Music and Money
Toward an argument for the value of music in a system that can't see it.
American society reveres wealth: its generation, and the influence that comes with it. The cultural obsession with money plays out on the level of national politics, and in the innermost aspects of our lives. Our relationship with money shapes our identities. It shapes our ideas—about freedom, power, status, independence, and success. It colors our anxieties—about growing up, getting sick, getting older. It’s no surprise, then, that to talk about money is to talk about our intimate and vulnerable selves.
Earlier this week, I led a discussion about money with young musicians at New England Conservatory in Boston. (OK, on Zoom, but “in” Boston.) I opened by asking them to relate the values, ideas, and beliefs they associate with money.
Their responses fell along familiar lines: anxieties (fear of going without, fear of an unknown future; fear of a future of endless economic precarity; conflicts (social values versus personal values); ideas about what it means to grow up; and a few practical questions—questions about how things actually work.
When I asked them to consider music alongside money, their responses showed how their commitment to artistic practice sits in conflict with social values.
In a society that holds money as an automatic good (money is good, more money is better) what place can there be for a musician?
Magical thinking about money and music
Our discussion about music and money reinforced what I already knew to be true: we carry all kinds of baggage about money. We commonly speak about money as though it were an obscure, ambiguous substance: either an elixir or a poison; the best to which we can aspire or the root of all evil. With that level of murkiness, it’s no wonder many young musicians would rather take a hands-off approach to it, or erect a thought-barrier made of various kinds of denial:
If I don’t think about money, the problems will go away;
I’ll think about money after I [graduate, turn 30, win my first job];
I didn’t get into music to make money;
Music has nothing to do with money; please make this go away.
But without coming to know the ideas we have about money, we can’t properly begin to have a good relationship with it.
Our society carries all kinds of baggage about music, too. We commonly speak as though music were a divine machine: a universal apparatus that builds bridges, gives hope, builds peace, ennobles us, empowers us, expresses the inexpressible, and transcends all time. Music is not a divine machine, but a complex set of social practices hardwired into every human culture. More to the point, it lives in a set of social practices enacted by musicians, alone and in community with other musicians, audiences, and institutions.
Music does not exist in opposition to money or the “real world.” Music is real, and it lives—with us—in a world where we navigate public conceptions of price (supply and demand, scarcity, peoples’ willingness to pay) and private conceptions of value (subjective judgments, aesthetics, ethics). In order to navigate concepts of public price and personal value, we have to sit in a good relationship to ourselves and to our music.
It’s not easy to do this in a culture that displays an unhealthy obsession with money. But we can create healthy relationships inside and around us.
The making and keeping of healthy relationships in the “real world”— fraught as it is— that’s one argument for why musical practice matters today.
A collision course with human life
“Capitalism is on a collision course with human life and the future of our planet.”
That’s the lede of a March 21 column by Owen Jones, a writer for The Guardian.1 Jones refers to a recent report—based on a trove of historical documents from corporate archives—showing how the oil industry knew for over 50 years that burning fossil fuels posed grave risks to human health, but continued to fund aggressive lobbying campaigns against clear air regulations.2 The oil industry’s goal is to keep sowing doubt about scientific data. So long as there’s doubt, there’s a chance to make a profit.3
“This may cause moral revulsion,” writes Jones, “but the behaviour is perfectly rational. An economic system based on accumulating profit will downgrade all other considerations, including the sanctity of human life.”
If the value of human life can’t be accounted for by capitalism, then what of the arts?
Capitalism requires that we keep silent about such revulsion; the market would prefer that we despair. To claim your identity as a musician—to refuse to have your worth defined by a system that will not see the value of human life—is to disrupt the status quo.
One argument to be made for music is that when we practice, we practice not-despair; we practice disrupting the status quo.
