Music and Sound Studies Colloquium: Benjamin Skoronski and Moira de Kok

Music is labor. While Marx reminds us that all commodities embody the labor behind their production (Marx 1867), recording and especially reperforming technologies also mediate the labor of performing musicians. The production and consumption of such mediated labor are inseparable from dynamics of race and class, as a media archeology of the player piano demonstrates. These instrument-machines were marketed to the white middle class as labor-savi...