86.3.peterson

Sound Work: Music as Labor and the 1940s Recording Bans ofthe American Federation of Musicians

Marina Peterson

Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 86, Number 3, Summer 2013, pp.791-823 (Article)

Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research

DOI: 10.1353/anq.2013.0040

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Article

Sound Work: Music as labor and the 1940s recording Bans of the American Federation of MusiciansMarina Peterson, Ohio University

ABSTRACTTwice in the 1940s, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) banned recording by its members. According to the union, the use of records on radio and in jukeboxes was replacing live performers, thus eliminating work for musicians. In an era of shifting federal policies and changing mo-dalities of labor, the bans put sound at the center of a struggle between labor and corporate interests. The bans provide a case through which to explore the significance and multidimensionality of music as labor. As a case that is integral to, yet distinct from, histories of audio technology and intellectual property, the bans are an important yet overlooked moment in the formation of current configurations of sonic value. [Keywords: Music, labor, audio technology, radio, liberalism, United States]

In the 1940s, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) organized two recording bans, during which no recordings were made by union musi-

cians on major record labels. The bans occurred at a moment in which records were stable objects that allowed repeated play and the commer-cial radio network system was largely in place. As a consequence, the nature and source of musicians’ jobs were being transformed. The bans’ organizers argued that by making recordings, musicians were displacing

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 86, No. 3, p. 791-824, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2013 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.

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themselves as workers while radio broadcasters and jukebox owners were profiting from the free and repeated use of recordings in contexts in which live performers might be used.1

The first ban took place during World War II, lasting from August 1, 1942 until November 11, 1944. A major outcome of the ban was the formation of the Recording and Transcription Fund (RTF). Administered by the union, the fund drew a percentage of record sales in order to hire union musicians to perform free concerts. Distributed to all locals in the US and Canada, it was part relief fund, part civic effort. The second ban began on January 1, 1948, the date when the Taft-Hartley Bill was to go into effect, a clause of which deemed the RTF illegal. It ended on December 14, 1948, upon restructuring the fund as a trust that was separate from the union.2 In con-sidering what some have described as a radical silencing, I ask, what did the recording bans sound like?3 Keeping the historicity of this question in mind, here I focus less on what was played on the radio and what was re-corded than on the terms of the bans.4 In other words: what kinds of noise did the bans make, both at the time and as lasting effects, and what was silenced by the bans (Trouillot 1995)?5

The recording bans are moments of productive rupture, in which an emphasis on music as labor challenged existing norms. This rupture was structured around musical value, destabilizing and refiguring existing or naturalized tendencies, if only for a moment. The bans’ effect on the status quo was apparent in the energetic responses of the National Association of Broadcasters and the federal government, directed especially at James C. Petrillo, then president of the musicians’ union. Personal attacks calling him czar, dictator, or the “Mussolini of Music” (Parsons and Yoder 1940) and deployment of his middle name “Caesar” were frequent in the press, while Senate committees brought suits against him and the AFM in an ef-fort to limit the power of unions in general. As suggested by its response, the state’s interests were threatened by the power of the musicians’ union to affect the commodity nature of music, to limit its circulation as such, and to define the meaning of music itself. Music thus had a critical role in crafting the terms of liberal democracy, notably the balance between labor and capital, and the role of the state therein.6

The range of notions of music as labor opened by this case allows for a dual examination of what labor can tell us about music and what music can tell us about labor. In an era of shifting federal policies and changing modalities of labor in the US, the bans put sound at the center of a struggle

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between labor and corporate interests. The 1940s are a crucial moment in labor history; as the US shifted its focus from World War II to the Cold War, New Deal Era pro-labor legislation was rewritten as anti-labor legislation (Lipsitz 1994). While this legislative shift cohered formally around orga-nized labor, during the bans broader meanings of music and of musical la-bor were invoked and deployed in the service of conflicting interests. The dimensions of music as labor made apparent through the recording bans suggest the importance of conceptualizing labor as a complex interplay between practice and institution.7

Musical labor has long been occluded in a history of negotiations over where value resides. The position of the AFM during the recording bans opens a space for conceiving of musical practice as a source of value and as the meaning of music, notions that are otherwise silenced by the ubiqui-ty of recorded sound and an emphasis on musical value as inhering in intel-lectual property. This silence exposes some of what is taken for granted in recent discussions of intellectual property, on subjects ranging from indig-enous culture to computer code (Carneiro da Cunha 2009, Coleman 2004, Coombe 1996, Kelty 2004, Lessig 2004).8 As the recording bans reveal, the layers of silencing—of live music and of the value of music as labor—are naturalized now, but were enacted with enormous effort of technological development, legislation, and corporate profit drive and interests.

In unpacking the significance of the 1940s recording bans for contem-porary configurations of labor and value, I follow the Comaroffs’ call for “a historical anthropology that is dedicated to exploring the processes that make and transform particular worlds—processes that reciprocally shape subjects and contexts, that allow certain things to be said and done” (1992:31). An ethnography of the archive of the recording bans con-sists of a reading of primary and secondary sources that pays attention to debates over terms and emergent norms. Senate hearing transcripts and musicians’ union publications, along with other contemporaneous commentary, indicate how law is a process through which terms of lib-eralism—freedom, market values, the rights of labor—are contested and defined (Coombe 1989; Falk Moore 1978, 2005).

Here sound serves as an object and as an analytic terrain from which to reconceptualize labor, technology, and value. Though music is the main iteration of sound addressed, it is not a uniform category. Moreover, dis-tinctions between modes of presentation of musical sound are crucial for the bans. And, while musicians were not recording, their union president


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was talking, most especially during numerous Senate hearings which were recorded for radio broadcast. Sound also provides an analytic lens for lis-tening to a history of sonic production through its mediums, and for paying attention to the noise and silences surrounding it. For this, anthropologists of sound are indebted to experimental sound practice of the 20th century, from the work of the Futurists through Cage and R. Murray Schafer, whose work with and conceptualizations of sound are credited with opening new ways of listening to the world (Feld 2012, Helmreich 2007, Novak 2010, Peterson 2010, Roosth 2009, Samuels et al. 2010). Intricately bound to the development of audio technology in the 20th century, these artists’ prac-tices reflect debates, anxieties, and optimisms about the relation between technology and “unmediated” sound, a dynamic played out in cases such as the recording bans (Samuels et al. 2010:330).

With music as labor the focal issue, I consider how ideologies of music are produced in and through historical dynamics, which here are largely structured by legislation, technology, and capital. The effort is to not take for granted the narrative writ by copyright and technology, but to recuper-ate music as labor within a history in which it is tied up in changing modali-ties of both. To this end, in the following, I discuss the tension between an object and practice of musical work that occludes a notion of music as labor, the embodied status of musical labor and its silencing, uneven formations of value around the status of music as commodity or labor, and the role of a changing state in structuring these dynamics.

Musical WorkThe first ban came at a time marked by struggles between radio, record-ing companies, and musicians over musical value in which music as la-bor was continually occluded. The previous decades had seen a series of lawsuits around who—record companies or musicians—owned copyright and performance rights for recordings, especially in the context of radio airplay (Countryman 1949). Despite these suits, royalties for performers remained limited to individual contracts between performers and record-ing companies, as judges ruled there was no precedent for copyright of performance (US Congress House 1978:9, 31-37; Gaines 1991). Facing displacement on radio by recordings, the Chicago local of the AFM had already organized a recording ban in 1937. Though making labor visible for a moment, the issues raised by these struggles were ultimately subsumed

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by the continuity of an existing structure of legislation in which the mean-ing of musical work cohered around the authorship of an object, again obscuring music as labor.

