an ‘American’ movement (except for the sitar), and its depiction of the idea of ‘America’ is entirely in keeping with the claim to be illustrating ‘the poetic spirit’ of a place. The World Symphony recording concludes with the ‘official 2000 Today anthem’, Tan's arrangement of the Bob Marley hit ‘One Love’, sung in this case by a world beat supergroup consisting of Marley's son, Ziggy, the Gipsy Kings, and the Boys’ Choir of Harlem, who according to the programme notes were ‘singing about a world united by love’.

Despite their many similarities, one key distinction should be drawn between Tan's work and the actual market genre of world music. Where groups such as the Gyuto monks found a way to monetize an existing and highly specialized practice, marketing it to Western listeners seeking a spiritual music, Tan's World Symphony calls for generalists, not specialists, to perform it. By updating the old orchestral instrumental groupings (strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion) for this project – Pluck, Wind, Percussion, Sampler – Tan flattens the significant technical, historical, and cultural distinctions between, for example, a banjo and a sitar. At the same time, this instrumentation suggests that eradicating those distinctions is part of the point of a global unity project. A generalist aesthetic, drawing from a vast array of musical traditions, thus emerges in World Symphony, and the usual musical boundaries of specialization were attenuated. Tan's aesthetic required him to be a generalist, as well, upending any remaining notions of the composer as specialist. In this way, Tan was in the vanguard: since these pieces were written, the idea of creating boundaryless music has caught on more broadly, manifesting itself in the current moment in a widespread discourse about ‘post-genre’ music.

The television broadcast 2000 Today was in many ways identical in aesthetic to its soundtrack. It included an even more remarkable variety of locales and performances, including those by the French ambient and New Age composer Jean-Michel Jarre, who played at the Egyptian pyramids, and Björk performing in Iceland. World Symphony was largely used in the broadcast as underscoring for montages of diverse ‘cultures’ and short speeches by global VIPS, all interspersed with live reports from different locations. Among the most prominent of the global figures in the broadcast was Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations. Annan's millennial report to the UN, titled ‘We the Peoples’, opened with text evocative of the 2000 Today millennial celebrations, reading in part, ‘for 24 hours the human family celebrated its unity through an unprecedented display of its rich diversity’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Annan was also a participant in the 2000 Today broadcast itself, in a short segment underscored by Tan's music.

World citizen, flexible citizen

Historian Richard Kyle describes the idea of global unity as one of the cores of New Age political thought, writing, ‘New Agers believe that there is to be a new world order characterized by internationalism – nations are to be united politically and economically … If god, humanity, and nature are all one, it follows that there should be no boundaries between nations.’Footnote ⁵¹ If these are understood as spiritual concepts, Tan's music is an especially apt aural manifestation. World Symphony’s emphasis on regions, rather than nations, carries a hint of fading borders, which easily played into fantasies about a unified, globalized world. But they could also be understood economically as tools of capital. Michael York makes an explicit connection between New Age's approach to world religions and liberal capitalism, writing, ‘Rather than a rejection of free market principles, New Age endorses a spiritualized counterpart of capitalism – one which seeks ever extended markets, new sources of marketable goods, and expanding profits.’Footnote ⁵² Tan has sought ever-extended markets, and his music reflects an ongoing pursuit of new sources for stylistic incorporation. Taruskin writes of the sacred entertainment works that they appealed to a ‘pressing need for personal autonomy and unlimited choice’, neither of those hallmarks of traditional Western religions, but both hallmarks of consumer culture. As Martin P. Davidson wrote in 1994, ‘Capital has fallen in love with difference … from World Music to exotic holidays in Third-World locations, ethnic TV dinners to Peruvian knitted hats, cultural difference sells.’Footnote ⁵³

No composer understood this better than Tan, who capitalized on his difference while arguing against any boundaries that difference might erect. Doing this by ‘capturing the spirit’ of the world's regions – or, more ambitiously, uniting the earth, both claimed as the animating missions of 2000 Today – has both spiritual and political ambitions; New Age political thought goes so far as to take such unification as a specific goal. A similar theology seems to animate Tan's music, which intersects easily with more political ideas about the global-as-universal. Thus, when Tan claims that a particular musical device should be understood as a global ‘unity’ theme, as in World Symphony, he offers his music as an apt soundtrack, perhaps even a harbinger of, such beliefs and ambitions.

York writes that New Age's appropriation of spiritual beliefs and practices from around the world ‘translates into the rationale and justification for appropriating whatever third-world institution has appeal to the individual religious consumer, along with the “freedom” to market what one allocates to others’.Footnote ⁵⁴ A similar process of appropriation and marketing marks Tan's musical pluralism. There is a great deal of resonance between the range of musical materials available to the late twentieth-century composer and the range of spiritual materials confronting the late twentieth-century spiritual seeker. If the Western musical seeker could choose from ancient scales, ragas, talas, gamelan, reggae, and more, the Western spiritual seeker likewise had, in York's arguments, ‘religious options on an unprecedented scale … Through gaining multiple perspectives, the religious consumer can now more easily than ever choose to become de-conditioned from the prevailing acculturation of his/her society and, in some cases even, re-conditioned into a new spiritual practice of his/her own choosing.’Footnote ⁵⁵ The composer can do likewise, even if – as is often the case among religious consumers, as well – the perspectives in question are only marginally acquired. Conversely, the composer Chou Wen-Chung, who helped members of the Class of 1978 come to the United States, expressed his disappointment in what he saw as a practice of ‘combining cultural artifacts in a superficial way, without a deep understanding of the cultural legacies involved’, as he told the New York Times in 2001, adding ‘It's not the kind of situation I wanted. What I'm looking for is a spiritual digestion of one's legacies.’Footnote ⁵⁶

An approach like the one advocated by Chou would require relinquishing Tan's ‘boundary-less’ identity, which, in musical, linguistic, political, personal terms, extends so far that his music can attach or be attached to almost any kind of occasion. As I have shown, this identity has been foundational to Tan's career, and he shows little sign of changing it. It also again suggests Tan as someone taking the role of ‘flexible citizen’, in Ong's terms, as when she argues, ‘Among transnational Chinese subjects, those most able to benefit from their participation in global capitalism celebrate flexibility and mobility … flexibility, migration, and relocations, instead of being coerced or resisted, have become practices to strive for rather than stability.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Tan has been predictive of the flexible, adaptable, and high-status worker that late capitalism so values.Footnote ⁵⁸

Tan demonstrated a pronounced form of musical adaptability from early in his career, straddling lines between avant-garde and traditional, acoustic and electronic, Chinese and American, Chinese and international. While such flexibility is now commonplace among today's ‘post-genre’ composers, Tan was among the first to adopt it and explicitly promote it as an aesthetic. He has consistently showed an ability to please audiences and critics alike (though sometimes with different pieces), to accommodate, to adapt to diverse musical situations with compositions as well-received as the opera Marco Polo (for which he won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 1998), and as critically ignored as World Symphony. Furthermore, Tan himself has become a global figure, accepting commissions from all over the world, and through his work as a conductor, keeping not only in musical but in personal circulation. He conducted the world premiere of Water Passion in Stuttgart, and has conducted it many times since; of the thirty-six performances or performance runs included in the complete performance history (as of April 2015), Tan has conducted half of them, in places including Leipzig, Rome, Seoul, and St Petersburg. Based in New York, he has also overseen (since 2011) a permanent show in the water cities outside Shanghai, Water Heavens. This performance is another stylistic and spiritual amalgamation, and it is one place where Tan has monetized an existing spiritual practice, rather than simply incorporating reference to it. The performance space for Water Heavens was built across the water from a monastery, and the show includes live chant by the monks, which Tan combines with rock music and Bach – something for everyone, from the composer for all occasions.

On the topic of borders and New Age thought, Maria O'Loughlin writes, ‘Cultural borders fluctuate as the flow of global information accelerates and definitions of personal and institutional identity lose their hermetic seal. As the spiritual expression of this phenomenon, the New Age is a global fugue of migrant magic and cultural exchange. Pre-modern, eastern and esoteric spiritualities mingle in a challenge to static religious identities.’Footnote ⁵⁹ It is easy to imagine such phrases being used to describe Tan's music, on his detailed website, or used as headlines and pull quotes. Music critics have called Tan ‘hard to define, but easy to appreciate’ (Mark Swed); said that Tan ‘epitomizes the cross-cultural musicians of the 21st century’; and, from the Netherlands the claim, ‘What Tan Dun composes is “world music”, music that brings together everything that you had always wanted to hear. The composer Tan Dun is therefore a citizen of the world, a man who can blend all styles.’Footnote ⁶⁰

After the millennium

Near the end of the 1990s, it would have been difficult to count the number of books, essays, newspaper and magazine articles, and scholarly pieces that began with one of two variations on a millennial theme: ‘As the millennium approaches’, or ‘As the millennium draws to a close’. The year 2000, as historian Charles Strozier writes, ‘reverberates with our deepest psychological dread … No one in our culture can entirely escape the millennial hysteria of the 1990s.’ Strozier linked this hysteria to concepts of the ‘end time’, which, he argued, ‘means that moment (which is at the same time a process) of moving out of human history and into God's time. But as a cultural artifact 2000 connects as well with secular forms of the apocalyptic.’Footnote ⁶¹ The apocalyptic mode, familiar from popular culture both secular and religious, predicted imminent and total catastrophe, but it was only one possibility. On the other side was the ‘renewal’ mode of millennialist thought, predicting some form of restoration or redemption and the coming of a ‘New Age’. This redemptive mode resonates with Tan's music and discourse, and further resonates with one of New Age's most consistent interests – again in Paul Heelas's words, it is ‘the human (and planetary) condition and how it can be transformed’ that is of most pressing concern.Footnote ⁶²

