Leah M Bernini, PhD
Leah O’Brien Bernini Cronin, PhD, is an American-born Irish fiddle player. Her PhD in Ethnomusicology, from the University of Limerick, is entitled "The Neoliberalisation of Cultural Production: An Ethnography of Professional Irish Traditional Music" (June 2016). Leah’s research focuses on the experiences of over 80 professional Irish traditional and Celtic musicians and music industry personnel as they negotiate the complex dynamics between capitalism and creativity.
She is also Music Director for the Millennium Academy of Irish Dance and Music in Granville, Ohio. There, she teaches Irish fiddle and steers the Millennium House Band, a working/teaching ensemble comprised of professional musicians, teachers, and students, in which students learn hands-on how to be in a real band and perform professionally.
Leah is also Vice President of Cultural Roadmapp, a groundbreaking, hands-free cultural audio tour app for motorists (www.culturalroadmapp.com). The GPS-guided app immerses the listener in Ireland’s rich cultural heritage, letting them experience local music, folklore, stories, and history as they drive.
She holds an MA in Irish Traditional Music Performance, an MA in Ethnomusicology, both from the University of Limerick, and a BM in Commercial Music Performance and Music Business from Belmont University in Nashville, TN.
Supervisors: Colin Quigley and Tim Taylor
She is also Music Director for the Millennium Academy of Irish Dance and Music in Granville, Ohio. There, she teaches Irish fiddle and steers the Millennium House Band, a working/teaching ensemble comprised of professional musicians, teachers, and students, in which students learn hands-on how to be in a real band and perform professionally.
Leah is also Vice President of Cultural Roadmapp, a groundbreaking, hands-free cultural audio tour app for motorists (www.culturalroadmapp.com). The GPS-guided app immerses the listener in Ireland’s rich cultural heritage, letting them experience local music, folklore, stories, and history as they drive.
She holds an MA in Irish Traditional Music Performance, an MA in Ethnomusicology, both from the University of Limerick, and a BM in Commercial Music Performance and Music Business from Belmont University in Nashville, TN.
Supervisors: Colin Quigley and Tim Taylor
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Books by Leah M Bernini, PhD
Direct Download: https://ulir.ul.ie/bitstream/handle/10344/5216/Bernini_2016_neoliberalisation.pdf?sequence=5
Through the theoretical lenses of agency, autonomy, resistance, and resilience, this ethnographic study reveals how professional musicians and cultural workers experience the neoliberalisation of cultural production in their careers and everyday lives. Neoliberal capitalism is the most powerful cultural, ideological, and economic system in the West today. As such, it largely influences labour and other social relations, including the modes of cultural production, distribution, and consumption. Further, many of the most urgent issues facing artists and cultural workers today result from neoliberalism’s intensification of precarious labour relations, and its encroachment of market values into nearly all realms of cultural life.
This study examines the lived realities of over eighty artists and cultural workers involved in professional Irish traditional and Celtic music production. Through in-depth interviews and extensive participant-observation, this work investigates the ambivalent, dynamic, and entwined relationships between art, commerce, and the social.
It proposes that the majority of participants’ activities that increase their access to resources and capital are in service of enhancing or increasing their agency. This increased agency can be used to achieve greater autonomy from market influences. More autonomy, in turn, can help them attain a better balance within the art / commerce / social arena, which is believed to promote a healthier, happier career and lifestyle.
Whether they are accumulating more economic, cultural, and social capital, recalibrating power dynamics, or configuring their environment to best suit their needs, artists and cultural workers often view attaining more control over their creative decisions, business relations, and professional environment as helping them achieve a more sustainable state of working and living with integrity. These values inform artists’ guiding philosophies, and as such, drive how they approach cultural production and labour relations in a tumultuous and challenging industry.
Conference Presentations by Leah M Bernini, PhD
In ecology, sociology, and psychology, resilience generally refers to a person or system’s capacity to “absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedback” (Walker et al., 2004:5). In this paper, I show how artists in Irish traditional music production employ specific resilience strategies, and demonstrate how resilience may prove indicative why some survive – even thrive – in the face of great environmental change, and others fall apart.