We won’t find the solutions in the places that produced the problems
A capitalist society values two things: things that increase productivity and efficiency, and things that make a profit. The market can see economic value in music, but not musicians. (See for example, Spotify’s record profits in 2020—at the same time, musicians were losing their lives and livelihoods to Covid-19.) There’s social and cultural capital to be gained from participation in musical events—that’s why concert halls carry the names of billionaires and robber barons, and why classical music’s claims for value fall back on terms of hierarchy and scarcity. Consider these three statements from NYC-based music institutions:
WQXR is the nation’s most listened-to classical music station, making the very best classical music accessible to listeners nationwide.4
Carnegie Hall's mission is to present extraordinary music and musicians on the three stages of this legendary hall, to bring the transformative power of music to the widest possible audience, to provide visionary education programs, and to foster the future of music through the cultivation of new works, artists, and audiences.5
The Metropolitan Opera is a vibrant home for the most creative and talented singers, conductors, composers, musicians, stage directors, designers, visual artists, choreographers, and dancers from around the world.6
The superlatives (the “most,” “the best”) and adjectives (“legendary,” “transformative”) reinforce central features of capitalism (competition, supply and demand, ownership). The high cost of admission and exclusive atmosphere welcome only a small segment of the city’s population. The role of musicians inside these spaces is limited to a discrete set of salaried positions. (Even these are under threat: the Met wants to be a vibrant home for artists — it just wants to pay them less for it.)
Meanwhile, the entryway into professional musicianship is narrowing. The escalating cost of entry (lessons, summer festivals, pre-college programs, instruments, college tuition) and professional maintenance (lessons, insurance, travel to auditions, rent in metropolitan centres) makes music an activity restricted to those who can afford it.
When I made a choice to become a musician, it wasn’t because I wanted to be a part of an exclusive club. I chose to become a musician because I thought I would be doing the real work of defending the invisible and essential. The idea that songs can help us think and be together in ways we couldn’t otherwise achieve. The idea that song keeps opens different channels of knowing.
Another argument for the value of musical practice today: by practicing music, alone and together, we hold space for the knowledge that’s found there.
Things are topsy-turvy
It can be difficult to defend the choice to be a musician when you live in a world that values profit over all forms of life. It’s a profound moral inversion.
When sociologist Rachel Sherman studied the attitudes of 50 wealthy New Yorkers—most in the top 1 to 2% in terms of income or wealth—she noticed how they downplayed their wealth in order to avoid the stigma attached to it. She reported in the New York Times how her subjects described themselves as “normal,” “comfortable,” or “fortunate.” Some preferred to position themselves as “middle class” or “in the middle,” despite the fact that they were, by any definition, at the very top. Sherman identified a kind of moral “win-win”:
“as they try to be “normal,” these wealthy and affluent people deflect the stigma of wealth. If they can see themselves as hard workers and reasonable consumers, they can belong symbolically to the broad and legitimate American “middle,” while remaining materially at the top.”7
Author Anand Giridharadas speaks about the myth of the “win-win.” In his book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, he illuminates how the global elite’s efforts to “change the world” function to preserve the status quo while obscuring their role in causing the very problems they seek to solve.
In this interview with NPR’s Krista Tippett, Giridharadas describes the moral vacuum that surrounds the activities of philanthropists (“thought leaders” and “change makers”) at gatherings like Aspen Institute, Davos and TED conferences.
“You can tell the rich and powerful in our age to do more good, but you can never tell them to do less harm. You can tell them to give more, but you can’t tell them to take less. You can tell them to share the spoils of extreme capitalism, but you can’t tell them to renovate capitalism.”8
Innocuous phrases like “win-win,” “giving back” and “doing well by doing good” all serve, he says, to smooth over uncomfortable facts. They uphold a system where the only acceptable forms of social change are those that preserve the speaker’s economic power.
When we focus on the moral worth of individuals, instead of social systems, it becomes easier to accommodate profound injustice and inequity simply because it is more socially convenient to look the other way. There is an easy succor in false promises and empty positivity. There is a cost to breaking silences. There is a cost to speaking out.
We need a different moral order
Many of my students’ fears about music and money are rooted in the assumption that they each need to defend their moral worth, when they might more rightly interrogate the moral status of the prevailing social order.
Do we want a world in which a person’s worth is assessed by their devotion to pursuing wealth, or is there some other moral metric by which we might assess a person’s value? Is the success we desire to be measured in terms of a system that maintains a commitment to ever-higher barriers to access? Should the measure of a career be productivity, if productivity requires access to private wealth? Is the world we want one in which it is acceptable for some people to have billions of dollars, so long as they can be seen to be “giving back”? Do we aspire to work in organizations that refuse to examine their roles in producing inequity?
