Musicians in Crisis: Working and Playing in the Greek Popular Music Industry 9781138615441, 9780429463099

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Musicians in Crisis

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 (2010–2017). 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. Ioannis Tsioulakis is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Ethnomusicology at Queen’s University Belfast, He recently co-edited a volume entitled Musicians and their Audiences: Performance, Speech and Mediation (with Elina Hytönen-Ng, Routledge 2017), and he has published numerous articles and chapters on Greek jazz music, cosmopolitanism and music professionalism.

SOAS Studies in Music Series Editors: Rachel Harris, SOAS, University of London, UK Rowan Pease, SOAS, University of London, UK Board Members: Angela Impey (SOAS, University of London) Noriko Manabe (Temple University) Suzel Reily (Universidade Estadual de Campinas) Martin Stokes (Kings College London) Richard Widdess (SOAS, University of London) SOAS Studies in Music is today one of the world’s leading series in the discipline of ethnomusicology. Our core mission is to produce high-quality, ethnographically rich studies of music-making in the world’s diverse musical cultures. We publish monographs and edited volumes that explore musical repertories and performance practice, critical issues in ethnomusicology, sound studies, historical and analytical approaches to music across the globe. We recognize the value of applied, interdisciplinary and collaborative research, and our authors draw on current approaches in musicology and anthropology, psychology, media and gender studies. We welcome monographs that investigate global contemporary, classical and popular musics, the effects of digital mediation and transnational flows. The Indian Drum of the King-God and the Pakhāwaj of Nathdwara Paolo Pacciolla Asante Court Music and Verbal Arts in Ghana The Porcupine and the Gold Stool Kwasi Ampene Presence Through Sound Music and Place in East Asia Keith Howard and Catherine Ingram Musicians in Crisis Working and Playing in the Greek Popular Music Industry Ioannis Tsioulakis Becoming Irish Traditional Musician Learning and Embodying Musical Culture Jessica Cawley For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/music/ series/SOASMS

Musicians in Crisis

Working and Playing in the Greek Popular Music Industry Ioannis Tsioulakis

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Ioannis Tsioulakis The right of Ioannis Tsioulakis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-61544-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-46309-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex Covantage, LLC

Contents

List of figuresvi Acknowledgementsvii 1 Introduction: doing music ethnography in Greece

1

2 Becoming a ‘Pro’: skills, strategies and success

27

3 A community of experience: intimacies, ideologies and discourses

54

4 Power and performative classes

81

5 Locating the music precariat in The Greek Crisis

112

6 Ways out: teaching, artisanship and micro-scenes

138



163

Epilogue: musicians (always) in crisis

Appendix: glossary of Greek terms167 Bibliography169 Index186

Figures

1.1 Stage of Athenian magazí covered in flowers 1.2 Musicians sound-checking before their concert 1.3 Instrumentalists and backing vocalists in their dressing room before the concert 2.1 The Groove Geishas at club Lazy, Athens 2.2 Instrumentalists waiting patiently for their rehearsal to start 3.1 Musicians, dancers and sound engineers drinking together during a flight to Cyprus 4.1 Sound and lighting technicians setting up the stage 4.2 Antonis performing with his jazz quartet at Small Music Theatre, Athens 6.1 John (left) and Petros (right) showcasing the Murmux synth in their workshop 6.2 Views of Jannis’s Jam Pedals workshop and rehearsal studio

15 18 19 38 47 69 96 104 150 152

Acknowledgements

This monograph is based on research and writing that began in 2007, when I first embarked on a doctoral programme at Queen’s University Belfast. Since then, and until 2019, countless people have contributed in making this a feasible project, and to all of them I am deeply grateful. Most importantly, my research in Greece would not have been possible without the help, support and companionship of my fellow Athenian musicians who provided me not only with the material for this monograph but also with unforgettable life experiences. They shared with me their unique stories through words and musical sounds, and they did so unreservedly, with sincerity and passion; they are true comrades. Among them, I would like to thank especially Dimitris Varelopoulos, Alexandros Kapsokavadis, Petros Lamprides, Yiorgos Kontogiannis, Spyridoula Baka, Yiorgos Ladopoulos, Ioannis-Iolaos Maniatis, Lia Pantazopoulou, Haig Yazdjian, Vassilis Rakopoulos, Petros Varthakouris, Yiorgos Livadas, Alex Papakonstantinou, Kostis Vihos, Mihalis Kapilidis, Antonis Dominos, Antigoni Tsiplakidi, Yiannis Markoulakis and Apostolis Makroyiannis. My academic supervisor between 2005 and 2011, Dr Marina Roseman, offered me enormous support during my MA and PhD studies as well as thereafter; for her constant guidance, emotional support and wise feedback, I feel greatly indebted. A number of other academics and friends have commented on written or presented parts of my research, and their feedback has been crucial to the shaping of this work. Among them, I owe special thanks to Suzel Reily, Martin Stokes, Fiona Magowan, Jonathan Stock, Elina Hytönen-Ng, Evi Chatzipanagiotidou, Maruška Svašek, Michalis Poupazis, Fiona Murphy, Kristin McGee, Cassandra Balosso-Bardin, Kay Milton, Lisette Josephides, Michael Jackson, Dafni Tragaki, Franco Fabbri, Laudan Nooshin, Jamie Jones, Aoife Granville, Carsten Wergin, Fabian Holt and Liam Farrell. The completion of this monograph has also been greatly inspired by my colleagues and students in anthropology and ethnomusicology at Queen’s University Belfast, who gave me sincere feedback on numerous occasions. Among them, special mention is due to Evi Patsiaoura, Gordon Ramsey, Stephen Millar, Sarah-Jane Gibson, Hadi Bastani, Noomi Mozard, Ray Casserly and Barbara Graham. During my research in Athens I was lucky enough to be supported by a number of exceptional Greek academics and postgraduate researchers, most importantly Pavlos Kavouras, Georgia Vavva, Irene Loutzaki

viii  Acknowledgements and Giorgos Kesisoglou. I am also very thankful for funding provided along the way by Queen’s University Belfast, University College Cork, the Department for Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland and the Hellenic-Egyptian Association Research Fund in Greece. I owe thanks to editors at Routledge, especially Constance Ditzel, Kaushikee Sharma and Annie Vaughan, who honoured me with their trust in delivering this manuscript (even if painstakingly delayed), and the illustrator Ashleigh Neill (@PhDcartoon) for the beautiful sketch on the book cover. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my family. My partner Elaine Farrell for her tireless help and empathy throughout our simultaneous journey as postgraduate students and early-career academics; my parents Nikos and Liliana and my brother Kostis for their endless support, encouragement and patience, without which I would never have become a musician or an academic; my godparents Lina and Christos whose generosity made my postgraduate studies possible during hard times; and my son, Aedan, who has been providing fun distractions, (in)sanity and purpose in my recent life.

1 Introduction Doing music ethnography in Greece

I entered the small music club reluctantly. All the chairs rested upside-down on the freshly cleaned tables. The smell of chlorine and coffee was competing with alcohol and smoke still lingering from the night before. Apart from the cleaner, who was hurrying in and out of the kitchen, the place was empty. Of course I was early; this was my first sound-check with a band of musicians whom I had only heard of and seen on TV. The only person I knew was the band leader, Vassilis, who had been my music teacher for the past four years. The band members were from five to 20 years older than me, and their reputation was enough to make me feel a mixture of awe and anxiety. They had played as session musicians with the most popular Greek singers and recorded an endless list of albums. I, on the other hand, was 20 years old and still a student. I probably knew the pieces better than they did. I had been practising them for weeks in my free time, a luxury that I assumed ‘real professionals’ lacked. But this was beside the point. I would not be judged on the basis of my familiarity with the pieces. Would my playing fit in with their groove? Would my improvisation skills impress them? Would my mediocre keyboard-set live up to the technical standards of the gig? I unpacked my keyboards, pedals and cables and connected everything to make sure that it worked. The sound engineer had not shown up yet, but I managed to find two cables with stickers labelled ‘keys 1’ and ‘keys 2’ and plugged them in anyway. Vassilis appeared 20 minutes later and with him Mihalis, the drummer. He introduced me and they both said ‘relax, it’s going to be a while!’ As the rest of the band arrived, I increasingly felt that this was out of my playing league. Yiannis, the bass player, was the Director of Studies at the jazz department that I was attending at the time. United with Mihalis, they were considered to be one of the ‘tightest’ rhythm sections playing around Athens in the early 2000s. Haris, the néi player, was the one closest to my age, but had already achieved an international reputation. I had a hard time understanding how Vassilis managed to get such an all-star band together for a badly paid jazz gig at a small club. The answer became clearer after the gig finished, while I was talking to Mihalis. He seemed to have greatly enjoyed the music, a fact that surprised me given the frequency with which he performed different gigs around Athens. I, on the other hand, due to a combination of anxiety and the alcohol that I used to eliminate it, found it difficult to articulate a lucid evaluation. I asked him about the 10/8

2  Introduction rhythm pattern in one of the pieces. His drumming style was different from the original recording and I wondered how to make my ‘comping’1 interlock better with him. ‘Ah don’t worry’ he replied, ‘I’m not going to be playing with you next week! I’m starting work on Thursday’. His choice of words troubled me. What kind of ‘work’ was that? Surely an established instrumentalist like himself would not need to pursue anything else besides music in order to make a living. As I asked for more details, he explained that the popular singer with whom he was performing was starting her shows at a large Athenian nightclub. ‘And you call this work?’ I joked. He smiled politely, but I sensed that he did not see why this was funny. Becoming accepted in a group of professionals requires attentiveness quite similar to ethnographic observation but with a different objective. Both persons need to figure out what certain words mean in the particular context. But while the ethnographer attempts to understand the meaning of the insider’s words in order to translate them (literally or metaphorically) for the academic environment, the expectant group member is driven by the urgent task of incorporating these words into a usable vocabulary. I first learned the meaning of musical ‘work’ and ‘play’ for the latter reason. As I soon realised, my prospective colleagues used this dichotomy as a crucial component in understanding their activities. ‘Work’ and ‘play’ were two categories of practice with very little overlap for Athenian musicians. Before long, I found myself using this division very naturally in everyday discussions. I neither questioned its validity nor wondered about the origins of its criteria. As a vocabulary, it was useful for situating the practices of an Athenian instrumentalist along a continuum that ranged from extreme labour to absolute playfulness. The existence of some conceptually ‘grey’ areas and the regular disagreement between different individuals (that what was ‘play’ for one musician, could easily be ‘work’ for another) did not seem potent enough to deconstruct the dualism. As I became immersed in the Athenian professional music milieu, the peculiarity of such a way of thinking became invisible. Reflecting back to my first collaborative encounter with professional musicians in the autumn of 2001, not only could I now understand why my joke did not amuse Mihalis, but I was also grateful that he was not offended. The oddity of the work vs play dichotomy resurfaced when I began my postgraduate studies in ethnomusicology. Attempting to explain the difference between ‘playing music’ and ‘working as a musician’ to a group of anthropologists in a foreign language made me aware of the complexity of its underlying logic. Cultural specificities relating to the way that the music industry is organised (Tsioulakis, 2018), local debates about ‘quality’ in music (Tsioulakis, 2013) and asymmetries of locality and translocality (Tsioulakis, 2011a) are embedded in the discourse. And if this dichotomy was a somewhat agreed-upon way to contrast between sorts of musical performance that generated different amounts of revenue and pleasure, the wake of The Greek Crisis (in its economic, social, political and numerous other manifestations) contributed to upsetting and redefining these poles.

Introduction 3 This monograph will describe the practices, rhetorics and imaginaries involved in Athenian professional music-making in an attempt to reveal the components of the work vs play dichotomy, in two different periods, before and since ‘The Crisis’.2 As will become apparent, this division between ‘working’ and ‘playing’ is central to the way musicians conceptualise of their role as ‘professionals’, position themselves in the workplace, evaluate music, operate within conditions of ‘Crisis’ and resist subjugation to precarity. The chapters in this monograph will examine all these themes and their inter-relationship, with reference to two different periods: the last few years of economic ‘prosperity’ (2005–2009, in Chapters 2 to 4) and the circumstances since the imposition of austerity policies (2010–2017, in Chapters 5 and 6). The main questions tackled by my analysis are: how does the social experience of power within the workplace affect professional musicians’ view of their activities? What kinds of implications does the division between ‘work’ and ‘play’ have for individual and collective music aesthetics? How has The Crisis and resulting increased job precarity affected the lives and subjectivities of freelance musicians? And finally, what kinds of ‘ways out’ of The Crisis do musicians forge, and what is the role of ‘working’ and ‘playing’ in this effort? The book will answer these questions through a study of musical performances, life stories, vignettes and discussions of work and play. In doing so, it will shed light on the experience of making a living from music in crisis-times in the Greek capital, while also acknowledging that many of the circumstances, strategies and discourses in this book are neither unique to that particular locality nor timestamped. Thus, this monograph hopes to contribute to an emergent scholarship on music as labour across the world.3 The rest of this chapter will introduce the ethnographic field through a series of themes and debates in the literature. First, I will examine some of the ways in which Greek culture has been portrayed in established anthropological work, as well as the emergence of an anthropology of The Greek Crisis since 2010. Subsequently, the chapter will review ethnomusicological work on Greece and in particular discuss its reluctance, until recently, to critically approach contemporary popular music. I will then provide a brief history as well as a contemporary snapshot of Greek popular music genres that serve as the context of ‘work’ and ‘play’ for the musicians that are discussed in the ethnographic chapters that follow. Finally, a section on ‘Entering the field’ will explain my engagement with local music production and clarify the methodology that generated this book.

Anthropologies of Greece and its ‘Crises’ In the 1980s, Michael Herzfeld, a scholar whose work has dominated the anthropology of Greece, identified a general reluctance within the discipline to seriously engage with modern Greek culture. In his view, this deficiency could only be explained by the discipline’s own predicaments, and in particular its exoticism (1987: 1). Greek culture, Herzfeld argued, was systematically ignored by

4  Introduction anthropologists because of its uncomfortable place between the exotic and the familiar. Additionally, he asserted: Anthropology is marginal to Greece as Greece is to anthropology. This tendency to mutual exclusion suggests that prevalent ideas about the Greeks’ role in the modern world may mirror, in some ironical fashion, ideas about the ways in which anthropologists – and their compatriots everywhere – go about understanding that world. (Herzfeld, 1987: 2) Herzfeld was primarily referring to the controversy between two views that have tantalised Greek culture since the first foundation of the independent Greek state in the 1830s. These views have been summarised in the two competing terms describing the Greek ethnos in late nineteenth and early twentieth century: Éllines and Romioí (Herzfeld, 1987: 95–122, 1995; Danforth, 1984; Harrison, 1999: 12–13). The former term stressed the continuous presence of Greek culture in the area and claimed a connection to the glorious ancient past from which all Western Civilisation allegedly sprung (Hamilakis and Yalouri, 1996; Calotychos, 2003). The latter characterisation focused on post-Ottoman Greek peasantry combined with Orthodox Christianity as the cradle of a national culture. This dichotomy has affected Greek culture in profound ways relating to the so-called ‘language question’ (Mackridge, 2009), the national politics of Europeanism (Faubion, 1993; Calotychos, 2003) and Greek people’s view of neighbouring nations (Theodossopoulos, 2006, 2007; Kirtsoglou, 2006). As will be shown later, music production has also been deeply affected by this discourse. In the influential volume Anthropology through the Looking Glass (1987), Herzfeld suggests that the competition between occidentalist and orientalist views, which survived in Greece until late in the twentieth century, is all too familiar to anthropological scholarship. This disemia (dual signification), as he calls it (1987: 111–117), and specifically the concept of Hellenism, bears similarities to the way anthropology has tended to ‘dehistoricize’ and ‘universalize’ itself (ibid: 93–94). The ambiguous relationship between Greeks and an imagined European community has been further explored by Herzfeld in a number of monographs (1982, 1997, 2004). Adopting different approaches in each of those books, Herzfeld has shed light on the multiple aspects defining this relationship. By switching between (and ultimately transcending) ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ views, which he treats ‘as but two of a host of refractions of a broadly shared cultural engagement’ (1997: 3; emphasis in the original), he has shown how ideas of Greekness and Europeanism can serve agendas with contradictory points of departure. Particularly in Cultural Intimacy (1997), Herzfeld showed the way in which stereotypes of Greekness, which ‘can take the forms of ostentatious displays of those alleged national traits’ (1997: 3), can be appropriated by different agents in the pursuit of their own social objectives.

Introduction 5 Fetishisation of the ‘rural’ These complex cultural negotiations and its uncomfortable positioning between the not-quite-exotic and the ambiguously (non-)Western have made Greek society an ethnographic (mine)field that is hard to navigate. As a result, in the effort to exoticise Greekness, much of the anthropological literature in the late twentieth century overly focused on rural, ‘traditional’ domains of cultural expression.4 As I will further elaborate upon later, this was a tendency also mirrored in the ethnomusicology of Greece. By studying predominantly rural communities and focusing on gender asymmetries and other rigid social structures as they presented themselves in everyday practices of division of labour, family life and rituals, these studies had – despite their undeniable analytical value – contributed to a rather unbalanced presentation of Greek society and culture. According to Loizos and Papataxiarchis: Greece is a ‘complex’ society, that is, a society in which some of the functions of kinship are performed by other formal institutions, but also one in which there are contexts other than marriage, diverse models of identity and personhood that cannot be understood within frameworks made for the study of ‘simple’ societies. (1991a: 4) One cannot help wondering if indeed there are any ‘simple’ societies and in what sense that ‘simplicity’ would be conceptualised. However, my reading of the previous excerpt evokes a critique of portraying rural Greek communities as ‘simple’ and monolithic, especially in the examination of gender and kinship issues. This anthropological tendency effectively led to a fetishisation of the ‘rural’. As Jill Dubisch remarks in 1991, anthropologists studying Greek society are forced to face the ethnographic and theoretical problems posed by declining rural communities, the growth of cities, increased anthropological awareness of regional variations within Greece and (for anthropologists who are not themselves Greek) their own relationship to Greek scholarship and scholars. (1991: 31) Nadia Seremetakis has further problematised any neat distinctions between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ Greece cautioning that ‘as normative categories, the “rural” and “urban” may have little or nothing to do with the actual residential settings of the person or group to which they are applied’ (1991: 6). She has, however, also phrased scepticism with regards to easy conceptualisations of modernity. In Seremetakis’s view, modernity is always connected to a discourse on loss, ‘which offers no alternatives, empties the neo-colonial site of all internal content, leaving it an empty and receptive shell for external cultural colonization’ (1994: ix).