Is it its versatility, its capacity for virtuosity, its grit and grace? It is its ability to oscillate easily between melody and harmony, between autonomy, leadership, and cooperation, or across diverse genres? Could it be its global familiarity, popularity, and the availability of instruments and teachers? Or is it its inherent beauty, the captivating aesthetic of the human-instrument synergic dance? Does its physical portability play a role, or is more credit due to the personality and characteristics of those with discipline to master this instrument and pursue a career in performance?
This paper explores fiddle as indisputably the most popular – and arguably the most economically viable – solo instrument in commercialised North Atlantic traditions. These findings derive from a five-year study investigating the entangled and mutually constitutive relationship between western commercial music and neoliberal capitalism. This study engages over eighty prominent professionals in commercialised Celtic music production and analyses participants’ strategies, experiences and actions as they navigate the delicate ‘art-commerce-social triad’ (Banks 2007). Examining how artists and industry personnel experience and interact with the neoliberal capitalist cultural formation, through their involvement in entertainment industry, helps reveal how professional artists experience the intersection of commerce and art, that is, the commodification of their musical experience.
For instance, when one artist felt frustrated during record label contract negotiations, he threatened to withdraw unless they granted him rights to the territory of the moon – they agreed. This symbolic victory for the artist, however financially insignificant, recalibrated unequal power dynamics by cleverly exposing the absurdity of the moment.
This paper presents findings from a four-year study examining creative and occupational experiences of over eighty Irish/Celtic artists and industry personnel as they attempt to achieve a delicate ‘balance between commerce and art… between the urge to create and the opportunity to profit from that creation’ (Riverdance creator Bill Whelan 2010).
By investigating acts of subversion and resistance, whether humorous and subtle or staged and daring, this work advances the understanding of power dynamics in the music industry. Revealing such subtleties of musical labour are essential to understanding and theorising conflicts within the creative/commercial/social triad (Banks 2007) embodied by professional artists in contemporary capitalism.
The study investigates how nearly eighty influential contributors to contemporary commercialised Irish and Irish-Celtic music in Ireland, Canada, the UK and the US perceive commercialization, agency, identity and the creative process in their occupational and personal lives.
This paper identifies two interrelated trends currently affecting the music industry that may stem from the implementation, institutionalization and naturalization of neoliberal ideologies and policy.
1. Firstly, the entertainment industry upheaval, resulting in professional musicians using new technologies to adapt and survive economically, and
2. Secondly, strong societal values of self-reliance, perhaps contributing to a strong desire for independence among professional traditional artists.
These two phenomena may be considered both symptoms and perpetuators of neoliberal ideologies. For instance, participants may reveal their internalisation of certain values common in neoliberal societies when describing their and others’ successes as resultant of ‘independence’, ‘control’ and ‘power’ while downplaying circumstance and privilege – thus reinforcing and naturalizing the alluring cultural mythology of the ‘self made man’ – thereby helping to propagate and reinforce the system through their consecration of these values.
This paper explores four critical trends emerging in the commercialization of Irish traditional music. First, many established artists, previously dependent on the resources provided by record labels, are now choosing to book their own tours, manage their own publicity, and record, market, and sell their albums independently. However, true ‘D.I.Y’ simply does not exist. Second, the over-saturation of the marketplace and the over-stimulation of consumers make catching and sustaining attention more difficult than ever, necessitating clever promotional strategies and local publicity based around an extensive touring schedule. Third, without label executives to appease, or a substantial investment to recoup, many participants feel that they can retain more creative agency and profits by being independent. Therefore, the music reaching the consumer may be more authentic to the artist’s vision (though possibly less commercially viable). Finally, crowdfunding through sites like Kickstarter allow independent artists to raise capital for recording an album directly from fans, eliminating the need for record label investment.
This research contributes essential missing voices – those of the artists and the industry personnel themselves – to current the ethnomusicological understanding of the music industry while contributing to a broader understanding of how traditional musics interact with the global commercial system.""
