They emphasised that their work as hired performers needed to be properly compensated and safeguarded by hard-won labour rights. What worked for many of the musicians I interviewed was compartmentalising work and play. There is also considerable mistrust – even fear – of those in power in the music industry, who are often seen as rogue and unregulated.Īs a result, during the crisis musicians had to battle it out individually and in isolation, leading to personal moments of rupture and issues of mental health, as was also the case on other countries, including the UK. This is partly because musicians in Greece do not see themselves as a collective campaigning body and receive very little support from the state or arts organisations. Unionisation and campaigning was not much in evidence throughout that period. The Panhellenic Musicians’ Union in Athens get vocal about the plight of struggling artists in May 2020. Gigs were scarcer, so they became more competitive, which made the idea of musician collectivism less appealing. In other words, musicians may be a test-tube case for making other kinds of work more precarious.Īs economic crisis intensified in Greece, these jobs became shorter term with lower pay, so musicians needed to work harder across more sectors. But as cultural academic Angela McRobbie has shown in the UK, these conditions of insecurity in the creative sector are “a way of laying the groundwork for the transformation of work, first for the few, then possibly for the many”. Musicians have always been conditioned in job insecurity – long before austerity and crisis. They still had to confront exploitative employers or fight for their right to get paid and receive legal benefits and social insurance. Even as the infamous Greek financial crisis became particularly devastating after 2010, musicians experienced it as an intensifying of the precarity they had dealt with their whole lives.Īs before, they still had to balance several, often contradictory, engagements. Musicians were eager to tell me that “crisis” in their work was somehow both new and familiar. As I witnessed venues closing and gigs being cancelled across the globe, the words of my research participants resonated more than ever. When lockdown measures across Europe began, I was finishing a book on Musicians in Crisis, based on research in Greece since 2005. Ilyas Tayfun Salci/Shutterstock Is music work or play? Musicians all over the world see creative opportunity in being “free” from permanent contractual employment, but these conditions often make them poorly paid, prone to exploitation, and insecure when it comes to work.īritish musicians outside the UK parliament in October 2020 protesting the shutdown of their industry.
My research on Greek musicians over the past 15 years has shown that work in artistic performance is as precarious as it is enjoyable. As a recent controversy involving the BBC has brought to the fore once again, employers, organisations and the state frequently assume that musicians will perform unpaid, merely for “exposure”. The idea that musicians are workers is self-evident – yet somehow often disregarded.
We want to make known that the music we love and keeps us company in our most difficult and most beautiful moments, is the result of a complex form of labour, which takes toil, sacrifice and dedication. Opening a virtual concert in support of music workers, his words were emotional – but firm: On the evening of Sunday December 13 the president of the Greek Musicians’ Union stood in front of an empty auditorium at the Athens Music Hall, as thousands watched at home.
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