ABSTRACT
Marxist analytical approaches to art and culture have significant affinities with those of ethnomusicology. Both sets of approaches seek to contextualize artistic expressions in their broader socio-historical context, to illuminate their relation to issues of agency, hegemony, and resistance, and to explore how artistic forms themselves may be conditioned by their socio-economic base. Authors from Arnold Hauser to Theodor Adorno have applied Marxist concepts in different ways to the study of music, and the approaches of cultural studies—extending Gramscian conceptions of class hegemony to dimensions of gender, ethnicity, and race—have become standard in modern studies of music and culture. Several ethnomusicological studies have also used Marxist-informed approaches in various ways, exploring, for example, the transition from feudal to capitalist arts patronage in twentieth-century India, the class affiliations of such music genres as heavy metal and country music, and the ways that the aesthetic sensibilities promoted by bourgeois capitalism have tended to favor particular formal structures in music. Such studies have made their own sorts of contributions to the understanding of relations between socio-economic base and expressive culture.
