I came across the concept of the ‘night’ as a lucrative yet perilous work destination in my own research on professional paradosiaka musicians in the 2000s, shortly before the Greek economic crisis broke out. To my interlocutors, who at the time represented a marginal Other in the Greek commercial music market, working as a nightclub musician was discursively linked to notions of professional, economic and, in some ways, musical attainment. Yet it also carried the grave risk of losing one's musical drive and inspiration, one's musical self.
In Tsioulakis's Musicians in Crisis, the night music industry sets the stage for a formidable analysis of freelance musicians’ working lives, shortly before (2005–2009) and during the Greek economic crisis (2010–2017). The music nightclub is the locus of hard-earned work, of passage into professional music-making, of division and subjugation but also of resistance and community construction. To dissect the music workplace, Tsioulakis employs a wide palette of theoretical tools drawn appositely from political and social theory, anthropology, ethnomusicology, media studies and popular music studies. The result is a compelling music ethnography that tells the story of a particular, and to-date under-researched, professional category of musicians, backing instrumentalists, and their performative and discursive strategies as they go about musicking their way across the ‘work’ and ‘play’ divide.
Tsioulakis's protagonists come from such diverse backgrounds as jazz, rock, Western classical and Greek traditional music, and specialise in various musical instruments, from electric guitar, bass, keyboards and drums, to violin, saxophone and other wind and string instruments. What joins them together is their shared membership in the backing orchestras of the night industry of Greek popular music – itself an eclectic mix encompassing laiko (urban-folk), pop and entehno (art song) music genres, hosted in a variety of clubs and stages.
Tsioulakis casts the music workplace as his ethnographic ‘field’, with music labour as the focal point of attention. This allows him to dispense altogether with the romanticised image of the musician, and also to steer clear of rigid typologies of musicians and music genres, concentrating instead on interconnectivities, intimacies and antagonistic relationships. Backing instrumentalists constitute one occupational group, or ‘performance class’, among many. The unusual emphasis on them rather than on star performers opens the way tor a nuanced exploration of the multiple agencies that are at play on the stage and in the popular music industry. The author analyses the ‘micro-struggles’ of the music workplace between four such major ‘classes’ of agents: musicians, singers, music producers/agents and venue owners. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, musicians are shown to engage in a battle over symbolic capital against the odds: despite possessing the cultural capital in the form of music knowledge, they find themselves deprived of social and economic capital. Their resulting experience of powerlessness and subordination is akin to what Bourdieu terms ‘positional suffering’, i.e. ‘the painful experience of occupying an inferior position in a specific social microcosm’ (p. 108). Yet their readiness to employ acts of discursive resistance may lead to power negotiations and, rarely, to power reversals.
The hard-earned status of professional musician depends on a combination of factors that far exceeds musical training and activities. Competence in a range of social strategies related especially to networking is equally crucial. The successful musician is not necessarily the good musician, rather one who combines musical with social skills in a way that procures reputation, a good payment rate, regular employment and a range of working options. What marks definitively the passage to music professionalism, however, is association with the music ‘mainstream’, which is seen as an unbearable conviction that necessitates making aesthetic concessions. The main predicament of professional musicians, then, is a discrepancy between an imagined life of musical creativity and recognition on the one hand, and the perceived ‘hardship of working (and networking) within the “mainstream” Greek industry’ (p. 49) on the other, or, in the musicians’ own words, between play and work.
What backing instrumentalists share ‘at work’ is a specific set of work conditions that include multiple professional engagement, precarity, long working hours and incessant travelling. These shape an adverse working regime that is experienced and narrated by musicians in terms of hardship, frustration, alienation and disengagement. Tsioulakis employs the notion of ‘community of experience’ (modelled after Wenger's ‘communities of practice’ but emphasising affective involvement) in order to trace the common sense of belonging and intimacy that is forged among participating musicians through the process of transforming experience into discourse. Community of experience operates as a unifying factor at the workplace, serving to alleviate disassociation and the trauma of work. Yet it is undermined by the musicians’ imagination of alternative musical contexts. These are construed on the basis of individual aesthetic dispositions, and may find their expression in subcultural music scenes and communities of ‘play’.
Having analysed the social ideologies and economic strategies of popular music labourers pre-crisis, in the two remaining chapters of the book, Tsioulakis ushers us into the Greek economic crisis, which was marked by the passage from a period of relative economic prosperity to one of austerity. How do musicians, who think themselves to be ‘always in crisis’, experience and narrate their working lives ‘before’ the crisis and ‘now’? The crisis narratives that Tsioulakis collected bespeak of precarity, which, excepting a few instances of solidarity, is internalised as an individual state of emergency, existential anxiety and rupture. This leads Tsioulakis to argue that despite the structural inequalities already inherent in the music industry, the crisis formed new ‘crisis subjectivities’ for musicians. At the same time, the diminishing opportunities and agency during the crisis made working musicians seek ‘work’ domains over which they could exert control (as music teachers or sound technology makers for instance), and in new spaces of ‘play’ that are more collective and collegial and less hierarchical and monetised.
This is an arresting music ethnography based on immersive, participative fieldwork by a ‘native ethnographer’ whose interlocutors were also his fellow performers at work and play in the field. It offers a nuanced and layered account of the working realities of quotidian musicians (as opposed to star performers) of Greek popular music. And although it would be fascinating to know how their main music antagonists, the singers, experience and interpret the power (not least gender) dynamics at play between them, this would detract from the depth of the analysis. Musicians in Crisis makes a strong case for empirical perspectives in order to understand how broad economic, political or social structures are experienced and negotiated on the ground, and to test top-down analyses in the field of cultural production.
Musicians in Crisis will enrich a growing literature in the fields of creative and artistic labour in the cultural industries, precarity studies, crisis ethnography and (Greek) popular music studies. It is also a thoughtful study on the period preceding the pandemic crisis and its accompanying music work realities: with hindsight, it was mainly during the 2020–2021 pandemic that Greek musicians took up stances of collective socio-political action. The economic crisis, and the experience of being always in crisis, seem to have provided both a counterpoint and a crucial preparatory stage.
