Abstract
Drawing on archival research, interviews and theories of labour and exchange (Marx, Bauman, Weber), this chapter aims to document the heterogeneous working practices prevailing in continental library music companies in the 1960s and 1970s (with a focus on Britain, France and Italy). The chapter is concerned with uncovering the broader ‘ecology’ of library music, focusing on the working lives and interrelated histories of those who invisibly composed and recorded it. Specific attention will be paid to library music’s material conditions of emergence – including its reliance on technological innovations and intensified partnerships with the audiovisual industry (and notably independent TV providers). We will consider library music as a distributed object, resulting from a collective, inter-authorial process and benefitting from myriad epistemes (the expertise of arrangers and recording engineers must be underlined here).
However, rather than seeking to establish a totalising or normative interpretation of library music practices, or to outrightly dismiss them as economically and creatively exploitative of artists, the chapter will ask how the heterogeneity and elasticity of working practices simultaneously contributed to the creative dynamism of the period. On the one hand, library music environments had become largely professionalised and regulated at the close of the 1970s (culminating with the Musicians’ Union formal recognition of library music recording in the UK in 1978). On the other hand, they were also often characterised by a climate of experimentalism and openness – offering in some cases a conduit for creative expression and sonic experimentation beyond the codified constraints of the mainstream popular and classical music industry (as reported by composers such as Ron Geesin and Carey Blyton). While this ‘freedom’ should not be retrospectively idealised, we will see how the poles of experimentalism and codification were interrelated.
Finally, the chapter will suggest ways in which the practices which were consolidated in the 1960s and 1970s paved the way for some contemporary trends in the music industry and its largely deregulated model (casualisation, precarisation, platformisation, individualisation of risk)(Ritzer, Graeber, Gorz and Bauman). Library music practices will therefore be historicized and read in light of recent industrial trends – but cannot by any means be seen as the sole ‘blueprint’ for contemporary developments in the music industry.
The chapter will notably draw from data collected from the Boosey & Hawkes archive (held at the British Library), the Musicians’ Union archive, as well as from memoirs and interviews with library music composers and managers.