March 7 at 3pm in Dodge 622
"Musical Development: Towards a Materialist Critique of Classical Music"
In 2020, the Louisville Orchestra offered a musical tribute to Breonna Taylor, who Louisville police had murdered six months earlier. This “Concert for Healing” was widely celebrated for “doing something” about racism in Louisville. In this talk, I accept the Orchestra’s invitation to think about the connections between orchestral classical music and social change. Via a mixture of archival research, investigative journalism, and critical theory, I tell a very different story than the optimistic one reiterated in proclamations about music’s transformative social power. This other story is about the material role that major symphony orchestras like Louisville’s have played in the racist urban development of their cities since the nineteenth century. I trace this history in an attempt to construct a materialist account of U.S. “classical music” very different from the idealist one that circulates in this musical culture. I ultimately argue that idealism constitutes a profound political problem that is omnipresent in social justice initiatives throughout the world of classical music.
Bio:
Marianna Ritchey is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She spent much of her young adulthood in Portland, Oregon, playing and touring in various indie rock bands, before going to UCLA for a PhD in Musicology. She has written about Berlioz, comedy, the dies irae, music history pedagogy, and operatic representations of Steve Jobs. Ritchey’s first book, Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (U. Chicago Press, 2019), examines classical music and capitalist ideologies in the contemporary United States. She is currently working on a second book, which explores materialist analyses of musical culture, and new possibilities for political imagining in academic music studies.