6  Introduction Accordingly, for Seremetakis, modernity can be best examined not at the centre, where it appears as a mere ‘perceptual effect’ (ibid: vii) but at the verges where its hegemony is incomplete. Indeed, research on issues of modernity within the Greek periphery, specifically with regard to gender, has been extremely productive. Kirtsoglou’s (2003) discussion of a female group in an anonymous Greek provincial town has challenged the stereotypes of gender and sexuality that dominated Greek ethnography. In addition, Cowan’s (1991) article on coffee consumption practices among teenage girls in a rural context has shown the tensions between pre-established gender roles and the rhetoric of ‘female emancipation’ which was developing in Greece during the 1980s. These accounts have undoubtedly benefited from the liminal position that the periphery seems to occupy within Greek processes of modernisation. What Kirtsoglou’s and Cowan’s writings have revealed, however, is that these processes are defined by a dialectic between the centre and the periphery. Moreover, I would contest Seremetakis’ inductive implication that in the urban context the hegemony of modernisation is necessarily complete. Faubion’s research has depicted Athens as a cultural context full of ‘anomalies, of artifacts and activities ostensibly neither “traditional” nor modern’ (1993: xii). His account, then, searches for the ‘Greek modern’ in a process of ‘historical constructivism’ (ibid), which can meaningfully assess these inconsistencies of urban modernisation. Consequently, research concentrating on cultural production, identity and discourses of cosmopolitanism within the – even geographically defined – urban setting, can reveal understandings of considerably different quality than the ones of the periphery. It is those understandings that are at the core of the present monograph. On crises A renewed interest in the anthropology of Greece, this time with a more urban and political/economic focus, has been sparked by a series of ‘Crises’ that manifested domestically but caused international sensations. Among them, the most prominent have been the protests that followed the murder of 15-year-old anarchist Alexis Grigoropoulos by the police in December 2008 (see Dalakoglou, 2012; Dalakoglou and Vradis, 2011), and more notably the Greek economic crisis since 2010 (see Knight, 2012, 2013, 2015; Dalakoglou and Agelopoulos, 2018; Athanasiou, 2012, 2018; Papailias, 2011) and the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ since 2014 (Cabot, 2014, 2016; Rozakou, 2016; Green, 2018; Western, 2020). The socioeconomic and political ‘Crisis’ is of particular interest for the present ethnography, especially in the ways that it has affected the conduct and subjectivities of musicians, as will be examined in Chapters 5 and 6. Beginning in 2007 and culminating into a global crisis, especially in the years 2008–2009, the Great Recession was initially triggered by a financial collapse of banking institutions in the US (Fligstein and Goldstein, 2011). This banking crisis rapidly infected the global economy resulting in austerity measures across

Introduction 7 Europe, the US and elsewhere (Powers and Rakopoulos, 2019). Greece experienced the consequences of this global phenomenon mainly through a sovereign debt crisis. In 2010, the Greek State ‘received a €110 billion bailout from the European Central Bank, European Commission and the International Monetary Fund (the so-called “Troika”), followed by another €130 billion in 2012 and €86 billion in 2015 in return for stringent austerity measures’ (Knight and Stewart, 2016: 1–2). The imposition of austerity had numerous consequences on the livelihoods of individuals, families and businesses but also remarkable repercussions on the domestic political system, whereby the parties that had been in power since the end of the Dictatorship in 1974 lost public support, giving way to, until then marginal, political formations coming both from the anti-capitalist Left and the far-Right. Daniel Knight has argued that in its manifestation through these interconnected phenomena, ‘the “Greek crisis” highlights the complex relationship between global systems and local experience’ (2013: 147). Elizabeth Kirtsoglou has further suggested that the concurrent economic crisis and humanitarian emergencies from the increased flow of refugees and migrants have operated as a ‘field’ for the rise of far Right extremism (2013: 3). Within this climate, The Crisis developed many faces and became manifest in multiple, often contradictory discourses, forming what could be called a ‘crisisscape’ (Brekke et al., 2014). A general distrust in elites (political, economic and even cultural; see Tsioulakis, 2017), which often erupted into collective actions of disobedience (Gourgouris, 2011; Douzinas, 2013; Theodossopoulos, 2014), has also been accompanied by new types of precariousness and vulnerability that are experienced in very personal and isolationary ways (Knight and Stewart, 2016). This has led to a series of issues including emigration (Chatzipanagiotidou, 2018), mental health (Apostolidou, 2018) and even a rise in reported suicide rates (Knight, 2013: 150; Davis, 2015). At the same time, the concomitant economic recession and presence of refugees has given rise to solidarity movements that include grassroots initiatives for the exchange of goods and services, healthcare, as well as sanctuary and political representation (Papataxiarchis, 2016; Rozakou, 2016; Douzina-Bakalaki, 2016). Within these circumstances, ‘solidarity networks are at once an offspring of the crisis and a means to contain some of its most dreadful results’ (Rakopoulos, 2016: 146–147). Significantly, cultural production has also been deeply affected by The Crisis, both as an economic reality and a moral/aesthetic/political discourse. As Chapters 5 and 6 will explain at more length, The Crisis has simultaneously caused significant difficulties for artists and institutions (Poulakis, 2015; Tsioulakis, 2017) and generated the need for strategies of ‘resilience’ and resistance that found creative outputs (Basea, 2016; Levidou, 2017; Tziovas, 2017). What is unmissable when conducting ethnography in contemporary Greece is that The Crisis has created a new social and economic reality for citizens across all strata. Households and individuals who enjoyed relative economic prosperity and stability have now become the ‘new poor’, in a turmoil that, along with bringing economic devastation, has also ‘shifted all grounds of . . . meaning,

8  Introduction signification and understanding; in other words the grounds of recognition’ (Panourgia, 2018: 136). The Crisis has rendered Greece a nation-state of permanent emergency, not only in economic but also in moral and political ways. Since the early defining moments of The Greek Crisis in 2010–2011, when massive protests against political elites and the imposition of austerity shook Greek cities (Dalakoglou, 2012), the State and mainstream media propagated a morality of ‘collective guilt . . . and a conservative regression to values such as national intimacy and familial comfort’ (Athanasiou, 2012: 29, my translation). This rhetoric has disproportionally affected youth, who are portrayed as existing in ‘a liminal stage and protracted state of incomplete adulthood’ (Chatzipanagiotidou, 2018: 11). Hence, The Crisis is not only understood through collective discourses and the prevalence of Crisis-talk in all public domains but has also shaped the ways in which individuals have come to think of their place in civic society and even their own self-conception. In other words, as Chapter 5 will argue, it has produced new subjectivities.

Towards an urban ethnomusicology of Athens Musical ethnographies of Greek practices until the 2000s had primarily dealt with ‘traditional’ formations, varying in their perspectives from essentialism to critical assessment of the notion of the ‘traditional’. Anna Caraveli’s (1982, 1985) writings on traditional song in Olympos village on the island of Karpathos and Pavlos Kavouras’s (1992, 1994) later work revisiting the same locale, Irene Loutzaki’s (1984, 1989) and Keil et al. (2002) study of music and dance in Greek Macedonia and Kevin Dawe’s extended research on Cretan music, offer prominent examples of such ethnographies. Kevin Dawe’s contributions deserve a special mention for their significant shift of perspective. Dawe begins his scholarly examination of Cretan music with a focus on gender and masculinity among male lýra players (1996), applying Herzfeld’s (1985) decade old analysis of Cretan ‘manhood’ to professional performers. Dawe’s orientation, however, soon shifts towards depicting professional musicians’ lives ‘in a rapidly changing music industry, where there is a squeeze on employment in an island economy that makes increasing and particular demands upon them as it intersects with international market forces’ (Dawe, 1998: 23) His following writings (Dawe, 1999, 2004, 2007b, 2007c) ponder more on this struggle of musicians ‘between worlds,’ trying to define themselves and their music within complex contexts of rural Cretan values and capitalism, traditional weddings and multinational record companies, cosmopolitan tourist flows and strict discourses of genealogical ownership. The revisiting of Greek musical traditions from a critical perspective in more recent years has generated a series of interesting ethnographies on revivals and folklorism. Eleni Kallimopoulou (2009) offers an examination of the paradosiaká genre (literally translated as ‘traditional’) and the discourses and agencies that brought it into being through a comprehensive inspection of its history, its local and international influences and the actors involved. She defines paradosiaká

Introduction 9 as an ‘urban musical style’ which developed mainly due to the importation and indigenisation of ‘eastern’ musical instruments that were popular in Turkey in the 1970s and 1980s (2009: 1). Through the syncretic adoption of a number of musical idioms ‘from mainland Greece or Asia Minor and even beyond’ (ibid: 6), the genre managed to attract a mainly educated, middle-class audience. Daphne Tragaki’s (2007) monograph focuses on the rebetiko revival in Thessaloniki. Tragaki illustrates rebetiko’s role as a cosmopolitan formation by combining a historical approach to the idiom with an ethnography of its regeneration within the northern Greek city. This revival, Tragaki argues, includes a process of ‘othering’, a construction of a musical ‘heterotopia’ (2007: 199–209). These two books, therefore, illuminate different sides of the same process of negotiation: the familiarisation of the exotic in paradosiaká and the exoticisation of the familiar in the rebetiko revival. Contributors to a 2010 edited volume on Folklore and Tradition (Kavouras, 2010) pushed some of these themes further, questioning the correlation between ‘tradition’ as a taken-for-granted concept that was promoted by earlier purist ethnomusicologists and contemporary performances of such musical forms (see particularly Papapavlou, 2010; Syrakouli, 2010). Despite the centrality of those debates within Greek ethnomusicology (and, to some extent, the ethnomusicology of Greece), the musical forms that have been represented in this literature remain somewhat marginal within the professional music industries of the urban centres. In contrast, the contemporary Greek popular music industry had until recently attracted disproportionately little attention in academia compared to its omnipresence in the social life of Greek people. The few existing scholarly accounts in English before 2010 had adopted the model of literary or popular music studies.5 Even when the authors were ethnomusicologists (Dawe, 2007a; Tragaki, 2005; Cowan, 1993), their analysis mainly relied on the examination of literary sources and recordings rather than ethnographic fieldwork, and their writings revealed more about historical and political dimensions of the genres than current performative practices. In more recent years, some of this literature gap has begun to be filled by ethnographic research that takes as its focus Greek urban popular music, in both its mass-mediated and subcultural manifestations. Dimitris Varelopoulos’s (2019) ethnography of the production of éntechno music within recording studios, Ioannis Polychronakis’s (2007, 2019) examination of the Greek/Cypriot pop-star Anna Vissi, and Dafni Tragaki’s (2019) analysis of the music of the éntechno songwriter Sokratis Malamas, are examples of such emergent literature that places the ‘popular’ under the scrutinising lens of an anthropology of performance.6 The work of Natalia Koutsougera (2012, 2018) also deserves particular attention as one of the very few scholars who have developed critical anthropological analyses of popular dance cultures in Athens, including laïko nightclubs and hip-hop/street dancing. Alongside this work, there has been a notable rise of ethnographies of current and historical musical subcultures in Athens, focusing on rock (Kallimopoulou and Kornetis, 2017), experimental (Stefanou, 2019), electronic (Polymeropoulou, 2019) and jazz music (Tsioulakis, 2011a, 2019a; Vavva, 2020), as well as migrant

10  Introduction musical and sound expressions within Greek urban centres (Patsiaoura, 2018, 2019; Styliou, 2019; Western, 2020). My aim in this book is to construct a grounded ethnography of professional ‘musicking’7 in Athens. The ethnographic chapters that follow, give voice to a specific class of background instrumentalists,8 adopting their unique viewpoints and following their (often distorted) perception of the Athenian musical reality as it exists in almost complete dissonance with local public/common view. By describing the musicians’ identities as they are disconcertingly situated between cosmopolitan imaginations (Tsioulakis, 2011a) and local realities, my study composes an account of a large scale industry from below. This monograph’s preoccupation with the musician’s view, therefore, is not due to the fact that it ‘evinced an underlying naïveté, a fresh and uncluttered honesty, a genuine devotion, and sometimes a remarkable depth’ (Michael, 2009: 376, emphasis mine). The lives and views of musicians provide more than embellishments within an otherwise ‘objective’ historical or aesthetic analysis of Greek music. The professional instrumentalist imbues the present study as the beholder of a unique perspective on the Athenian music industry, not as a supporting source for a text-based analysis. I am specifically interested in the musical workplace as a social world within which instrument-players shape their identities and worldviews.

Popular music in Greece: a brief history In line with Herzfeld’s (1987: 111–117) concept of disemia examined earlier, Greek popular music has also been caught up in the debate between Occidentalism and Orientalism, which can be traced in local cultural production since the late 1800s. This debate has been significantly renegotiated throughout the twentieth century, but it can still be identified in contemporary music discourses. An early example within urban popular music is offered by the case of the cafés amán and the cafés chantants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At that time, the cafés amán hosted performances of the so-called anatolítika (‘eastern-sounding’) songs of the rebétiko tradition (Gauntlett, 1982; Liavas, 2009). Rebétiko music of the early 1900s is generally divided into two categories: the smyrnéiko style (from Smýrni, the Turkish Izmir)9 used instrumentation and playing styles drawing on the Ottoman makam tradition, while the pireótiko style (from Piraeus) was based on tempered bouzouki-family instruments and guitars (Kallimopoulou, 2009: 23; Pennanen, 1997: 66). The rebétiko culture was boosted by the appearance of migrants from Asia Minor and North-East Thrace, which peaked with the population exchange that ended the Greek-Turkish war between 1918 and 1922 (Tragaki, 2007: 53–54; Holst-Warhaft, 2002: 308–311). The two styles of rebétiko became practically unified in the 1920s (Papanikolaou, 2007: 65–66), and the genre was associated with an urban underworld stereotyped in the male persona of the mángas, the hashish-consuming, legendary outlaw (Tragaki, 2007: 26). The cafés amán were eventually closed down by the Metaxas dictatorship in 1936, and the drug references in rebétiko song were censored.

Introduction 11 The cafés chantants, on the other hand, catered to the cosmopolitan tastes of the urban upper classes by featuring mostly translated or original Western European songs. Their popularity among the Athenian bourgeoisie contributed, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, to the development of Athinaїkí Epitheórisi (Athenian Review), a genre of popular musical theatre ministered by composers who ‘largely plagiarised foreign melodies’ (Milonas, 2002: 60). The Westernised side of Athenian music production was, subsequently in the 1930s, represented by the rise of the Athinaїkí Kantáda, a genre that, despite its European influences, has been considered quintessentially Greek (ibid: 106). Epitomised by the singersongwriter Attik, the Westernised Athenian song of the 1930s incorporated Western European instrumentation, harmony and vocal techniques, but its repertoire comprised original compositions with Greek lyrics. The next stage of the competition between ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ influenced song was played out in the 1940s and 1950s. This period found both trends renamed and their appeal somewhat less class-segregated. The rebétiko culture became increasingly disassociated from the criminal underworld and gave rise to the laїkó tragoúdi (‘urban-folk’ song).10 Prominent figures in this process were the composers Vassilis Tsitsanis and, later, Manolis Hiotis who, through a transformation of the harmony and the lyrics used, managed to capture a wider, inter-class, urban sensibility in their music (Pennanen, 1997; Michael, 1996). The themes of the songs switched from the eulogy of the marginal mángas figure, to love and the hardship of working-class life. The increasing appeal of the laїkó song can moreover be explained by the rapid urbanisation of Greece, which also allowed for greater class mobility. At the same time, the emergence of elafró tragoudi (‘light’ song), represented by composers such as Kostas Yiannidis, Hristos Hairopoulos and Yiannis Spartakos, continued the Western-influenced trend. Their music was typified by the use of classically and jazz-trained ensembles which resonated with the ballroom cultures of Western Europe and the cosmopolitan themes of their lyrics. During the two decades after World War II, the audiences of the two styles appear to overlap more than they did earlier in the twentieth century. In other words, the groups following laїkó and elafró were not as mutually exclusive as the ones of the cafés amán and the cafés chantants. Laїkó tragoúdi, however, seems to have won the ‘battle’ in the 1960s with the emergence of the kosmikí tavérna (‘beau-monde tavern’, Pennanen, 1997: 67), which became the primary locus of laїkó performances attracting wide Athenian audiences. According to Tragaki, the changing entertainment aesthetics of the bourgeois clientele during postwar years further motivated musicians previously employed in the “European” ensembles (elafro song orchestras) to seek employment in kosmikes tavernes (pl.) where they could work in the kind of luxurious performance context they once used to monopolize. (2005: 66–67)

12  Introduction The Greek popular music scene after the 1960s was dominated by the work of two composers: Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hadjidakis (see Tambakaki, 2019; Kanellopoulos, 2019). The release of Theodorakis’s album Epitáfios in 1960 signals the emergence of the new éntechno-laїkó (‘art-folk’) genre which combined the work of current Greek poets with laїkó compositions (Holst-Warhaft, 2002: 313–317). The strategic aim of Theodorakis’s work was the familiarisation of the working classes with intellectual poetry through a new form of ‘national’ music that utilised Greek folk idioms while avoiding references to particular regions (Cowan, 1993: 5; Tambakaki, 2019; Athanasiou, 2019). This fact made his music inclusive and pan-Hellenic. A dedicated Marxist and Western-educated composer (Holst-Warhaft, 1980), Theodorakis succeeded with his music in incarnating the romantic leftist patriotism prevalent among Greek intellectuals at the time.11 The genesis of the éntechno-laїkó genre gave rise to heated debates over the role of intellectuals in the cultural enlightenment of ‘the masses’ (Tragaki, 2007), which did not leave any sector of Greek culture unaffected. Manos Hadjidakis’s role, on the other hand, was less political. His incorporation of folk music, following from his speech in 1948 on the artistic value and historical importance of rebétiko,12 was part of a wider search for compositional styles. His international reputation, largely connected to the success of his film music for Never on a Sunday, for which he got an Oscar in 1960, and his collaboration with Nana Mouskouri, rarely acknowledges the array of his compositional and orchestrational techniques, of which the incorporation of laїkó and rebétiko represented only a fraction.13 Another important composer of the period, who emerged through the éntehno-laїkó genre but followed his own unique musical path, is Dionysis Savvopoulos. Widely referred to as ‘the Greek Bob Dylan’, Savvopoulos presents a sui generis case of Greek popular culture with regard to both his music, which combined a variety of Balkan idioms with rock aesthetics, and his political stance, amalgamating leftist patriotism with Neo-Orthodox Christianity.14 The fact remains that the emergence of éntehno-laїkó and the popularity of Theodorakis and Hadjidakis contributed to the decline of the Westernised elafró genre. Within international music circles, Greece was referred to as ‘the country of the two composers’ (Papanikolaou, 2007: 61). As early as 1961, Hairopoulos, one of the main composers of the elafró genre, predicted the prevalence of Theodorakis’s musical doctrine and complained in popular media about the excessive publicity that his competitor received (ibid: 161). The prohibition of Theodorakis’s music during the Dictatorship of the Colonels from 1967 to 1974 (see Papaeti, 2019: 139–145) only managed to increase the composer’s endorsement by local leftist circles. After the end of the dictatorship, Theodorakis repatriated from France and his status was effectively elevated to an official national composer. In the meantime, a strand of laїkó song ‘proper’ continued its existence away from the intellectualist debates involved in the production of éntehno-laїkó. This genre was exemplified by singers such as Stelios Kazantzidis and Stratos Dionysiou and songwriters Akis Panou and Christos Nikolopoulos.

Introduction 13 The dominance of éntehno-laїkó, with its politicised connotations, ended in the 1980s. Jane Cowan (1993: 14) correctly locates the main reason for the genre’s eventual decline in the electoral victory of PA.SO.K (Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement) in 1981. The new government, adopting a populist Social-Democrat rhetoric, ultimately rendered the political function performed by éntehno-laїkó song redundant and outdated. Ironically, the complete endorsement of Theodorakis by the new political leadership made his music less relevant to current social circumstances. This process contributed to the de-politicisation of Greek popular music which, in turn, led to an escalating monetisation of the local music market. In the 1990s, debates concerning the ‘folk’ or ‘western’ origins of popular genres became increasingly irrelevant, giving way to other types of music evaluation. The main debate of the 1990s is captured by the phrase ‘crisis of Greek song’ (krísi tou ellinikoú tragoudioú, see Cowan, 1993: 20–21), referring to a perceived problem of commoditisation identified primarily with the mass-produced laїkó of that period.

