This is a rather fine book. Focussed on the US film industry, Timothy Taylor develops both his own work about capitalism (Taylor Reference Taylor2012, Reference Taylor2016) and contributes to the growing study of popular musicians as workers. He does this via an account of the working lives and practices of musicians who work as composers of film, television and computer game music. The result is a book which is never less than interesting and often compelling.
Following an Introduction on Working Musicians, the book contains eight chapters which discuss Group Production; Creativity; Composers’ Labour; The Music Supply Chain after the Composer; Challenges; Gender; Neoliberalization; and the fact that there are ‘Thousands of Guys Like Me’. This structure allows for the development of an understanding of these composers’ working lives, while also locating them within a broader context, i.e. the continued development of capitalism and its impact on musical workers. As Taylor notes, he wants to ‘document what these working musicians do’ (p. 81). This has methodological implications: ‘The main point is to attempt to discover what is meaningful to the people we study, not induce them to tell us what is meaningful to us or impose our synthetic frameworks on them’ (p. 17).
The book's first chapter outlines processes of group production, which can include composers subcontracting work to other composers. Taylor draws particularly on the work of Raymond Williams here. He clearly locates the focus of his book as being workers (p. 23), and notes the importance of supply chains, wherein surplus value is produced, drawing on Anna Tsing (Reference Tsing2009, Reference Tsing2013, Reference Tsing2015) to show that this is a collective process. Pierre Bourdieu's various forms of capital are also drawn on in order to illustrate how composers work, showing that success relies on becoming the sort of person that others want to work with (a form of social capital).
Creativity is discussed ‘as a discourse in the Foucauldian sense’ (p. 48) and here Taylor shows how notions of creativity have changed throughout (modern) history and are clearly gendered. For Taylor's subjects, the question is of how creative they can be in a context where the final say always lies with their employer. He also shows that what is possible varies across film, television and computer games. In all cases, budgets were, of course, a key determinant within a general tendency to use technology to replace live musicians.
The labour these composers perform is said to be ‘at the pleasure of producers and directors’ (p. 81), and Taylor suggests that ‘composers’ labor is viewed as a kind of natural resource which is acquired through primitive accumulation’ (p. 82). Of particular importance here is that composers ‘do not own copyrights to their own music’ (p. 84) following a lost battle by the Composers and Lyricists of America in the 1970s. He also shows how composers get into the business and subsequently how they can be hired, for work that is both increasingly collective and subject to ever-intensive competition.
Taylor next deals with work following the completion of compositions, including the work of orchestrators, copyists, contractors, performers, recording engineers, mixers and music editors. This is a world within which ‘social capital matters’ (p.127) and where such people are being ‘paid less to do more, in the same amount of time or less, with new digital tools which allow their bosses to demand more at the last minute and to facilitate the outsourcing of some of their labor’ (p. 137). Glamorous this is not. But it is still a place where people overcome the existing social relations and manage to practice their own creativity within the constraints which envelop them.
A chapter on challenges focuses on questions of authority and communication. Changing technology has increased the amount of people who the composer must please. Their first job is thus to work out who has the ultimate say. They can also face problems with non-musical directors who think that they know about music. Examples here include a story of a director who heard – and commented on – the sound of a flute, when what was actually being played was a cello. Some directors also used colours to describe the sound they wanted. In all this, negotiating a way through an artistic minefield came to be one of the composer's extra-musical skills.
A chapter on gender notes how most of Taylor's interviewees were men, something which was not remarked upon by interviewees themselves unless Taylor specifically mentioned it. Taylor does not seek to justify this imbalance so much as show it to be illustrative of wider phenomena with film composition. The work patterns of composers in a world of last-minute demands was clearly not conducive to family life, although there does appear to be some growing acceptance on behalf of employers of people expecting – and receiving – time off with their families. Most composers had home studios. Wage inequality was still reported, but overall there appeared to be growing inclusivity, albeit with a long road left to travel.
A chapter on neoliberalism and self-exploitation notes how much the market has entered into every facet of human relations. Competition was shown to be getting fiercer, something exacerbated by the rise of digital technonolgies and the concomitant demands for ever greater productivity. Composers had a sense of the music itself getting worse. They were also increasingly paid via package deals in which they – and not the employer – are responsible for organising much of the sub-contracting work. Here payments previously paid by the studio had increasingly become the responsibility of the composer. Budgets were getting tighter and precarity increasing. The need to unionise was apparent, but held back by disagreements about what to prioritise.