A dispute over “platter turners” characterizes some of what was at stake in negotiating the nature of musical labor through law. In January 1943, during a hearing before the Subcommittee of the Interstate Commerce Committee, Senator Tobey of New Hampshire asked Petrillo about a news item reporting that “Chicago and St. Louis radio stations are required un-der their contracts to hire members of the musicians’ union as ‘pancake turners.’” He stated his question, “This job consists of changing and turn-ing phonograph records.” Petrillo responded, “Because the record is made of music.”

Senator Tobey: “Is made of what?” Petrillo: “Music is on the record.”

Petrillo continued, saying, “And we feel if there is music on the record, that the man who puts the record on the machine should be a member of the musicians’ union.” He went on to explain that this was an agree-ment in Chicago and St. Louis because he had included it in the contracts and the stations had not protested, acknowledging that those locals were more powerful than others. Senator Tobey continued questioning Petrillo, asking him whether he believed in this practice in principle. Petrillo said he would love to have this across the country. Senator Tobey restated his question, “And that principle is sound, in your judgment, to do it this way?” Petrillo responded: “I don’t know whether it is sound, but I know it makes for more employment” (National Association of Broadcasters 1943:20-21).

Petrillo’s assertion that changing records should be the job of members of the musicians’ union because “they have music on them” undermined the divide between recorded sound that might circulate on its own, di-vorced from the musician who produced the sound that was on it, and the work of musicians, understood as inherently about the live production of sound. Practice that engaged with an object producing music was thus conceptually—and now legally, through contract—bound to musical labor, in a move that interestingly anticipated the potential for those technolo-gies to become instruments.9 The senator pushed the conceptual import of this practice, drawing a broader question of what music is, and what musicians do, into hearings focused on employment by radio stations.


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Petrillo was ultimately reluctant to argue the merit of this point on principle; he reverted to practicality, discussing work as an issue separable from music and supporting an agreement that produced more employment for musicians. Echoing an existing dynamic between composition and prac-tice, the intersection of technology and musical practice invoked by the case of “platter turners” created fissures during the recording bans, fis-sures not only of where value resided, but of the very meaning and nature of music (Sennett 2008:84-88).

Musical work, meaning its practice or performance, has an unstable status. Central to this is that the word “work” is used first and foremost to refer to musical composition. The notion of the musical work emerged coterminously with “the emancipation of music from the ‘extra-musical’” (Goehr 2007:149) at the beginning of the 19th century (Benjamin 2003:256). Goehr attributes this to the romantic formulation of autonomous art and the inclusion of music as a fine art, which marked a dramatic shift from a notion of art—and music—as including practice and performance to one that insisted on a “concrete or lasting” product (2007:150). Including musical composition under late 18th century copyright law was key to establishing a composition as a work of art, a product of creative genius of an individual, and consequently removing the musician from a legal designation of “music” (2007:218, Szendy 2008; see also Saunders 1992).

Extending copyright first to player piano rolls and then to records in the early 20th century continued to short-circuit and circumvent the musi-cian. Though all of these require musicians for their sound, existing and nascent copyright legislation sutured records to compositions, closing the gap between them in which the musician had for a moment been audible (Gitelman 1997). Interestingly, accounts tracing this history foreclose the professional or working musician by introducing musical engagement by consumers. This allows for a narrative of the decline of musical practice situated somewhere between the use of sheet music in the American home and the development of radio, to which people listened and arguably stopped playing music themselves (Attali 1985:58-59, Barthes 1991:262, Gitelman 1997). Such analyses naturalize “music” in the terms inscribed by copyright law and audio technology, which, through struggle by cor-porate interests, among others, created legal precedents that continue to exclude the musician (Auslander 1999, Sterne 2003).10 Despite these analytic shifts, the practicing musician remains present, at minimum as a performer of compositions and as a recording artist.

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The ways in which technology and copyright emphasize work as arti-fact occlude both live music and music as labor. The tension between the two is itself a debate that privileges a romantic notion of art over labor. The perduring split between music and work is reflected in the title of a 1950s book, Music: An Art and a Business (Carpenter 1950). Taking the side of “art,” Carpenter concludes a chapter on the musicians’ union by assert-ing that James Caesar Petrillo, in helping the working musicians, “con-tributed nothing to the Art of Music” (1950:149). Bourdieu addresses this divide with the concise statement that the field of cultural production is the “economic world reversed” (1993:29). The formation of the American Federation of Musicians was structured on this distinction. Debates at the time distinguished between musicians as either members of a labor move-ment or as “artists only.” An earlier organization, the National League of Musicians (NLM), had emphasized musicians as “artists,” with the expec-tation of a certain level of playing for membership. The AFM, on the other hand, was a craft union that considered musicians to be workers, accept-ing anyone who made money from playing music (Kelley 2001, Seltzer 1989). The International Musician described the differences through occu-pation and clothing, explaining how NLM members called their opponents “‘Stove Polishers’ ‘Stove Moulders’ and ‘Shoe Polishers,’” receiving in turn the monikers “‘Silk Hats’ ‘Toppers’ and ‘Prince Alberts’” because of what they wore to meetings (“Official Proceedings” 1947:19; sic, commas missing in original).

Doubly occluded, music as labor seems to be an edge or limit of what music is even as it is central to it. Audio technologies yield both potential-ity and pastness of sound that fundamentally structure a Euro-American notion of music. Focusing only on music as labor and removing recorded sounds and scores evokes a sense of loss, both of the possibilities for lis-tening and of “music” itself. The tendency to refer to durable objects when we say “music” is revealed by music as labor. This is especially apparent when close attention is paid to the processes of its legal devaluation and its qualities of impermanence and ephemerality are taken seriously. In a world and a time in which recorded sound is often what we are talking about when we talk about music, music as labor becomes a haunting in the “moment of [sonic] postdisappearance” (Taylor 2003:142). The bans contributed to a double disappearance, as a silencing of recording was structured around a mode of sound production that is inherently about disappearance. Nevertheless, this disappearance was, and continues to


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be, productive, revealing the historicity of what is largely taken for granted in current uses and understandings of music and its mediums, and open-ing a space for taking music as labor seriously.

Sonic embodimentThrough labor, the ephemerality of live sound and the materiality of the body cohere around the temporal evanescence of sound. While embodi-ment and ephemerality are significant for the ways in which musical labor played a crucial role in changing conditions of labor and new technolo-gies, they also contribute to the silencing of music as labor insofar as they reflect aspects of musical production that fall outside of dominant configurations of sonic value. Music as labor is performed live, the body of the musician making the sound in the present, whether on stage for an audience, in a practice room, or before a microphone during a record-ing session.11 Music is made through touch, breath, weight, and balance (Comaroff 1985, Lock and Farquhar 2007, Noland and Ness 2008, Stoller 1997). An elbow lifted allows a cellist to cross to a higher string, while the weight produced by lowering it can provide emphasis in a phrase, the sur-prise of an accented note, or the deep reverberation of the C string. “For musicians, the sense of touch defines our physical experience of art: lips applied to reed, fingers pushing down keys or strings” (Sennett 2003:481). The proper balance between tool and body allows the craftsman, whether musician or carpenter, to do work, to craft the phrase that captures the ear or draws on the listener’s emotions (Sennett 2008). With or without the framework of organized labor, playing music is work, and the refinement of touch and muscle that allows for better performance is accompanied with various disfigurations and injuries: everyday callouses and blisters, the violinist’s permanent neck mark, trumpet players’ potential to blow their lips out, postural difficulties and imbalances, and hearing loss. These battle scars might be at once examples of the exploitative nature of capi-talist labor and consequences of pleasure in playing.12 And though the physical effects of musical labor remain in the body, the sound they are conditioned to produce disappears soon after it is made.