Genres and the Greek music industry in the early twenty-first century Since the beginning of my involvement in Greek popular music-making in the early 2000s, the music industry was dominated by three song genres: 1

2

Laїkó (‘urban-folk’) offers a modernised version of the same genre that existed in the four previous decades. The laїkó production is constantly subject to ambiguous evaluation processes by critics and fans, who situate the artists in a continuum of high and low ‘quality’ (poiótita). The ‘quality’ of laїkó production is largely judged based on the lyrics (the more poeticised, the closer the song is placed to the ‘quality’ end of the spectrum) and the instrumentation of the songs (excessive use of electronic instruments and digital programming is considered a sign of ‘low quality’ laїkó). Laїkó stars are mainly solo singers. Prominent examples of the ‘high quality’ side would be Kostas Makedonas, Eleni Vitali and Gerasimos Andreatos, while singers such as Stamatis Gonidis, Yiannis Ploutarhos and Antzela Dimitriou would be considered representatives of the commercialised, populist strand (see Tsioulakis, 2017, 2019b). Éntechno (art-song) derives as a term from the éntechno-laїkó of the period 1960–1980 (See Fabbri and Tsioulakis, 2016). Since the 2000s, however, the ‘urban-folk’ roots of the genre (designated by the word laїkó in the earlier term) have been enriched and complemented by a wider array of musical influences coming from Western-European and American singer-songwriter styles, rock, jazz and in some cases ‘eastern’ idioms from Turkey and the wider Eastern Mediterranean region.15 Its main characteristics are the intellectualist lyrics, the emphasis on acoustic instrumentation and the use of harmonically and melodically elaborate composition techniques. This genre is

14  Introduction

3

dominated by male singer-songwriters (tragoudopoioí, literally ‘song-crafters’, a term introduced by Dionysis Savvopoulos) such as Orfeas Peridis, Alkinoos Ioannidis and Sokratis Malamas. Female representatives of the genre are predominantly singers who do not write their own songs, such as Eleftheria Arvanitaki, Alkistis Protopsalti and Melina Kana.16 Pop is a song category that became increasingly influential in the 2000s. This genre strives for a purely Westernised sound influenced by (and referential to) dance, R’n’B and other mainstream Anglo-American pop music styles. Epitomised in the late 2000s by artists such as Sakis Rouvas, Elena Paparizou and the band Onirama, the pop style is distinguished by its technophilia and the use of simple harmony, repetitive melodies and ‘catchy’ rhymes.

The recording industry in Athens before The Crisis was more or less controlled by the multi-national companies that dominate the Western popular music market and two Greek companies that were associated with local private broadcasting networks.17 Significantly, however, since the vast majority of the local popular music has Greek lyrics – with the almost unique exception of songs competing for the Eurovision Song Contest – it does not tend to be circulated abroad. It is intended for intra-national consumption.18 Consequently, Greek popular music stars usually maintain their audience and earn money by performing at fixed Athenian nightclubs (magaziá) for seasons that roughly last from October until March or April. These clubs are described by a variety of names depending on the genre performed. Clubs that feature laїkó singers would be referred to as pístes (dancestages), bouzoúkia (plural of bouzoúki, the ‘urban-folk’ instrument characteristic of the genre) or the degrading term skyládika19 (literally ‘dog-dens’ used by their cultural opponents). On the other hand, clubs hosting éntechno artists are usually termed mousikés skinés (music stages). A few umbrella-terms such as magaziá (literally ‘shops’, the term that I will be using henceforth) and kéndra (meaning ‘centres’) are also used to refer to all live music nightclubs. In these magaziá, popular music stars before The Crisis would typically have offered four performances per week, Thursday to Sunday, during seasons that lasted from October until April or May each year. The economic recession, however, has reduced the number of nightclubs in operation, the length of the seasons and the number of weekly performances, which are now typically offered no more than twice per week. Despite the different terms describing the clubs and their featured genres, performance conventions in magaziá are quite uniform. The shows start after midnight and last until 4 or 5 am with no more than a 15-minute break. Each magazí hosts a combination of artists, who sometimes represent different genres in order to appeal to the broadest possible audience.20 The less recognisable singers, the so-called ‘smaller names’ (mikrá onómata), habitually start the show, while the ‘bigger names’ (megála onómata) follow when the kéfi (enjoyment) is approaching its peak. The audience members sit at tables and consume alcohol21 or occasionally get up on the stage to dance. Tables are pre-reserved and charged according to the number of alcohol units purchased.22 An activity associated more with the laїká magaziá (or bouzoúkia) is tossing flowers (usually

Introduction 15

Figure 1.1  Stage of Athenian magazí covered in flowers

white and red carnations) to the singers and dancers (Figure 1.1). Patrons buy these flowers in small baskets from the louloudoúdes (flower-girls) who are employed by the club.23 These settings offer permanent employment options for musicians, who choose to be in the service of a specific singer for about a year. The backing instrumentalists usually stay on stage for the whole show, supporting both the ‘smaller’ and the ‘bigger names’. Performing in these contexts is referred to by musicians as ‘working’. It represents a practice largely ill-regarded by them, a ‘necessary evil’ that they need to engage with in order to survive financially. It is, thus, contrasted with ‘playing’, a term describing musicking that is perceived as creative, expressive and, consequently, enjoyable (Tsioulakis, 2013). The uniformity of performance practices presents a challenge for the division of genres. Despite their historical particularities, social connotations and aesthetic discrepancies, the three genres of Greek popular music appear quite similar as far as participatory conventions and presentational norms are concerned. Even more importantly, the backing instrumentalists, who serve as the protagonists of this study, seem to move between genres (as Chapter 2 will discuss) with greater ease than the singers and songwriters, who become inextricably identified by critics and audiences with the music style that they serve. This practice means that all the

16  Introduction previous genres ultimately draw upon the same pool of employable session musicians. As a consequence, the ethnographic data in this monograph will challenge some of the criteria by which cultural studies have assessed the question of genre in popular music (Fabbri, 1989; Frith, 1998). According to Frith, ‘[t]heoretically, the cultural studies argument is that the explicit aims and intentions of music makers are less significant than the meanings read into their sounds by their consumers’ (1989: 71). This view, however, is dependent upon the assumption that behind any musical process hides a single and coherent creative author (be it a solo artist or a band).24 Franco Fabbri’s (1989) classic chapter on the rules for genre distinction indulges in this methodological reduction. While offering a rich analysis of the diverse technical, semiotic, economic, ideological and behavioural rules that characterise diverse genres, Fabbri’s account focuses on the front-person, ignoring the discrepancies between his or her creative intentions and the aesthetics of the backing musicians.25 Martin Stokes has also identified the reluctance of popular music studies to seek and widely engage with the diverse viewpoints of music practitioners as a methodological problem of ‘making sense of conflicting data’ (2003: 22). My examination of the social tensions within the popular music workplace will make sense of these discrepancies. As my analysis will illustrate, the intended meaning of music-making is socially negotiated and far from uncontested. To put it simply: when an éntechno songwriter performs their compositions on stage supported by ten instrumentalists who do not share his or her musical aspirations and often have little respect for them as an artist, finding a concrete set of criteria to assess the significance of performance is at best a futile intellectual exercise. Alongside the ‘mainstream’ music industry with the expensive record productions and the large magaziá, or perhaps more accurately ‘underneath’ it, flourish several subcultural music networks. These networks vary in visibility, participatory conventions and ideologies. Rock and indie genres (Kallimopoulou and Kornetis, 2017; Christakis, 1999), heavy metal (Astrinakis and Stylianoudi, 1996), goth (Vasileiou, 2010), hip-hop (Koutsougera, 2012, 2018; Styliou, 2019) experimental (Stefanou, 2019) and electronic (Polymeropoulou, 2019) subcultures provide some such examples. Among those subcultures, the Athenian jazz scene is of particular interest due to the fact that most of its practitioners are also employed as session musicians in the mainstream popular music industry. As I have shown elsewhere (Tsioulakis, 2011a, 2011b, 2013, 2018, 2019a), the activities of professional musicians within the jazz community serve as the ultimate example of ‘play’, which becomes an antidote to their strenuous ‘work’ in the popular clubs.26

Entering the field: music ethnography among my peers In his critique of postmodernist anthropology’s overemphasis on what he thought was a counterproductive reflexivity, Bourdieu posed the idea of ‘participant objectivation’ (2003). This somewhat cumbersome term describes the process though which, in Bourdieu’s view, an ethnographer succeeds in revealing the

Introduction 17 social circumstances shaping not only the subject under scrutiny but him-/herself as a researcher. However, this self-examination is, according to Bourdieu, productive only when it strives to reveal the social presuppositions of the researcher in order to prevent their interference with the research findings. This is, then, a process facilitating anthropological ‘objectivation’ (the rendering of social phenomena into study-objects) rather than a tendency to talk about oneself due to the post-modernist assumption that a researcher is unable to meaningfully describe the social experiences of his or her subjects.27 For Bourdieu, this method ‘aims at objectivizing the subjective relation to the object which, far from leading to a relativistic and more-or-less antiscientific subjectivism, is one of the conditions of genuine scientific objectivity’ (2003: 282). This ethnography is not impartial. The ‘partial truths’ (Clifford, 1986) that are presented in this monograph are impacted by the fact that I am a native member of the community under scrutiny in a double sense. First, I was born in Athens and lived there, permanently until 2005 and intermittently thereafter. Second, I was involved as a performer and music teacher in the city from 1998 until 2009, and the majority of my ‘informants’ were actually instrumentalists whom I have known for a long time and with many of whom I have collaborated on stage. These undeniable conditions of my research positioning make me a ‘native ethnographer’ with a specific agenda: to document and convey the experience of professional music-making from the subjective standpoint of the freelance instrumentalist, which, as this monograph will show, is defined by a series of sociocultural markers that relate to skill (Chapter 2), gender (Chapter 3), power(lessness) (Chapter 4) and precarity (Chapter 5). The field research that provides the data for this monograph has been carried out with different degrees of intensity for over a decade. Immersed and systematic ethnographic fieldwork took place from June 2006 to September 2007, from June 2008 to September 2009, and from August 2016 to February 2017. This was complemented by frequent short visits throughout the years of living, learning and working within the academic worlds of the UK and Ireland, from 2005 until the completion of this manuscript in the summer of 2019. Field research conducted until 2010 as part of my postgraduate studies captures the experience of musicians before the imposition of austerity, and it is presented in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. Since 2011, my ethnographic enquiry has focused more closely on the unfolding of The Crisis and its musical manifestations (see Tsioulakis, 2017). Data from interviews and observation that were carried out since then shapes the ethnography presented in Chapters 5 and 6. My main research methodology involved participant observation, a practice which comprised various activities ranging from the deeply involved ‘participant’ to the purely ‘observational’ end of the spectrum. My role as a member of the professional music scene of Athens ensured that I was given sufficient opportunity to actively participate in diverse live performances. Moreover, the fact that I am trained in piano and keyboards, instruments that are used for almost every popular music genre within the Athenian music scene, posed no restrictions to the

18  Introduction music I could perform. Consequently, during these years of research, I worked as a backing keyboardist in several magaziá (nightclubs) for prominent pop and éntechno singers, performed in concerts and recorded albums with éthnik-jazz bands (Tsioulakis, 2011a, 2019a) and played one-off gigs with funk, rock and jazz cover-bands in small Athenian clubs. These events gave me the opportunity to follow musicians as they moved through different settings of ‘work’ and ‘play’. I also frequently attended performances of laïkó (urban-folk) and éntechno as a member of the audience, thus situating myself closer to the ‘observational’ pole. Performing live in Athenian venues such as large music clubs (magaziá), small theatres, open-air venues and so on, involves a range of actions and procedures: transferring equipment and members to the site using several cars or a mini-van for the band members and the equipment, setting up the stage, sound-checking, performing, repacking the equipment and returning to everyone’s accommodations. These procedures differ according to the type of the event (outdoors or indoors, in Athens or touring the periphery, single occasion or series of gigs at the same venue and so on) and, understandably, take longer than the actual performance. It is during and between those activities, in the time spaces that sit uncomfortably between ethnomusicological definitions of performance and nonperformance, that my role as an observing participant was particularly fruitful. My various degrees of involvement, from band to audience member, from ‘some musician’s friend’ to ‘scholar doing research,’ gave me different levels of access

Figure 1.2  Musicians sound-checking before their concert

Introduction 19 to the musicians’ experience and consequently diverse perspectives on their contested truths of professional musicianship. My research methodology also involved 63 personal interviews with musicians that varied between semi-structured and unstructured. Most of my informants were between 25 and 45 years old, representing the age bracket within which instrumentalists tend to be more active in freelance session employment. Out of the 63 interviewees, 47 were male and 16 female, an imbalance justified by the disproportionate male presence within the ranks of session instrumentalists.28 The sample included 50 practitioners of ‘western’ instruments, five ‘traditional’ or ‘eastern’ instrumentalists and eight vocalists. This quota was dictated by my focus on instrumentalists as a specific class of performers within the popular music industry. My argument throughout this book is that the instrumentalist’s (mousikós) experience is qualitatively different than the singer’s (tragoudistís). My study has focused on the former. Moreover, the popular music industry mainly employs musicians specialised in ‘western’ instruments.29 Finally, 31 of these interviews were conducted between 2006 and 2010 (before The Crisis) and 32 between 2011 and 2017. In those interviews, I found concentrating on life narratives particularly useful. Although the scope of my research was not primarily historical, life narratives, focusing on the reasons and the means through which my informants became interested in music, proved extremely helpful in illustrating identity construction

Figure 1.3  Instrumentalists and backing vocalists in their dressing room before the concert

20  Introduction processes (Tsioulakis, 2011b). Unfulfilled expectations and moments of frustration along with feelings of accomplishment in musical life histories were nodal points in revealing how musicians experience, imagine and articulate the music scene and their roles within it. Even though the format of interviews was quite similar between the two time periods (before and since The Crisis), the content of the responses changed significantly since The Crisis became an undeniable reality within Greek public discourse. This can be partly attributed to my briefing to informants before the interviews, whereby before 2010, I would simply explain that I am interested in the working lives of professional musicians, whereas after 2011, I was explicit about my interest in the impact of austerity and economic recession. However, this change also reflects a wider prevalence of crisis-talk within all domains of Greek life (Dalakoglou et al., 2018; Knight, 2012, 2013; Herzfeld, 2011; Theodossopoulos, 2013). Conducting in-depth personal interviews as well as reporting on intimate conversations in the workplace raises issues of confidentiality and anonymity. In this monograph, I have treated the question of anonymity as an ongoing and dynamic one, continuously reassessed according to content (what is the informant saying and about whom?) and context (how are the words presented in the wider text?). Throughout the book I present my interlocutors by first name only. This way, the protagonists of this study become personified, their views distinguishable (since one can trace their utterances and even unveil their occasional inconsistencies which are central to my examination) and their stories more meaningful. By not including their surnames I am preventing outside readers from identifying the musicians, some of whom are quite recognisable within the Athenian popular music industry. Wherever my informants’ assertions are offensive or judgmental of other community members, the names of the persons involved have been changed in order to protect their reputation.30 These changed names, then, have been kept consistent throughout the text in order for their viewpoints to be wholly appreciated in context. Public figures of the music industry (especially popular singers and songwriters), on the other hand, have only been referred to by their first initial. This is because those popular stars are more easily identifiable by the general public but also because the purpose of this work is to bring instrumentalists into the spotlight from the background and often invisible position that they normatively occupy within the music industry. So, obscuring the names of popular stars is consistent with my focus on the subaltern instrument-players rather than the megála onómata (‘big names’).31 The focus on the background instrumentalist should also be seen as a result of my personal preoccupations as a native ethnographer. Traditionally, anthropology has valued the achievement of ‘insider’ access to cultural meanings.32 Acceptance into a community is always difficult, but once the mistrust has been overcome, the ethnographer is assumed to have a privileged contact with knowledge otherwise untouched. What I would rather suggest, in specific relation to the professional musical community of Athens, is that what is accessed is a different quality of knowledge, not necessarily a more valid or authentic one. In that sense, what is

Introduction 21 revealed to insiders and outsiders are competing and incomplete truths, which are articulated for particular reasons in particular contexts. In the context of my research, my insider position gave me direct access to only some of those truths. Here is an example: to a question considering the choice to work with a specific singer, an anthropologist unacquainted (outsider) with the interviewee instrumentalist would probably receive an answer explaining the creative and musical reasons that motivated the collaboration. A fellow musician (insider) asking the same question would obtain an answer focusing on the purely economic benefit from this labour, often followed by an expression of distaste for the singer who represents a competing professional class (see Chapter 4). Both of these articulations, however, are partly dictated by the conditions mediating the interviewer-interviewee relationship, resulting in partial revelations, neither of which is absolutely true or false. The consideration of power rhetoric, aesthetic ideology, precarity and its resistance among backing instrumentalists in the popular music industry of Athens resulted from both a personal preoccupation and a research necessity. My long involvement in practices where I learned the tropes in order to express these very views unquestionably generated my interest in studying them. Conversely, once I revisited the same locale as a researcher, my ‘insider’ status ensured that these views were all that I was presented with. Even if my ethnographic scope was different, the fact that the interviewed musicians saw the opportunity to have their subaltern voices heard and their unique preoccupations communicated through my research would have shaped the text accordingly. For this reason, my role as a native ethnographer is simultaneously the greatest benefit and handicap of this study.

Worlds of work in Athenian music: the themes and structure of this book My main aim throughout this volume is to shed light on the different aspects of ‘work’ that define the experience and articulation of professional musicking in Athens. As I will show, the division between ‘work’ and ‘play’ encapsulates a wide array of meanings relevant to the musicians’ identities, communities, aesthetics, sociality and ontology. Furthermore, by roughly dividing the attention of the monograph between two successive periods (before The Crisis – from 2005 to 2009 – and after the first implementation of austerity – from 2010 until 2017), I am attempting a comparative approach which documents how a multiplicity of changes, as part of what has come to be known as The Greek Crisis, has affected the lives of professional musicians. This chronological division, however, does not suggest that musicians necessarily experience The Crisis as a rupture. In fact, as the following chapters will show, the transition between the two periods is portrayed by my interlocutors as much through breaks as it is through continuities. Hence the title of this book, Musicians in Crisis, alludes to lives of precarity and strategic struggle (work), alongside moments of musical and affective fulfilment

22  Introduction (play), both individual and collective, which existed long before Greece entered its now notorious state of turbulence. As many musicians told me, ‘We are always in crisis’. This chapter has explained how different music genres came into being and described the performative conditions that define them today. It also contextualised the ethnographic field within anthropological and ethnomusicological literature on Greece and provided a critical account of ‘The Crisis’, outlining its main manifestations and discourses. Finally, this introductory chapter has explained how my individual background dictated the ethnographic perspective of this book: the view of Athenian popular music industries through the eyes of professional instrumentalists. In Chapter 2, I examine the concept of ‘professionalism’. After discussing academic and vernacular definitions of professionalism in music, I proceed with the analysis of the three central components to professionalism: training, strategies and the idea of success. Through this examination, I illustrate how musicians acquire their professional skills, the kinds of social tactics which they utilise in their effort to be employed in the music industry and the criteria that are used for the assessment of a musician’s professional accomplishment. As Chapter 2 illustrates, the threefold process of training – strategies – success is not as straightforward as its chronological order suggests. On the contrary, the variety of training methods, the controversial character of social strategies and the ambiguity of the factors for success complicate the tale of music professionalism. Chapter 3 considers the extent to which professional musicians can be theorised as a community. In this effort, I  inspect, on the one hand, the experiences and rhetorics that bring musicians together and, on the other, the attitudes and ideologies that separate them. Specifically, this chapter discusses: (1) the representation of music ‘work’ as an experience of ‘hardship and frustration’, (2) the gender dynamics connected to instrument-playing, (3) the musicians’ self-perception as low-status, deviant social beings and the impact this notion has on their collectiveness and (4) the centrality of music aesthetics in the making of ideology. Ultimately, this chapter proposes that professional musicians ‘at work’ form a ‘community of experience’ that is constructed through the intimacies, ideologies and discourses in which they partake. In Chapter 4, I concentrate on the music workplace as a terrain for power struggles. Applying Pierre Bourdieu’s theorisations of the social space (1985), the forms of capital (1986, 1989) and the distinction of taste (1984), I look at the ways in which instrumentalists and other occupational groups involved in popular music practices compete for social authority. My approach is threefold. (1) By examining the instrumentalists’ verbal representation of other professional groups with whom they collaborate, I identify a rhetoric of subalternity and class consciousness. (2) Through an investigation of three specific social battles that I witnessed as a participant observer in a music nightclub, I illustrate the criteria involved in the negotiation of power. (3) Finally, I assess the significance of a rare power-reversal seen in the case of an individual musician’s juridical clash with his employers in the music industry.