Yet the turn of the millennium, although not terribly remote in chronological terms, seems quite far in ideological and political terms. World music, cross-cultural music, post-genre music, boundaryless, global, universal music: it is difficult to know to what extent Tan's aesthetic will continue to have a place in a world that in many places seems bent reviving its ‘parochial hatreds’, in Benjamin Barber's words. The re-emergence of overt white nationalism, the rise of the far right in places such as Hungary, Italy, and the United States all virulently reject the advertising claims of the 1990s, and raise questions about the usefulness of a compositional style that insists on piling the world's sounds atop one another. When US president Donald Trump spoke to a welcoming crowd in Warsaw in 2017, he extolled the virtues of the West, saying, ‘The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?’ And in listing the achievements of the West, Trump said this: ‘We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.’Footnote ⁶³ When symphonies are foregrounded as bearers of white supremacist and white nationalist values, what room is there for Tan's approach: the Lexus to this olive tree retrenchment, explicitly non-nationalist, which, in Frank Oteri's words, can effect a ‘grandiose global coming together?’Footnote ⁶⁴

For now, Tan seems untouched by such questions. The ease of appreciating his music, to which Mark Swed refers, has made Tan a concert hall favourite, an awards-winning phenomenon – including the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2017 Venice Biennale – and certainly an easy choice for programmers seeking to commission new music for public occasions. He has also recently been appointed Dean of the Conservatory of Music at Bard College, giving him an even higher profile in new and classical music circles.Footnote ⁶⁵ In attempting a close study of Tan's works, one finds quickly that the usual tools of analysis may be inadequate, as all of his references, techniques, and allusions are either instantly identifiable in the score or recording, or openly referred to by him in interviews or programme notes. Tan's music – and Tan himself – are routinely described as ‘exuberant’, ‘naive’, ‘happy’, ‘open-hearted’, etc., adjectives it is difficult to imagine being applied to his contemporaries, and which can also raise some questions about their exoticizing potential.Footnote ⁶⁶

The pieces described here, whatever their universalist pretentions, may be ‘anti-intellectual’ in the way Dennis Hall described New Age music, placing accessibility above compositional systems or polemics, and eschewing most of the arguments that characterized twentieth-century composition. It is largely this kind of musical anti-intellectualism, and audience appeal, that has made ‘New Age’ an epithet for (too easily) accessible new music, music that rejects the demand for intellectual complexity. Still, while there might be better musical descriptions of his work, given his peripatetic career, devotion to the Western canon, and commitment to a boundaryless practice, there can hardly be a description more likely to meet his approval than O'Loughlin's contrapuntal trope for New Age multiplicity: a ‘global fugue of migrant magic’.Footnote ⁶⁷

When Tan was appointed UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 2013, he said he would work to ‘promote intercultural dialogue and water preservation’. Yet even as he barely hinted at a political project, Tan brought attention back to his personal mythology: ‘[Water is] related to my childhood memories … the sounds of the water have … claimed a big part of my artistic activities’. The work of politics is not Tan's work, and yet he continues to brush up against it, and remains committed to the eradication of whatever boundaries – political, generic, spiritual – that he finds. Judging by his output and his schedule, he remains prolific and energetic. Like the New Age philosophy his musical career seems to epitomize, he remains stubbornly optimistic, and typically obscure: ‘I feel that I live for the future. But to look for answers about the future necessitates a search for traces of the past. The traces of the past will provide a lot of answers about the future. It's same for the sound, for the color, for the form, for all kinds of art.’Footnote ⁶⁸

Back at the turn of the millennium, critic Claus Spahn, who interviewed Tan before the Passion 2000 premieres, was overall unimpressed with Passion 2000 afterwards. Of Water Passion he wrote: ‘And when Christ has died on the cross, when the thunderclaps of the giant earthquake have sounded, Tan gives a sermon on the old hippie message: One world, one peace, one religion.’ Spahn was perhaps even more correct than he knew. And there could hardly have been a more apt headline for his German-language review of the multicultural Passion 2000 than the one it was given, which so clearly evoked a familiar slogan that it ran in English without translation: ‘United Colours of Bach’.Footnote ⁶⁹

The musical analogy

Contemporary managerial literature often relates the various practices of business to those of musical performance, a comparison also suggested in the Bloomberg/Met advertisement that opened this contribution. According to this rubric, staged music and plays have much to teach the business world:

Such writers also frequently compare corporate managers to composers of symphonies, and management practices to compositional practices. In the edited volume Managing Creativity, for example, the very first argument the authors lay out – the argument that provides the justification for the whole book – is that business management should be considered an art form akin to musical composition. They demonstrate this argument via a comparison between a musical score and the various ‘marks on paper’ that are used to spread knowledge in a business:

After establishing this understanding of musical composition, the authors go on to demonstrate that a musical score is analogous to: an organizational chart showing the infrastructure of a firm; a marketing survey; double-entry bookkeeping; and a budget. Ultimately, they see all ‘management technologies’ as ‘forms of composition’, a fact that justifies taking business management seriously as a creative art form. Similarly, an essay in The Routledge Companion to Creativity compares the ‘genius-level creativity’ of Beethoven to the exemplary leadership skills of Napoleon, arguing that leadership and composition ‘have a lot in common’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The author notes that both Beethoven and Napoleon ‘made a name for themselves, or left a mark on history, by exerting impact through products’, and ultimately draws an important comparison with modern business management: ‘Bill Gates of Microsoft is to the economy what Beethoven is to music and Napoleon is to war.’Footnote ⁷⁶

However, while managerial discourses frequently compare managers to composers, it is the metaphor of the orchestra, with its visionary leader (the conductor), that recurs most powerfully. In Talent Wants to be Free, for example, the business consultant and Harvard professor Orly Lobel argues that good bosses are the ones that do not try to inhibit their employees’ creativity with restrictive contracts and intellectual property agreements. In one of her illustrations of this argument, Lobel compares Riccardo Muti to Henry Ford, noting that like Ford, Muti is too rigid and controlling, and as a result his orchestras hate him and do not play well. By contrast, Lobel approvingly describes Herbert von Karajan, who has the ‘gift’ of ‘commanding without controlling’. By giving his musicians the space to explore their own creativity, Karajan allows their full potential to ‘flourish’, an assertion Lobel bases on the fact that Karajan closes his eyes when he conducts, ‘signaling to his orchestra that the harmony should be found internally’.Footnote ⁷⁷

It is interesting that the Western classical orchestra has become such a powerful analogy for contemporary business, given that in certain respects the kind of music – as well as the labour and social formations – the orchestra evokes is becoming increasingly anachronistic. Where contemporary neoliberal discourse promotes job and skill flexibility for workers, orchestral musicianship is a highly specialized skill set. Where neoliberalism propagandizes the gleaming future to which high-tech innovations will deliver us, classical music is widely seen as a relic of the past. Finally, where contemporary management literature insists that firms must become less hierarchical in allowing autonomous employees to pursue their own creativity and work collaboratively on projects, the orchestra remains a rigidly hierarchized group undertaking, one that has more in common with the old business models of the past than with the highly differentiated networks of the present. The improvisatory, non-hierarchical practices of some kinds of group jazz musicking, for example, would seem like more appropriate analogues for the ideal business environment preached by management discourses, and yet in such discourses it is the classical orchestra – and specifically its conductor – that recurs most urgently. I will argue that this recurrence has much to show us about the worship of power that actually undergirds contemporary perceptions of what businesses do, and what makes them great.

As these examples may suggest, the musical analogy in business literature is one facet of a broader discourse on ‘creativity’ that has transformed corporate and municipal policy as well as the way business students are taught and managers are trained. This discourse positions creativity as a prime facilitator of economic growth and as an important resource that institutions as well as individuals must cultivate in order to amass profits. These ideas can be tied to the work of the urban studies scholar Richard Florida, whose 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class established the idea that ‘a new social class’ of people is providing the foundation for a new economy.Footnote ⁷⁸ For Florida, ‘creatives’ can be found in a diverse array of industries, including not only art and music but also science, engineering, finance, education, law, and health care – anyone ‘whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content’ counts as a member of this rising class, because this kind of person engages in ‘complex problem solving that involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high levels of education or human capital’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Florida wants the creative class to ‘attain class consciousness’ so that they can begin wielding the political power that is their right. Because this rising class will be driving the economy more and more, cities and companies that want to survive must radically transform their policies in order to appeal to the types of people who embody this prized resource. The Rise of the Creative Class thus instigated a major shift in how companies and cities structured their development plans, incentive schemes, and marketing campaigns.Footnote ⁸⁰

Florida's work – as well as how influential it has been – indicates the degree to which values such as creativity and diversity have been transformed by market logic. Wendy Brown discusses this kind of ‘economization’ of values that were once grounded in morality or ethics, arguing that it is symptomatic of neoliberalism's reformulation of all individual and institutional action as ‘rational entrepreneurial action’.Footnote ⁸¹ For example, Florida recommends that cities use a ‘gay index’ to assess which neighborhoods have the most gays and lesbians in them, and thus determine which areas manifest the kind of ‘open culture’ that is attractive to creatives. In arguing for this practice, Florida asserts that diversity ‘is not a private virtue but an economic necessity’, and suggests that even staunch cultural conservatives should work to attract sexual minorities to their firms and neighbourhoods, because such diversity has been proven to correlate with financial profit.Footnote ⁸² In these ways he consistently uses economic profitability as a trump card to play against bigotry, and thus positions himself as a progressive hero. However, the fact that he suggests discarding moral beliefs when those beliefs are not economically expedient should give us pause; such an argument can just as easily be deployed against progressive goals, if pursuing those goals can be shown to hinder economic growth. The kind of liberal worldview represented in Florida's work is thus an essentially amoral one, which substitutes data analysis and the profit motive for ethically or socially responsible thinking.