Resounding throughout both bans, voice offers a way of conceiving of music as labor beyond that structured by organized labor, reflecting both the role of the body in musical practice and the silencing of musical labor. Following Feld and Fox, voice is both “the embodiment of spoken and

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sung performance” and a “key representational trope for social position and power” (1994:26). Voice fills gaps between authorized and conflicting narratives of the bans. During the bans, voice was heard, and, as such, conveyed meaning and authority because it was not a source of value for the musicians’ union. In the context of the recording bans, voice—as sound, medium, and matter—was like clicks in the record, which con-veyed something in excess of the record’s “meaning” through sense and sound.

Petrillo’s voice was audible throughout the decade, most notably dur-ing his numerous hearings. Excerpts from 1948 hearings on “Restrictive Union Practices of the American Federation of Musicians” before the House Committee on Education and Labor were aired on network radio. Following several days of testimony by radio executives, Petrillo took the stand before a committee chaired by Senator Fred A. Hartley, Jr. (NJ), and whose members included Senators Richard M. Nixon (CA), John F. Kennedy (MA), Walter E. Brehm (OH), and Gerald Landis (IN) (US Congress House 1948). On the radio, just days after the hearings were held and re-corded, Petrillo’s testimony was introduced by the ABC announcer, “This is John Edwards in Washington. In the next half hour you are going to hear by recording—voice recording—a man who has banned the making of recordings—musical recordings—because, he says, they are putting his musicians out of work” (American Broadcasting Company 1948). The dis-tinction drawn between “spoken” and “musical” recorded sound indicates how voice mediates between music as meaningful for the bans and sound that is insignificant (Barthes 1991, Connor 2000, Dolar 2006). Where oth-ers (Feld et al. 2004:322, 323) have explored the multifaceted dynamics linking language and music, in this case it is the disarticulation—the sever-ing of voice from music—that is significant. Recorded speech broadcast on radio is illegible in terms of the concerns of the musicians’ union and the aims of the bans. Hence, it was heard.

Vocalists were also heard. They were not members of the musicians’ union because, as a 1946 resolution calling for a new union tax on vo-calists explained, “The laws or rules classifying the eligibility of persons joining the A. F. of M. were made in the Federation’s infancy, when a vo-calist was never dreamed of, and therefore could not have been thought of as a member of a musical organization” (“Resolution No. 53” 1946:22; if vocalists were union members, they belonged to the American Guild of Musical Artists). Hence, one way of subverting the bans was for singers


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to make records with vocal, rather than instrumental, back up. As Dinah Washington sings in her 1948 “Record Ban Blues,” “The union man said go ahead / But you’ll have to do it without the band.” The precedent for such recordings was set during the first ban. In 1943, Frank Sinatra, already known as “The Voice,” recorded “Close to You.” Sinatra was a product of audio technology; the crooner’s voice was suited for the microphone, which lacked the ability to capture wide dynamic range (Connor 2000).13 On “Close to You,” voices are substituted for instru-ments, creating something of a “vocal orchestra.” As an arranger ex-plained, “You wrote it the way that you would a band: the bass voices would keep time like a bass would, you would write sections on top of that. The girls could be the equivalent of either the trumpets or strings, depending on what your orchestration is” (Friedwald 1993:38). While vo-calizations with vowel sounds emphasize sound over linguistic meaning, at times the voices repeat the main line, something instruments cannot do. Hence, a vocal back up is both less than and in excess of instru-ments, the space of an absent instrument filled with the quality of the voice and its signifying capacity.14

In sounding, the voice conveys music’s adherence to the body, which is both instrument and musician-laborer. “The body acts as a resonat-ing chamber in the performance of both speech and song” (Feld et al. 2004:333), shaping the sound made and itself shaped by training and practice. Well-developed vocal chords of the trained or experienced sing-er reveal and reflect the physical traces of sound production that exist with any instrument. Labor is foundational to the voice, such that “To speak is to perform work” (Connor 2000:2). At the same time, voice as a model for musical expression hides the labor of playing an instrument. “When we say of a musical instrument that it is played musically we say of it that it sings” (Goehr 1998:117). Often the goal of playing an instrument is to make it seem like an extension of the musician’s body, not a separate tool; “at that moment, it effectively becomes concealed” (1998:122). In its lack of an external “tool,” an ephemerality and immaterality of sound might be most keenly felt with voice.

The musicians’ union, though generally focused on wage scales and working conditions, also emphasized the physical nature of the job, suggesting how a labor theory of value is intimately bound up in bod-ies. Articles in its trade publication International Musician echo Marx’s (1990:355) discussion of the illnesses that affect the body of the worker

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through and through, from posture to internal organs, from joints to lungs. Representing the extraction of surplus value from labor, Marx character-izes this dynamic with the visceral metaphor of the vampire of capital that sucks living labor and “will not let go ‘while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited’” (1990:416). The metaphor plays on blood as the food of vampires writ as the literal blood of the worker, coursing through bodies whose very life force is drawn on by the capital-ist who spins “silk for 10 hours a day out of the blood of little children” (1990:406). It operates on multiple levels, exposing the injustice of child labor while signifying class solidarity writ as a historicized version of race, with workers’ blood made common by their position in the relations and mode of production.

In the 1940s, articles in the International Musician addressed “The Musicians Hands,” health issues specific to musicians, and the tech-nique and physicality of playing trumpet. “The musician’s hands,” the eponymous article expounds, “are as important for his professional ac-tivities as tools are for more mechanical jobs” (Schweisheimer 1941:29). They are well conditioned, and “more resistant than the hands of other people” (1941:29). The author of the column suggests treatments for problems musicians face, such as “‘playing through’” their fingers, tiny warts under the fingernails, rheumatic pains in the finger joints, sweaty palms, allergies to rosin, and hand cramps (1941:29; see also “Hands Make the Musician” 1949). Other pieces extended the discussion to the need for decent working conditions and enough money for food, hous-ing, and leisure, or those things that support life and allow the musician to work another day (“Lest Ivory Tower Tempt” 1947:13). For the musician, an evening’s work might consist of dispensing “some thousand notes,” executing “hundreds of bow strokes, drum-beats, or lip movements” with enthusiasm (“The Musician Takes Stock” 1946:12). This embodied practice generates affect in the audience, creating a “glow of well-being and kindliness where before there was coldness and craftiness” (“The Musician Takes Stock” 1946:12). Yet, the musician does not receive the same value as the listener. Rather, “these hours of outgiving do not leave the artist vibrant and aflame, but inert and spent” (“The Musician Takes Stock” 1946:12). The musician’s performance of enthusiasm and good will is physical labor, generated with and through a body that is exhausted after an evening of such work. For the musician, a different form of alche-my is required, one in which money transforms food, rest, and friendship


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into the physicality of musical performance and vice versa. “The musician who does not obtain this money in sufficient amounts to stock up again in his wares of enthusiasm, energy and dexterity cannot continue in his profession” (“The Musician Takes Stock” 1946:12).

A trumpet player who blows his lip out often cannot play well enough to continue working.15 To promote the 1948 ban, an article in the International Musician used the example of a trumpet player who had blown his lip out; he now worked as a waiter while listening to his hit on the radio every night, the musician still poor while the radio station profited from adver-tisement revenue (Rose 1948:5). In the minutes of Chicago’s Local 208, the black musician’s union, bandleaders complained about musicians on the basis of their playing, articulating the inseparability of the physicality of playing, the work done, and the music. As one explained, a trumpet player “was able to read” but “his lip was down, which made it impossible for him to hit Bb or properly support the first trumpet player” (AFM Local 208 Minutes 1942). This was a problem because “in one number the brass had to play five choruses without taking down. In another number the brass had to play seven choruses of Bugle Blues and five of Christopher Columbus” (AFM Local 208 minutes 1942). The bandleader “advised that he would rather not use Gray because of the ill effects that a poor showing might make” (AFM Local 208 minutes 1942).