These questions gain still more urgency in the context of climate emergency. Survival in this environment demands a kind of fearless commitment to moral imagination and inquiry.
Such inquiry might look like this:
To know that your worth does not come from capital (financial, cultural or social)
To unhinge music from money; to defend the practice of the “amateur” and redefine the nature of “professional”
To question careerist models of professional success
To imagine lineage, history, and practice as tools by which we might reach the geological layer of human truth
To develop the capacity to trust your instincts, even when those around you are against you
To excavate and elevate things that lurk in the heart, the things we say in silence and privacy of the self, and sound them so that others can say, “Yes, I hear that, too.”
To develop the moral discernment to know where we live up to our values and where we do not
To ask, What is my relationship to a flawed system? In whose service do I work? Am I making empty declarations (e.g. “making a difference”, “truth to power”) or am I aligning my body, mind, spirit and time in service of human need?
To reframe music as a discipline of disrupting the silences that uphold the status quo, even if the disruption is a song you sing in silence to yourself
To refuse to doubt the power of song.
How to save for the unknown future
It’s tough to teach compound interest and retirement savings to college students, for whom the possibility of continued life on this planet is called into greater question, year by year.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a strong risk of catastrophic conditions as early 2040 if strong actions aren't taken to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.9 In 2040, I’ll be 70 years old. My students will be 39 - 45 years old. I tell them that’s about the age I was when retirement savings suddenly made sense to me. I tell them that I grew up in the tail end of the Cold War. We lived with the threat of annihilation, too.
Things are different now. My students will graduate with an average of $43,000 in student loan debt. Wage growth in the top 1% grew five times as fast as the bottom 90%.10
No matter what, I conclude, there are some practical things around money that are good to know; questions that can find answers. It’s good to know how much you need to live. It’s good to have 3-6 months’ worth of living expenses on hand, preferably in cash and liquid accounts. It's good to get comfortable seeing yourself as an investor—to imagine the needs and desires of a future self; to know that financial literacy does not belong to people who went to business school. It’s good to have a healthy relationship with money. Like any other healthy relationship, it depends on what you bring to it: self-knowledge, responsibility, communication, trust, and time. It's good to inquire after the stories we tell ourselves. Stories about what it means to grow up, what it means to succeed, what it means to live with a moral compass— a true north.
No matter what, I tell them, music is real work. It is most real. With these slender weapons (cane, wood, string, bow, breath) we defend what’s invisible and essential. When we practice music, we make little pinholes in the world between the invisible and visible, through which we can glimpse a future, and other ways of being.
Sometimes it feels like the most important thing I can do: reminding young people that what they want is real and true; that building a life centred on artistic practice is powerful medicine, and when they do it well they make it possible for others to do the same; that they should take seriously the task of building a sustainable life and a sturdy, resilient spirit; that making music is not a cop-out; but to do essential life-sustaining work.
Sometimes I feel a little awkward, talking about how music transforms internal environments when the external environment is burning. But I will defend the Kumbaya moment to the end.
"Someone's hurting, Lord." It's how we know who we are and where we are; who needs help, and where to find it; how to find each other and how to go on.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/19/planet-pursuit-profit-oil-companies-damage
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/18/oil-industry-fossil-fuels-air-pollution-documents
It’s the same playbook used by the tobacco industry, as exposed by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway in Merchants of Doubt, a 2010 book subsequently made into a documentary, either of which serves as an excellent introduction to a public relations playbook that put paid scientists, conservative think tanks, and private corporations together to challenge scientific consensus on tobacco, acid rain, DDT, and the hole in the ozone layer.
Source: https://sponsorship.wnyc.org/aboutnypr
Source: https://www.carnegiehall.org/About
Source: https://www.metopera.org/about/the-met/
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/sunday/what-the-rich-wont-tell-you.html
Source: https://onbeing.org/programs/anand-giridharadas-when-the-market-is-our-only-language-nov2018/
Source: https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-1-5c-approved-by-governments/
Source: https://www.epi.org/publication/decades-of-rising-economic-inequality-in-the-u-s-testimony-before-the-u-s-house-of-representatives-ways-and-means-committee/
Such a strong clear voice... thank you for continuing to raise it.
Thank you. Great post.