This work focuses on the intersection of Irish traditional music and the marketplace as experienced by prominent artists, industry personnel, and employees of the largest Irish/Celtic record label. It is based on twelve interviews conducted over the last year and is reflected upon through my perspective as a semi-professional Irish traditional fiddle player and former industry employee.
This research contributes essential missing voices – those of the artists and the industry personnel themselves – to current ethnomusicological investigations of the music industry while contributing to a broader understanding of how traditional musics interact with the global commercial system."
Ethnographic studies conducted within the music industry are rare, though a small but growing sub-genre of recording studio ethnographies has appeared since 2007. There are many theoretical, methodological, and logistical difficulties presented by the industry that may attribute to the small number of studies. This work briefly explains how meaningful ethnomusicological research conducted within the music industry is possible by bridging the sensibilities of ethnomusicology (ethnographic and musicological) with the subjects of popular music studies through a careful adaptation of relevant social theory and fieldwork methods. It then illustrates various approaches that may help ethnomusicologists overcome industry gatekeepers, complex ethical issues, and copyright laws.
With the intention of understanding how traditional music interacts with the global commercial system, this work focuses on the intersection of traditional music and capitalism as experienced by prominent Irish traditional artists, music industry personnel, and employees of the largest Irish/Celtic record label. Understood through the analysis of recording studio-based performance interaction, participant-observation and personal interviews, this research contributes essential missing voices – those of the artists and the industry personnel themselves – to the current ethnomusicological understanding of the music industry.
The music industry presents a venue wherein ethnomusicologists, armed with compatible tools and approaches, may gain a deeper understanding of how musicians experience the intersection of music and capitalism. This work offers new insight regarding how participants experience the recording studio as an important domain of musical production through the analysis of performance interaction. "
Papers by Leah M Bernini, PhD
In the dissertation, I explore the links between neoliberal rhetoric and ideology, artists’ conceptions of agency, freedom, and autonomy, and the economic, psychological, and social strategies they use to enhance or achieve it. While we won’t have much time today in-depth theoretical analysis, I hope to convey a more nuanced understanding of what drives many of the professional artists in my study, as well as how and why they do what they do.
With the larger intentions of eventually understanding where and how traditional music and musicians fit into the global commercial system, this thesis examines the intersection of music and capitalism as experienced by numerous prominent Irish traditional artists and music industry personnel. It contributes essential missing voices – those of the artists and the industry personnel themselves – to the current ethnomusicological understanding of musical commodification.
Unlike the much of the previous ethnomusicological work concerning commodification, commercialisation, and capitalism, this study is driven by extensive primary-source ethnographic research. It is augmented by appropriate interdisciplinary literature and methodological techniques, grounded in relevant social theory, and reflected upon through my perspective as an Irish traditional musician and former Irish traditional music industry employee. All participants are key contributors to Irish traditional music and/or the roots music industry in Ireland and the America.
This thesis begins by historically situating Irish traditional artists within the global capitalist system. It then details how Irish traditional artists make a living: the mechanics of record labels, the importance of marketing, and various business approaches utilised by participants. It subsequently explores the application and consequences of marketing, branding, and commoditising to traditional music. Finally, it illuminates and analyses many of the profound effects of commodification and marketing on the participants’ perceptions of their individual agency, identity, and creative processes.
Direct Download: https://ulir.ul.ie/bitstream/handle/10344/5216/Bernini_2016_neoliberalisation.pdf?sequence=5
Through the theoretical lenses of agency, autonomy, resistance, and resilience, this ethnographic study reveals how professional musicians and cultural workers experience the neoliberalisation of cultural production in their careers and everyday lives. Neoliberal capitalism is the most powerful cultural, ideological, and economic system in the West today. As such, it largely influences labour and other social relations, including the modes of cultural production, distribution, and consumption. Further, many of the most urgent issues facing artists and cultural workers today result from neoliberalism’s intensification of precarious labour relations, and its encroachment of market values into nearly all realms of cultural life.
This study examines the lived realities of over eighty artists and cultural workers involved in professional Irish traditional and Celtic music production. Through in-depth interviews and extensive participant-observation, this work investigates the ambivalent, dynamic, and entwined relationships between art, commerce, and the social.