To make sound from an instrument or one’s voice requires the use of the body. And while a consideration of embodiment is integral to music as labor, the body as an agent of practice conveys something more than that which is distilled in the driving interests of the union. The ways in which the voice was both silenced and heard during the bans suggest how music as labor is a more expansive terrain than is accounted for by organized labor. The range of physicality, affect, and ideology required to make music is work, even if not structured under union interests. Moreover, the ephem-erality of sound is caught up in the embodied nature of musical practice. In this way, the silencing of voice as a source of immediate economic value resonates with a general silencing of music as labor. Despite continual ef-forts to attach value to ephemerality, a sound that is immediately silenced upon its playing and that cannot be made or heard in precisely the same way again largely falls out of current configurations of value, along with its embodied production.

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Musical Value During the bans, music stood at the center of a radical restructuring of labor during a transformative moment in capitalism. Concomitantly, the very meaning of music was worked out through a debate about its status as labor and commodity. These modalities of value cohered around the temporalities inherent in and produced by the various mediums of musi-cal production, from the presentness and presence of live performance to the potentialities for future projection, repetition, and recollection made possible by the record. The shift from Fordism to post-Fordist modes of production—from the value of labor time in production to an informational economy in part organized around intellectual property—was prefigured by the dynamics of music as labor that were brought into relief by the bans.

The struggle over the value of music during the recording bans was closely tied to temporalities that inhere in various modes of sonic pro-duction. Music, when performed live, is ephemeral. Without an object, neither hoarding nor surplus value is possible. Existing only in the moment it is played, its lasting effects are extramusical, identified as perduring in things ranging from morals to morale. New temporalities emerge from re-cords’ qualities as representation, record, and repetition. Before the ban, record companies stockpiled records to “supply the market for at least a year” (Lunde 1948:48).16 Marking it as a song that would have been held and released during the 1948 recording ban, Dinah Washington’s “Record Ban Blues” is written from the perspective of the ban, looking back on a recording session that took place before it began. Hence, when it was recorded in December 1947, it looked forward to the ban. “‘Thirty-first of December / Was my last recording date / Started out real early / Didn’t get through ’til real late.” The record, as both materialized recorded sound and industry, enables a projection into the future that, when heard, registers as being in the present of its playing and hearing. Washington addresses listeners from the perspective of being inside a ban whose ending is still unknown, singing, “don’t ask me…” Listening to the song over 50 years later provides us a vantage point onto the past, with the facts of the case outlined by the lyrics providing a historical document of the era.

As the economic value of music inhered in emergent modes of sonic production and reproduction such as the phonograph, the jukebox, and radio, the AFM supported labor as the primary source of value. Debates about the nature of music as labor made during the formation of the AFM were now reasserted with and against sound recording. The history of the


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musicians’ union parallels the development of recorded sound. The AFM was founded in 1896, less than a decade after Emile Berliner developed the flat disc record. By the 1930s and 1940s, records’ “reasonable fidelity to original sounds” allowed for their increasing use by radio stations (AFM 1950:7). Hence, the AFM feared that radio would have a similar effect as “talkies,” said to have been responsible for the loss of 18,000 jobs for pit musicians (Kelley 2001, Leiter 1974:147). Privileging a notion of music as made by musicians over and against existing copyright laws, during the 1940s the AFM shifted the discussion of the meaning of music to one about sonic production by musicians rather than intellectual property or recorded sound. In emphasizing live performance as the source of “music,” presence and the ephemerality of sound took precedence over reproduction and repetition. At the same time, the position of the musicians’ union closed spaces for other possibilities by opting for the good of all worker-musicians over individual recording artists. It also obscured a range of other modes of sonic production and reproduction, including music made by amateurs and non-union members.

As organized labor, music follows the dominant labor model of the time in which the union was formed, that of Taylorism, in which the value of labor is measured in increments of modern clock time. Union wage scales designate pay based on hours played, by type of music and event. This is applied equally to live performance, radio appearance, and recording ses-sions, with wage scales for the latter two determined by and distributed to the locals during the 1930s and 1940s (AFM, Chicago Chapter Files). This measurement, and production (Postone 1993), of regular time is counter to musical time or meter. Though the metronome, an early modern inven-tion, equalized internal musical time, when played by people rhythm and meter are never entirely regular or equal, nor are they supposed to be.17

Lacking an objectified, material form when performed live (by worker-musicians), music is available only in its present moment, consumable through auditory presence. This, Marx suggests, constitutes music as un-productive labor, produced by workers “whose services are exchanged directly against revenue” (1952:156). As something consumed only in the moment of production, music is not productive labor, or labor which “pro-duces capital” (1952:148). Yet, as it inheres in various mediums, music moves between productive and unproductive labor, allowing claims to be made on the basis of one or the other of these statuses that might then be challenged on the grounds of the other.18

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Records as mediums of musical reproduction allow the process of capital to be complete; inscribed in durable objects, music becomes a commodity that can be circulated, exchanged, and stored in ways that live performance cannot. “The term ‘revolution’ is hardly an exaggeration with regard to the long-playing record,” Adorno wrote, with “revolution” pointing both to transformations in music’s social life as a commodity, as well as to the repetition inscribed in the form of the record (Adorno and Levin 1990:63).19 The record shifted production, such that the sound made by the musician is disarticulated, or alienated, from the recording, manufacturing, and subsequent reproduction of the disc itself; as Attali puts it, “Music escapes from musicians” (1985:115). Such disarticulation was supported by court decisions in the US that ruled that the record is the product of the record company, not of the musician whose sound is captured on it.20 Yet to maintain capital’s nature as circulation, records as commodities require musicians. Marx’s notes in Grundrisse sum up the process: “Exchange value emerging from circulation, a presupposi-tion of circulation, preserving and multiplying itself in it by means of labor” (1993:264).

The objects of recorded sound allow a surplus value of music to be newly extracted (Ross 2000). It was this surplus value that was at stake for the AFM. Yet rather than aiming their sights on it, the AFM sustained a labor theory of value in which live musicians are the sole producers of music. Hence its insistence on music as labor made it blind to the inevita-bility of or potential within this surplus value. With music grounded in labor, and instruments understood primarily as non-electronic, it followed that the necessary outcome was maintaining jobs for performing musicians. Petrillo maintained, “We have a job to do and that is why we are organized, and primarily we have got to look out for our bread and butter. I believe that comes first. We all must eat” (US Congress House 1947:270).

Free MusicDuring the 1940s, music played a critical role in shifting relations between state, labor, and market. Amidst the turbulence of labor unrest following World War II, the AFM was the focus of labor legislation aimed at limit-ing the strength of unions (Countryman 1948, 1949; Lunden 1965). This turned out to be the beginning of a long unraveling of labor rights that had been put in place in the 1930s. During the first ban, the ongoing war was


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the lens for responses to the ban, and Senate committee hearings focused on how national morale would be affected by the loss of recorded sound, the needs of the public, and labor in the context of the war. The War Labor Board took over from the Interstate Commerce Committee, demanding that musicians go back to work. With only three record companies holding out on signing the agreement for the Recording and Transcription Fund, the union’s executive board voted to continue the ban, despite a personal appeal by President Roosevelt to end it.