This kind of amoral construction of creativity also instrumentalizes it, turning it into a set of skills that can and should be taught to business students and corporate employees. Indeed, cities and firms are racing to become more creative, now that creativity is such a profitable resource. Myriad books, articles, and corporate initiatives promise to teach workers and CEOs how to be more creative, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, entails learning to ‘think like an artist’.Footnote ⁸³ To facilitate this change in corporate thinking, businesses and business schools are establishing arts programmes and creativity grants, and even artist residencies. The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, for example, founded a ‘Visiting Artist and Social Entrepreneur’ residency in 2013, which brings MBA students together with professional artists from various disciplines. According to the Booth School, learning about the arts helps students learn ‘to innovate, to throw out the rule book and to consider a new way of doing things’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Businesses can also outsource this kind of experience to new corporate arts-based learning firms that lead seminars and workshops to help employees unleash and manage their innate creativity by identifying their inner artist. One such firm is Creativity at Work, whose website breaks down the artistic process and its attendant business lessons:

• – Reframe problems in order to generate new perspectives.

• – Observe information to decipher complexity, make meaning and discern emerging futures.

• – Find relationships between unrelated ideas and events.

• – Use imagination to spark ideas.

• – Work at the edge of your potential.

• – Take conceptual risks.

• – Work within constraints.

• – Use all the senses to surface insights.

• – Transform vision into action.Footnote ⁸⁵

Attaining this skill set will enhance things such as ‘hosting strategic conversations’, ‘meetings and think tanks’, ‘new product development’, and, somewhat ominously, ‘culture change’. The book Creativity, Inc. argues that when businesses implement this kind of ‘systemic creativity’, then creativity ‘swirls’ throughout the whole company, and workers at every level come up with ‘blockbuster ideas that turn into multimillion-dollar products or even billion-dollar new businesses. Or they create ingenious marketing campaigns that ratchet up revenue.’Footnote ⁸⁶

We can see that within business discourses like these, ‘art’ is instrumentalized as a set of learnable, transferable skills that will help individuals identify economically profitable ideas and approaches to leadership, and develop the courage to implement those ideas. This perspective is also present in Richard Florida's work, which lumps wildly disparate practices together as examples of undifferentiated creativity, and asserts that this creativity must be exploited to maximize corporate and municipal profits. Once instrumentalized in this way, art-making becomes simply capitalist value creation.

The business literature on creativity certainly urges all employees to embrace their inner artist as a means of becoming more productive for their firms. But this discourse is most interesting when it applies the lessons of art – and particularly of music – to those of business management. This represents the ongoing transformation of the ‘boss’ that Boltanski and Chiapello chart: in previous eras of capitalism, bosses visibly occupied the top position in a very defined power hierarchy; today, by contrast, bosses are supposed to be ‘team leaders’ who work alongside their employees on diffuse projects, using their superior ‘vision’ to coax out employees’ inner creativity. The perceived affinity between managers and musical conductors has thus begun activating a wide variety of corporate creativity initiatives in recent years, as firms strive to learn the secrets of these great leaders who are so adept at nurturing creativity amongst their workers.

In recent years, classical music practitioners have started capitalizing on this corporate prerogative by trying to insert music into management training. The Israeli conductor Itay Talgam bills himself as a ‘conductor and business consultant’, for example, one who can help businesses learn lessons from orchestras and classical musicians. In his popular TED Talks as well as in his 2015 book, The Ignorant Maestro: How Great Leaders Inspire Unpredictable Brilliance, Talgam discusses among other things the way conductors must turn audiences into ‘stakeholders’ for performances, as well as the notion that business managers should embrace the core value of conducting, which is ‘enabling other people's stories to be heard’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The corporate arts-based learning firm Music and Management undertakes similar pedagogical initiatives, and claims to ‘bring music to life in a startling way that is highly relevant to business today’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Music and Management provides ‘a range of musical experiences to address specific learning objectives’. Corporations that hire this firm are able to send employees to special workshops in which they sit in an orchestra or a jazz big band, observe the ensemble performing music together, and then talk with the musicians and conductor, engaging in ‘an interactive discussion about teamwork, risk-taking and innovation within a fast-moving business environment’. Business schools are experimenting with orchestra-based pedagogy as well; in one pilot programme, budding executives sat in on orchestra rehearsals in order to ‘better understand the dynamics of corporate management’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Such undertakings not only lend corporate power the perception of prestige that still adheres to classical music but also work to establish a new notion that music is just another business practice, like undertaking market research, cultivating venture capital, or running a start-up.

Music schools, too, may be starting to experiment with lending their accumulated musical wisdom to management training. In 2014 Northwestern's Bienen School of Music offered workshops to students in the Kellogg School of Management. Management students sat interspersed amongst one of the Bienen School's orchestras, while its conductor, Stephen Alltop, led the ensemble through some Beethoven, and then spoke for two hours about the lessons musical performance and conducting have to offer business managers. ‘Like a conductor, most CEOs don't make their product’, Alltop said, ‘they are charged with having a vision, and the more compelling, persuasive and passionate their vision, the more inspired their work force is going to be.’ After the workshop, Alltop said he was surprised by how ‘naturally’ the business students related to the experience; Management Professor Holly Raider explained that ‘it was the approach and the extent of the metaphor of the conductor as leader and how the participants were immersed in it that really hit home with them’.Footnote ⁹⁰ These pedagogical projects integrate music with business such that the lessons of one are described as fitting ‘naturally’, ‘obviously’, and ‘beautifully’ into the goals of the other.Footnote ⁹¹

The increasingly routine analogy drawn between orchestras and businesses may come as a surprise to musicologists and serious fans of classical music. After all, one of the most powerful ideologies that has energized Western art music since the early nineteenth century is the one that identifies such music as profoundly indifferent to the whims of the commercial marketplace and the petty squabbling of the hucksters and opportunists who populate it. Music by great masters such as Beethoven or Brahms has long been mythologized as articulating a transcendent realm, populated by our highest ideals; the notion of attaching that music and its performance to the tawdry world of business management – a world commonly seen as at best indifferent to art and at worst actively hostile to it – may seem ridiculous.

And yet, it was the development of this very canon of high art music that necessitated the new labour formation represented by the orchestra conductor, a labour formation that dovetails precisely with the one concurrently developing within bourgeois industrial capitalism. Until well into the nineteenth century, orchestras and other ensembles did not have conductors in the modern sense of the word; they were led by individual members who also contributed to the performance by playing an instrument. The rise of the conductor was necessitated by the growth in orchestra size and the size of the halls these groups played in; it is perhaps no accident that this evolution was coterminous with the division of labour required by factory production. As Jacques Attali argues, ‘the metaphor of the orchestra’ as it began developing in the 1850s thus served a social and symbolic function, namely, ‘to convince people of the rationality of the world and the necessity of its organization.’Footnote ⁹² For Attali, the orchestra represents ‘the image of programmed labor in our society’, and the conductor ‘is thus the representation of economic power’.Footnote ⁹³ Since the 1850s, this deeply embedded notion ‘has never been absent’ from classical music discourse.Footnote ⁹⁴

Adorno also examined the figure of the conductor and what this figure has to tell us about bourgeois society. For Adorno – as for Attali – the conductor's fundamental role is to exert organizing power over the productive forces of the orchestra. Adorno argues that Wagner was the first to write ‘conductor's music in the grand style’, by which he means music that ‘is conceived in terms of the gesture of striking a blow … the whole idea of beating is fundamental to it’.Footnote ⁹⁵ For Adorno, this spectacle of regulative violence is compelling to audiences because it both disciplines and represents normative bourgeois citizenship: the conductor ‘is the spokesman for all and so encourages an attitude of speechless obedience in all’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Aestheticizing power

The musical analogy with business is most often activated by business schools, business writers, and conductors themselves. However, composers, too, can articulate this connection, and perhaps even more effectively. A recent opera about Steve Jobs foregrounds the association of great business management with musical conducting diagnosed above, and uses this analogy to aestheticize power and those who wield it over others. Titled The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, it is the newest entry into the growing celebratory discourse surrounding the founder of Apple. It, like much of the rest of this literature, insistently figures Jobs as first and foremost a great artist, one whose innovations are on a par with those of J. S. Bach, Picasso, Bob Dylan, and Ansel Adams. As do many of the texts in the Jobs discourse, the opera explicitly compares Jobs to an orchestral conductor. Ultimately, I suggest that the opera – like the myriad books and movies that have examined Jobs since his death – celebrates him not for any of his specific creations or contributions to society, but rather for the very power he wielded. In the Jobs discourse, the various manifestations of his ability to control and dominate others emerges as a major – perhaps even the defining – feature of his creative genius.

RSJ was written by the composer Mason Bates, who often glorifies technology and the founders of tech corporations in his work.Footnote ⁹⁷ The text is by the Pulitzer-winning librettist Mark Campbell. In composing the libretto, Campbell took his lead from Walter Isaacson's Reference Isaacson2011 authorized biography of Jobs, as well as from the two biopics that have been released since Jobs's death. The biography, biopics, and opera all work to position Jobs as an artist, and often deliberately associate him with musical creativity.