Taylor's concluding chapter, ‘Thousands of Guys Like Me’, is in many ways the essence of the book. Taylor is interested in ‘everyday musicians’ (p.212) and their struggles to both be creative and survive. These people live in a world where studios will (have to) pay thousands to use a sample of a classic piece of music, but wince at paying for ‘original’ material. As Taylor says: ‘Profligacy at the top, parsimony everywhere else’ (p. 213). He also concludes that neoliberalists do not care about the music, just the bottom line. This is a sombre end to a work about artistic creators. Seemingly the majority will not truly flourish while neoliberalism remains the norm.
Theoretically, Taylor locates his work firmly in the Marxist camp. He says that his book is a ‘combination of classic Marxian perspectives with more recent arguments about how value is created or refined through supply chains, as well as thematising issues of patriarchy and gender’ (p. 16). However, as this is a Marxist account, class is inevitably (and welcomingly) to the fore. Taylor immediately notes the middle-class nature of the majority of the composers (p. 2). The question, then, is not so much whether capitalism is the problem, but how neoliberal capitalism has impacted on these workers. The evidence he has gathered here suggests that:
neoliberal capitalism has sped up production, increased income inequality between music workers and their bosses, and introduced greater demands for marginalization so that composers are as much entrepreneur-managers as musicians. (p. 3)
Taylor also suggests that ‘Neoliberalism capitalism has brought with it new usages and meanings of creativity’ (p. 12, emphasis in original) and ‘in some ways … utterly changed how music is produced’ (p. 15). This seems to me to be a claim too far. Indeed at times it was unclear whether what Taylor is showing is particularly about neoliberal capitalism or capitalism per se. For example, the continual search for work that pays enough (p. 193) has been a concern for musicians prior to and throughout capitalism. What is perhaps occurring is that neoliberal capitalism is now developing traits which were inherent within capitalism at a time when nation-states are less inclined to reign in capitalist excess and more likely to remove any obstacles in its way.
Unsurprisingly, the theme of technology recurs throughout, and its development within neoliberal capitalism is a key concern. What is perhaps more surprising is its impact on film composers. Overall, Taylor's respondents suggested that, since the 1970s, the main impact of these technologies ‘have left composers even less time to do their work and have unemployed many live musicians since their playing time can be generated by software’ (p. 7), and that ‘digital technologies have also resulted in people working longer and harder, as, unlike in the past, their bosses know that changes can now be demanded and effected at the last minute’ (p. 15), a point which is reiterated at various points in the book (e.g. p. 66).
Despite my praise for the book, I did find some of its omissions rather strange. First, there is no reference to Alan Peacock and Ronald Weir's excellent book The Composer in the Market Place (Reference Peacock and Weir1975) – and it is exactly this issue which Taylor is addressing. Secondly, many of the musicians in this book are ‘hidden’ (or anonymous) in exactly the way which Ruth Finnegan (Reference Finnegan1989) theorised. As Taylor says, the book is about musicians who are ‘not stars, but people who work every day to bring us the music we hear every day’ (p. 1) and this has obvious overlap with Finnegan. While a reviewer can always look for gaps in the literature, the lack of reference to these two seminal texts was surprising. In a book which contains a fair share of theory, these two texts could well have brought still more light to what is already a bright piece of work and I would have welcomed Taylor's reflections on them. In addition, while Taylor acknowledges previous American and British work on cultural businesses and cultural production, there is little on the recent turn to labour within Popular Music Studies, where works by the likes of Abfalter and Reitsmer (Reference Abfalter and Reitsmer2022), Stahl (Reference Stahl2013) and Williamson and Cloonan (Reference Williamson and Cloonan2016) might usefully have been drawn upon.
Taylor's research is based on interviews which began in 2012 and then continued between 2017 and 2020. This timescale becomes problematic at various points, as such things as the politics of the #MeToo movement, the rapid changes in technology and the fight for more family time mean that the world has changed a lot in 10 years. In addition, the account is definitely an American one, and it would be good to know about such issues in other countries. Location still matters. However, overall Taylor succeeds in his task of explaining these workers’ working lives and the factors that influence them. This is a welcome study. Recommended.