By 1948, the climate had shifted to one of anti-labor legislation and anti-communist sentiment. President Truman characterized a 1946 na-tionwide rail strike as a “strike against the government of the United States itself” and called on Congress to pass laws that would prohibit such mo-bilizations (Truman 1946). Subsequently, legislation was drafted that did just that; of these—including the Case Bill and the Lea Act (also referred to as the “anti-Petrillo Act” [Seltzer 1989:41, 48; “Entering Wedge” 1946:14]) —the Taft-Hartley Bill most dramatically overhauled “labor-management relations” (Truman 1947b), rewriting the existing labor legislation of the Wagner Act. In 1948, Truman gave an impassioned critique of the Taft-Hartley Bill, following his veto of it (which was subsequently overruled by the Senate). Radio networks displaced scheduled programming to broadcast Truman’s address, in which he maintained that the bill was “bad for labor, bad for management, bad for the country” (Truman 1947b). In particular, he said, by banning collective bargaining, among other things, it would shift the dynamic between management and labor from one in which they worked together for the public good to one in which they were opposed to each other (Truman 1947a, 1947b). The AFM was at the center of much of this legislation, as its target and in organizing against it.21 When Petrillo testified before the Committee on Education and Labor in January 1948, this was only the latest of nearly annual appearances before a fed-eral committee over the course of the decade.

The status of music as labor continued to be negotiated through leg-islation and a series of federal cases brought against the AFM through-out the 1940s. What emerge herein are contingent meanings of labor that are related to practice, defined in terms of specific circumstances and needs marked by a range of interests. Law as process does not produce a general meaning of labor, but serves as a space in which negotiations and debates over the meaning of music as labor take place, even during labor hearings that ostensibly provide a defining frame (Falk Moore 1978,

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2005). Music as labor was alternately validated and contested. Framing music as labor allowed senators to argue that recording technologies should be considered similar to technological advancement in any field, such that prohibiting musicians from recording would be denying them the use of new technologies for their work. At the same time, during 1947 hearings, a senator asserted that the AFM “is so unique in its organization and operation that there is some doubt whether or not it is a regular labor union entitled to the protection and exemptions of our Federal statutes” (US Congress House 1947:176). Various aspects of musical work were referenced to support this doubt, including the uneven employment of musicians, insofar as many earned most of their income from other jobs, and the notion that “anyone can sing,” which was used to undermine the professional status of musicians in general.

The status of music as labor—and consequently of the very nature of labor—was also negotiated through the types of cases brought against the AFM. A 1942 antitrust suit was ultimately deemed impermissible on the basis of a clause of the 1914 Clayton Act that states that labor is not a commodity (“The Clayton Act” 1993, US Congress Senate 1943). This legislated definition of labor suggests an effort to recuperate practice as a space of value. In this case, what Marx refers to as labor as practice—the “transient manifestation” of labor power—remains within the domain of law (1952:168), while an abstracted form of labor power might maintain commodity status. Though critical of the commodification of labor and its concomitant dynamics of alienation, Marx ultimately maintains that posi-tioning labor as commodity is necessary for the struggle over the working day in order for the dispute between workers and capitalists to be orga-nized around the same term (1990:344). Hence, the clause of the Clayton Act that was intended to protect unions from antitrust suits also put labor in a different category than the commodity, disallowing negotiations that might cohere around a common concern. Through the recording bans, music as commodity and music as labor became different domains, the former possible with recorded sound while the latter was unmoored from both commodity and sonic reproduction.

Petrillo’s statements during the numerous hearings interpellated the role of the state in mediating between interests of corporations and labor. As such, they are of import for understanding the ways in which the bans also marked a fundamental negotiation over the relation between state and mar-ket, played out through the matter of music. During 1948 hearings, officials


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of the National Association of Broadcasters and Petrillo were questioned by the Committee on Education and Labor in the House of Representatives in order to determine whether existing legislation—notably the recently en-acted Taft-Hartley Act—was sufficient to limit Petrillo’s purported control over the union or whether additional legislation was needed to “curtail the power of unions” (US Congress House 1948). In the 1947 and 1948 hear-ings, Petrillo’s voice is silenced insofar as his testimony is subsumed by the desired outcome, which is inscribed in the questions and in the mode of questioning. The speech of his testimony constitutes procedure, as op-posed to having meaningful or significant content that might shift outcome. In questioning Petrillo, senators on the committee continually accused him of holding and wielding absolute and arbitrary power. The mode of ques-tioning often proceeded as such: a senator made an accusation as part of a question, which Petrillo refuted. Subsequently, the senator restated the initial accusation. Rather than making a legal argument, the senator’s point is made through repetition of speech. AFM’s legal counsel challenged this mode of questioning at one point, saying, “I do not like to object, Mr. Chairman, but I think counsel should not assume the role of a prosecutor of trying to get admissions through questions that have implications” (US Congress House 1947:303-304). In the transcripts, Petrillo appears ame-nable, answering questions without challenge and continually minimizing his power. At least in print, he does not “sound” like the persona that was the basis for efforts against him and the union. What is apparent from the transcripts is how a general anti-labor agenda structured the hearings; framed with a question of whether Petrillo had too much power over the musicians’ union, the answer is already presumed to be affirmative, with further questioning supporting considerations of how to limit that power.

The transcripts shift from general to particular, the general being that which cannot be argued with, on which there is ostensibly agreement (Bloch 1975:16). Yet general ideological claims are always tied to interests, which, when conflicting, suggest both the non-universality of such claims and their obfuscating effects. At the same time, the perduring charge of such grand claims sustains their iteration and circulation as interpretive frames. Throughout, when grand claims or accusations are made, Petrillo brings the discussion back to specifics, whether of union policy or the politics of musical truisms. Of the latter, a notion of “free music” emerges time and again, a general statement frequently used by senators to assert the public’s right to music, a right denied, as it were, by the bans.

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By the 1940s, the social spaces of recorded and broadcast sound were taken for granted, making possible Lunde’s comment that while “The technique of the ban…effectively call[s] attention to the problems of the musicians, [it] operates to restrict the cultural facilities available to the public” (1948:56). Lunde’s position built on the precedent set by the 1942 antitrust case, which asserted that the recording ban would “deprive mil-lions of radio listeners from hearing musical recordings,” especially in-sofar as radio and jukeboxes were the main source of musical entertain-ment for civilians and members of the armed forces (US Congress Senate 1943:2). Throughout the 1942 hearings, music was used to support cor-porate interest and competitive capitalism in the name of national wel-fare, public morale, public good, and, most especially, war. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) concurred that the musicians’ union was being unpatriotic in not allowing its members to make recordings. “‘Music plays a vital part in war morale,’ [the NAB] argued,” and a senator maintained that the ban was a “serious attack on public well-being dur-ing war-time” (Kraft 1996:145). Asserting its concern with the “national interest in maintaining the broadest possible system of radio communi-cation,” the Senate committee’s discussion took up ways in which music was listened to and enjoyed (US Congress Senate 1943:6). Soldiers, a senator said, want music when there are women to dance with.

Speaking in the name of a public whose interest was said to be a right to music, the state’s intervention in a struggle between labor and corpo-rations reflected its capitalist tendencies. In the context of the record-ing bans, for the state, music as a right was organized around listeners as consumers, not around labor. The discussion suggested that, though there might be a benefit in understanding that the music one is hearing over the radio is being played at that moment, the record, by enabling multiple hearings, helps educate a listening public whose members cre-ate a consumer market, but, more idealistically, learn to better appreciate difficult music. As a senator explained, “No one hearing a symphony the first time absorbs all of it. After a dozen or 15 or 20 times you begin to see its beauty and cadences, and so forth” (US Congress Senate 1943:27). During 1947 hearings, Petrillo and Richard Nixon discussed the union practice of spreading jobs across its members by not allowing musicians to play in multiple sectors. Nixon used this strategy against unemploy-ment to invoke the rights of the listening public, saying “Let us suppose that some of the musicians that work in the studios are the best musicians


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in southern California. That rule would have the effect of denying to peo-ple who did not go to the motion pictures the best music” (US Congress House 1947:236).