Introduction 23 The remaining two chapters shift the attention to an examination of The Crisis and its impact on musicians’ lives. Drawing on the work of political philosopher Isabell Lorey, as well as the anthropology of austerity and precarity, Chapter 5 analyses how ‘governmental precarization’ (Lorey, 2015, 2019) shapes a new type of consciousness among musicians, what I call a crisis-subjectivity. As the testimonies in this chapter show, this condition is not entirely unprecedented, but neither is it merely a continuation of previous forms of precarity. A key component of the analysis is story-telling: I examine how musicians narrativise the ‘before’ and ‘now’ of The Crisis in their musical journeys and internalise this national predicament as a personal condition of emotional distress. Furthermore, I recount three specific precarity stories, which illustrate musicians’ clashes with the State, the power-holders of the nightclub industry and their fellow colleagues, respectively, as results of top-down austerity, economic recession and job insecurity. Finally, I examine musicians’ reflections on post-crisis futures as a discursive restoration of collective creativity, agency and control. Chapter 6, then, examines ‘ways out’ of The Crisis as efforts to regain control. I focus on three specific strategies: (1) teaching innovation as a way to complement the decreasing stability of night-time performance employment through a refocusing on educational practices; (2) artisanship, specifically the manufacturing of new technologies, whereby musicians find ways to control not only their time and labour conditions but also the space within which their conduct occurs; and (3) the emergence of ‘micro-scenes’ as a way for musicians to de-monetise their performance activities as well as a creative field that fosters a resistance ethic/aesthetic. Addressing some of the debates around ‘crisis as opportunity’, in this chapter I argue against a reading of ‘opportunism’ (Knight, 2015) and in favour of an analysis of resistance through ‘presentism’ and ‘exodus’ (Lorey, 2016, 2019) in my interlocutors’ responses to conditions of Crisis. This is not only a book about the conditions in which musicians find themselves (In Crisis, be it temporary or permanent) but also their strategies of coping within and fighting against these conditions: ‘working’ and ‘playing’. For that reason, each chapter’s conclusion revisits the work vs play dichotomy to enrich and layer it, through reference to other debates: skills and strategies (Chapter 2), experience and ideology (Chapter 3), subjugation and resistance (Chapter 4), crisis present and post-crisis futures (Chapter 5) and finally creativity and control (Chapter 6).

Notes 1 ‘Comping’ is the expression used in jazz for specific types of rhythmic accompaniment (See Monson, 1996: 43–44; Berliner, 1994: 315). The term is widely used among Greek jazz musicians in its English form. 2 I will be capitalising the term ‘The Crisis’ throughout this monograph, in order to emphasise its pervasive role as a discourse. This is not to suggest that The Crisis is not a lived reality. On the contrary, what I am arguing is that the lived experience of recession and austerity is elevated into such a dominant mainstream reference that it is impossible to separate the ways in which people articulate it as a personal, collective or even national condition.

24  Introduction 3 For some research that evokes similar ethnographic examples and raises complementary points to the present monograph in different national/cultural contexts, see the work of Stephen Cottrell (2002, 2004, 2007), Robert Faulkner and Howard Becker (2009), David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker (2010, 2011), Izabela Wagner (2012), Fred Moehn (2012), Elina Hytönen-Ng (2013), Martin Cloonan (2014), Leah O’Brien Bernini (2015) and Ana Hofman (2015). 4 There are, of course, notable exceptions to this trend, such as the work of Neni Panourgia (1995) in Athens and Giorgos Agelopoulos (2000) in Thessaloniki. 5 Papanikolaou (2007) offers a prominent example of such a study. See, also, Andreopoulos (2001), Michael (2009) and Holst-Warhaft (1980, 2002). 6 To these I would add my recent work on Greek popular music focusing on the performances of folk and pop nightclubs (2019b), the Crisis-discourses of popular stars and their audiences (2017) and the aesthetic debates of local music professionalism (2018). 7 Christopher Small (1998) has used the term ‘musicking’ to capture a wider concept of music participation than what is usually described as ‘music-making’. Transcending the established boundaries between composition, performance, spectatorship, consumption and so on, the term ‘musicking’ focuses on the inter-relationship between all of those activities that define music as a meaningful practice. 8 In Chapter 2, I elaborate on the local meaning of the term ‘professional musician’ and its identification with the instrument-player. Furthermore, in Chapter 4, I explain my use of ‘class’ as a marker for those instrumentalists, as it becomes manifest in performative inequalities and hegemonies that are integral to their experience of musical labour. 9 Pennanen suggests that the name smyrnéiko is misleading and indicative of the nationalist agendas of various rebetologists. In his view, ‘only a part of the repertoire originated from the popular music of Izmir (Smyrna): the majority of melodies came from Istanbul, the centre of Ottoman classical and popular music’ (1997: 66). 10 Translating the term laїkó is far from an easy task. Terms such as ‘folk’ (Tragaki, 2007: 25), and ‘popular’ (Cowan, 1993: 4; Papanikolaou, 2007: 85; Economou, 2019) have been used interchangeably. I choose the term ‘urban-folk song’ to describe laїkó tragoúdi, in order to distinguish it from other local genres of popular music and from the ‘rural’ or regional folk (dimotikó) music. 11 Papanikolaou regards the éntechno-laїkó song as Theodorakis’s answer to the Gramscian call for ‘a modern humanism able to reach right to the simplest and most uneducated classes’ (2007: 87). 12 See Tragaki (2007: 52), Papanikolaou (2007: 63), Andreopoulos (2001: 256–257). 13 For a discussion of Hadjidakis’s diverse work, see Andreopoulos (2001) and Kanellopoulos (2019). 14 Savvopoulos’s music and politics has been discussed in length by Papanikolaou (2006, 2007). See, also, Cowan (1993: 7–9) and Kallimopoulou (2009: 20–23). 15 See Varelopoulos (2019) for an extensive analysis of the broadening of éntechno influences, especially within recording practices. For a discussion of éntechno and its incorporation of Greek ‘traditional’ and ‘eastern’ idioms, see Kallimopoulou (2009: 154–157 and 213–214). 16 The gender stereotype of the female singer as opposed to the male ‘musician’ will be discussed in Chapter 3. 17 Since the 1990s, and especially in its peak years in the early 2000s, the local music industry was a place of antagonism between multinational (Sony, EMI, Warner and Universal) and Greek companies (Heaven and Legend) over who signs more established local pop-stars. However, this fact did not deeply affect the work of freelance instrument-players who generally did not perceive this competition as capable of bringing any qualitative changes to the local music market. For some quantitative data regarding the Greek popular music industry of the 1990s, see Papageorgiou (1997:

Introduction 25 74–80). The combined impact of online music consumption and economic crisis, however, has devastated the domestic recording industry, which is rarely seen as a lucrative business nowadays. As part of this process, as many informants reported to me, larger recording companies have now developed live-music branches, trying to capitalise on the more profitable market of festivals and concerts. Chapter 5 will specifically discuss the economic impact of The Crisis on freelance musicians. 18 Polychronakis (2007) has presented an interesting case of a Greek pop-star’s brief success at reaching international audiences. 19 See Tsioulakis (2019b), Polychronakis (2019) and Cowan (1990: 180, 1993: 21). See, also, the Glossary in this volume for a clarification of all these terms. 20 This strategy has been the norm in the past few years as a solution to the perceived decline of the popularity of magaziá as a choice for nightly entertainment (Tsioulakis, 2019b). By employing singers who represent different genres, club managements aim to attract diverse audiences and, thus, make their magazí more profitable. In this case, ‘quality’ laїkó singers usually collaborate with éntechno artists, while pop singers share the stage with the more ‘commercial’ laїkó representatives. Although different combinations are not unheard of, they are considerably rarer. 21 Until the 1990s, food was also frequently served during the early parts of the show. This practice has largely been abandoned these days as it is considered degrading for the artist on stage. For an account of the changing modes of spectatorship in Athenian nightclubs, and specifically the differences between laïko and pop magaziá, see Tsioulakis (2019b). 22 During the season of 2008–2009, when I was employed as a band member in one such nightclub, a minimum table charge would be around 150 euro for a bottle of alcohol (whiskey or vodka) per three or four guests. This price did not include the tip to the maitre, whose responsibility was the allocation of specific tables. For a table close to the stage, a customer would have to tip the maitre with as much as two or three times the minimum table charge. 23 In the specific club where I worked as a keyboard player for the season of 2008–2009, the louloudoúdes stayed after the end of the show and the departure of the spectators in order to recollect the flowers from the stage floor, store them in refrigerators and sell them again the following night. The more experienced instrumentalists assured me that this was common practice everywhere they had worked. 24 This view has also been deconstructed by Howard Becker (1982), who introduced the term ‘art worlds’ to emphasise the collective character of any artistic production and break the myth of ‘artistic genius’. 25 Fabian Holt explains some of the inadequacies of Fabbri’s and Frith’s work on genre definitions as ‘typical problems of armchair research’ (2007: 8). 26 Due to my own involvement in the Greek jazz music scene throughout the 2000s, many of my informants who work within the mainstream popular industry come from a jazz background and engage with jazz music as their ‘play’ activity. This is not to suggest that other subcultures can’t also serve as fields of ‘play’ for musicians with different aesthetic preferences or genre-specific skills. The fact is, however, that many jazz musicians were headhunted for jobs in the mainstream nightclubs specifically because of their unique skillset, which included advanced instrumental technique, competence in writing and sight-reading musical notation, ability to improvise and knowledge of orchestration that made them effective musical directors. 27 In the anthropology postgraduate seminars at Queen’s University Belfast, which during my MA study (2005–2006) were convened by Kay Milton, the question of ‘objectivity’ was a recurrent theme. In one of those seminars, Kay Milton (herself quite sceptical of extreme post-modernism) remarked that in the discussion of ‘objectivity’, anthropologists often confuse it with ‘impartiality’. ‘Impartiality’, she asserted, is impossible, as the researcher is always emotionally and ideologically immersed in the studied culture.

26  Introduction In fact, her personal work (Milton, 2002; Milton and Svasek, 2005) has focused on the indistinguishable nature of emotions and ideology. ‘Objectivity’, on the other hand, is the ability of the researcher to place a cultural phenomenon under observation and analyse it, while simultaneously acknowledging his or her relationship with the phenomenon which shapes the observational process. 28 The gender dynamics of the community of professional musicians will be discussed in Chapter 3. 29 A typical backing band working for a popular singer’s act would include one or two electric/acoustic guitar players, a bassist, a drummer and/or percussionist and one or two keyboardists. Depending on the genre performed, one or two bouzoúki players could be added to the group, or occasionally a klaríno (Greek/Balkan variation of the Western clarinet that has been associated with demotic music. See Kallimopoulou, 2009: 129). 30 This is despite the fact that none of the musicians that I interviewed chose complete anonymity, an option that I offered explicitly and consistently. 31 I like to think of this writing choice as in a way similar to the animated cartoons that I watched as a child. What I always found fascinating in those programs was the depiction of human presence (especially of grown-ups) only through the occasional appearance of legs and muffled voices. The human would only be momentarily visible in order to regulate the playful existence of the personified mouse or cat. This way, the asymmetry between the dominant actor (human) and the marginal presence (mouse) was temporarily reversed. This is the effect that I am aiming for by referring to the industry’s power-holders by an impersonal initial letter. This book represents the backing musicians’ moment to shine. 32 For a debate on ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perspectives specifically connected to the ‘native ethnographer’ discussion, see Hastrup (1990, 1993) and Einarsson (1990).

2 Becoming a ‘Pro’ Skills, strategies and success

It was in September 2003 that I was first ‘turned’ into a ‘professional musician’. It all happened through a phone call. It was a Saturday afternoon and I had just completed six hours of teaching at a music conservatoire in the south of Athens when I received a call from Vassilis, an established jazz guitarist. Vassilis had been my teacher in music theory since 1996, and in the autumn of 2001, he had invited me to join his band as a keyboard player. We had played numerous gigs together at small music scenes and jazz festivals in Athens, the Greek periphery and even abroad, promoting his latest éthnik-jazz album.1 This phone call, however, was going to change our mode of collaboration and, along with it, my self-identification at the time as an ‘amateur’ (or, at best, ‘semi-professional’) musician. The purpose of his call was to inform me that he was discussing a joint music project with N –,2 a well-known singer-songwriter of the éntechno genre.3 They were planning to put together a music show that would comprise some of N – ’s latest songs along with Vassilis’s instrumental compositions. This collaboration fitted within a wider trend of inter-genre music projects taking place in Athens at that time. The project would be presented to the audience as an attempt by the well-established singersongwriter to engage with more sophisticated kinds of music, as jazz was routinely perceived. Simultaneously, and most importantly for my case, it signified Vassilis’s decision to ‘go mainstream’. The project would entail a series of performances at an Athenian theatre over a period of two months with an additional prospect of an album release featuring fragments of the live concerts. When this collaboration was proposed I was 22 years old and I had already been playing with different bands on stage for the previous six years. One of these bands had released an album in 2002, which had received some media attention and had resulted in various interviews and radio airings. The gigs that I had been playing did not provide me with more than a little pocket-money, but my main occupation as a piano and music theory teacher in various conservatoires was enough to support me financially. The payment proposed for this new collaboration was, in fact, not significantly higher than what I was used to receiving for a night’s work, since the whole project (as dictated by its experimental character) was described as ‘low-budget.’ The obvious question, then, is: if I was already living off music (by performing and teaching) and had collaborated with

28  Becoming a ‘Pro’ well-established musicians, why did I feel that I was only at that moment turning into a ‘professional musician’? In an effort to answer this question, this chapter will describe the various components of the definition of professional musicianship. While clarifying the term and showing its fluid and impermanent character, the text will set the scene for the precarious and constantly shifting occupation of musicking in the Greek capital. Although the dichotomy between professional and amateur musicianship has been mentioned and problematised since the early stages of ethnomusicological literature (Becker, 1951; Merriam, 1964), little work has been dedicated to the explanation of its conceptual essence. In the mid-1980s, Robert Faulkner remarked that ‘discussion about persons employed in the popular-culture and mass-communications industries has resulted in many dry remarks but little careful understanding of these settings’ (1985: 3). His assertion might be less true three decades later,4 but the examination of the phenomenon of professionalism as a factor of musical performance and aesthetics remains quite marginal in ethnomusicology and popular music studies. This lack of analysis, I argue, reveals the difficulty of posing a satisfactory definition of ‘professional’ (and, by contrast, ‘amateur’) musician, a term that seems to acquire variable meanings not only across but also within cultures. Alan Merriam has asserted that professionalism is ‘usually defined in terms of whether the musician is paid for and supported economically by his [sic] skill’ (1964: 124). The economic criterion, however, as Merriam himself acknowledges, can be very ambiguous. According to Ruth Finnegan, some complications regarding the professional/amateur dichotomy lie in the ambiguities in the concept of “earning one’s living”, others in differing interpretations about what is meant by working in “music”, and others again – perhaps the most powerful of all – in the emotive overtones of the term “professional” as used by the participants themselves. (1989: 13) Using the example of classical musicians in London, Stephen Cottrell stresses that, although the most common criterion of professionalism is ‘to be paid to play’, it is the context within which one is employed that ultimately defines whether or not this is ‘real professional work’ (2004: 9). The problem of distinguishing between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ musicians also expands beyond the western capitalist market. John Baily reports an interesting case in Afghanistan: while the traditional dichotomy between professional (kesbi) and amateur (shauqi) musicians is dictated by hereditary criteria (musicians can only inherit professional status from their fathers), increasingly more musicians claim a kesbi status based on the fact that music is their sole source of income (1988: 2–4). Evidently, the constantly variable colloquial use of the term to emphasize skill, rank or success, makes it hard to pin down. It seems, thus, that a definition of musical professionalism needs to be accompanied by a series

Becoming a ‘Pro’ 29 of other clarifications (concerning concepts such as ‘earning a living’, ‘music’) as well as by an acknowledgement of the speaker’s positioning. Even when such clarifications have been made, any definition of professionalism remains culturally specific and works better when ethnographically grounded. Some of the issues around definitions of professionalism within music (and more broadly the ‘creative industries’) is due to the profession itself existing within such a state of flux and precarity that the very essence of ‘employment’ is questionable (see Scharff, 2018; Raunig et al., 2011; Bennett, 2018; Haenfler, 2018; Lorey, 2011; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010). In that sense, more than defined by professional stability, those workers (including, but not limited to musicians) are what Isabell Lorey (2011) calls ‘virtuosos of freedom’: The present virtuosos of this ambivalence may be further described within a few parameters: they pursue temporary jobs, make their living on projects and from contract work from several clients simultaneously and from consecutive clients, mostly without any sick pay, paid holiday leave or unemployment compensation, without protection against wrongful dismissal – basically with minimal social protection or none whatsoever. . . . There is no longer any dividing line between leisure time and work. There is an accumulation of knowledge during the unpaid hours that is not remunerated separately, but which is naturally called on and used in the context of paid work. (ibid: 86) Hence, the identification of a ‘professional musician’ can be additionally complicated by the fact that they are always in danger of being unemployed or underemployed, whereby their label can be under question. As Silvia Tarassi (2018) points out, even the correlation between professionalism and economic viability is not straightforward. In her research among indie musicians in Italy, interviewees ‘explained that in many situations they worked without getting any economic revenue because they were interested in acquiring new artistic experiences and regarded this, in itself, as a form of return for their labour’ (2018: 216). Christina Scharff’s (2018) in-depth research among female classical musicians in London and Berlin further testifies to the complicated relationship between precariousness and pleasure in the lives of professional performers. Scharff provides a close analysis of the ways in which her interlocutors invoked both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ aspects of insecure employment, arguing that ‘[t]hese aspects were difficult to separate, pointing to the complexities surrounding subjective experiences of precarious work in the cultural and creative industries’ (2018: 165). Similarly, the term ‘professional musician’ (epaggelmatías mousikós) in the Athenian music scene is a rather complicated one. Besides the straightforward understanding of a person making a living by participating in musical practices, there is a more specific emic sense in the characterisation. First, there is a strong distinction between ‘musician’ (mousikós) and ‘singer’ (tragoudistís). In order for a musician (etic) to be identified as mousikós (emic) he, or less commonly

30  Becoming a ‘Pro’ she, needs to be a skilled performer of a specific instrument. Second, in order to qualify as a ‘professional’, one needs to have worked ‘in the night’ (sti nýhta). This phrase, very popular among musicians for describing their experiences, associates professional musicianship with late-hour labour. The ‘night’ (nýhta) is projected as both a rite of passage and a source of ‘street cred’ for a musician, as it is considered the sole context within which one can effectively earn a living.5 Consequently, the term ‘professional musician’ is a highly exclusive one: a singer who does not play an instrument on stage – either by choice or due to lack of training – a music teacher, a composer and a producer are all examples of individuals who fail to qualify as professional musicians insomuch as they are not paid to perform an instrument on stage. Specifically, the distinction between the ‘singer’ and the mousikós is defined by a synergy of criteria. Power, aesthetics, spectatorship, ideology, gender and education are just a few elements defining this division that is – on and off stage – constantly negotiated. What needs to be made clear here is that professional musicians’ identities are constantly shaped by their interaction with the music performed, the setting and the other participants. In the view of the mousikós, the local music culture consists of what is perceived as mutually exclusive sub-groups of labourer-musicians, star-singers (accomplished or wannabes) and greedy entrepreneurs. These sub-groups are often articulated through a Marxian class rhetoric with direct references to economic exploitation and social power dynamics.6 A romantic understanding of musical performance as a holistic phenomenon that synthesises individuals harmonically into a collective is rarely the case here. The tale of professional musicking in Athens is rather one of contradicting aesthetics and ideologies, or as this monograph argues, one of contested imaginaries. However frustrating, these contradictions are integral to the experience of professional music-making. The perceived inability of musicians to make a living out of settings that would suit their specialised music aesthetics has established a conceptual link between professionalism and the ‘mainstream’. In other words, in order to reach the status of a real professional, a musician needs to have collaborated with recognisable singers of the Athenian music industry. The inherent contradiction of this situation, namely the fact that prominence is achieved through the engagement with ill-regarded music genres, is one of the most central characteristics of Greek music culture. The association with ‘the mainstream’, seen either as a necessary hardship or an unbearable conviction, is a fundamental prerequisite for professional ranking, adding to its ambiguous character. It was this last component that granted me the professional status when I was 22 years old, profoundly changing the way that I was seen by my colleagues, my students and my friends and altering the role that I was expected to embody from that point on.7