One of the most oft-repeated anecdotes from Jobs's life story also emphasizes the connection between his genius and that of conductors. As a young man, Jobs dropped acid in a wheat field and had an aural hallucination in which he ‘conducted’ the plants and dirt and rocks as they played the music of J. S. Bach. This story is related in many of the biographies and corporate histories I have read, as well as in the 2013 biopic starring Ashton Kutcher. It is also one of the major set pieces in the opera; as Jobs blissfully conducts, his admiring girlfriend watches him and sings an aria about his genius. Years later, while creating the Apple II prototype with his friend and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Jobs is frustrated by his inability to explain his vision for this new computer. Suddenly, he remembers the acid trip and the transformative experience of conducting Bach in the great outdoors. ‘Let's have … Sound. Sound. Sound!’ he sings, in a long aria that conflates music and computers:

The routine association drawn between Jobs and great conductors and composers seems odd – Jobs was not even a musician, for example – but a reason for it is suggested in a scene from the Danny Boyle biopic: in the pit of the San Francisco Opera House, a tearful Wozniak accuses Jobs of being a mediocre engineer who never actually made anything, who simply bullies his friends and employees and takes credit for their work. Jobs does not deny these charges (really, they are more or less true); instead he justifies them by comparing himself to the conductor Seiji Ozawa: the musicians may actually play the music, Jobs says, but ‘I play the orchestra.’

Comparing Jobs to great conductors and other creative geniuses helps business writers and the creators of RSJ emphasize the widespread belief that Jobs was a visionary leader, someone whose brilliant insight and superior vision compelled people to do their best work for him. In Mason Bates's words, Jobs was ‘a visionary of Jesus-like charisma’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Walter Isaacson regularly calls Jobs ‘a visionary leader’, and ultimately dubs him ‘the greatest business executive of our era’.Footnote ⁹⁹ In this discourse, Jobs is often figured as an ideal manager, the kind of manager that other managers should seek to emulate; books and articles encourage aspiring executives to ‘lead like Steve Jobs’ by learning to think as Jobs thought. For many writers, this entails learning to think like an artist. According to a 2013 Forbes article, for example, understanding Steve Jobs's similarities to Pablo Picasso is crucial to successful business management: ‘how both men approached the creative process holds valuable lessons for all leaders who want to kick-start their own creative juices or encourage creativity to flourish in their organizations’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Judging by these assessments of his visionary leadership, we might expect to find that Jobs's management style adhered to the ideal one described in today's managerial discourse. According to the contemporary management training models discussed above, the best managers are those who guide without being controlling: Orly Lobel praises Karajan for allowing his musicians to develop their own unique creativity; Creativity at Work suggests giving employees the time and space to work on their own ideas, independent of managerial direction. This literature explicitly condemns the kind of old-fashioned management style represented by tyrants such as Henry Ford, who exerted an extreme degree of control over his employees and over the production process. Today's best managers, by contrast, are not bosses but ‘team leaders’, people who may gently guide and suggest but whose true talent is identifying individual employees’ strengths and helping them nurture those strengths through creative exploration.

It is odd, then, to see the way the Jobs discourse describes his actual management style. In the biographies and corporate histories of Apple, as well as in the biopics and in RSJ, Jobs emerges as a frightening dictator; even the most hagiographic accounts describe him as vindictive, self-centred, egomaniacal, pathologically controlling, and often pointlessly cruel.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Isaacson calls Jobs someone ‘whose charisma and ego led him to abuse power’, and quotes a Pixar co-founder who calls Jobs ‘a bully’ and ‘a televangelist’.Footnote ¹⁰² A writer for Esquire noted Jobs's ‘conscious readiness, even a perverse eagerness, to put people down, humiliate them, show he was smarter’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Jobs often got his way by screaming at people and even threatening them; Isaacson describes him as ‘a CEO prone to tantrums and withering blasts’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This certainly does not sound like the kind of nurturing, collaborative ‘team leader’ promoted by contemporary managerial literature.

In all the books and articles about Jobs that I have read, however, his cruel, petty behaviour, and his insistence on monomaniacally controlling every aspect of product design down to the tiniest detail, are not only excused, but also often actively celebrated as manifestations of a specifically creative genius. The tech writer Eric Jackson observes that ‘we have heard stories of Steve Jobs yelling or dressing down staff. He's a control freak, we've heard – a perfectionist.’ However, for Jackson, these qualities are merely evidence of Jobs's superior commitment to his creative vision: ‘The bottom line is that he is in touch with his passion.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ After describing Jobs throughout his biography as ‘abusive’, ‘autocratic’, ‘obnoxious’, ‘boorish’, ‘nasty to others’, and ‘an asshole’, Isaacson waves these traits away, not only by pointing out that ‘wanting control was ingrained in his nature’, but also by associating this controlling nature with Jobs's status as an artist. ‘He thought of himself as an artist, which he was, and he indulged in the temperament of one.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Conflating Jobs's antisocial behaviour with the natural behaviour expected of artists allows these commentators to celebrate it. This conflation also happens in musical discourse – orchestra conductors’ cruel and controlling behaviour is sometimes excused by commentators who insist either that the art these conductors generate should be considered separately from their personal behaviour, or that such bad behaviour actually indicates the depth of their artistry. Similarly, for Jobs's fans, his ability to force others to his will emerges as a major aspect of his creative genius. As Isaacson puts it, ‘sometimes it's nice to be in the hands of a control freak’. It does not matter if bosses are bad people, so long as what they create is good; at its darkest, this discourse almost seems to suggest that such bosses do great things because they are bad people. In one particularly arresting passage, Isaacson insists that while Jobs's ‘nasty edge’ was sometimes a liability, ‘it did, at times, serve a purpose. Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The opera ends on the kind of grateful and laudatory note that is common to the discourse surrounding Jobs: at his funeral (which he watches over from Heaven, accompanied by his Buddhist spiritual guide Kōbun Chino Otogawa) messages of gratitude and blessing in all the languages of the world are projected onto the set, as the chorus sings, ‘Have a safe journey Steve … thanks for making great things … one generation, notre génération, nós te amamos, iSad, iTriste, iTraurig, iKanashi … making better clouds.’

Jobs's biographers, as well as the filmmakers, librettists, and composers who have apotheosized him since his death, work hard to interpolate authoritarianism with artistry. They link Jobs's ability to ‘force change’ to his ‘creativity’; effectively wielding power over others here becomes a stirring expression of artistry akin to conducting a symphony. Jobs ‘played the orchestra’, which justifies his tyrannical behaviour as well as the fact that he himself never actually invented anything or engineered a product.

Indeed, the regular comparison of business management to orchestra conducting helps naturalize a capitalist labour relation in which people who produce nothing are considered greater contributors to the economy than the workers they supervise.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The conductor seems to be calling forth music using the force of his own will (famous conductors are overwhelmingly men). In both managerial discourse and classical music criticism, conductors are figured as omniscient creative geniuses whose overarching vision is what allows musicians to transcend the restrictions of collective labour. It thus makes sense that business commentators would appropriate this particular musical role in explaining what it is that great bosses do. As Attali puts it:

Using music to deify authoritarianism is certainly nothing new. Lully exalted the Sun King in all his works, and musicologists have argued that the performances of these operas helped condition Louis XIV's subjects to celebrate his absolute power over their lives.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Many of the opera serias of the eighteenth century were projects in myth-making, in which the composer figured his king as a God or a hero from ancient legends. Bates and Campbell also mythologize their subject, turning him into a wise role model, a just and even-handed lord, a world-builder we can be proud of and grateful for. But where Lully's celebration of authoritarianism was straightforward, Bates's and Campbell's is disguised: in RSJ, power is glorified via a new idea of art, one that reconfigures capitalists as artists, and art-making as little more than canny brand management. By extolling the creative genius of Steve Jobs in the form of an opera, Bates and Campbell (and the opera's co-commissioning and co-producing institutions) have helped to glorify the kind of corporate power that is radically transforming our world.

Absolute capitalism

In certain respects, the discourses examined thus far represent a radical break in historical ideas of what business and art are, as well as the relationship between them. In the early nineteenth century, art became figured as a refuge from the demands of commercial culture. In the famous preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, the French poet and critic Théophile Gautier laid out the Romantic conception of art. The preface attacks his enemies, the journalists who assess artistic products in terms of what benefit (or detriment) they have for society. For Gautier, demanding that art must serve a social purpose defeats its whole raison d’être. He counters the view that art ought to be judged on its usefulness: ‘To begin with, it is not very useful that we are on the earth and alive’, he writes, before brutally extending the ideology of utilitarianism to its absurd logical conclusion: if we value things primarily based on how useful they are to human life, he says, then all we really require is a piece of bread twice a day, and ‘a hollow cube measuring seven or eight feet every way, with a hole to breathe through’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Art, Gautier insists, is indispensable to us precisely because it is not useful. Making and appreciating things that do not contribute to our physical survival is beautiful, because it is absurd and pointless; this pointless, useless creativity is what separates us from other beasts.