As a commercial interest that was federally regulated, radio’s public was at once a consumer public and one with a right to public goods. Regulated under the Interstate Commerce Commission, radio’s “com-merce” is sound, though its revenue comes from selling advertisements. Affective links between radio shows—whether musical, humorous, or dra-matic—and sponsorship encouraged listeners to use specific products. A system of market research was developed to support the connections between the listening public and product consumption in order to attract advertisers. Radio’s desire to not pay for music was supported by argu-ments about the rights of the public to free music and the ephemerality of sound. Recorded sound, removed from the musicians who were paid to play the music, made this possible, especially as long as there were minimal or no royalties required for performance rights. As Attali explains,

A radio station…neither pays for the performance nor pays the musi-cians, on the grounds that the broadcast of a work, live or recorded, gives the work free publicity and is thus advantageous for other forms of the commercialization of music. Not recognizing themselves as a locus of representation, radio stations everywhere wished to be ex-empted from copyright restrictions and from paying royalties on the objects they use. (1985:84)

As early as 1930, the NAB “opposed enactment of…a provision [that would have allowed for protection against unauthorized performance through broadcast], stating that it would be a burden to small radio broadcasters” (US Congress House 1978:31). This position was supported by the sena-tors questioning Petrillo during his numerous hearings. Petrillo’s testimony in January 1948 followed a week of testimony by radio executives, whose interests shaped the terms of the hearings. The year before, Petrillo had pointed out, “when you say that radio is free, and you want it to be free for the people, it is one thing to say that it is free, and it is another to say, ‘is it free?’ I think it is as free as the broadcasters are willing to make it” (US Congress House 1947:345).22

A notion that music is free is a shifter that supports a myriad of points. Pointing out that everyone can sing was an argument that music is free

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(and hence not valuable as labor) at the same time as it framed voice as the marginal “instrument” marking the limits of music as labor. As something ephemeral, uncontained, and uncontainable, sound lacks an object form that allows for clear demarcations of ownership. The record becomes that object, subsequently undone by digital audio technology and musical practices such as sampling, whose proponents argue that music is, or should be, free to support rights to creative expression. The democratization of the arts in liberal democracy also draws on prescrip-tive designations of free music, expressed most directly in the form of free public concerts (Peterson 2010).

conclusionMusical labor, technology, and the state remain linked through the still active Music Performance Fund (MPF), with record sales supporting free performances and employment for musicians in live performance. Drawn from agreements brokered by the Department of Labor, the fund keeps the recording industry and free public performances—capitalism and civic goods—attached through the state. Their relationship reveals the ambiva-lence of this capitalist state, which filters both consumer practice and civic music through a national imaginary. The imminent presence of the state is manifest in the agreement that maintains a relation between these sonic spaces.23 Ultimately, the buying power of a consumer public of recorded sound makes possible—or not—a public of free concerts. That in purchas-ing a CD an individual contributes to free public performances registers a form of citizenship in which consumer choice is at once a civic act and an authorization of music as labor, as the listener binds live and recorded sound through her inadvertent contribution to the MPF while becoming attached to a state that created the framework for that act. Changing tech-nology continues to be significant for these dynamics; downloading, an MPF trustee suggested, was responsible for a decrease in fund income (Timberg 2003).

Through the recording bans and their lasting effects, sound works in multiple and substantive ways. Music as labor has long been occluded by copyright law that emphasizes authorship and materiality. The score became a way to pin down the ephemerality of sound even as it gave the performing musician a lower status vis-à-vis the meaning of music and its economic value. During the recording bans, radio—configured as a


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corporate interest—demanded free music. The potential to have access to free music was fought for from the early moments of network broad-casting, and justified in relation to the status of sound on radio, which appeared, to the listening public, to be free. The state supported these interests of radio, putting the musicians’ union at the center of what was, in effect, a struggle between capital and labor, and between sound as commodity or practice. As the iteration of a particular moment of what is a continual negotiation between state, capital, and labor, the bans reveal crucial aspects of the making of liberalism.

The ways in which sound worked during the bans resonate with Attali’s (1985) thesis that transformations in music prefigure those of capitalism in general. The dynamics inhering in music as labor and the tensions between production and property reflect shifts in labor in the latter part of the 20th century, in which, at least in the so-called industrialized countries, there has been an effacement of an embodied practice towards flexible accumula-tion and an emphasis on intellectual property as the source of economic value. While by now even the most ephemeral things can become prod-ucts, there remains an unstable basis for valuing the labor that produces an ephemeral good. The valuation of product over practice is also indicative of the relationship between embodiment and liberal subjectivity in the current moment, in which relative inclusions and exclusions are organized around racial or ethnic representation; class, and its basis in modes of work, is no longer a category of diversity. This is not an argument for recuperating a labor theory of value or a romantic notion of craft. It is simply to point out the work that has gone into making music what it is today, to suggest the importance of recognizing that musical practice is still requisite for any sonic production, and to draw out the significance of music for an un-derstanding of labor, both in terms of its meaning and status. Though the concerns raised by the bans were ultimately occluded and musical value as inhering in intellectual property largely re-closed, shockwaves from this rupture linger to this day. Music as labor remains a haunting, and many of the issues of that moment continue to emerge, unresolved. n

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A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s :

I wish to thank the research staff at the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives, the Harold Washington Library, and the Kheel Center at Cornell University. Research support was provided by an Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship from Berea College. Rafael Martinez helped track down sources. Discussions at two sessions of the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings and at the Southern Labor Studies Association Bi-Annual Conference were crucial for developing this article. Vicki Brennan and Jesse Shipley provided invaluable suggestions and conversation throughout research, conceptualiza-tion, and writing. Many thanks also to the editor of Anthropological Quarterly, Richard Grinker, and two anonymous reviewers; their suggestions for revision came out of generous and knowledgeable readings, such that, more than anything, they reminded me of things I had meant to say and helped me sharpen the overall thrust of the article. Any remaining errors or omissions are my own.

e n d n o t e s :

1The growth of radio networks, the corporatization of radio, and the relation between the networks and local stations were all factors in the shift from live performance to recorded sound. The 1940s was a time of discussion over proper programming and responsibility to the public, even as the networks were anxious about their right to free speech given government regulation of airwaves (Landry 1942, Seldes 1950). Moreover, musicians had jobs as live performers on radio largely because of the unstable nature of mediums of audio recording, not because of an inherent value of live sound. This was legislated. In 1922, then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was bothered by the sound of records worn out from being played too much on radio, and banned using them on radio. The radio wave lengths belong to the people, he asserted, and part of radio’s responsibility to the people included employment (AFM 1950:4). Hence, the potential repetition of sound provided by recordings was curtailed and the reliance on transcriptions, which allowed one-time play, set precedents for labor rights—though not copyrights or royalty rights—of union musicians. Some key works for the history of radio are Barnouw 1968, Greenfield 1989, Hilliard 2010, Hilmes and Loviglio 2001, Smulyan 1994, and Sterling and Kittross 2002.

2The 1940s recording bans are widely known and referenced, yet little analyzed for their import for un-derstanding the emergence of the dynamics of contemporary musical life we now take for granted. They are invariably mentioned in passing in histories of rock and jazz music (DeVeaux 1997; Sanjek 1988; Wald 2009; Ward, Stokes, and Tucker 1986. Thornton [1996] discusses a similar campaign in the 1950s by the British Musicians’ Union). Several sources address them more thoroughly in themselves (Anderson 2004, 2006; Austin 1980; Countryman 1948; DeVeaux 1988; Lunde 1948; Pinta 2008) or as part of a wider discussion of the musicians’ union (Burlingame 1997, Hart 1973, Kraft 1996, Leiter 1974, Seltzer 1989). They were covered extensively in news and trade publications at the time such as Billboard, International Musician, The New York Times, and Time. Yet scholarship does not convey the enormous amount of inter-est the bans received by the media and the state. The aim here is not to provide a comprehensive history of the recording bans and their era, whether in terms of its politics, technological changes, or cultural life. Rather, I focus on particular elements in order to consider the ways in which the bans and the concerns mobilized relate to and destabilize formations of music and labor, and their relationship to capital and the state. My interest in this case grew out of ethnographic research on public concerts in Chicago and Los Angeles, some of which were funded by the Musicians’ Performance Trust Fund, as it was then called (Peterson 2002, 2010).