Professional training and the acquisition of ‘skill’ One of the most frequently uttered clichés in the Greek music industry is that ‘the “papers” won’t make you a musician’ (ta ‘hartiá’ de se kánoun mousikó). This

Becoming a ‘Pro’ 31 assertion is primarily opposed to the belief (especially popular in parental guidance) that ‘you won’t go far in your life without “papers” ’. The word ‘papers’ is invariably used to describe official qualifications coming from established educational institutions. Urban Greece, especially after the 1960s, has attached a huge social value to education.8 Proof of this social value relies upon gathering qualifications that vary in ‘strength’ depending on the level of their recognition by the state. An average urban Greek adolescent would complete six years of primary school (dimotikó), three years of junior secondary school (gymnásio) and another three of senior secondary school (lýkeio). Children would be signed up for their first foreign language lessons (usually English) at privately owned evening schools (frontistíria) during primary school, with a second language often added when they enter secondary school. Simultaneously, most children take on a range of extracurricular activities the most prominent of which are music, sports and dance. These latter activities are usually discontinued during the last two years of secondary school when the pressure of studying for university entry exams increases. Universities in Greece are established and controlled by the state and are free for undergraduate studies.9 Secondary school students are admitted into Universities through a centralised process of examinations that is regarded as a very important turning point in every young adult’s life, one that is always described as a source of much stress. Most secondary school graduates are admitted into an academic institution and a large proportion of them graduate with a third-level qualification of some sort. Music education in Greece has undergone significant reconstruction in the last few decades. Until the late 1980s, systematic music education was only offered at private conservatoires (odeía) that attracted students of every age and offered evening classes usually specialised to a specific instrument (Kallergi-Panopoulou, 2015). The odeía have curricula that are centrally planned and recognised by the Ministry of Culture and initially only taught western classical music. Accordingly, odeía students are primarily trained in a specific instrument of the western musical tradition (piano, violin, flute and so on) and sometimes receive additional lessons in music theory. On the other hand, music education in the day-school (public or private) offers solely an introduction to some general musical concepts. In 1988, the first State Experimental Music Secondary School was founded in the east suburbs of Athens. The innovative feature of the school was not only that it extended the general secondary school curriculum by offering intensive music courses but also that it had a clear focus on Greek traditional music. The students of the Music Secondary School were taught Byzantine music and traditional instruments10 alongside Western classical music. Numerous ensembles (an element absent from most odeía) were formed in order to promote the students’ creative musical engagement. Although most of the taught ensembles belonged to either the traditional or the western end of the musical spectrum, the students did not hesitate to experiment with innovative blends of instruments and styles, incorporating a cosmopolitan trend of world-fusion music in a playful manner. The success and popularity of the first music high school led to the foundation of

32  Becoming a ‘Pro’ several others around Athens and the Greek periphery. Forty-three such schools are in existence today (Kallergi-Panopoulou, 2015: 157). Music Secondary School graduates always stress the difference between the education at the private odeía and their experience at school: Things were a bit ‘sterile’ at the odeío. Especially at Odeío Athinón where I was enrolled, teaching was quite strict and, even though I liked music, I wasn’t really looking forward to going to my lessons every week. It was later, within the [music secondary] school that I really fell in love with music, when I started playing with others. I was being taught how to collaborate with other musicians. (Anastasia – vocalist) The first specialised academic Department of Music Studies was founded in 1985, at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki. Two more departments soon appeared at the University of Athens and the Ionian University of Corfu. These departments are, today, mostly specialised in musicology (such as systematic, historical and ethnomusicology) and are not perceived as training institutions for performers. The only department that specialises in training instrumentalists of both Western European and Greek music was founded in 1998, at the University of Macedonia (again in Thessaloniki).11 The establishment of music high schools and relevant academic departments illustrates a government policy at the end of the 1980s, aiming to take over music education that was, until then, an exclusively private market endeavour.12 The struggle between private and public music institutions profoundly affected the course of educational practices. The qualifications provided, however, were always seen as more relevant to teaching than performing. Those who held diverse degrees and diplomas argued over their suitability to occupy the available teaching jobs at the private and public sector; yet everyone regarded the skill of a successful performer as existing in another sphere, away from official transcripts and the educational processes that resulted in their achievement. This is not to suggest that professional performers lacked official degrees, nor that they were unfamiliar with the educational systems and the debates surrounding them. My research reveals that the community of professional musicians contains both systematically trained and self-taught or trained-on-the-job individuals (although progressively more of the first kind). The assertion ‘the “papers” won’t make you a musician,’ instead, proposes an understanding of music professionalism independently from formalised training. In other words, although many of the instrumentalists undertake systematic education and use its certificates to pursue careers in teaching, they nonetheless portray their quest for success within the music business as depending on different prerequisites.13 Narratives of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in the professional music milieu mainly involve two factors: skill and strategies. But, if skill is not affirmed by certificates of formalised study, how is it obtained and assessed? My private interviews with professional musicians invariably started with a question about their early musical education and its relevance to their decision to enter professional music-making.14

Becoming a ‘Pro’ 33 Apart from a few of my informants who grew up in musical families, most musicians I encountered did not consciously link their early efforts in learning music to any professional ambitions. Most of them stress the playful and experimental character of their musical attempts as children: A guitar was brought home and I saw it as a toy. And I think this fact is what keeps me going up to now: I saw music as ‘playing’ from the beginning. (Kostas – bassist) My family had a tavern. My memories from growing up are all placed in that tavern on Páros island. In the tavern there was a piano; it came with the tavern when my folks rented it. One day, I think I was about five years old, they brought a technician to repair the piano. I will never forget that day when the piano spotlight was suddenly turned on! It was like this new game had started. So, I started messing with it and I discovered that I could play melodies. My mum saw it and she said ‘right, we’re getting a piano teacher!’ (Petros – bassist) We had a music teacher from Finland at primary school who brought a drumset for the school concerts. I sat on it once and I got obsessed! I remember battering on desks and cushions for the next few years. It wasn’t until I went to senior secondary school that I actually got my own drum-set. (Yiorgos – drummer) Conversely, some musicians portrayed their early encounters with education as rather unsuccessful and frustrating: I couldn’t communicate at all with my first music teacher. I was so nervous; I went to the lesson with my knees trembling! And he was not helpful, he discouraged me and I felt like I wasn’t able to do it at all. I even thought about giving up altogether. (Sofia – vocalist/flutist) I studied piano for five years during primary school but it was only because my parents signed me up for it. I never practised, I didn’t like it. It’s not like they forced me, I wanted it too. But I soon realised it wasn’t for me. (Tolis – guitarist) A decision to pursue further education in music was, quite often, met by a lack of parental support, resulting in strong tension within the family: During the last few years of secondary school I got more seriously into music but my parents were not encouraging at all. My father wanted me to become an archaeologist. But I put my foot down and soon I moved out of home. (Anastasia – vocalist)

34  Becoming a ‘Pro’ Music was always an important part of my life, but my family objected to my intention to pursue further studies and a career. My parents directed me to graphic arts, which I had studied for a while, as a more ‘rational’ employment option. (Vasso – guitarist) These two testimonies are offered by women, a factor quite significant as will be shown by the examination of gender roles within the music industry and the perception of instrumentalists by outsiders (such as the musicians’ families).15 They are, however, still indicative of an overall view of music as essentially an extracurricular non-remunerative activity. Whatever the initial difficulties and aspirations of young musicians, this is the story of those who ultimately entered the music business. In order to do so, they had to acquire the necessary skills through a process that involved a range of activities as students and during their first professional steps. The life stories of the 63 musicians whom I formally interviewed (supported by the numerous others that I heard in more informal settings) present a range of quite diverse learning processes. The main factors defining every musician’s learning course appeared to be the instrument of specialisation, the music genre that first attracted them into performing and the socio-cultural context of their upbringing. Instrument Musicians specialised in instruments of the Western classical tradition tend to have a more formal educational background, some of them holding a few degrees of odeía or even academic institutions. Such is usually the case with pianists (often working as keyboardists in popular music bands), violinists and wind instrumentalists (especially saxophone and flute players). The keyboardist of a popular music ensemble is the one that is more likely to have advanced training in reading and writing Western musical notation, a fact often contributing to his or her promotion to musical director (maéstros). A keyboard player’s frequent knowledge of Western harmony is further valued when it comes to arranging the different sections of the band, the backing vocals and the written parts of the ‘lead instruments’ such as the occasional violin or saxophone. Music genre The music genre that an instrumentalist started engaging with as a child or an adolescent also influences the kind of education he or she received. A  useful example is that of guitar players. The overwhelming majority of guitar players whom I met, had started practising for one of the following two reasons: either to accompany their singing (usually choosing an acoustic guitar) or because of their appreciation of the electric guitar as a solo instrument. It was mostly the latter kind who pursued careers as professional guitar players while the former rarely

Becoming a ‘Pro’ 35 regarded the instrument as a musical end in its own right. Subsequently, the education of the electric guitar players was shaped by their musical preferences: those who remained faithful to a rock musical idiom were not usually directed into any systematic education. A majority of them remained completely self-taught and would trace their professional training to band participation and the early years of work.16 The guitar players who became interested in jazz and jazz-fusion genres, which require much more sophisticated techniques and harmonic training, were typically the ones who undertook systematic lessons. Some of them departed for Western Europe or North America to be taught by the masters of such playing styles while others approached local guitar virtuosos, many of whom had returned from abroad quite recently.17 This category of jazz-trained guitar players is often characterised by a quite elaborate knowledge of Western classical and modal harmony, a fact that often informs their disregard for the self-taught kind who ‘can only improvise in blues-pentatonic scales’. This case similarly refers to bassguitar players and drummers. Socio-cultural environment of upbringing The third defining factor of a musician’s education relates to the place in which he or she was born and raised. Although all of the musicians who I interviewed are currently employed in the Athenian music industry and their lives revolve around the urban capital, some of them were born in provincial towns or even rural areas (Tsioulakis, 2011b). The private odeía system is well spread around the Greek periphery, thus providing the opportunity for an elementary music education to everyone who lives in proximity to an average-sized town. However, the odeía of the countryside rarely offer the range of musical styles and the contact with the ‘cosmopolitan’ teachers that one would find in large urban centres such as Athens and Thessaloniki. Accordingly, instrumentalists coming from non-urban areas are to a larger extent self-taught, while some of them only managed to find teachers for their specialised musical needs and tastes in later stages of their lives.18 Despite the diverse courses through which musicians found their way into the professional terrain, there is one important characteristic that they all share: versatility (see, also, Cottrell, 2007; Vaugeois, 2007). As dictated by the variety of influences that have been incorporated into Greek popular music (folk melodies, Latin rhythms, jazz harmony, rock instrumentation, electro-pop programming, to name but a few), the professional instrumentalist’s most important attribute is to be versatile. It is widely acknowledged that a musician’s move from a specialised musical milieu to the professional industry is marked by breadth over depth in their performing skills.19 While, for example, guitar players of rock genres would be appreciated by those who share their musical preferences for their profound knowledge and understanding of a specific rock playing style, in the professional setting they are credited for the amount of different styles that they can perform successfully (see Tsioulakis, 2018). In short, as far as employability is concerned, versatility is the optimal skill. The phrase that is commonly used to affirm a

36  Becoming a ‘Pro’ player’s ability in a given style is: ‘tó ‘hei!’ (he/she has it!). An instrumentalist credited with ‘having’ a large number of genres and playing styles is more employable and, consequently, more successful. This requirement, however, is often frustrating for musicians who are (or would like to have the opportunity to be) more specialised in their preferred style: In America, according to what I’ve heard anyway, you can be a specialised session musician. Someone is a session guitarist who plays jazz, another plays rock, punk, whatever. Here, you need to be able to play from Brit-pop to Papalábraina [stereotypical folk tune] in order to be employed. That’s why these bands have no character: because a jazz keyboardist, a rock drummer, and a laïkós bouzouksís [bouzouki-player], are all working together for an éntechno singer. (Alekos – guitarist) This view explains the reluctance of musicians to link professional skill with formal education. Extended study in an odeío or an academic institution and the ‘papers’ that stand as its proof, verify the expertise of a musician in a specific instrument of a defined musical tradition, as well as his or her ability to transmit this expertise through teaching. Professional music-making, on the other hand, requires an ability to switch between styles and genres and the eagerness to sacrifice what some musicians would consider a ‘knowledgeable’ performance in favour of efficiency and time management. This ability is largely seen as an element that can only be obtained through experience ‘in the night’ (sti nýhta) and the training it entails cannot be certified by any kind of official documents.

Social strategies and networking According to Merriam, a ‘criterion of major importance . . . concerns the acceptance of the individual as a specialist or professional. . . . the “true” specialist is a social specialist; he must be acknowledged as a musician by the members of the society in which he is a part’ (1964: 125). What does this kind of social specialisation include? If skill is essentially seen as depending on such ambiguous virtues as versatility and adaptability, and since these virtues are being continuously assessed by one’s colleagues, strategies refer to the social management of skill aiming at professional success. Skill and strategies exist and operate in a complementary fashion: although strategies involve processes qualitatively different than the acquisition of musical skill, these processes are socially valid only if they are seen as promoting an existing skill. In other words, professional strategies are most fruitful when hidden, and success is always portrayed as primarily dependent on the skill of a musician. However, as this section will illustrate, skill is publicised and socially recognised through a set of strategies with which, in their pursuit of a career, musicians are often more preoccupied than the development of the skill itself.

Becoming a ‘Pro’ 37 Some ethnomusicological literature concerning musicians and their social behaviour has illustrated the complexity of strategies involved in achieving professional success. Cottrell (2002) has elaborated on the practice of ‘deputising’ among professional musicians in London. His analysis has shown that the subtle social dangers involved in the process of double-booking concerts and finding replacements, result in sophisticated strategies that the musicians invent and employ. Christian has also discussed the strategic planning that semi-professional jazz musicians in London utilise in order ‘to satisfy musical ambitions while minimising the pressures on them which would be likely to make them compromise their musical integrity’ (1987: 238). Based on research among five classically trained female musicians in England, Victoria Armstrong emphasises their ‘insistence that any work they took on -whether paid or unpaid- had to have an affective component, affording them some level of enjoyment and giving them a sense of fulfilment and opportunities to explore their creativity’ (Armstrong, 2013: 308). In a critical piece on the demands of the so-called ‘creative industries’, Angela McRobbie has emphasized the extensive work that is dedicated to networking for these types of workers in their pursuit of ‘success’: A single big hit is what almost everyone inside the creative economy is hoping for, because it can have a transformative effect, it can lift the individual out of the pressure of multi-tasking and all the exhausting networking this entails. . . . This projected passage from micro-activity carried out at home or round the kitchen table to macro-activity involving key players from the global culture industry also functions as another mode of self-disciplining. (2011: 126) Contributing to this literature, what follows will describe a set of strategies exercised by musicians aiming for professional success in the Athenian music business. Rather than a preconceived plan, these strategies should be seen more as a sort of social improvisation (Hallam and Ingold, 2007). As the following ethnographic examples and the discrepancies between individual utterances will show, when it comes to professional strategies, musicians ‘play it by ear’. Participation in backing bands for popular singers in Athens – one of the main employment options for instrument players – is not determined by auditions. A musician who is proposed for a job in a band, frequently has to show up for a brief ‘jam’ with the rest of the players and even participate in a few rehearsals before the collaboration is established. However, these ‘jams’ and the negotiations with the band’s musical director do not resemble open auditions or job interviews for which anyone can apply.20 In order for a musician to be considered for a band position he or she needs to either be invited by the musical director himself, or recommended by one of the existing members. Consequently, musicians put significant effort into making sure that when a musical director is in need of a specific instrumentalist, they will be among the first to ‘pop into his mind’. As this process dictates, in order for musicians to be successful, their

38  Becoming a ‘Pro’ skill is only valuable if their colleagues are constantly made aware of its existence. This, then, is a matter of strategy. In the summer of 2007, I was invited to join a band called Groove Geishas as a keyboard player. The band consisted of Achilleas on bass and Babis on electric guitar, both of whom I had played with before in another band called Rustík,21 Stelios on drums and Artemis, Achilleas’s girlfriend, on vocals.22 The repertoire of the Groove Geishas mainly included covers of current American R’n’B and funk hits, played in a more jazzy and improvisational style than in the original recordings. By performing their own arrangements of the songs with interjected solos or ‘jamming’ parts, the Groove Geishas built a show where well-known songs served as a ground for playful interaction including space for improvisation. This arrangement was perceived as ‘the best of both worlds’ since it allowed for some musical freedom while the audience would be familiar with the songs which would keep them interested and entertained. Although everyone deemed this collaboration very enjoyable, the musicians’ further professional obligations did not allow it to develop into anything more than an occasional occurrence. The first Groove Geishas concert in which I participated was held in a small rock club in the north of Athens. Although the musical part of the performance was deemed very successful, a fact suggested both by audience participation and the musicians’ enjoyment, the locale of the gig was judged inappropriate. The

Figure 2.1 The Groove Geishas at club Lazy, Athens

Becoming a ‘Pro’ 39 musicians were frustrated by the ‘stuffy’ atmosphere of the small club, which was made worse by the hot Athenian summer, as well as the sound volume restrictions. A second gig was situated at an open-terrace bar, in the western Athenian suburbs. For this concert, Achilleas invited three very established (albeit young) jazz instrumentalists to attend, who, as common practice dictates, would eventually join the band on stage for a ‘jam session.’ The arrival of the three jazz musicians at the club a few minutes before the gig caused great anxiety among the members of the Groove Geishas, especially since Achilleas had not informed the rest of the band that they were invited. Despite the initial anxiety, the Geishas performed to their standards and the visitors expressed their amazement at the skill and the energy of the players. They, moreover, eagerly shared the stage with the band for brief periods, during which they continuously affirmed their enormous enjoyment verbally and by the use of bodily gestures.23 Bands such as the Groove Geishas, which experiment with foreign pop music and jazzy arrangements, do not enjoy massive popularity in Athens. The absence of Greek lyrics, the perceived elaborate playing style and the references to a repertoire with which the majority of the Athenian audience is not familiar, limits their followers to small numbers. Consequently, bands of this type always make an effort to invite people to their gigs in order to make sure that the audience will be large enough for a successful show. The invitation, however, of some of the most successful musicians of the local professional scene to the event serves an entirely different purpose. A gig that gives musicians the opportunity to play more freely provides the ideal opportunity for an illustration of their skill. Having their colleagues in the audience, especially when they are more established in the music industry than the band on stage, offers the chance to the band’s instrumentalists to advertise themselves. Since there are no open auditions for music jobs, this is an ideal (yet subtle) way for a musician to demonstrate his or her abilities.24 Furthermore, the band is expected to invite the musicians from the audience to ‘jam’ with them on stage. Failure to act according to this norm would be perceived as an amateurish mistake and would often be openly criticised. The manner in which this brief ‘jam’ is orchestrated was almost identical in every occasion that I encountered it: a singer or instrumentalist would be invited on stage by a member of the playing band (usually the one who knows them best) by announcing their name on the microphone. The musician would typically decline the offer at least once, saying something along the lines of ‘oh no . . . I haven’t prepared anything, you guys are playing great, I’d embarrass myself!’ After the band insisting for some time, supported by the audience’s (spontaneous or orchestrated) applause, the musician invariably joins them on stage and performs one or two songs. This is a quite sensitive negotiation. I have witnessed several misunderstandings arising from the ‘wrong’ handling of this practice. Bands not inviting their peers from the audience to ‘jam’, invitations being declined, or musicians monopolising the ‘jam session’ for too long after accepting an invitation are examples of condemned behaviour.