It proposes that the majority of participants’ activities that increase their access to resources and capital are in service of enhancing or increasing their agency. This increased agency can be used to achieve greater autonomy from market influences. More autonomy, in turn, can help them attain a better balance within the art / commerce / social arena, which is believed to promote a healthier, happier career and lifestyle.
Whether they are accumulating more economic, cultural, and social capital, recalibrating power dynamics, or configuring their environment to best suit their needs, artists and cultural workers often view attaining more control over their creative decisions, business relations, and professional environment as helping them achieve a more sustainable state of working and living with integrity. These values inform artists’ guiding philosophies, and as such, drive how they approach cultural production and labour relations in a tumultuous and challenging industry.
In ecology, sociology, and psychology, resilience generally refers to a person or system’s capacity to “absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedback” (Walker et al., 2004:5). In this paper, I show how artists in Irish traditional music production employ specific resilience strategies, and demonstrate how resilience may prove indicative why some survive – even thrive – in the face of great environmental change, and others fall apart.
Is it its versatility, its capacity for virtuosity, its grit and grace? It is its ability to oscillate easily between melody and harmony, between autonomy, leadership, and cooperation, or across diverse genres? Could it be its global familiarity, popularity, and the availability of instruments and teachers? Or is it its inherent beauty, the captivating aesthetic of the human-instrument synergic dance? Does its physical portability play a role, or is more credit due to the personality and characteristics of those with discipline to master this instrument and pursue a career in performance?
This paper explores fiddle as indisputably the most popular – and arguably the most economically viable – solo instrument in commercialised North Atlantic traditions. These findings derive from a five-year study investigating the entangled and mutually constitutive relationship between western commercial music and neoliberal capitalism. This study engages over eighty prominent professionals in commercialised Celtic music production and analyses participants’ strategies, experiences and actions as they navigate the delicate ‘art-commerce-social triad’ (Banks 2007). Examining how artists and industry personnel experience and interact with the neoliberal capitalist cultural formation, through their involvement in entertainment industry, helps reveal how professional artists experience the intersection of commerce and art, that is, the commodification of their musical experience.
For instance, when one artist felt frustrated during record label contract negotiations, he threatened to withdraw unless they granted him rights to the territory of the moon – they agreed. This symbolic victory for the artist, however financially insignificant, recalibrated unequal power dynamics by cleverly exposing the absurdity of the moment.
This paper presents findings from a four-year study examining creative and occupational experiences of over eighty Irish/Celtic artists and industry personnel as they attempt to achieve a delicate ‘balance between commerce and art… between the urge to create and the opportunity to profit from that creation’ (Riverdance creator Bill Whelan 2010).
By investigating acts of subversion and resistance, whether humorous and subtle or staged and daring, this work advances the understanding of power dynamics in the music industry. Revealing such subtleties of musical labour are essential to understanding and theorising conflicts within the creative/commercial/social triad (Banks 2007) embodied by professional artists in contemporary capitalism.
The study investigates how nearly eighty influential contributors to contemporary commercialised Irish and Irish-Celtic music in Ireland, Canada, the UK and the US perceive commercialization, agency, identity and the creative process in their occupational and personal lives.
This paper identifies two interrelated trends currently affecting the music industry that may stem from the implementation, institutionalization and naturalization of neoliberal ideologies and policy.
1. Firstly, the entertainment industry upheaval, resulting in professional musicians using new technologies to adapt and survive economically, and
2. Secondly, strong societal values of self-reliance, perhaps contributing to a strong desire for independence among professional traditional artists.
These two phenomena may be considered both symptoms and perpetuators of neoliberal ideologies. For instance, participants may reveal their internalisation of certain values common in neoliberal societies when describing their and others’ successes as resultant of ‘independence’, ‘control’ and ‘power’ while downplaying circumstance and privilege – thus reinforcing and naturalizing the alluring cultural mythology of the ‘self made man’ – thereby helping to propagate and reinforce the system through their consecration of these values.