3As argued especially by jazz and rock historians, the recording bans resulted in a gap in the archive of recorded sound, resulting in the loss of a sonic record of the origins of bebop (Ward, Stokes, and Tucker 1986). Though this gap in jazz history is well critiqued by DeVeaux (1988), when the bans are addressed from a vantage point that looks—or listens—back onto history through audio recordings, the fact that the bans created major silences in sonic production holds.

4The very possibility of addressing these questions is caught up in the terms of the bans and of their con-tinuing consequences for sonic presents, pasts, and futures. Recording technology shifted assumptions about sonic histories (Bull and Back 2003, Pollock 1998, Smith 2004). Work on audio histories inscribes and reveals this emphasis on the necessity of having a record—whether aural or written—of sound to “hear” the past. Though musical labor might be “recorded” in perduring forms ranging from kinesthetic memory to the physics of instruments that have been played and the spaces in which they have been played, as a practice it resides largely in and of the present. As such, it is largely overlooked in accounts of sonic pasts.

5Field recordings of music and everyday life (Bartok, Lomax) and compositional practice developing dur-ing the time (Cage) open a terrain that begs questions about music as a specialized form of sound and of silence as a sonic space. As Bauman (1983) points out in his work on 17th century Quakers, silence can


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be a powerful mode of symbolic communication that also structures sonic expression. In asking what was heard, the project considers how meanings are projected onto or inhere in sonic material, whether in its presence or absence, and what kind of work silence does.

Some continued to record during the bans, indicating the unequal status of musical genres, general exclu-sions along lines of race and class, and the persistence of recording companies working outside the major labels. Interestingly, despite the pro-labor position of many of his artists, Moses Asch actively recorded jazz musicians on Folkways during the first recording ban (Carlin 2008, Olmsted 1999).

6Much about this case is specific to configurations of law, music, and technology at a particular historical moment in North America. Moreover, the notions of “music” that structure these dynamics are grounded in a European and North American history of copyright, musical practice, and aesthetic theory. In yielding rich insight into the modalities of music in a particular time and place, the recording bans organized by the AFM also allow for potential resonance and comparison with similar dynamics in other places and times.

7The literature on the musicians’ union—like labor studies literature more generally—does not explore the practice of music, but focuses on labor in its organized, institutional form of unions, taking for granted the practice that goes into sound production (Kraft 1996, Seltzer 1989). This is true of the anthropology of labor and work as well, which emphasizes the struggles of labor unions and social movements over the practice of work (Durrenberger 2007, Durrenberger and Reichart 2010, Erem and Durrenberger 2008). The divide between labor as practice and institution is reflected in the fact that recent ethnographic work on aspects of the new economy, from stock markets (Ho 2009, Zaloom 2006) to digital labor (Coleman 2010, Terranova 2000), explore the practice of work in these fields, while not necessarily discussing it as labor per se. An emergent literature on craft (Adamson 2007, 2010; Sennett 2008) allows for a more expansive understanding of music as labor that considers labor in its multiple forms of practice and institution.

Bridging these, though not related to music or the musicians’ union directly, is literature on musical work or music and capital (Mason 2006, forthcoming; Qureshi 2002; Shipley 2012). Almost all work in ethnomu-sicology and the anthropology of music addresses the craft and practice of music while not necessarily discussing it as work per se (the literature is too vast to cite here; some that emphasize embodiment are Blacking 1995, Friedson 2009, Kapchan 2007. See Green and Porcello 2006, Meintjes 2003, Porcello 2006, and Shipley 2012 for discussions of musical work in recording studios). Furthermore, there is a small but rich and significant literature on artistic workers more generally, largely, though not exclusively, fo-cused on the mid-20th century US (Denning 1997, Franko 2002, Lipsitz 1994, Ross 2000, Terranova 2000).

8A key exception to this is found in Toynbee’s (2004) discussion of how musicians are excluded from copyright. In general, however, the burgeoning literature on social and cultural dimensions of audio tech-nology and on music and copyright does not address this occlusion. Important sources exploring aspects of over a century of developments in audio technology include Braun 2002, Chanan 1997, Goodale 2011, Greene and Porcello 2004, Katz 2010, Kittler 1999, Miller 2008, Morton 1999, Sterne 2003, Suisman 2009, Suisman and Strasser 2009, and Taylor 2001. Coombe 1998 and Frith and Marshall 2004 provide impor-tant discussions of copyright as it pertains to sound.

Current concerns with piracy, or its flip side of sampling, depend on the existence of recorded sound. Moreover, both positions take for granted current figurations of technology and law, occluding the musi-cian who made the sound on the recorded artifact (Condry 2004, Dent 2012, Johns 2010).

9Beyond the obvious case here of DJs and turntablists, we can look to the avant garde for other examples of using audio technologies as instruments. John Cage suggested that the process of making music is more significant than the designation of instruments, providing possibilities for compositions that worked with and against new audio technologies. In 1948 he wrote,

Since Petrillo’s…recent ban on recordings took effect on the New Year, I allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy of how normalizing the effect might have been had he had the power, and exerted it, to ban not only recordings, but radio, television, the newspapers, and Hollywood. We might then realize that phonographs and radios are not musical instruments…[I]t is rather the age-old process of making and using music and our becoming more integrated as personalities through this mak-ing and using that is of real value. (1993:43)

Continuing, he expressed his desire to use turntables and radios as instruments, as well as to “compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to Muzak Co…3 or 4 ½ minutes long—those being the standard lengths of ‘canned’ music” (1993:43) and a piece for 12 radios. The first, tentatively titled “Silent Prayer,” ultimately became the now infamous “4’33”.”

10Sterne makes a conceptual argument about high fidelity that again occludes the musician. Conflating orders of analysis, he uses historical evidence to support a conceptual argument about sonic ontology, referring to the specificity of sound made to meet requirements of recording technologies and a 1950s

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campaign validating “liveness” by the musicians’ union that was organized in response to recorded sound (2003:219, 221). The AFM made such arguments consistently in the face of threats by audio technology, whether “talkies” or the LP (“We Herewith Firmly Resolve—” 1947:19). Though Auslander makes a similar argument in Liveness, he is clear to emphasize that “the very concept of live performance presupposes that of reproduction” (1999:54, emphasis added). Occluded by these discussions is the possibility of look-ing at and taking seriously the practice of recording, and the requirement that musicians make sounds in the recording studio. Whether or not these sounds are directed toward or shaped by the microphone technology does not erase the fact that a practice by musicians takes place in the process.

11A discussion of the reification of performance as ontologically bound up in embodiment and ephemeral-ity has been well addressed by performance studies scholars (Auslander 1999, Phelan 1993, Taylor 2003). I am not claiming a fundamental ontological quality of performance, but simply point out that the physical nature of musical practice is a central feature of music as labor and is key for understanding its occlu-sion. In the past decades, work in musicology has begun to address the significance of musical practice, even as it continues to grapple with its relation to the text (Feldman 2007, Le Guin 2005, McClary 2002, Rouget 1985).

