We are delighted to announce our keynote speaker for the BFE One Day Conference:
Dr Ioannis Tsioulakis, Queen’s University Belfast
From Austerity to Covid-19: The Struggle of Work in Music
Dr Ioannis Tsioulakis, Queen’s University Belfast
From Austerity to Covid-19: The Struggle of Work in Music
Musicians are workers. Take a breath and read this again, out loud: Musicians are workers. Although I expect that there is little disagreement around that fact within (ethno)musicology circles, this condition of music as labour often escapes our analytical attention. Music academia prefers to see musicians through different lenses: as creative geniuses, carriers of traditions, socio-cultural agents, political actors, intersectionally racialised/gendered/classed persons, facilitators of affect or ritual. And while evidently musicians are all that and more, one of their core self-perceptions, at least within capitalist music industries, is as workers, engaged in everyday struggles of economic survival. Although working in music has never been without its challenges, recent circumstances have brought the consideration of music labour conditions to the fore. Among those, most blatant are the ‘Great Recession’ and resulting austerity policies across and beyond Europe since 2008, and the ‘Great Lockdown’ dictated by state responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
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Drawing on research among workers in popular music industries since 2000, this keynote address will trace some of the ways that we can meaningfully talk about music labour in times of ‘crisis’ in ethnomusicology. With a focus on nodal events such as ‘The Greek Crisis’ and Covid-19, the paper will explore whether musicians’ working lives are marked by ruptures or continuities in the turmoil around them. I will urge us to listen to precarity, as it is talked about, strategised against, and musicked. I will wonder if we can speak to musical ‘struggle’ as evocatively as we speak to musical ‘pleasure’. Thinking with political philosopher Isabell Lorey, I will argue for the centrality of time in these speeches/strategies/musics, and particularly views of the ‘present’ and the ‘future’ in shaping them.
Biography
Dr Ioannis Tsioulakis is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Ethnomusicology at Queen’s University Belfast. His research focuses on popular music in Greece, with an emphasis on session musicians, creative labour, and economic crisis. His monograph Musicians in Crisis: Working and Playing in the Greek Popular Music Industry will be published by Routledge in September 2020. He has co-edited a volume entitled Musicians and their Audiences: Performance, Speech and Mediation (with Elina Hytönen-Ng, Routledge 2016), and has published numerous articles and chapters on Greek jazz music, cosmopolitanism and music professionalism. Ioannis is currently conducting research on the impact of Covid-19 on performing artists, with a number of publications and collaborative projects under development (a preliminary co-written piece with Dr Ali FitzGibbon can be found here). Ioannis is also an active ensemble director, arranger and pianist.
Twitter: @itsioulakis
Dr Ioannis Tsioulakis is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Ethnomusicology at Queen’s University Belfast. His research focuses on popular music in Greece, with an emphasis on session musicians, creative labour, and economic crisis. His monograph Musicians in Crisis: Working and Playing in the Greek Popular Music Industry will be published by Routledge in September 2020. He has co-edited a volume entitled Musicians and their Audiences: Performance, Speech and Mediation (with Elina Hytönen-Ng, Routledge 2016), and has published numerous articles and chapters on Greek jazz music, cosmopolitanism and music professionalism. Ioannis is currently conducting research on the impact of Covid-19 on performing artists, with a number of publications and collaborative projects under development (a preliminary co-written piece with Dr Ali FitzGibbon can be found here). Ioannis is also an active ensemble director, arranger and pianist.
Twitter: @itsioulakis
Book Launch
NOTE: the book launch will take place at 6pm on Sat 7 November and will be a free online event open to the public. Register here for this event.
Musicians in Crisis: Working and Playing in the Greek Popular Music Industry
Musicians in Crisis is a music ethnography of contemporary Athens, before and during the infamous economic and political crisis. It spans two contrasting periods in Greece: the last few years of relative economic prosperity and social cohesion (2005-2009) and the following period of austerity and socio-political turmoil (2010-2016). Based on the author’s participation and professional involvement in the local music scenes since 2005, the monograph untangles a web of creative practices, economic strategies, and social ideologies through the previously unheard voices of Athenian music professionals. The book follows the life stories of freelance musicians of different genders, ages, educational backgrounds, and musical genres, while they ‘work’ and ‘play’ in Athenian venues, recording studios, and classrooms. Adding to the growing literature on precarity and resistance in the creative industries, it traces the effects of unprecedented socioeconomic circumstances on musicians’ everyday experience, as well as the actions and solidarities that help them to navigate personal and collective devastation. Through rich and evocative testimonies from the labourers of an industrious popular music scene, Musicians in Crisis contests popular narratives of the Greek predicament as they are reported by political and financial elites through international media. In this process, the book tells a story about how popular music is made in the liminal spaces between East and West, affluence and poverty, harmony and turmoil. Routledge, September 2020 |