40  Becoming a ‘Pro’ I argue that this whole process of invitations (to the gig and on stage) is inextricably linked to the strategy of skill advertisement. The band invites the established musicians to the gig in order for them to witness the band’s abilities in a performance setting that allows for some improvisation and spontaneous creativity. During a private interview, Achilleas explained: ‘Jam nights’ are the best for meeting other musicians. I mean, as long as the level is high. If you end up playing with students, this could have a negative impact on your image. But the Geishas were good advertisement for me. I met a lot of musicians who had heard me playing with them and they were like ‘Oh, Achilleas from the Geishas! He’s a good player!’ Another musician also stressed the importance of being seen by potential employers while performing in a creative and playful context: You need to keep your energy and your spirits high, that’s what other musicians will like about you. M – (éntechno singer/songwriter) saw me playing in an amazing funk band, that’s how I got the job. If he saw me working somewhere where I was bored out of my mind, he would have never asked me. (Thanos – drummer) On the other hand, the official performers give their special guests the opportunity to illustrate their own skill, as a reciprocal offering. This latter procedure has a dual aim: first, by inviting the musicians on stage, the members of the band show their respect and modesty towards the perceived masters, thus disguising their intention to show off. Second, by briefly offering their stage and audience to the invited musicians and transforming themselves into backing instrumentalists, they illustrate an understanding of practical reciprocity: the guests were listeners for quite some time – it is now their turn to be performers. As this example clearly shows, the strategy of promoting oneself professionally is intertwined not only with their skill but also with appropriate socio-musical behaviour. After the Groove Geishas gig had finished, we all packed our equipment and cleared the stage. As I was preparing to leave, Achilleas approached me and suggested that I joined him and the guest musicians for a drink at a live-music bar nearby, where a band of Cuban musicians was apparently playing. I apologised for not being able to follow since I had promised a ride home to some friends in the audience, but I also wondered about his eagerness to carry on after having been at the bar since early that evening and playing until 1 am. He responded, ‘well, I never go to bed early, but anyhow, we need to do some PR right?’ Evidently, it is during these marginal time frames before and after the performance that the most important professional negotiations take place. The time immediately after a successful concert, while the impression of listening and playing is still vivid, presents the most suitable opportunity for musicians to discuss further

Becoming a ‘Pro’ 41 professional plans. As I found out the next day, one of the Cuban performers who lived in Athens recognised Achilleas and his company and invited them for yet another ‘jam session’ that night. The reciprocity of shifting between stage and audience roles that I touched upon in the previous example, also translates in larger scales than the microcosm of a specific concert. Generally speaking, attending concerts is one of the primary strategies employed to increase the ‘likeability’ of a musician, since it is perceived as an utterly altruistic act. During my fieldwork, being more consciously preoccupied with issues of reciprocal actions than when I was only involved as a musician, I attended a substantial number of my informants’ concerts. I eventually discovered that it was considerably easier to arrange an interview with a musician just after their concert than through a phone call at another time. Part of the reason was that musicians felt obliged because of my presence as a member of the audience at their concert. In one instance, when I was planning to attend an éthnik-jazz gig, I called one of my informants, Alexandros, and asked him to accompany me since he knew the front-man of the performing band. He declined the offer by saying: ‘this guy hasn’t shown up to any of my gigs in months! Why would I keep going to his?’ Ultimately, concert frequenting is seen as a necessary part of a musician’s social behaviour. Indeed, I suggest that attendance at concerts operates as an equivalent of gift exchange in traditional, non-monetary economies: it is seen as an offering that results in obligation of the other part, which can only be resolved by reciprocation.25 Both the example of the Groove Geishas jam session and the practice of reciprocal concert attendance suggest that a musician is never completely satisfied as a member of the audience. Consequently, obligation is seen as the ultimate reason why a musician would be attending concerts featuring his or her colleagues. This realisation can lead to a number of conclusions regarding conceptions of listening and participating among Athenian musicians, on which I will concentrate later in this book.26 What I am suggesting here, however, is that concert frequenting is inextricably linked with musicians’ strategies of professional networking, since it leads to appreciation by their immediate social environment. This appreciation can be considered as a necessary but not sufficient condition for professional success. Even its very necessity would often be challenged in formal verbal discourses; a musical director would never admit that he employed musicians due to their social skills or because he was flattered by their repeated presence at his gigs. At the same time, musicians understand that their absence from this circle of reciprocal concert attendance would handicap their pursuit of professional success. But this strategy needs to remain hidden; if the musician’s presence is openly viewed as an attempt to achieve a personal goal, then it is rendered illicit. If someone is a not a good player, I won’t go to see his gig. Why would I? So that he’ll give me a job later? I don’t care. I pity all those people who go around doing public relations just to get more gigs. (Nikos – bassist)

42  Becoming a ‘Pro’ In his classic study of gift exchange, Marcel Mauss has shown how the practice of reciprocity is ‘apparently free and disinterested but nevertheless constrained and self-interested’ (2001 [1954]: 4). Such practices as favours, gifts and flattery are invariably social strategies resulting in an obligation for reciprocation. Mauss, moreover, argues that although these acts are presented in a somewhat voluntary form, ‘in the final analysis they are strictly compulsory, on pain of private or public warfare’ (Ibid: 7). In Mauss’s tribal ethnographic examples, the ‘warfare’ takes a quite literal sense. This is not to suggest, however, that ignoring practices of reciprocity cannot lead into social conflicts of other sorts within post-industrial contexts. As the previous discussions have illustrated, prolonged absence from the concert circles can result in the social marginalisation of a musician. Mauss has actually discussed the similarity of gift exchange practices with social invitations in modern societies. The invitation, he argued, ‘must be given and must be accepted’ (Ibid: 84). Moreover, quite similar to gift exchange, the practice of offering and accepting concert invitations is a matter of ‘style’, where timing and occasion are crucial (Bourdieu, 1977: 6). If one is to return the favour of participating as a member of the audience in a colleague’s concerts and ‘jam sessions’ too soon, then the voluntary effect disappears. In summary, Bourdieu argues that if the system is to work, the agents must not be entirely unaware of the truth of their exchanges, which is made explicit in the anthropologist’s model, while at the same time they must refuse to know and above all to recognize it’. (Ibid) I suggest that this is how we should read the outspoken disapproval of selfinterested behaviour in the previous quotes. When I asked Nikos, the bassist quoted earlier, about the possible repercussions that his recent absence from gigs around Athens could have on his career, he responded: ‘I don’t care, I have enough music degrees to get me jobs as a music teacher. I don’t need to pretend to be enjoying their concerts anymore’. This last utterance brings us full circle back to the initial argument: the skills and strategies employed in the pursuit of a professional career in music are seen as a subject of social negotiation; therefore, they cannot be associated with formal education. This fact, however, is not necessarily seen as positive. In the previous quote, Nikos shows his preference for teaching, a milieu where concrete knowledge is valued and rewarded rather than professional musicking with its network of social assessment. Although music education often involves its own set of professional strategies, here it is portrayed as an environment of more ‘fairness’ and less politicking. This negotiation of musical skill through social strategies is always a conscious part of the musician’s representation of professional life: I always tell my students that the best ticket into this circuit is what the other musicians say about you. It’s they who will call you for jobs. (Mihalis – drummer)

Becoming a ‘Pro’ 43 These circumstances are described through a dual rhetoric that, on the one hand, disapproves of easily detectable public-relations techniques, while simultaneously implying that no one will go very far without employing them.

The discourse of ‘Success’ Since employability in the music business does not rely solely on skill but also on subtle social strategies, the term ‘good musician’ is not inevitably synonymous to ‘successful musician’.27 ‘Success’ (epityhía) is seen as a combination of achievements which, not unlike musical skill, are socially assessed, but through a different set of criteria. These criteria can vary significantly depending on the person describing them, the context of the discussion and the narrative by which they are evoked. In practice, the criteria of success and the importance attached to them by an individual musician become evident in his or her decisions. Despite variations, conscious verbal expression and practical decision making have illustrated four main criteria of success in the professional music scene: reputation, payment rate, professional viability and range of working options. These criteria are evidently interconnected and overlapping; their conceptual essence, nonetheless, differs. Reputation Professional instrumentalists in Athens form a fluid community that exists in (and becomes defined by) a constant opposition to other professional communities acting within the music business (such as singers, producers, entrepreneurs, technicians and so on).28 The criterion of reputation, then, works on two levels: first, within the community of instrumentalists and, second, across the diverse professional groups that are involved in the operation of the music scene. It is, nevertheless, the latter level that is mainly regarded as evidence of professional success. I will illustrate this with an example. Vasso is a middle-aged guitarist who, after being employed in several music jobs on the Greek periphery, decided to advance her musical training by studying jazz performance and composition in Los Angeles. Following the end of her studies, she worked as a guitarist and a composer in California for over ten years before she decided (for personal reasons unrelated to music) to return to Greece in the year 2000. Her reappearance in the Athenian music scene was met by recognition and respect from her colleagues. Her reputation among jazz instrumentalists grew fast, resulting in a growing number of students. One of her most prominent guitar students was C –, a very wellknown singer/songwriter of the éntechno genre. Additionally, C – was her first employer as a paid performer in Athens, and the person she acknowledges as helping her ‘crack her way into the mainstream industry’. In our private interview, she described her recent experience in the professional scene by saying: I shouldn’t complain because I’ve always been very lucky. C – treated me with respect and helped me a lot. So did D – and T – [other established

44  Becoming a ‘Pro’ songwriters]. They even acknowledged me in the liner notes of their CDs, a great honour for me. What is significant in the previous example, however, is that Vasso was already recognised as an exceptional guitarist among her peers when she returned to Greece. Moreover, C – had already illustrated his admiration by asking her to be his teacher. Nonetheless, Vasso chose to refer to the personal acknowledgements in the CDs as evidence of her success in the music business. In other words, she regarded this written recognition as a great honour, even though it came from a person who was ultimately her student. I argue that the explanation for this paradox lies in the differentiation between two types of recognition. By selecting her as a teacher, C – demonstrated his admiration towards Vasso’s musical skill. By promoting and crediting her publicly, however, he acknowledged her as an important player within local popular music-making, thus increasing her professional reputation. Returning to my initial distinction, the first fact identified Vasso as a good musician; but it was the second fact that ranked her as ‘successful’.29 This criterion relates to my initial self-recollection of being ‘turned’ into a professional musician. This process bears an ambiguous relationship with the ‘mainstream’ music business and the figures that dominate them. Although the power-holders (especially popular singers) are routinely portrayed by instrumentalists as less musically knowledgeable than themselves, their recognition is regarded an essential prerequisite for the achievement of professional success. Payment rate ( kassé) Attention to musicians’ economic and employment relationships within local music industries can reveal processes that impact powerfully on how music production is structured and conceptualised. As Ana Hofman has argued, in shifting the focus to the economic perspective and the musician – patron relationship, we do not reduce professional musicianship to economic imperatives but rather point to the importance of musicians’ economic realities, of concrete working practices and professional musicians’ subjectivities, without implying the dominance of one aspect over another. (2015: 6) During my ethnographic research before ‘The Crisis’, payment rates constituted a central, if ambiguous, aspect of success. Even though money serves as the centre of any professional negotiation, and as a very popular theme for discussion in the workplace, almost every musician I have ever met seemed to have a rather disastrous relationship with it. During the winter season of 2008–2009, right before ‘The Crisis’ reconfigured the whole spectrum of economic relationships within the Athenian music scene,30 an average payment for an instrumentalist working for a popular singer in an Athenian magazí was between €250 and €400 per night.

Becoming a ‘Pro’ 45 Given the fact that most clubs were open for three nights a week, an instrumentplayer made more than €3,000 per month throughout the season, which corresponded, for example, to roughly double the salary of a permanent school teacher at the time. It is, then, remarkable that even young, bachelor instrumentalists consistently complained about their poor finances. This phenomenon is primarily connected to the precarity of the profession.31 The busy and stable winter season is followed by a rather stressful summer period during which a musician could be earning anything from double the winter salary (if the employing singer has a busy touring schedule) to nothing at all. Moreover, finding profitable employment for one year does not ensure a similar occurrence for the next winter season. This situation makes payment a rather vague factor for judging success, since it could easily be attributed to temporal good fortune: ‘Even if you’re working with the “elite” singers, you don’t know what the future holds. It only means that you’re earning good money at that precise moment’ (Yiorgos – drummer). What is, instead, regarded as a more concrete criterion is the kassé,32 namely, the amount of money that a particular musician habitually claims and receives for a specific job. The kassé, rather than revealing how much a musician is currently earning, is seen as depicting how much their service is actually worth. A particularly illustrative example is that of studio recordings. While, for example, a young and emerging bass player could ask for €50 per hour to perform for an album recording, an established, experienced colleague might request as much as four times that. Such a high kassé serves as evidence of professional success, despite the fact that the young musician might ultimately be making more money due to the fact that he is more affordable and thus more employable: The payment I get for working at the magazí doesn’t have as much to do with how many hours I’m on stage, but with how ‘big’ my name is. Petros [well known bassist] for example, can ask for 600 euro a night and he might get it. I won’t! But then, they might prefer me if they can’t afford him. (Achilleas – bassist) An interesting incident took place when Panos, a young percussionist, was invited to play at an album recording that I was attending. Panos had initially requested 100 euro as his payment for playing in two songs (about three hours’ work), a price that the producer found very reasonable. After the end of the recording, Panos approached the producer and handed him a taxi receipt for 20 euro, asking for this amount to be added to his fee as ‘travelling expenses’. The producer did not object to the extra payment but, after Panos’s departure, he commented in front of everybody in the studio: ‘that was so petty! I would have given him 200 euro from the beginning if he had asked and I’d have twice the respect for him that I have now!’ In almost every professional context, claims for travelling expenses would be a reasonable common practice. For a musician in the Athenian scene, however, payment is not seen as compensation for his or her time,

46  Becoming a ‘Pro’ as much as an appreciation of status and expertise. Consequently, by asking for a larger payment beforehand, Panos would have covered his travelling expenses while having avoided the socially awkward incident and at the same time valuing himself through establishing a higher kassé. Evidently, payment rates are not only the result of professional success, often they are the means through which a social status of ‘successfulness’ is publicly claimed. Viability As the precarity of the profession of freelance musicians dictates, viability in the music industry is a challenging goal. Consequently, one of the most important elements of success is professional ‘security’ (asfália). In other words, musicians are often more preoccupied with establishing a network of relationships that will ensure their long-term presence in the music scene than with increasing their current income. This issue often relates to ‘loyalty’ to an employer (usually a singer). Finding employment in a popular singer’s band is always considered the beginning of a rather fragile collaboration. Part of the musician’s duties (the most important one, some would argue) is to be constantly available. This availability can prove to be extremely costly for a musician who frequently earns his or her income by being simultaneously employed in a few different settings (teaching, recording, performing and so on). The issue of ‘loyalty’ became very apparent to me during the rehearsal period of the autumn of 2008. Very soon after I  started my doctoral fieldwork, in July 2008, I received a proposal to work as a keyboard player in the band of a renowned Greek male pop-star. The job offer concerned live performances at a newly built magazí for three nights per week. The proposed opening date was 23 October. The rehearsals for the band, however, started as early as 1 September, and, as common practice dictates, they were unpaid. The frequency and duration of rehearsals increased as the opening date approached, leaving virtually no time for any of the musicians involved to engage in anything other than the preparation for the show. The rehearsals started usually around noon and lasted until 3 or 4 am. In addition to that, due to disagreements over the decoration of the club, the opening date kept being postponed until the club eventually opened on 4 December. This delay meant that the musicians involved were not paid (since according to the agreement they were only to be paid for public performances), and they were also unable to occupy themselves with any other profitable activities (such as teaching or recording) since their absolute availability was required throughout the preparation period. Being fully employed yet unpaid for a period of three months, led all of the musicians to mental and financial exhaustion. What is surprising, however, is that none of the seven instrumentalists involved seriously considered quitting or finding any other employment on the side. Although everyone repeatedly expressed their frustration over the circumstances, no one acted upon it by making themselves (even temporarily) unavailable.

Becoming a ‘Pro’ 47

Figure 2.2  Instrumentalists waiting patiently for their rehearsal to start

A similar case was narrated to me in a private interview with Alekos, a young guitarist: Alekos: I was calling D – [singer] all summer long, asking him what the plans were for the winter. ‘Don’t worry,’ he kept saying, ‘we have loads of gigs booked, and even a standard magazí that we’re going to be in.’ Then he vanished. He wouldn’t answer his phone, texts, nothing! So when another band-leader called me for a job I didn’t know what to do. I had to say ‘wait, I’m not sure . . . we’ll see.’ Ioannis: And could you not say ‘yes’ to them? And forget about D – ? Alekos: No, obviously I couldn’t do that. Then D – would be furious! Then, he called me months later and he had no gigs! So I lost the other job for nothing. But what can you do? This illustration of professional ‘loyalty’ and dedication is seen as a prerequisite for successful collaboration with a desired employer. This can only be explained by the presumed stability that it ensures. By building strong relationships with a popular singer and their production team, musicians secure their viability within the music business, a factor more desirable in the long-term than temporal profit.

48  Becoming a ‘Pro’ Viability is thus regarded as an attribute that has been acquired through sacrifices, and subsequently, a highly respected one. Musicians will never fail to acknowledge that a ‘successful musician’ is not the one busy with multiple engagements, but the one who has stable long-term collaborations and a constant presence within the popular music business. Range of options The last factor of success refers to the range of working options. What differentiates this factor from the previously elaborated quest for professional ‘viability’ is its focus on personal aesthetics. As mentioned already, the majority of instrumentalists (especially ones trained in jazz and rock genres on whom this book primarily focuses) are characterised by various degrees of distaste towards ‘mainstream’ Greek popular music. Accordingly, despite the working conditions involved, some performing jobs are viewed as more attractive than others depending on the proximity of the music genre to the individual musician’s taste. For example, many musicians would express their preference of working for éntechno (‘art-song’) singers, since their music is ‘not as bad as the laїkó’ (‘urban-folk’).33 As a result, having a range of working options across different popular music genres is perceived as an important accomplishment. During rehearsals with the previously mentioned pop-star, the second keyboard player, Vaggelis, told me that he considered himself ‘lucky to be working within the pop circuit’ as he was tired of laїkó. In his words, ‘I had several offers to work for many skyládes,34 but I feel that I have reached a point where I have better options’. Another musician who was working for an éntechno singer confessed to me that, every night after the performance, he had to ‘go home and study the new laiká souksé [urban-folk hits] ‘cause I won’t always have the option of working for éntechno singers, so I can’t afford being left behind!’ (Vaios – bassist). Interestingly enough, both musicians kept complaining during our collaboration about the fact that their previous jobs in the laїkó genre involved more performances per week and a longer playing season, thus being more profitable. This suggests that the reason why they considered themselves lucky to have the option to work for the pop and the éntechno genres was, above all, connected to their aesthetic preferences. The previous ethnographic examples illustrate the way in which a discourse of ‘success’ can be broken down into more concrete criteria such as reputation, payment rates (kassé), viability and inter-genre range of employment options. The clarification of these criteria, however, does not intend to overlook their interconnectedness. As expected, an increased reputation would possibly result in a larger kassé, but, as the recording studio example has shown, the process could equally be reversed. In addition, a documented long-term presence of an instrumentalist in the scene (viability) could widen and enhance his/her performing options. Nonetheless, by being employed within a specific circuit for an extensive period and being loyal to one singer, instrumentalists can end up being completely associated

Becoming a ‘Pro’ 49 with the respective music style, a fact that prevents their mobility across genres. Consequently, the discussed factors of success represent a variety of preoccupations according to which musicians make their everyday career choices. These factors can only be understood in relation to each other, as they often are complementary or contradictory depending on the circumstances.