The idea of ‘absolute music’ was an aspect of these nineteenth-century attempts to preserve a special space for art that was separate from the marketplace. Via this rubric, music's abstract nature suddenly became a positive attribute; where for centuries music's content had been understood to be its lyrics and emotional effect on listeners, in the early nineteenth century, critics began arguing that music's content was its form. E. T. A. Hoffmann formulated an early theory of musical autonomy, arguing that music without words or programmatic titles – music, in other words, that could not communicate concrete ideas – was more capable of revealing ‘the spirit world of the infinite’.Footnote ¹¹² Later in the century, Eduard Hanslick extended Hoffmann's arguments, asserting that music's emotional effect did not constitute its meaning; rather, ‘pure’ music's meaning consists only of its own internal logic. Such music generates its own coherence, without requiring external referents, as texted music does. Mark Evan Bonds points out that Hanslick's insistence on rigidly separating music's essence from its emotional effect on the listener is what was ‘radical’ in his thought.Footnote ¹¹³ This notion was also highly influential; instrumental music's perceived status as a hermetic, purely aesthetic art quickly raised its level of prestige in Romantic culture.

Gautier was deliberately warding off critics’ attempts to instrumentalize art by insisting it serve a purpose; his espousal of l'art pour l'art established some of the time-honoured stereotypes about art that still linger today: authentic art stems from individual inspiration and expression rather than a desire to earn money or fame. These nineteenth-century ideas about art positioned it as antithetical to commercial concerns, thus the ideal of autonomy became attached to art products that lacked wide consumer appeal.

The long-standing (and, of course, largely fantastical) notion that the creation of true art is a commercially disinterested practice totally separate from the commercial sphere would seem to rub awkwardly against the prerogatives of contemporary business. Indeed, in the phenomenon of corporate arts-based learning and business school art residencies, we can see that cultural understandings of art have been transformed. No longer is art seen as a refuge from commerce; rather, it has become merely another set of tools business can use to increase profits. In other words, art has been made useful, and it is this usefulness that makes it valuable to business (which in turn enhances the value of art at a time when it is seen as increasingly irrelevant). In a post on its website about the lessons business can learn from the artist Damien Hirst, for example, Creativity at Work neatly separates the content or impact of art from its ability to generate capital, although it does so in order to make the opposite point that Gautier articulates: regardless of what business people may think of Hirst's artworks, ‘they cannot help admiring a man who parted art-lovers from £70.5 m ($126.5m) on the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed’.

At the same time, we can see some surprising affinities between business and art as it was understood by nineteenth-century idealists such as Gautier or Hoffmann. Like autonomous art, business is expected to follow only its own internal logic, which is the need to accumulate capital. Within this belief system, all other concerns must be formulated with respect to their effect on this process of accumulation. Even when business commentators argue that corporations should become more socially responsible, for example by curbing emissions, such assertions are always couched in terms of how social responsibility will ultimately increase profits.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Here we may think of Richard Florida's insistence that tolerance and diversity are good because they make our cities more economically profitable; similarly, the multi-billionaire Sir Richard Branson asserts ‘I believe in business because I believe business is a force for good. By that I mean that doing good is good for business.’Footnote ¹¹⁵

The hermeticism of contemporary business ideology leads to an odd value system; in business and managerial literature, the simple spectacle of capital accumulating sometimes provokes the kind of awe that Hoffmann experienced when listening to a Beethoven symphony. Many of these authors describe specific businesses or business people in terms of how they identified a new market opportunity and gained power and money, not in terms of what they actually created, produced, or contributed to the world. Books about the business insights of great CEOs such as Bill Gates or Sam Walton relentlessly focus on their immense personal wealth as an awesome symbol of their greatness; Walter Isaacson concludes his paean to Steve Jobs's genius by saying his main contribution to the world was the creation of Apple itself, ‘a place where imagination was nurtured, applied, and executed in ways so creative that it became the most valuable company on earth’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In this literature, a person's or firm's ability to accumulate capital becomes an automatic testament to their genius, and is considered emotionally stirring for its own sake.

In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello argue that capital itself has finally become ‘genuinely abstract’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Liberated from the gold standard, there is no longer any limit to its accumulation, and ‘profit’ is assessed by comparing balance sheets, rather than by the satisfaction of any actual desires or needs. Thus capitalism (much like absolute music) ‘identifies its purpose in itself’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Furthermore, what we value about people and companies that find success within capitalism often seems abstract – just as Hoffmann loved the way Beethoven's music eschewed concrete meaning in order to make apparent the spirit world of the infinite, we worship the founders of Microsoft, Virgin Airlines, Wal-Mart, and Amazon for the way they revealed hitherto unseen markets. This abstraction is nowhere more obvious than in the realm of speculative finance; in this world, firms buy and trade assets based on the possibility of those assets becoming profitable in the future, and billionaires such as Warren Buffett are revered as ‘wizards’ for the way they reap massive profits based on things that have not happened yet. Today, such asset trading is largely done by computers using algorithms, and is nearly instantaneous. We live in a glowing network of data in which abstract values are calculated by robots, and numbers indicating amounts of theoretical wealth are transferred digitally from one offshore account to another and back again. This instantaneous flow of numbers around the globe certainly has concrete effects on our lives – depending on where the numbers are concentrated at any given time, wars begin or end, leaders are assassinated or installed, waves of forced migration or sudden prosperity transform societies, we lose our jobs, we get new jobs, we die in a state-sanctioned genocide – but the process has become so vast and unknowable that we can only feel our insignificance in the face of it. Hoffmann's description of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony seems apropos for describing the sublime abstraction of contemporary capital, which ‘opens up to us the realm of the monstrous and the immeasurable’ and makes us aware of ‘giant shadows that surge back and forth, driving us into narrower and narrower confines until they destroy us’.Footnote ¹¹⁹

We need to believe in the essential justness of these processes, and of the power hierarchy governing our lives, because the alternative would be to question it, and such questioning leads to either revolt or nihilistic despair. The power structure finds many ways to disseminate a benevolent image of itself, in order to reassure us that it is acceptable for some people to wield political power over others, and for that power to be linked to economic wealth. One feature of this propaganda is its emphasis on the meritocratic virtues of capitalism; although capitalism is predicated on some people accumulating the wealth of other people, we are also told that this system makes it theoretically possible for everyone to become equally wealthy.

A similar contradiction riddles the celebratory discourse on creativity as an economic resource. Within this discourse, creativity, which was once perhaps associated primarily with artists, now becomes a defining aspect of the human species: ‘every single human being is creative’, Florida declares in The Creative Class Revisited, asserting that creativity is ‘what sets us apart from all other species’ and that it is ‘innate in each of us and shared by every one of us’.Footnote ¹²⁰ This vision of humanity as an essentially creative species bears some resemblance to Gautier's observations about how art is what separates us from beasts. Unlike Gautier, however, Florida values the creative impulse for its ability to generate profits; art is good because it is useful, not because it is not. Florida's formulation of creativity as a universal and innate feature of humanity also generates a tension with his other great claim, which is that creative people represent a special ‘class’ that must attain ‘class consciousness’ if the new economy is to fully flourish. This uneasy rhetorical contradiction is one that underlies much of the creativity discourse that has emerged in the wake of Florida's book: on the one hand, creativity is an innate aspect of every human being, and it is each of our responsibility to invest our human capital wisely so as to maximize this innate quality; while on the other hand, these same commentators blandly accept the fact that some people simply have more of this innate creativity than others, and that this special group must be carefully cultivated by businesses and cities, often at the expense of lamentably uncreative people such as service workers, janitors, and of course the homeless.Footnote ¹²¹

It is interesting to see the way discourses promoting contemporary capitalism have fixated on the orchestra as a means of associating the depredations of corporate power with creative genius, because on its surface this association might seem to reflect a misunderstanding of how orchestral music is actually made. While business commentators such as Orly Lobel may talk about individual creativity and freedom of expression and the need for CEOs to relinquish their control mentalities, the orchestra is the most authoritarian of all music genres. Its individual performers train for decades and practise relentlessly in order to perfect an extremely specialized set of technical skills, which they then deploy in reproducing written instructions with exactitude. Conductors are the highest paid of any orchestra employees, garnering superstar salaries and enormous prestige; furthermore, they are expected to wield absolute control over ‘their’ musicians in order to realize artistic perfection. Finally, orchestral conducting is predominantly a white man's game, which would seem to clash against contemporary corporations’ loud promotion of the many ‘diversity initiatives’ they are undertaking to be more inclusive of women and people of colour. So, in some ways the association with the orchestra would seem to be a mismatch for contemporary business discourses, which strive to present their flexible labour formations and relations of production as enabling individual creativity and freedom of choice.

As the various hagiographies of Steve Jobs suggest, despite corporations’ superficial capitulation to demands for social justice, it is nonetheless very much in their interest to associate capitalism's supposed empowering and liberatory qualities with those of an authoritarian, elite-centric musical practice such as the traditional classical orchestra, a practice that has long been supported by similar assertions about the transcendent nature of great art. In the discourse surrounding disgraced Metropolitan Opera Music Director James Levine, for example, his vision and creative genius were persistently used as trump cards to play against people who tried to question his reprehensible treatment of other human beings. In a gloomy VAN magazine article, Ben Miller sums up this attitude: ‘How could the rumors be true if Levine's performances were so great?’ Miller quotes for example BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons, who has said that sexual harassment does not occur in classical music because ‘art makes people better humans’.Footnote ¹²² By appropriating music's mantle of creativity and transcendence, capital can seem liberating, positive, and good for humanity; but by relentlessly associating this creativity with the organizational structure of the orchestra (rather than that of free jazz, or a rock band, or any number of other collective musical labour formations), capital can subtly glorify the kind of racist, patriarchal, and elitist power dynamic that is essential to its continued functioning.Footnote ¹²³

Max Weber noted that capitalism is essentially an absurd system, and argued that it can only assure our continued participation by seeming to adhere to real moral values that are external to it.Footnote ¹²⁴ The system cannot justify itself in its own terms, because its only reason for existence – the accumulation of capital – is fundamentally an amoral one, one that robots are more successful at than humans are. Associating capital accumulation with ‘creativity’ is one method for justifying our participation in the system, as well as for justifying the vast inequality the system generates. If corporate tycoons are artists in the same way that Beethoven or Seiji Ozawa are artists, then the enormous wealth they accumulate and the political power they wield over our lives must be justified. We accept their wielding of power because they are ‘visionaries’ with superior knowledge of how our future should be sculpted; and we accept the legitimacy of their vast wealth because we still hold a deep-seated belief that true artists do not care about such things – such wealth is merely a well-deserved byproduct of the pursuit of creative innovation, rather than its sole point. Just as Weber argued that Puritanism still ‘wanders around in our lives as the ghost of beliefs no longer anchored in the substance of religion’, I suggest that nineteenth-century ideas about the transcendent, commercially disinterested nature of authentic art still linger in the Western cultural consciousness, even now that art has been financialized. This ghostly echo of Gautier's l'art pour l'art helps us reassure ourselves that by enabling and fostering creativity, capitalists are selflessly adding value to our world.

