The 2024 MMRC Lecture

Between Cultural Labor and Political Struggle: Music and Class

In view of the crisis-ridden character of global capitalism, the concept of class is receiving renewed attention across many scholarly disciplines. The 2024 MMRC Lecture invites different perspectives on the connections between class and music as a political instrument, an economic power relation and a creative, shared experience of self-determination and resistance across different geographical and historical contexts.

In her keynote, ethnomusicologist and anthropologist Ana Hofman (Institute of Culture and Memory Studies at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana) focuses on the amateur-professional nexus as one of the key grounds for musical actualizations of the ideas of class struggle to provide conceptual framework for listening for (in)equality beyond an exclusive focus on a subject position towards historically situated processes of social stratification.

Cultural geographer and artist Anjeline de Dios (Manila) extends these reflections in her response by analyzing the class hierarchy of race as experienced by overseas Filipino musicians performing Western songs in leisure venues around Asia. Understood as a form of care or service work, their livelihood is marginalised in the global music industry, however they find ways to challenge these hierarchies.

They are complemented by a musical contribution of Mata Granata (Croatia/Vienna), who raps about class as a shared experience of people from different cultural contexts, class struggles and the invisibility of migrant labour.

While all of the contributors focus on different geographical and historical contexts, their talks and music are intended to be starting points of a conversation about interconnections – between class and race, the histories of the so-called former Second World and the Global South, state socialism and overseas colonialism, struggles and mobilities.

Programm

Musical Performance: Mata Granata

Opening: Ulrike Sych, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

Introduction: Ursula Hemetek, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

Keynote: "Lessons on Music and Class struggle"

Ana Hofman (Institute of Culture and Memory Studies at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana)

Response: "Migrant Sonic Work: Overseas Filipino Musicians and the Class Mobilities of Music and Race"

Anjeline de Dios (Manila)

Q&A Session: Chaired by Ursula Hemetek, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

Musical performance: Mata Granata