Journal article
Composing on Commission: Entrepreneurship and the Changing Social Basis of Popular Music Collaboration in Postsocialist Tirana, Albania
N Tochka
Culture Theory and Critique | ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD | Published : 2014
Abstract
Since the 1990s, economic reforms in postsocialist Albania have reorganised the social basis of popular music production. Administered within a state-subsidised economy during socialism, production has been transformed by the penetration of economic capital into relations between composers and singers. This essay analyses how composers conceptualise and manage their careers in order to examine more broadly how neoliberalism contributes to the reshaping of artistic subjectivities in one postsocialist context. Celebrated locally as a withdrawal of government, the postsocialist state's desubsidisation of popular music has, I argue, shifted new obligations for self-government on to agents. In pu..
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Funding Acknowledgements
In cases where publication might potentially damage the business or personal relationships on which my interlocutors depend, I employ pseudonyms or alter minor identifying details. I mark the first usage of a pseudonym with an asterisk where it occurs in the text. This essay derives from ten months of ethnographic and archival research in Tirana, Albania funded by an American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship in East European Studies during 2009-2010. In researching the political economy of popular music-making in state-socialist subsidy and its transformation by capitalism, I conducted interviews with composers, singers, lyricists and producers, observed first hand the organisation of a singing contest, and followed several other televised festivals closely through the popular media.