This paper explores four critical trends emerging in the commercialization of Irish traditional music. First, many established artists, previously dependent on the resources provided by record labels, are now choosing to book their own tours, manage their own publicity, and record, market, and sell their albums independently. However, true ‘D.I.Y’ simply does not exist. Second, the over-saturation of the marketplace and the over-stimulation of consumers make catching and sustaining attention more difficult than ever, necessitating clever promotional strategies and local publicity based around an extensive touring schedule. Third, without label executives to appease, or a substantial investment to recoup, many participants feel that they can retain more creative agency and profits by being independent. Therefore, the music reaching the consumer may be more authentic to the artist’s vision (though possibly less commercially viable). Finally, crowdfunding through sites like Kickstarter allow independent artists to raise capital for recording an album directly from fans, eliminating the need for record label investment.
This research contributes essential missing voices – those of the artists and the industry personnel themselves – to current the ethnomusicological understanding of the music industry while contributing to a broader understanding of how traditional musics interact with the global commercial system.""
This work focuses on the intersection of Irish traditional music and the marketplace as experienced by prominent artists, industry personnel, and employees of the largest Irish/Celtic record label. It is based on twelve interviews conducted over the last year and is reflected upon through my perspective as a semi-professional Irish traditional fiddle player and former industry employee.
This research contributes essential missing voices – those of the artists and the industry personnel themselves – to current ethnomusicological investigations of the music industry while contributing to a broader understanding of how traditional musics interact with the global commercial system."
Ethnographic studies conducted within the music industry are rare, though a small but growing sub-genre of recording studio ethnographies has appeared since 2007. There are many theoretical, methodological, and logistical difficulties presented by the industry that may attribute to the small number of studies. This work briefly explains how meaningful ethnomusicological research conducted within the music industry is possible by bridging the sensibilities of ethnomusicology (ethnographic and musicological) with the subjects of popular music studies through a careful adaptation of relevant social theory and fieldwork methods. It then illustrates various approaches that may help ethnomusicologists overcome industry gatekeepers, complex ethical issues, and copyright laws.
With the intention of understanding how traditional music interacts with the global commercial system, this work focuses on the intersection of traditional music and capitalism as experienced by prominent Irish traditional artists, music industry personnel, and employees of the largest Irish/Celtic record label. Understood through the analysis of recording studio-based performance interaction, participant-observation and personal interviews, this research contributes essential missing voices – those of the artists and the industry personnel themselves – to the current ethnomusicological understanding of the music industry.
The music industry presents a venue wherein ethnomusicologists, armed with compatible tools and approaches, may gain a deeper understanding of how musicians experience the intersection of music and capitalism. This work offers new insight regarding how participants experience the recording studio as an important domain of musical production through the analysis of performance interaction. "
In the dissertation, I explore the links between neoliberal rhetoric and ideology, artists’ conceptions of agency, freedom, and autonomy, and the economic, psychological, and social strategies they use to enhance or achieve it. While we won’t have much time today in-depth theoretical analysis, I hope to convey a more nuanced understanding of what drives many of the professional artists in my study, as well as how and why they do what they do.
With the larger intentions of eventually understanding where and how traditional music and musicians fit into the global commercial system, this thesis examines the intersection of music and capitalism as experienced by numerous prominent Irish traditional artists and music industry personnel. It contributes essential missing voices – those of the artists and the industry personnel themselves – to the current ethnomusicological understanding of musical commodification.
Unlike the much of the previous ethnomusicological work concerning commodification, commercialisation, and capitalism, this study is driven by extensive primary-source ethnographic research. It is augmented by appropriate interdisciplinary literature and methodological techniques, grounded in relevant social theory, and reflected upon through my perspective as an Irish traditional musician and former Irish traditional music industry employee. All participants are key contributors to Irish traditional music and/or the roots music industry in Ireland and the America.
This thesis begins by historically situating Irish traditional artists within the global capitalist system. It then details how Irish traditional artists make a living: the mechanics of record labels, the importance of marketing, and various business approaches utilised by participants. It subsequently explores the application and consequences of marketing, branding, and commoditising to traditional music. Finally, it illuminates and analyses many of the profound effects of commodification and marketing on the participants’ perceptions of their individual agency, identity, and creative processes.