Conclusion: a first approach to work vs play As this chapter has shown, a professional career in the Athenian music industry is realised through three stages: the acquisition of the relevant skill, the engineering of social strategies and the accomplishment of – a very fragile – success. One might suggest that this process is not specific to musicians; a teacher, a lawyer or an academic would have described similar stages in their respective career narratives. Yet, I would propose two significant differentiating factors for musicians: the early age in which this process began and the centrality of musicality to the cultural identity of every individual. As suggested by the life narratives that I gathered, musicians in Athens start their music education in early childhood.35 Understandably, musical training at this age is linked to a set of icons and fantasies of the future connected to an imaginary of ‘musical life’. Since these childhood musical idols were (at least for the performers of ‘Western’ instruments who are under scrutiny in this monograph) invariably foreign, the created imagery often refers to a remote culture or even a cinematically portrayed past time.36 However, as I have illustrated in this chapter, the most significant part of the experience of music professionalism is its relationship with the Greek ‘mainstream’. As a result, every young musician’s first contact with the Athenian music business leads to an immediate harsh realisation of the discrepancy between this imagined life of creativity, appreciation by the public and glamour and the hardship of working (and networking) within the ‘mainstream’ Greek industry. One of the earliest aims of ethnomusicological literature was the conceptualisation of musicality as a primal human attribute.37 Either seen as a socio-cultural phenomenon of unity through religious/ritualistic or secular practices in the societies that ethnomusicology has traditionally examined (Feld, 1982; Roseman, 1991; Reily, 2002), or as a differentiating factor of personal taste and identity construction in urban societies (Stokes, 2011; DeNora, 2000; Fonarow, 2005), music has always been central to the human condition. It is what DeNora (1999) calls a ‘technology of the self’. In Martin Stokes’s words, ‘a moment’s reflection on our own musical practices brings home to us the sheer profusion of identities and selves that we possess’ (1994: 4). Performance and consumption, aesthetics and style, skill and evaluation are crucial factors of musicking, intrinsic to processes of collective and individual cultural identification. There lies the particularity of music-making as a professional endeavour: it entails making a living out of a fundamental characteristic of one’s cultural identity. This fact shapes the experience of professionalism in a profound way. Upon their entry into the professional

50  Becoming a ‘Pro’ milieu, young musicians discover that the mainstream music scene offers very limited space for the expression of their preconceived musical identities. This environment is, thus, linked to an experience of alienating labour. The discussion of professionalism and its strategies offers the grounds for a first approach to the ‘work’ vs ‘play’ dichotomy: while ‘play’ is connected to a performance of musicality depending upon the participants’ skill, ‘work’ refers to the ambiguously calculated social practices of paid music labour. A musician only relies on the acquisition of a certain skill in order to ‘play’. ‘Work’, on the other hand, and especially ‘successful work’, is judged, as illustrated earlier, by a variety of other factors. This dichotomy will be examined in various ways throughout this book revealing its multiplicity in rhetoric and practice. What needs to be clarified is that this dualism is more than an epistemological schema; its construction can be detected in a set of discourses generated by the local musicians themselves and the way that they divide their activities. The next few chapters will show how this division between expressive creativity and disengaged labour can be both a subjugating force and a tool for resistance.

Notes 1 On ethnik-jazz and its place within the professional music scenes of Athens, see Tsioulakis (2011a, 2019a). 2 Throughout this book, I will be identifying professional session instrumentalists through their first names (or pseudonyms when it was required by the informant), while only using initials for well-known popular singers. See Chapter 1 for more details on methodological concerns and anonymity. 3 For discussions on the history and aesthetics of the éntechno genre, see Fabbri and Tsioulakis (2016), Varelopoulos (2019), Papanikolaou (2007), Tambakaki (2019) and Tragaki (2005, 2019). 4 See Scharff (2018), Cloonan (2014) and Hofman (2015) for three recent approaches to musicians as labourers in connection to unionisation and working precariousness, and Morcom (2013) for a discussion of professional performance and its connection to post-colonialism and morality among female and transgender dancers in India. Some very in-depth research on professionals within creative industries, including musicians, has been conducted by Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2010, 2011), which fruitfully combines ethnography and qualitative data. Some further enlightening contributions on the strategies of professional musicians outside Europe and the US have been offered by Feld (2012) in his study of jazz musicians in Ghana, Ottosson (2009) focusing on Aboriginal Australian Desert Musicians, Packman (2009, 2011) in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil and Moisala (2013) among musicians in Nepal. 5 Payments for professional instrumentalists ‘in the night’ before The Crisis were very generous. During my years of systematic fieldwork in Athens between 2007 and 2009, musicians in popular nightclubs were receiving between 200 and 400 euro per night. However, as Chapter 5 will show, with the increased precarisation of all professional domains due to austerity after 2010, compensations for musicians have diminished, and even these ‘secure’ jobs have become a lot less frequent and stable. 6 This will be discussed in Chapter 4. 7 Cottrell has also argued that financial income is for the young professional ‘the thing which makes the greatest impact on your peers’ (2004: 9). 8 There are two words in the Greek language that could be translated as ‘education’: ekpaídefsi (εκπαίδευση, literally ‘education’) and mórfosi (μόρφωση), which literally

Becoming a ‘Pro’ 51 would be translated as ‘shaping’. This second word, which is more commonly used to refer to the benefits of education, connects it to the shaping of a worthy and valued social being. 9 The public and free status of universities is established by the Greek Constitution. Discussions concerning the recognition of private universities have been taking place since the early 2000s as directed by official policies of the European Union and specifically the ‘Bologna declaration’ of 1999. This discussion has caused much controversy in Greek academic society, which was demonstrated through numerous student protests and endless debates in Parliament. 10 Alexandros Kapsokavadis (2017) offers an in-depth account of the teaching of traditional instruments in the music high schools and the purposes it served. In his analysis, although the introduction of traditional music education in the urban music schools served, to some extent, a political agenda of reifying Greekness, the result was that numerous students became interested in traditional music-making of the wider Mediterranean region. Through their love for the instruments’ particular aural quality and technical potentials, students engaged with cosmopolitan musical experimentations that transcended the initial nationalist notions. The role of the State Music Secondary Schools in the neo-traditional music revival in urban Greece has also been explored by Dionyssiou (2000) and Kallimopoulou (2009: 135–145). 11 See Hapsulas, 2015: 86. 12 The music education of the past 20 years has been marked by endless negotiations and antagonisms between the existing private institutions and the newly founded public ones. These negotiations were additionally handicapped by the division between the Ministry of Culture that controlled the private odeía and the Ministry of Education that was responsible for the operation of the music high schools and university departments (See Kallergi-Panopoulou, 2015: 158). The antagonism focused primarily on the recognition of the diverse qualifications and their relevance to specific employment opportunities such as teaching in public schools, music schools and so on. Since the economic crisis and political turmoil of 2009, many odeía are struggling to survive, others have closed and the Music Secondary Schools are suffering from lack of funding. Hence, the discussions over the integration and systematisation of music education have been transformed and to some extent sidelined by financial issues. (See Poulakis, 2015; Hapsulas, 2015). 13 I will examine the role of ‘musical knowledge’ and its recognition as cultural capital within the music workplace in Chapter 4. 14 I explore the connections between life-narratives of early contact with music and musicians’ present social consciousness in another article (Tsioulakis, 2011b). 15 A discussion of the musician as a special or ‘deviant’ social being will be attempted in the next chapter along with a focus on the gender dynamics within the music community/ies. 16 This fact also resonates with Ruth Finnegan’s work with amateur musicians in Milton Keynes. She reports that ‘rock players . . . typically learn “on the job” by becoming members of local groups, sometimes with practically no previous musical experience at all but developing their skills through local practising and performing’ (1989: 18). Lucy Green (2001) has also elaborated on how different methods of learning are incorporated by different music genres, even within the Western context. More recently, some of these norms are challenged by rock guitar players who are dedicating their efforts to developing a systematic curriculum (see, also, Guest-Scott, 2008, for some similar cases in the US). One such case is examined in Chapter 6, focusing on Katerina and George, the founders of the teaching centre MusicFor. 17 Tony Whyton (2006) has discussed the increasing institutionalisation of jazz music education in the United States and the United Kingdom. Although Greek music institutions are far from achieving the American standards according to which they model their jazz curricula, it is certainly true that Athenian jazz-trained musicians have been

52  Becoming a ‘Pro’ subjected to more systematic education than their colleagues who specialise in rock music genres. 18 This, admittedly, is not the case for traditional music. The training of traditional musicians, especially as it is practised in the periphery, exceeds the scope of this research. For a discussion of traditional music and education, see Kallimopoulou (2009) and Kavouras (1999). 19 Cottrell (2007) has also illustrated that professional musicians in London have to become proficient in different music styles in order to survive financially. Moreover, as Cottrell asserts, ‘this kind of bi- or polymusicality is continually subject to scrutiny . . . by the most unforgiving and discerning of individuals: those other musicians with whom one must play and upon whom one’s future employment prospects depend’ (2007: 102). 20 Ricardo Pinheiro has similarly shown how, among jazz musicians in New York City, jam sessions facilitate ‘the construction of social networks, contributing to [the musicians’] entry and integration in the labor market’ (2014: 342). 21 I will be referring to my collaboration with the members of Rustík in different settings and configurations throughout this book. The range of their performing abilities as well as the diversity of shared musical experiences between us makes them key informants for this study (see, also, Tsioulakis, 2013). Both band names, The Groove Geishas and Rustík, as well as the names of their members are pseudonyms used in order to protect the anonymity of the musicians. 22 All of the members except Artemis were male, despite the feminine connotations of the band’s name (which, albeit fictitious for the needs of this monograph, preserves the gender associations of the original). 23 Bruce Johnson (2017) has emphasised the importance of gestures in the development of cognitive relationships within performance events, resulting in what he calls ‘corporeal interactivity’. Also, see Tsioulakis (2019a) on the role of gestures within rehearsals. 24 Silvia Tarassi has also demonstrated how networking for musicians during concerts is a key part of their professional activities. She explains that ‘since networking is an essential task in today’s economy, and networking events usually happen during concerts, it is interesting to note how the distinctions between leisure time and work, and between consumption and production tended to blur’ (2018: 215). For a similar discussion within the British indie scene, see Fonarow (2005: 122–153). 25 For a classic anthropological work on economies of reciprocal exchange, see Mauss (2001 [1954]). See, also, Lisette Josephides’s (1985) study among the Kewa of Papua New Guinea, and Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the strategies of reciprocity in Kabylia (1977: 3–9). 26 In Chapter 3, I examine the apparent reluctance of Athenian musicians to seriously engage with (and be influenced by) local music production. 27 Ruth Finnegan has argued that when local musicians use the term “professional” they often refer to evaluative rather than economic aspects: the “high standard” of a player, his or her specialist qualifications, teachers, musical role, or appearance as a regular performer with musicians themselves regarded as “professional”. (1989: 14) Although my research supports the evaluative meaning of the term, I have found it more relevant to the appraisal of success than skill. 28 The concept of a professional music ‘community’ will be discussed in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 will then concentrate on the power relations with other professionals within the scene.

Becoming a ‘Pro’ 53 29 This discrepancy between ‘skill’ and ‘reputation’ can be analysed through Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural and social capital. I will utilise those terms analytically in Chapter 4. 30 The impact of the recession on the new landscape of freelance music-making in Athens will be discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. 31 As Chapter 5 will illustrate, this phenomenon has been severely exacerbated with ‘The Crisis’. However, precarity was already a formative battleground for freelance musicians even during the times of ‘prosperity’. 32 I believe the use of the word linguistically derives from the French word ‘cachet’, which describes the fee for the services of an artist or other freelance professional (Harrap's New Standard French and English Dictionary, 1972: C:2). However, common use suggests a misunderstood link with the English word ‘cash’. 33 See Chapter 1 for a discussion of the main genres of the Greek popular music industry. 34 Skyládes or skýloi (literally meaning ‘dogs’), is a diminishing term for musicians and singers of the laїkó genre, which is also referred to, in its most degenerate form, as skyládiko, literally ‘dog-den song’. (See discussion of genres in the Introduction, and for a comprehensive discussion of the spectale of ‘skyládika’, see Tsioulakis, 2019b). 35 Fifty-nine of the 63 formally interviewed musicians had their first contact with a musical instrument (although not necessarily the one that they currently practice), before the age of ten. For an in-depth discussion of life-narratives in ethnomusicological writing, see Tsioulakis (2011b). 36 I have discussed the role of cosmopolitanism in the imaginaries of Athenian musicians elsewhere (Tsioulakis, 2011a). 37 See, mainly, Blacking (1973) and Small (1977).

3 A community of experience Intimacies, ideologies and discourses

‘We’re better than other people’, Petros said, exhaling a big cloud of smoke, which as its smell betrayed contained more than tobacco. ‘Who, Greeks?!’ I replied irritated. ‘No, no!’ he exclaimed, laughing and coughing at the same time, ‘musicians!’ ‘Are we?’ I  said unconvinced, looking around as the audience was leaving the venue and we were catching our breath before having to pack a truckload of equipment at 3am, ‘people don’t seem to appreciate us much around here’. ‘Oh they do, of course they do, that’s why they torture us, because deep down they know that we’re more talented, sensitive and creative than them. They’re jealous’. In this chapter, I will examine the way in which professional musicians construct a community of experience through collective intimacies (Dueck, 2013) and reflection on the circumstances of their work as well as what they perceive to be their common traits. The concept of ‘community’ is as widespread as it is uncomfortable for anthropological studies, musical or otherwise. The awkwardness of the term lies in two contradictory developments within ethnographic work: first, the deconstruction of functionalist and structuralist approaches with their inherent depiction of communities as culturally and geographically bounded (Anderson, 1983; Inda and Rosaldo, 2008; Tsing, 2000; Appadurai, 1990, 1996, 2000; Gaonkar, 1999, 2002); second, in the necessity of conceptualising a locale and a group of people under study as a meaningful entity (Stoller, 2017; Clifford, 1998). Thus, although twenty-first-century anthropologists have recognised the inability of ‘traditional’ factors such as ethnic purity, defined locality and ideological homogeneity to account for the way in which people in urban contexts (at least) come together, they still need to justify the validity of anthropological research by illustrating other features that can suggest the applicability of ‘community’ as an analytical term. Rarely would anthropologists openly admit that their informants fail to qualify as, or explicitly deny being part of a community, as this fact would possibly put the methodology and, ultimately, the merit of their research into question. As Gupta and Ferguson put it: How are understandings of locality, community, and region formed and lived? To answer this question, we must turn away from the commonsense

A community of experience 55 idea that such things as locality and community are simply given or natural and turn toward a focus on social and political processes of place making, conceived less as a matter of “ideas” than of embodied practices that shape identities and enable resistances. (1997: 6) I would argue, however, that the destabilisation of ‘community’ as a meaningful concept reveals a transitory stage of theory rather than of ‘real-life’ interaction: our ethnographic subjects largely go about their multi-communital activities without any profound sense of fragmentation or loss of belonging. I would, moreover, suggest that the anthropologist is not even presented with any large methodological problems of fieldwork; it is not during observation and participation that the problematic essence of ‘community’ appears, but at the writing and, specifically, the theorising stage. In order to transcend this difficulty, I will thus rephrase the question of ‘community’ as follows: within the socio-historically specific practices of Athenian professional musicians, what are the components contributing to the participants’ sense of belonging? Anthony Cohen (1985) has suggested that the genesis of what he calls ‘community consciousness’ is a result of the construction of symbolic boundaries. Moreover, he asserts that ‘in addition to recognizing the symbolic constituents of community consciousness, we have also to reveal the essentially symbolic nature of the idea of community itself, again essentially enshrined in the concept of boundary’ (1985: 14). Benedict Anderson has also proposed that ultimately all communities are ‘imagined’ and, consequently, that ‘communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’ (1983: 15). These two hugely influential texts have dominated the anthropological discussion of ‘community’ since the eighties, bringing the ‘imagination’ and the ‘symbolic’ to the centre of the theorisation of community construction. According to Rapport and Overing, anthropology has tended to conceptualise communities around one or more of the following three characteristics: (1) common interests, (2) common ecology/locality and/or (3) common social system (2000: 61). Later in the same text, Rapport and Overing offer a more practical definition of community as ‘the arena in which one learns and largely continues to practice being social’ (2000: 63). It is between these two definitions of community, on the one hand as an act of the imagination and, on the other, as an arena for social practice that I find the most unsettling tension. While the earlier definition relies principally on Rapport and Overing’s first characteristic (common interests), the latter presumes to some extent the remaining two (shared locality and/or social system). Byron Dueck (2013) has proposed the term ‘intimacies’ to explore the ways in which indigenous Manitoban musicians form musical, performative and religious collectivities. This form of community, Dueck explains, ‘describes engagements between known and knowable persons, especially those that involve the

56  A community of experience “interaction rituals” . . . of ‘face-to-face’ social and musical contact’ (2013: 7). Within his perspective, [t]he idea that some relationships are more intimate than others is retained. People who interact frequently tend to have expectations that are more closely calibrated. This is typically true of kin, friends, and members of small communities and of musicians and dancers who regularly perform together, Note, however, the variety of potential intimacies: in relationships both tender and adversarial, both ‘private’ and ‘public.’ And not only between lovers and spouses but also between regular sparring partners and bitter rivals. (2013: 7) Dueck’s ‘intimacies’ provide a productive framework for my examination of communities of professional musicians ‘at work’, insofar as it emphasises both the way in which these communities form on the basis of constant, physical interaction (even if, as Dueck admits, sometimes also with reference to abstract ‘imaginaries’) and the possibility that they might include persons who relate through antagonism and rivalry. Stephen Cottrell, in his study of professional musicians in London, has proposed the concept of ‘work’ as a symbol around which a collective identity and, subsequently, a community is constructed (2004: 11–12). Although my research verifies Cottrell’s assertion of ‘work’ as the key unifying concept among professional musicians, I would conceptualise ‘work’ as experience and discourse rather than symbol. This choice of terms implies a significant, if subtle, difference: rather than using ‘work’ as a symbol representative of a community, I propose that musicians in Athens become a community by experiencing ‘work’, which, in turn, develops into a social discourse. Alan Merriam, for example, has defined the ‘jazz community’ as: a number of people who share an occupational ideology and participate in a set of expected behaviors. We use the term community here not to denote a group with a geographic locus, but in the sense of a community of interest; what is implied by the word is that the people described here share a set of norms which in turn define roles for them. (1960: 211) This definition fits quite well with my informants’ understanding of their social surrounding and their position in it, a position which is indeed defined by expected behaviours and ascribed roles more than by a specific geographic locus.1 The proposed conceptual link between ideology and behaviour, however, needs to be ethnographically tested. In Merriam’s case study, this link can be explained by reference to ‘isolation’ and ‘self-segregation’ as central socio-psychological characteristics of the jazz musician (ibid: 213). To subsequently assume, however, that conforming to a ‘set of expected behaviours’ and sharing a ‘set of norms’ leads

A community of experience 57 inescapably to the adoption of a uniform ideology would, in my case, represent a leap of logic. In my examination of ‘work’ in the Athenian music industries, I will describe a community of practice, intimacies and experience, within which I will, subsequently, test the assumption of ideological homogeneity. This chapter will, therefore, consider the extent to which professional musicians share a ‘community consciousness’ by referring to the cultural characteristics that they have in common as well as the factors that distinguish and separate them. In order to achieve this, I will elaborate on three factors that shape the internal dynamics of the professional musicians’ collective: gender, identity and ideology. By examining experienced events and individual utterances, this section will reveal the amount of ideological differentiation manifest among instrumentalists of the professional Athenian scene and its effect on the sense of ‘belonging’ to a community.