Concluding remarks

The flourishing of a new music scene, like that of the Indie film industry, depends on the passionate commitments of performers and composers about the importance of art that is fully enmeshed in the present. This passion is matched by listeners who also desire musical experiences of our time and crave artistic encounters that engage and challenge. The successes of new music groups, such as Yarn/Wire and Ensemble Dal Niente, have been shaped by larger cultural, economic, and technological changes affecting virtually all parts of the world – this success is a welcome and positive development. But it is important to note that not all change is necessarily positive, as Ortner tracks in Not Hollywood. The flourishing of the Indie film industry arose from the passionate commitments of producers, directors, actors, and audiences as they made ‘edgy’ films that often exposed the negative consequences of economic changes linked to neoliberal capitalism at the turn of the millennium. My focus here has been on the flourishing of the new music scene in North America and not explicitly on how music of the present reflects and shapes our present – something that is eloquently expressed by the other articles in this forum. It is worth noting that this flourishing marks a significant change from mid- to late twentieth-century attitudes towards ‘new’ music, and the explosive growth of new music groups since the turn of the millennium may indeed herald a long-lasting trend in classical music – only time will tell if this will be sustained. But for now, we may observe that the performance and creation of new music has, despite the odds against it, flourished in the larger cultural, economic, and technological changes of the twenty-first century.

Neoliberalism and musical labour

Analysing the promotional material of all three ensembles demonstrates the pervasiveness of ‘boundaryless entrepreneurship’ as a mode of discourse. Such rhetoric marks an important shift within discourses and practices in new music that indicates a tentative embrace of neoliberal ideals. Discussing the music and public statements of composers such as Judd Greenstein, Missy Mazzoli, and especially Mason Bates, Marianna Ritchey outlines persistent attempts on the part of these composers and their advocates to position themselves as somehow moving beyond the boundaries of traditional classical music and its institutional biases.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Previous generations of modernist composers also celebrated transgression through innovation, but they maintained disdain for popular music and by extension popular cultural realm and large audiences.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In contrast, boundarylessness, as it appears for both the composers studied by Ritchey and the ensembles I discuss here, frequently touts relationships with musicians that can be marketed as ‘popular’. As David Blake has recently demonstrated, this trend reflects a broader shift in taste characteristic of newly dominant ‘omnivore’ tastes, both among educated elites in general and in the musical academy.Footnote ¹⁵¹ In new music, people typically employ boundarylessness to mean a combination of musical gestures viewed as somehow foreign to the classical music canon, with its emphasis on acoustic works written according to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics. Thus Robin demonstrates the perceived success of a collaboration between the new music ensemble yMusic and singer-songwriter Ben Folds, despite the uneven remuneration of student composers.Footnote ¹⁵² In terms of musical qualities, Ritchey identifies boundarylessness as an emphasis on anything that could signify popular music ostensibly foreign to the musical academy. Ultimately, the musical qualities of ‘boundarylessness’ are so numerous as to be of questionable significance. Nevertheless, musicians and arts workers typically point to electric guitars, turn-tables, laptops, as well as musical gestures Ritchey describes as ‘typically diatonic and often predominantly consonant’ when describing boundarylessness.Footnote ¹⁵³

Boundarylessness also figures prominently in analyses and celebrations of neoliberal labour. In neoliberalism, the individual is an enterprise that must compete on the market, and that should be flexible, take on risk, and embark on numerous endeavours as part of a ‘boundaryless career’. Boltanski and Chiapello have located these attributes as part of a ‘new spirit’ of capitalism, identifying it as a recurring trope in contemporary managerial texts.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In this new environment, workers celebrate a move away from the tedious stability provided by long-term employment at a single firm. To some extent, this shift results from workers themselves reacting against previous generations who were viewed as mired in bureaucratic and meaningless work.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The ‘new spirit’ encourages individuals to strike out on their own and work outside the perceived boundaries of the firm. To facilitate such labour, people develop ‘portfolio careers’ that piece together a more project-based employment at several places.

Returning to musical labour, the discourse of neoliberal flexibility and portfolio careers has gained prominence in recent years. Moore argues that schools of music have developed entrepreneurship programmes in order to respond both to a perceived decline in the status of classical music in general – the ‘death of classical music’ debate – and to the financial crises of the early twenty-first century: ‘Musical entrepreneurship has become the most widely promoted, disseminated, and supported of these possible solutions.’Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Similar to Ritchey's critique of boundarylessness, Moore connects the embrace of musical entrepreneurship with the embrace of neoliberalism on the part of arts administrators. The result is the valorization of what Guy Standing has called ‘precarious labor’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

In the performing arts, of course, labour has been precarious for centuries, and many have constructed personae in part as a promotional move. From Franz Liszt's exploitation of military heroism, to P. T. Barnum's promotion of Norwegian singer Jenny Lind, to freelance classical musicians working in the twenty-first century, musicians have long engaged in self-promotion, flexible labour, and work that could be considered an enterprise of the self.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Neoliberal ideals of flexibility, entrepreneurship, and boundarylessness have become newly embraced by musical academies because they provide musicians and arts workers with ways to describe their work that dovetail with the values of contemporary capital and its discourses.

Revelry: the building and the b(r)ands

During my fieldwork with ensembles working at 4045 N. Rockwell, I was routinely struck by the parallels between the space rented by the three ensembles and broader economic shifts in the United States. Both witnessed dramatic changes over the past few decades. Prior to its existence as a multi-use leased space, 4045 N. Rockwell had been home to a family-owned luxury photo album manufacturing business. At its peak in the 1990s, the business had employed upwards of two hundred and fifty people. By the time I arrived in 2014, however, the business was all but shuttered: employees had been laid off, and only a few orders remained to be filled. Over the years of my fieldwork, the business dwindled steadily, though tenant occupancy increased. When I last visited in winter 2018, the owners had sold off the heavy machinery used to create the albums. Based on interviews with the business owners, the advent of digital photo technology had contributed to this decline.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The family who owned the business transitioned to managing the building itself and leasing out space to various occupants. Tenants included several poster makers, a wine maker, an internet radio station, a bicycle bag company, offices for a performing arts non-profit, and the three ensembles I researched.

The building thus echoed a more general trend in the United States: a space once occupied by working- and middle-class workers had been abandoned, only to be re-claimed by elite cultural producers. As several authors have shown, manufacturing in the United States has declined while, at the same time, boutique venues have flourished as cities sought to encourage a ‘creative class’ that, it was argued, would bring new prosperity.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Timothy Taylor has described this kind of shift as symptomatic of neoliberalism more generally.Footnote ¹⁶¹ A feature of this shift includes emphasis on niche markets, as producers attempt to cater to a newly legitimate plethora of tastes. Where mid-twentieth-century cultural producers sold a canon of works, musical and otherwise, to large audiences, they gradually reset their sights on the ‘conquest of cool’.Footnote ¹⁶² This ‘cool’ is then mobilized as part of a heretofore unprecedented level of commodification:

The situation at 4045 N. Rockwell provides a particularly stark example of this class shift. An American-owned and -operated business of a few hundred has faded, and a new group of cultural producers have taken their place.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The changes seen at 4045 N. Rockwell parallel broader economic developments. All three ensembles I studied enthusiastically leveraged ideas of ‘what is hip, cool, and edgy’ to sell their musical performances. They are part of Taylor's ‘new class’ who would employ the ideology of cool to ‘sell anything’, even avant-garde music.

‘Hip, cool, and edgy’ manifested in ensemble promotional material and in performances in response to the debates underway within new/classical music communities. For the three ensembles I study, boundarylessness appears most consistently in rhetorical and visual celebrations that reinforce ideas of a pop-culture friendly orientation. Members of all three ensembles frequently emphasize the diversity of musical influences found in a given programme. Each of the ensemble's biographies emphasizes some kind of cross-generic connection between traditional classical repertoires and pop music. Promoting its twenty years of touring and performance, Eighth Blackbird's online biography proclaims:

Third Coast Percussion similarly focuses on repertoire and collaborations that seem to cross generic boundaries.

Finally, Ensemble Dal Niente touts its work with bands Deerhoof and a wide variety of composers:

All three of these examples point to ostensibly cross-genre collaborations – Byce Dessner and Bon Iver for Eighth Blackbird; Glenn Kotche (drummer for Wilco) for Third Coast Percussion; and Deerhoof for Ensemble Dal Niente – while also name dropping some of the most prominent composers in new music today (e.g. David Lang, Donnacha Dennehy, and George Lewis, respectively). These collaborations connote a musical world that finds artists and collaborators from within the academy and without. All three groups also celebrate collaborations with scientists, visual artists, and dancers in projects that are similarly promoted as somehow challenging the stereotypical conventions of the classical music concert hall.