12Bodies, though replaceable as laborers, were not all equal; bound up in wider dynamics of a racialized nation, musicians’ unions were segregated, with “colored locals” in 50 cities. Locals were not integrated until the 1950s. In the 1940s, Petrillo responded negatively to an NAACP appeal for integration. Yet the AFM also canceled a visit to St. Petersburg (under consideration for a future convention) after the town would not allow African-American delegates to visit certain sites or eat with white delegates (“Negro Ban Clinches Nix on St. Pete as Future Confab Site” 1946:20, 116). The matter of the unequal valuing of bod-ies arguably deserves more than an endnote. It is, however, outside the purview of this article. I hope to address this more thoroughly in future work, both in terms of race and class. Others who have explored issues of music, race, and labor include Gilbert 2011, Halker 1988, Miller 2010, and Spivey 1984.

13Caruso’s status as an early and successful recording artist put voice at the center of the technology and circulation of records, discursively marked as objects in which embodied sound inhered (Sterne 2003, Suisman 2009).

14Even as others (including Perry Como, Dick Hymes, and Bing Crosby) were releasing such recordings, during the first ban, Sinatra “held out,” explaining in 1970, “I think the strike went on for a couple of years and I came in at the end of it with these things. I got a lot of pressure from the people at Columbia Records to do them. I didn’t want to cross the lines, in a sense’” (as quoted in Friedwald 1993:38). He later sup-ported members of Los Angeles’ Local 47—disgruntled recording artists who ultimately split from the AFM (Burlingame 1997:16). During the second ban in 1948, he was not a hold out. That year, both Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan recorded versions of “Nature Boy” with vocal back up.

15Petrillo learned trumpet as a child at Jane Addams’ Hull House, where part of the settlement project was to give working class people the tools to create art themselves in order to counter the “slavery of com-merce and the wage-law” (Starr 2010:160). As Jackson (2000:105) explains, the founders of Hull House were interested in art as a non-alienating practice, as an antidote to the industrial production of the time. The AFM’s position on labor seems counter to this formulation, as it is fully organized around the terms of wage labor. Yet, its wider discussions of what musical labor entails suggest an affinity with Petrillo’s early influence, as musicians are validated for their physical practice, artistic output, and need for a full and satisfying life.

Petrillo pursued musical work along with other manual labor jobs as a member of an Italian immigrant fam-ily. His “official” and published life story is largely told through quips he made repeatedly, such as attend-ing school for nine years but never moving past the fourth grade and finally deciding to drop out. Another anecdote is that after he gave a talk, a friend suggested he would be good as union president and that he should run for office. By this time, Petrillo had blown his lip out. Petrillo often referred to his poor skills as a musician. He had purportedly worked professionally in bands, therefore crossing the divide between amateur and professional, if not having the “talent” to have a more lucrative or otherwise successful career (Kubach 1964:66-69). In 1954, Petrillo brought his trumpet out to perform with President Truman, a pianist, six years after the successful restructuring of the Musicians’ Performance Trust Fund, an inauguration with music provided by the AFM, and the granting to Truman of an honorary lifetime AFM membership.

James Caesar Petrillo’s brother, Caesar James Petrillo, also learned to play trumpet at Hull House; he went on to become a composer, recording artist, leader of the CBS dance band on WBBM Chicago, and radio executive.

16Anders Lunde was a researcher with the Bureau for Applied Social Research at Columbia University, which was started when the Office of Radio Research, of which Adorno was an early member, moved from Princeton in 1940.


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17The drum machine shifted the possibility and aesthetic of meter (Katz 2010, Peterson 2010).

18Moreover, as Marx lays out, a given performance might function differently for those there: it is unpro-ductive labor for people at a bar enjoying the music and consuming it without it being turned into a com-modity while it is productive labor for the bar owner who profits from having music there. The recording musician might, in this way, be likened to the writer, who is “a productive worker not because he produces ideas, but in so far as he enriches the publisher who publishes his works, or if he is a wage worker for a capitalist” (Marx 1952:154). Others have discussed Marx’s notion of productive labor in relation to mu-sic, emphasizing the possibility for musical performance to be a source of surplus value (Mason 2006, Olmsted 2002, Taylor 2007). I read this passage in relation to the concerns of the case at hand, in which live music was not conceived of as a source of surplus value for the performer, but rather understood in terms of a labor theory of value.

19Musical repetition is not of one order. The basis for a critique of music’s commodification and massifi-cation (Adorno 1981), repetition is also part of the pleasure of the groove in participatory music-making described by Keil and Feld (1994) and Turino (2008). And even the former can be a space of pleasure. Dinah Washington’s designation as “Queen of the Jukebox” marked an emergent space of musical so-ciability: public spaces with individually selected songs, where dance styles and intimacies were formed (Haskins 1987).

20Attali (1985:98) discusses the negotiation over whose rights inhered in recorded sound that resulted in establishing the author as a recipient of rent from the sale of records. However, royalties for composers are firmly established legally through copyright law, while those for performers remain independent agree-ments between the musician and record company.

21The International Musician ran numerous articles critiquing the various bills and their consequences for labor, including “Entering Wedge” 1946, “Fight Anti-Labor Bills!” 1947, Gershberg 1947, “Grievance as a Goad” 1947, Keenan 1949, “Labor Hazards in the Coming Year” 1947, “Labor’s Solid Front” 1946, Meany 1947, “The Open Shop” 1947, Padway 1946, “The Road to Chaos” 1947, “Taft-Hartley Law Exposed!” 1948, Woll 1946, and “The Worker’s Sense of Dignity” 1947.

22The AFM was attuned to the range of meanings of “freedom” (Harvey 2005) and the uses to which it could be put. Most especially, it was critical of the notion of a free market and its implications for labor (“Free Enterprise—Where To?” 1946). Debates around the circulation of digital technology echo this call for free music. These debates once again occlude the musician by emphasizing the sound file as an object that exists on its own, taking for granted a seeming logic of new technology. As with radio, the potential ease of sharing digital technology is due not simply to an inherent nature of the medium, but to forces of capital and legislation that variously allow and disallow its circulation.

23Petrillo had first used public performances as a means of providing work for musicians in 1935, following the decline in Chicago’s civic music budgets after the stock market crash of 1929. Though the perfor-mances were open to the general public, the performers were from the whites-only Local 10, reflecting the contradictions of the potential inclusiveness of any public. During the Progressive Era, free concerts were used to elevate the masses, assimilate immigrants into the body politic, and entertain. With European classical music presented downtown and music of specific ethnic or national groups in neighborhoods, they also mapped social geographies, supporting and performing dynamics of diversity and unity. As such, they set a precedent for current iterations of civic performance in cities across the country, which include both symphony concerts and programming oriented toward a multicultural city brought together through music, each deployed in the name of music’s unifying and transcendent qualities (Peterson 2010, Vaillant 2003).

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F o r e i g n l a n g u a g e tr a n s l a t i o n s

Sound Work: Music as Labor and the 1940s Recording Bans of the American Federation of Musicians [Keywords: Music, labor, audio technology, radio, liberalism, United States]

音声工程：音乐做为劳动，以及1940年代美国音乐家联盟的录音禁令关键词：音乐，劳动，音频技术，收音机，自由主义，美国

Звуковая работа: Музыка как труд: запрет Американской федерации музыкантов на записи исполнителей [Ключевые слова: Музыка, труд, аудиотехнология, радио, либерализм, США]

Trabalho Sonoro: Música enquanto Trabalho e as Censuras de Gravação de Discos dos anos 1940 pela Federação Americana de Músicos [Palavras chave: Música, trabalho, tecnologia audio, rádio, liberalismo, Estados Unidos da América]

توظيف األصوات: املوسيقى كعمل وحظر التسجيل لالتحاد األمرييك لعازيف املوسيقى يف أربعينيات القرن العرشينكلامت البحث: املوسيقى، العمل، تكنولوجيا الصوت، الراديو، الليربالية، االواليات املتحدة

86.3.peterson

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