Visual work by the groups also reinforces notions of boundarylessness. Publicity photos feature members smiling, often professionally posed in appealing ways. The groups often appear outside the concert hall, either in industrial spaces similar to 4045 N. Rockwell, or in unspecified play spaces. Through dress and environment, these ensembles present themselves as agglomerations of individual artists with their own skills and sensibilities rather than homogeneous members of traditional ensembles. These attributes come together to deliver stunning performances of new music that provide new insight into difficult to understand new musical works. Musicians are portrayed as both casual (as in Figures 6 and 7), and focused, (as in Figures 8 and 9).

Figure 6

Eighth Blackbird publicity photo. Photo by Saverio Truglia. Used with permission.

Figure 7

Third Coast Percussion. Photo by Saverio Truglia. Used with permission.

Figure 8

Ensemble Dal Niente publicity photo.

Figure 9

Eighth Blackbird publicity photo. Photo by Saverio Truglia. Used with permission.

The brands portrayed in these publicity photos and articulated in these bios all demonstrate an embrace of boundarylessness that has become widely celebrated in new/classical music. In many ways, ensemble members employ boundarylessness as a response to the stereotypical view that the musical academy is oriented towards a certain kind of ‘difficult’ music, that is, music comprising complex and difficult to discern processes. Susan McClary used this term to theorize the discourse surrounding music by composers engaged in an anti-populist justification for the inaccessible nature of their musical works. More recently, Robin has shown contemporary musicians responding to McClary's critiques while also seeking to express their personal musical tastes.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ From the 1980s on, composers sought a more inclusive setting for musical practices. Boundarylessness became in part an index of a more stylistically diverse and generally welcoming scene than that found in demonized (and reductively stereotyped) musical institutions.

This anti-institutionalism manifests in all three ensemble's promotional rhetoric and brands; it is a central aspect of what ‘boundaryless’ means in this community. In ethnographic interviews, members of both Eighth Blackbird and Third Coast described to me a desire to portray the ensembles as somehow not ‘academic’. In an interview from 2015, Eighth Blackbird cellist and founding member, Nick Photinos, explained the ensemble's approach to me this way:

Former Eighth Blackbird employee Kyle Vegter offered such an assessment when I asked him to describe the group's brand in 2011:

Robert Dillon, founding member of Third Coast Percussion, described his ensemble's brand to me thusly:

Dillon's invocation of a perceived boundary between the academy and the rest of the world echoes Vegter's use of ‘academic’, as well as Photinos's description of new music concerts as ‘academics only’ above. The desire to move beyond ‘academic’ illustrates the boundaryless aesthetic widely lauded in contemporary new music culture.

For Ensemble Dal Niente, ‘boundarylessness’ portrays the ensemble as true to the critical mission of much avant-garde music. In some ways, Ensemble Dal Niente has much in common with previous generations of new music ensembles who performed musical works unsupportable outside of an academic or institutional context.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The chamber orchestra has much stronger ties to the European avant-garde associated with Darmstadt and other institutional entities with composers who write precisely the kind of ‘difficult’ music identified by McClary. As a part-time ensemble, the group's members earn most of their incomes outside of their work with Dal Niente. Repertoire choices certainly reflect the interests of ensemble members, but they also demonstrate Ensemble Dal Niente's greater programming freedom. The ensemble gains considerable freedom to engage in eclectic projects exclusively, rather than chase down every potential gig, as the two full-time ensembles must. At the same time, the demands of foundations that award grants encourage the group to portray themselves as engaging as diverse an audience as possible.

Conversations with Ensemble Dal Niente members demonstrate a wariness of the kind of enthusiastic boundarylessness seen in the two full-time ensembles. Despite participating in a branding workshop similar to that of Third Coast Percussion, musicians struggled to articulate a coherent brand for Ensemble Dal Niente. Ben Melsky, executive director of the orchestra, put it this way:

This emphasis on risk appeared only occasionally in conversations with Eighth Blackbird and Third Coast Percussion, partly because the two full-time ensembles had been able to invest more time in the construction of brands. To be clear, musicians in all three ensembles have played music they enjoyed and music that some members did not care for. In spite of the struggle to articulate a brand, Melsky and other Ensemble Dal Niente members felt compelled to provide a coherent narrative about the work of the ensemble, and especially to celebrate and emphasize the diversity of the types of music performed, as seen in the above-cited bio excerpt and in Melsky's emphasis on difference. While the aesthetic distinctions between the ensembles are well understood by members, Ensemble Dal Niente nevertheless deploys ‘boundarylessness’ as a marketing tactic in both print and image, a fact that demonstrates the importance of the concept to new music's marketplaces.

To sum-up, the boundarylessness touted by the three ensembles reinforces relatively recent goals important to the new and classical music institutions and presenters. In this context of a field actively seeking new ways to attract audiences, employ students, respond to a past of elitist music-making, and gain cultural relevance, the three new music ensembles of 4045 N. Rockwell emerge as attractive success stories. They have taken a repertoire that is difficult to play, broadly unknown, and frequently reviled and made it look cool. Incredible performances bear witness to musical prowess, and 4045 N. Rockwell emerges as a testament to their apparent financial success. Bohemian studio space can seem like evidence of musicians’ success in making it ‘in the real world’. Ensemble Dal Niente, Third Coast Percussion, and Eighth Blackbird can all afford to pay rent in an ostensibly self-supporting manner. True to the missions of boundaryless musical ensembles, they have used 4045 N. Rockwell for performances, fundraisers, and recordings, all things for which it was never designed, but that add an exciting energy to this space.

Publicity photos, snappy copy, and branding all consolidate ensembles’ goals and project a marketable identity. But these ensemble brands do more than that: they mask struggle. Promotional material does not tell the story of all the work that goes into getting to the rehearsal. It can gloss over the renting and moving of gear, the actual playability of parts, and the frustrations felt at various points in the production process. Online biographies do not show what it is like, for example, to move a bunch of equipment upstairs while two people are sick with colds and trying to figure out who will carry what suitcases on the plane that takes off at six a.m. tomorrow morning from O'Hare. To analyse that side of musical labour, I turn now to the struggle and challenges faced by the three ensembles.

Struggle

While members of the three ensembles enjoyed the benefits of the class shift described by Taylor, they struggled constantly in order to maintain the economic and social standing of their groups. They are all registered as 501(c)3 non-profit entities reliant on grants for specific projects. In the absence of the tenure-oriented employment associated with symphony orchestras, these ensembles often work either as freelancers or adjunct faculty, depending on the gig. The boundarylessness celebrated in both neoliberalism and classical music also meant that boundaries between personal and professional domains were often blurred, and work–life balance was often impossible. Ensemble members were themselves well aware of this challenge, and spoke of it openly. Michael Lewanski, conductor and co-artistic director of Ensemble Dal Niente, addressed the tenuous nature of the new music scene and of 4045 N. Rockwell. Writing for New Music Box in autumn 2016, Lewanski described the Chicago new/classical music scene and Dal Niente as an ‘instantiation of the contingent’.Footnote ¹⁷¹ By this, Lewanski explains in the article, he meant that multiple factors and forces – a pool of talented individuals, institutional support, and a certain DIY ethos – had come together to create a new music scene that was exciting but unstable. This description applies exceptionally well to 4045 N. Rockwell; it is, after all, a real ‘instantiated’ place. However, in contrast with purpose-built buildings such as Chicago's Symphony Center on Michigan Avenue, 4045 N. Rockwell also remains in many ways contingent and ever-changing. For Lewanski, instantiation of the contingent pertained both to repertoire and to work, to aesthetics and to labour, two separate but ultimately interwoven issues that shaped the fabric of daily life for him and many musicians:

While all three groups can point to exciting work that crosses the traditional generic boundaries of classical music, their respective budgets demonstrate strong ties to arts-funding institutions. About a third of Eighth Blackbird's and Third Coast Percussion's respective incomes come from grants and donations (‘contributed’), with the remaining two-thirds coming from gigs (‘earned’). Ensemble Dal Niente's split of contributed versus earned is closer to about 55 per cent contributed and 45 per cent earned. Economist Robert Flanagan has argued that the performing arts, and classical symphony orchestras especially, are endangered by a ‘cost disease’ wherein the cost of labour outpaces the growth of productivity.Footnote ¹⁷³ Building on arguments of William Baumol and William Bowen,Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Flanagan studied the budgets of the fifty largest symphony orchestras in the United States from 1987 to 2005. In his research, Flanagan consistently cites the division between earned and contributed as an indicator of overall financial health. Orchestras, he finds, have seen their earned incomes decline consistently so that, on average by 2005, only 41 per cent of income came from ‘earned’ sources such as ticket sales, royalties, and other market-based sources. In light of this finding, Eighth Blackbird and Third Coast Percussion would seem to perform quite well, given their high levels of income derived from earned sources, and Ensemble Dal Niente is at least about average which, given the historically low level of market interest in their repertoire, seems quite good.

However, viewing the budgets in the manner outlined by Flanagan misrepresents the nature of the three ensembles’ markets. Unlike orchestras who rely at least somewhat on ticket sales for revenue, the three ensembles usually earn fees regardless of the size of the audience. In general, all three ensembles secure fees guaranteed by the venue presenter. Furthermore, the venues in which the ensemble perform are usually themselves a part of a subsidized musical institution, either a school of music, or the concert series of a university. These venues themselves rely on grants and donations, both for individual concerts and for general operating expenses. It is more accurate, then, to understand the ensembles’ financial standing as based not the kind of open market in entertainment in general, but as reliant on a specialized market controlled by venue presenters, as a market with some autonomy from the vicissitudes of the broader US financial market. Viewed thusly, one could view all of the ensemble's income, with the exception of the small fraction from merchandise, as contributed.

Understanding the extent to which these ensembles rely on institutions raises interesting questions when considered in light of their boundaryless branding. In this light, Eighth Blackbird's and Third Coast Percussion's respective anti-academic rhetoric may seem inconsistent, or even duplicitous, and we might expect that such funded institutions might take offence at it. Music institutions, however, have tended to embrace these anti-institutional brands as part of their own self-marketing. Despite their anti-academic stances, for example, all three ensembles enjoyed residencies at the country's top schools and conservatories. Eighth Blackbird has been in residence for many years at the University of Richmond, while also working at the University of Chicago and the Curtis Institute. Third Coast Percussion has held residencies at the University of Notre Dame, and Dal Niente has been in residence for the June in Buffalo new music festival at SUNY Buffalo. These residencies vary in length and in curricular integration, but they routinely see all three groups teaching student performers and composers, giving masterclasses in performance strategies, and mounting elaborate productions.

These relationships suggest the extent to which various academic institutions themselves fear presenting a stodgy and overly specialized image. Rhetoric about creating students ready for the real world serves dominant neoliberal ideologies, which base success largely on financial prosperity. While altruistic or aesthetic values (playing music because it is valuable for human expression, for example) remain important, many music departments justify their existence in part through their ability to prepare students for work. Residency collaborations with these highly skilled and very successful ensembles reinforce the institutions’ abilities to market themselves as supportive of musical pursuits that extend beyond the academy and towards the market. Furthermore, such employment-oriented motives reinforce broader justifications of the arts as drivers of economic growth, a trend identified by several as indicative of neoliberalism's reconfiguration of values in general.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

Where the distinction between earned and contributed can be problematic, the ensemble budgets do tell a consistent story: there is money to be made from the performance of new music. Budgets show that Dal Niente had earned around $250,000 each year; Third Coast Percussion's budget has fluctuated between $430,000 and about $550,000 over the past several years; and Eighth Blackbird's budget fluctuates between $800,000 and $1 million. This success has been hard won, and budget shortfalls always threaten the stability of groups, even for Eighth Blackbird. The three ensembles do work in a market, though that market is itself the product of individual donations, grants, and institutional support.

Securing gigs requires venue presenters to learn about an ensemble and understand what it does. As a result, ensembles must frequently introduce themselves to presenters over and over again. In part to facilitate this process, Eighth Blackbird and Third Coast Percussion have routinely attended annual gatherings of venue presenters and performers such as the Chamber Music America Conference in New York City and Arts Midwest. Third Coast Percussionist David Skidmore described attending these events to me in a 2014 interview, outlining a variety of levels of participation ranging from simply attending all the way to being hired as a paid performer. At Midwest, performing organizations can also rent a booth as a way to promote themselves to presenters from around the country. According to Skidmore:

Conferences offer numerous opportunities for both parties to meet and discuss possible projects, an important part in the struggle to make new music economically viable. Skidmore emphasized that, unlike traditional classical music ensembles such as string quartets, new music ensembles have to go to extra lengths to secure gigs:

Anticipating the concerns of presenters, Skidmore described the folder of press materials Third Coast Percussion distributed to possible presenters:

Thus, even for high-profile ensembles like Eighth Blackbird, securing gigs and creating projects requires substantial work as many venues seek extensive conversations with ensembles about what exactly the performers will play, what it sounds like, and how it fits with other programme offerings at that venue. One performer bemoaned this state of affairs, arguing that this quibbling over programmes happens only in classical music. A result of this constant process of negotiation is that the two full-time ensembles tend to perform new music viewed as somehow more audience-friendly. Rob Dillon of Third Coast Percussion described repertoire selection as ‘a type of “natural selection” which means that a program that interests presenters may be performed dozens of times, whereas another program we're also excited about may only get one performance, if presenters aren't getting on board’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ For Eighth Blackbird and Third Coast, this has meant more frequent performances of music by Steve Reich, as opposed to their other projects that might seem less accessible. To be sure, all three ensembles play a wide variety of music; Eighth Blackbird, for example, built much of its reputation within the new music field on staged or semi-staged performances of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. Third Coast Percussion has commissioned avant-garde dramatic works such as David T. Little's Haunt of Last Nightfall (2010), a work about the slaughter of villagers in El Salvador in 1981 by American-backed soldiers. However, these pieces appear less frequently in touring shows in part because of the need to negotiate with presenters. In this way, the market decides the boundaries to be crossed by these ‘boundaryless’ ensembles.

Understanding the gig negotiation process further illustrates how ensembles must negotiate professional boundaries. During my fieldwork with Eighth Blackbird, I worked with Eighth Blackbird's former managing Director Peter McDowell and founding member Matthew Duvall to draw up a chart outlining the steps that lead up to a gig (see Figure 10). For Eighth Blackbird, gigs could originate either from the group or from an outside source soliciting the ensemble members, from McDowell, or from their agent David Lieberman Artists. After initial conversations about tentative dates and repertoire, parties usually discuss fees and expenses. For Eighth Blackbird, the agent handles many, if not all, of the initial conversations. However, certain presenters might express interests in specific repertoire, which necessitates a conversation between one of the Eighth Blackbird performers, usually Nick Photinos, Lisa Kaplan, or Matthew Duvall. Sometimes gig opportunities would be set aside for a later date, or sometimes a project required the availability of external funds such as a grant or donor. Managing the labour required for gigs has led to performers taking on dual roles, operating both as musicians and as business agents of one kind or another. The general contours of the outline I created for Eighth Blackbird can apply to all three groups, with the removal of agents from the process. For each ensemble, gigs required at least several conversations, lasting anywhere from a few weeks to a few years, depending on the scope of the project (especially for multi-year residency activities).

Figure 10

Eighth Blackbird's gig flowchart, created by the author in consultation with ensemble members. This chart works for Third Coast Percussion and Ensemble Dal Niente, but without the mediation of booking agents.

One of the working realities of this type of labour model meant that certain musicians were frequently managing the business of future gigs while on site at other gigs. During down time between rehearsals, for example, musicians often held conversations about future gigs. A good example of such a day came from my first day of fieldwork with Third Coast Percussion in 2014, shortly before the above-cited conversation with David Skidmore. I met the group at the University of Chicago's Rockwell Chapel where they played for the church's non-denominational service. Afterwards, the group held an informal ‘instrument petting zoo’ that allowed children to come play with some of the percussion equipment. I thanked the minister, Elizabeth, and got her card. She told me, ‘With a group like Third Coast, you can't go wrong.’ Load up after the event took over an hour, and was followed by a one-hour van ride back to Rockwell. David Skidmore was on the phone during much of the load up, busy working out the details of an upcoming gig. I had intended to set up interviews with Skidmore during the drive, but even in the van his phone never left his ear for long as he arranged to sub for Eighth Blackbird percussionist Matthew Duvall. When we finally arrived back at the studio, I offered to help David unload the van, an arduous process that involves squatting awkwardly to lift pieces of instruments onto the building's loading dock. At one point, I felt a muscle in my back spasm and I wondered if Third Coast has health insurance. All the instruments were re-assembled upstairs in preparation for tomorrow's rehearsal.

During this day I saw musicians at their most flexible, performing an ecumenical service, teaching children how to play a thumb piano, and promptly moving on to a rehearsal for the next gig, all the while managing the possibility of other performances and substituting with Eighth Blackbird. This kind of labour was a constant feature of my fieldwork with all three ensembles, and was succinctly summarized by Ensemble Dal Niente soprano Amanda DeBoer-Bartlett who noted one evening, ‘There's no sitting in new music.’

Besides the constant set-ups and tear-downs, life in 4045 N. Rockwell can also be a struggle. It is not beautiful, nor warm, nor especially waterproof. The rent has gone up most years. The acoustics are wonky at best: sound bleeds out when you want it to stay in an area, and concerts in the space can be acoustically unsatisfying, a challenge when playing, say, spectral music by James Tenney. Thus 4045 N. Rockwell is utopic only in a certain promotional context or in the sense that it affords musicians a degree of personal agency.

Despite the practical challenges posed by the building, many of musicians I interviewed often spoke with pride and are proud of their space. Matthew Duvall, founding member and percussionist in Eighth Blackbird, demonstrated this affection when he showed me around the then-new space in 2014, pointing out all the rooms they had, the storage space for percussion, and the potential for recording. Greg Beyers, percussionist in Ensemble Dal Niente, suggested that they could develop 4045 N. Rockwell into a dedicated artist's space with a major grant. He shared these ideas with me while we painted one of the walls in anticipation of the 2016 Dal Niente Party, held at the Rockwell Studios. One of the poster makers emphasized her pride to me in passing when she criticized a Chicago Tribune article that described the building as akin to a bombed out Soviet warehouse. As Figure 11 demonstrates, the spaces occupied by groups become highly personalized. They speak to some degree of success and inter-ensemble community. They become charged with meanings. In my fieldwork, I often returned to the building with a sense of eagerness, excited to see what I would find inside its paint-flecked walls.

Figure 11

Ensemble Dal Niente members embrace after the 2016 party held at 4045 N. Rockwell. Photo by the author.