Experiences of hardship and frustration As the previous chapter illustrated, although musicians in Athens come from different socio-geographical backgrounds and have undergone diverse stages of education, their professional strategies and their criteria for success are quite uniform. This section will consider the way in which freelance instrumentalists and vocalists articulate their experiences within the milieu of musical labour. There was a time when I was working four nights per week at the magazí, and, in the same week, I had three or four morning studio sessions. Also, I was going to take part in a two-day concert at the Mégaro Mousikís [Athens Music Hall] which required a month of rehearsals with a symphony orchestra. We’re talking about endless hours of work! (Mihalis – drummer) I have worked in skyládika where we were playing five or six hours a night. Playing the same stuff from midnight to 6 am, four days a week, is a slow death. It’s like a prison sentence. You lose all interest in music. (Kostas – guitarist) It’s even worse for wind-instrument players like me: five hours on stage, blowing! It’s easier for a keyboard player or a guitarist. How can you play at 4 am? You’re half asleep! . . . It was already 5 am when we stepped off the stage, 6 by the time we left. Very tiring for your body and mind. (Antonis – saxophone player) Hardship serves in the descriptions of instrumentalists as one of the primary characteristics of musical labour. The previous quotes refer to the conditions of work in Athenian magaziá.2 The working hours and the plethora of engagements are invariably proposed as factors of stress and fatigue. In any musician’s account,

58  A community of experience professional involvement in the Athenian music industry equates to a frantic race, trying to fit diverse obligations into limited time:3 In 1997, I counted eighteen different groups that I was involved in. I remember playing for fifteen consecutive days, in different clubs.  .  .  . Different groups, different programmes everyday! And I had rehearsals in the morning. I would wake up at 9 am, have a studio recording, go to a rehearsal, go for a gig and come back at 3 am. For 15 days, then one day off and all over again! (Haris – néi4 player) Another frequently mentioned component of music labour is the constant travelling, especially during the summer months when most of the indoor Athenian nightclubs remain closed. During this period, most popular singers and their professional backing musicians tour the Greek periphery and participate in festivals abroad. This practice is viewed with great excitement at the early stages of a musician’s career.5 Older musicians, however, tend to list their travelling commitments among the unpleasant attributes of their occupation. Suffice to contrast here the words of Haris, a wind-instrument player in his early thirties remembering his first experience of travelling abroad for festivals and those of Vasso, a guitarist in her fifties: It was really magical. Imagine, you’re here and suddenly they [the singer and production team] call you and say ‘next month, four concerts in the Netherlands.’ You’re nineteen! Of course you get ecstatic. (Haris) I eventually realised that I’m too old for this. In the sense that if I travel today for Thessaloniki, a five-hour drive, and another five hours for setting up at the venue and doing the sound-check, that’s ten hours with no food and rest. Then another few hours of playing and travelling back the next day? I need two days of rest afterwards. (Vasso) The frustration connected to travelling also focuses on the lack of proper technical support and the inadequate preparation for these touring shows. Alekos, a young guitar player, expressed to me his anxiety over the fact that he had to go on tour with a pop singer’s band after having practised the songs only by listening to older live recordings alone: ‘I kept asking them to arrange a proper rehearsal but I only got to meet my co-performers on stage during the first gig!’ He also stated his disappointment regarding the low quality of equipment that he had to cope with: ‘I was often embarrassed! Say a guitar player was there in the audience; he’d be thinking “look at this ridiculous amplifier, I’ve got a better one to practise at home!” ’ Alex, a bass player, similarly noted: ‘for this type of gigs you get equipment from different companies every time. Sometimes you don’t even know if they’re going to work’.

A community of experience 59 A rather ambiguous discourse develops regarding the financial life of the musician. The general underlying rhetoric is of musicianship as a precarious professional engagement: our monthly expenses are standardised, but our income is never stable. (Petros – bassist) One month I would be making three-thousand euro and the next six-hundred. (Stefanos – keyboardist) You get called for a studio recording here and a gig there, you make ends meet . . . but you’re never sure that you will have a specific amount coming in. (Nana – vocalist) These testimonies, phrased in 2008, before the eruption of the financial crisis in 2010, show that precarity was a defining factor of the life of professional musicians even before austerity.6 On the other hand, during those times of ‘prosperity’, semi-permanent work for a few months at a large magazí was usually seen as a very profitable job, sometimes even excessively so: The ‘night’ gives you easy money, it’s like a running tap! So much money . . . it doesn’t feel right. It’s not worth it! Why would you be getting so much money every night? There’s no reason! (Haris – néi player) If you go to the States and tell them that we work four nights a week and we get 300 euro per night, they will think you’re an alien! They will be like ‘where is that? We should come too!’ It’s a bit paranoid really, that’s why musicians get so tempted and they get sucked into it. (Nikos – bassist) The freelance musician’s everyday decision making is portrayed as an endless effort to balance profitable but aesthetically ill-regarded engagements and enjoyable yet financially unrewarding ones. According to Tolis, a young professional guitarist, the dilemma ultimately revolves around the appropriate fee: Everything is about the money, isn’t it? Let’s take for example something that I don’t eat: snails. If they offered me 10 euro I still wouldn’t eat them. But for 3000 I probably would! It’s the same, I wouldn’t go and play music that I don’t like for 80 euro a night; but for 300 I would, and I have done it in the past. The hardship and frustration of working within the popular music industry is, by and large, described as a necessary evil, a step along the way of achieving ‘success,’ which – as illustrated in the previous chapter – would provide a musician with a wider array of music-making options: This type of work is not stable; it’s fine if you manage to do it for two or three years, five at most. Of course it’s so tiring, crazy late hours. But if you save some good money you can raise your head and do something else. (Antonis – saxophone player)

60  A community of experience The contextualised examination of the previous testimonies reveals the essence of what I call a community of experience. The consistency of the ‘hardship and frustration’ rhetoric in the accounts of individual musicians does not merely mirror everyday occurrences, it is a socially specific discourse. The lived experiences of economic precarity and consequent multiple professional engagements and the betrayal of initial expectations (creative, technical and so on) become continuous themes of conversation and bonding. These themes are more than frequent topics of discussion; they are the narratives through which musicians socialise and they serve as underlying constants for their interpersonal engagement. As a result, community is formed through a process of transformation of experience into discourse, which in turn produces points of intimacy (Dueck, 2013). My approach is related to Etienne Wenger’s (1998) notion of ‘communities of practice’. Wenger’s term captures ‘a kind of community created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise’ (ibid: 45). In his work, Wenger explores how these communities come together, how they learn and how they produce meaning, knowledge, identities and boundaries. He also asserts that these communities are not necessarily based on common life aspirations. Using the example of a group of corporate workers, Wegner argues that their intention is to earn a living, not to form any kind of a community (ibid: 18–34). In fact, as Wegner shows, much of what the community members have in common comes from the fact that ‘most of them would rather be somewhere else, doing something else’ (ibid: 45). Paradoxically, this is the very factor that brings them together. In this respect, Wenger’s concept is not far from my portrayal of a ‘community of experience’. By using the term ‘experience’, however, I want to stress the affective involvement of the participants (Hofman, 2015) and the way their socialisation provides them with a common rhetoric, which they then use to express these affects. In other words, what brings the community of professional musicians together, is not only ‘the systematic pursuit of a common enterprise’ but also the way in which they learn to interpret, reflect on and articulate their experiences. Furthermore, these shared experiences provide a basis of intimacy between working musicians, which can then be extended to other members of the community who are perceived as having accumulated similar experience. In that sense, the community of professional musicians doesn’t solely include those who have gained such experiences together but extends its intimacy to those ‘known and knowable persons’ (Dueck, 2013: 7) who are recognised as sharing this subjectivity.

Gender and instrumentalism Gender has served as a key theme in the anthropology of Greece and indeed the Mediterranean, often reaffirming stereotypes of the ‘honour and shame’ continuum which sought to ‘tribalize’ the Mediterranean context (Magrini, 2003: 12). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the community of professional mousikoí that I investigated is a largely male-populated field.7 As this section will illustrate, however,

A community of experience 61 this fact should not be mistaken as a straightforward manifestation of male domination of the Greek public domain. The majority of anthropological work on Greek gender has focused on the male-female asymmetries manifest in primarily rural contexts (Herzfeld, 1985; Dubisch, 1986; Cowan, 1990). These writings have depicted the public sphere as a male-dominated field and female behaviour as hegemonised through cultural notions of ‘shame’ and ‘restraint’ that ensure women’s confinement within the private domain of marriage and the household. Loizos and Papataxiarchis (1991a) have challenged the unidimensional domestic model of gender and sexuality in Greece and have elaborated on the significance of researching gender behaviours outside marriage. Their contribution, along with writings that focused on women of a younger age (Cowan, 1991) or urban-educated, professional females (Kirtsoglou, 2003), reveal the existing tendency for subversion of the established gender ideologies, yet they still maintain a constant reference to the provincial norms. In the anthropological research on Greek gender, the urban centres feature either as exceptional contexts where the discussed gender discourses are seen as simply inapplicable8 or as loci where ‘modernity’ is all-encompassing and thus unfruitful for ethnographic scrutiny. (Seremetakis, 1994: vii) Consequently, although the Greek urban lifestyle is deemed useful as a point of comparison in the testimonies (and the imagination) of rural ethnographic subjects, it has rarely been seen as a worthy field for gender research in its own right. The domestic gender model has similarly affected accounts of Greek female musicality. The literature has focused on issues of acceptability of female musical expression in relation, again, to the themes of ‘shame’ and ‘containment’. According to Auerbach, whose research was carried out in a North-Western Greek village, ‘professional female entertainers and women who sing or dance with abandon in public are disparaged for their shamelessness’ (1987: 30). Similarly, female participants in the gléndia (music fests) of the island of Karpathos are, according to Anna Caraveli, mostly responsible for preparing the feast and are rarely expected to sing along with the male glendistés (1985: 263). Kevin Dawe has also discussed the male role of directing any musical performance in Crete and has shown that ‘even though women take up the dance, it is to the tune of a lýra-playing male. The lýra player comes to epitomise the control men have in these contexts’ (1996: 99). The ethnomusicological accounts of rural Greece seem to agree in the avoidable female musical role of the tragoudiára (songstress). This degrading term is used around Greece in order to describe a woman who, through her insatiable desire to sing, ‘has distinguished herself for proclivities and abilities beyond her assigned female tasks. She engages in this joyful, carefree activity as though unburdened by female responsibilities and the standard of shame’ (Auerbach, 1987: 30). Conversely, Auerbach illustrates how the performance of lamenting, along with the occasional singing at weddings, are perceived as quintessential female duties that are not regarded as a threat to a woman’s reputation (ibid: 28). Seremetakis (1991)

62  A community of experience has also elaborated on the particularities of lamenting performances in Peloponnese and the gender characteristics that render them non-singing. In the urban music scenes of Athens, although the issues of ‘shame’ and the ideal of ‘containment’ are rarely explicitly proposed as essential female virtues, the category of tragoudiára is far from absent from public moralist discourses. Opposed to tragoudístria (the generic term for a female singer), the term tragoudiára is usually employed in order to describe a female who, without necessarily being a skilled singer, is achieving success due to her physical attractiveness and exaggerated sexuality. What is noteworthy about the perceived sexuality of the female singer, is that it serves simultaneously as a prerequisite for success and a basis for negative moral judgement.9 I have heard musicians commenting with disgust on the tendency of the media to promote only ‘singers who are willing to appear half-naked on stage’, and then judge their female co-workers based on their appearance before they even mention their musical skill. The performative sexuality of the female singer is, thus, presented as a requirement of their profession which inevitably develops into a central attribute of their perceived identity. This resonates well with JaFran Jones’s remark about Tunisian female singers: If popular tradition casts professional female singers in the obscure region beyond conventional family morality, it appears that neither the singers themselves, nor the press that lionizes them, exert much effort to offer the public a glimpse into the more serious, normal, and down-to-earth aspects of their lives. (1987: 80) In her in-depth study of ‘illicit’ dance in India, Anna Morcom (2013) explains how concerns related to class/race-defined notions of ‘morality’ affected the perception of gender performativity. Within this nexus, the category of a ‘professional’ female performer was particularly problematic because of its perceived link to prostitution. These concerns are not dissimilar to dominant discourses of morality in Greece, where even the insiders of the music scene, who arguably understand the performative conventions that dictate the exaggeration of the female singer’s sexuality, often use it as a justification for moral judgements.10 The examination of the gender identity of the tragoudístria is, however, beyond the scope of this book. How is the female gender represented within the group of professional instrumentalists who serve as the protagonists of this study? Is there a female mousikós? JaFran Jones has asserted that the absence of women from instrument-playing stands cross-culturally ‘as if it were a law of nature’ (1987: 81).11 Similarly, Steven Feld has suggested that instruments used by the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea such as hand drums and bamboo Jew’s harps are not to be touched, let alone performed, by women (1984: 398). Fiona Magowan also reports that among Northern Australian Aboriginals, boys learn to play instruments such as ‘clapsticks and didjeridu, or teach themselves guitars and

A community of experience 63 keyboards in Christian and popular music contexts, while women mainly perform crying-songs’ (2007: 50). Even when women appear as instrumentalists, the range of ‘appropriate’ instruments is not all-embracing.12 In a classic study of female musicality around the world, Ellen Koskoff has suggested that ‘cultural beliefs in women’s inherent sexuality may motivate the separation of or restriction imposed upon women’s musical activities’ (1987: 6). In this light, Marina Roseman demonstrates that the instruments used for the rituals of the Temiar people of Peninsular Malaysia carry clear ‘father’ and ‘mother’ metaphors, thus reproducing local gender roles and ideologies (1987: 142). Elsewhere, she argues that the musical instruments identified with women ‘are fashioned from bamboo tubes, primary utensils from the female domain of labor’ (Roseman 1984: 421). In Afghanistan, Veronica Doubleday reports that ‘men have inhibited women from playing almost all musical instruments’, allowing only the frame-drum to be played in the all-female private domestic domain and at weddings (2006: 119). Mora has also elaborated on the way in which instruments in the Philippines are classified according to their perceived gender attributes based on criteria of size and timbre (2008: 232). Male and female instruments appear respectively in public and private contexts, thus illustrating, according to Mora, a wider cosmology of gender complementarity (ibid: 235–6).13 Women’s participation in instrument-playing has not been less hindered in the West. In an important review of discourses of femininity within Western classical music (a quintessentially instrumental tradition), Susan McClary (1991) has connected the exclusion of women to male retaliation against the widespread notion of music as a ‘feminine’ realm. In her view, male musicians have attempted to disassociate music practices from their effeminate reputation by stressing a series of presumably masculine attributes such as rationality, objectivity and universality, and by further ‘prohibiting actual female participation altogether’ (1991: 17). Furthermore, Hassinger (1987) has identified a division between ‘male’ and ‘female’ instruments within American jazz music. According to this division, ‘brass, reeds, and percussion instruments are located in the male domain, while strings and flute are supposedly female in essence’ (1987: 196–197). These norms are, of course, not without exceptions. The emergence of ‘all-girl’ jazz bands in the US in the 1920s and 1930, for example, is analysed by Kristin McGee (2008) as an immensely popular phenomenon of female instrumentalism, orchestration and composition. These bands, however, remained largely disregarded by contemporary critics who ‘tended to conceive of jazz as a male domain and therefore disavowed the cross-fertilizations of all-girl musical groups, especially those featured within new forms of mass culture’ (McGee, 2008: 631). Resonating with the examples around the world, the Greek professional instrumentalist is typically male. Apart from the occasional employment of all-female string quartets or flautists, the instrument players working within the Athenian popular music industry are in their overwhelming majority men. McClary has argued that gender segregation within instrumental traditions is a result of institutional

64  A community of experience obstacles: ‘women have been denied the necessary training and professional connections, and they have been assumed to be incapable of sustained creative activity’ (1991: 18). Conversely, I would argue that if there is indeed an institutional reasoning behind the absence of female instrumentalists, this should not be traced to educational practices. In fact, as any frequenter of a Greek odeío (conservatoire) would be able to verify, young girls are equally (if not overly) represented in comparison to boys within the music student demographic. These girls, however, are less likely to pursue professional careers in performance, although many of them choose careers in music education. This fact also mirrors wider Western patterns of female musicality. As Nettl has mentioned, ‘an ethnomusicologist of a distant planet wishing to generalize might perhaps have concluded that music in that society was “made” by men and “taught” by women’ (2005: 406). But if women’s music education is not hindered, how can one explain their nonexistence in the milieu of popular instrumentalists? I would argue that the exegesis of the imbalance between male and female instrumentalists can be found in two overemphasised characteristics of the professional life of the musician: first its portrayal as ‘hard labour’ and second its technophilia. As I have discussed in the previous section, professional musicians’ depictions of their occupational life in the popular industry are rife with references to ‘hardship’ and ‘frustration’. Thus, the frequent declaration by male musicians that ‘women can’t do this job’ should not be seen as implying the woman’s incapability of sustaining creative activity (McClary, 1991: 18), since ‘this job’ is rarely regarded as creative. The suggestion is, rather, that ‘this job is too tough for a woman’. Within this process, the exclusion of female instrumentalists from the professional music industry becomes somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy: the domain is portrayed (by men, the power-holders) as an inappropriate field for women, which in turn serves to reproduce and perpetuate the toxic masculinity of the circuit, thus in effect making the involvement of women both prohibitive and unpleasant. Take, for example, the testimony of Alexandra, a singer-songwriter, band-leader and multi-instrumentalist: It needs a tough attitude to make it in the music business, especially for a woman. You need to do your own PR, go to the club and socialise with whatever sleazebag owns it, whose hands might even wander . . . and you need to promote yourself while at the same time trying to maintain the boundaries. . . . They always call me a ‘little girl’, and I am a 35 year old woman. Why? Either to try and hit on me, or to pay me less, or usually both. The separation between supporting labourer-musicians and publicly exposed (and often sexualised) singers evidently leads to the easier inclusion of females in the latter category. This segregation, in turn, contributes to an increasing masculinisation of the rhetoric of the professional musician that makes the community even more unwelcoming to prospective female members.14 This argument could be further supported by the more vibrant female participation in Athenian instrumental

A community of experience 65 scenes that are not associated with the ‘hardship’ of the nýhta (literally ‘night’) such as the classical music scene and the neo-traditional revival.15 Those scenes, due to their intellectualist character, are perceived as more welcoming for female musicians, since they bear no link to the morally questionable profile of the ‘deviant’ musician (which will be examined later).16 Simultaneously, the increasing technological orientation of desired professional music-making skills has been seen as an additional handicap for female participation. The link between technological competence and notions of masculinity, specifically with regard to music production, has been demonstrated by various authors (Wolfe, 2019; Greene, 2005; Porcello, 2003; Théberge, 1997; Bradby, 1993). In his influential study of technological consumption as a key aspect of popular music-making, Thebérge has identified the lack of female involvement in music technology in the explicit sexist attitude of the media representing this milieu (1997: 122–125). Bradby has also spoken of ‘ideologies that linked technological expertise with masculinity’ (1993: 156). In her view, ‘a mastery of technology . . . is a taken-for-granted aspect of the spectacle of “live” rock and a part of rock’s peculiarly masculine erotic’ (ibid.). Thomas Porcello also remarks that In the highly male world of popular music, the studio and its sophisticated technologies are forcefully constructed as male domains; when women are present, it is usually as singers (background singers at that), and they are generally expected to take directions, not to give them. (2003: 284–285) Music producer and feminist scholar Paula Wolfe (2019) has further provided an experiential account of how music production has been tainted by gendered restrictions and unquestioned masculinist rhetorics. In her account of recording and production practices by women between 2002 and 2018, she shows how these can be ‘disruptive’, since they manifest within a ‘core contradiction in which the creative liberation proferred by the digital recording technologies and online marketing practices of new industry remain restricted by old industry values sustained through gendered norms of gatekeeping and representation’ (2019: 4). This discourse of masculinity with regards to technology and the instruments is vibrantly present within the Athenian music workplace. I have repeatedly heard female vocalists complaining about their male accompanists’ obsessive discussions about the latest music gadgetry.17 This fact contributes to a perception of male instrumentalists as one-dimensional and self-indulgent, an image contributing to further alienation of their female colleagues.18 This hypothesis is again verified by the more frequent presence of women instrumentalists in the Western classical and the neo-traditional scenes, which are far less technologically oriented than the popular music industry. This is not to suggest, however that those scenes are devoid of inequality. As Christina Scharff’s (2018) study of young, female, classical instrumentalists in London and Berlin has shown, the experience of musical work is structured and hierarchized along gender lines, especially

66  A community of experience within conditions of neoliberalism. In her words, ‘female musicians face a range of gendered challenges when engaging in this practice, demonstrating that the figure of the self-promoting, cultural worker is not gender neutral’ (2018: 2). I argue that the division between male and female roles within the popular music industry is a deeply rooted performative pattern rather than a straightforward indication of absolute gender hegemony. In fact, although women have been gradually more successful at occupying positions of power (as club managers, artists’ agents and record company directors) and ‘invisible’ creative posts (lyricists, music producers), they have dedicated little effort to the inversion of the performative gender dynamics of the female singer and the male instrumentalist/composer. An explanation can be found in Ellen Koskoff’s words: ‘In societies where males were or are the main patrons of musical performances . . . musical behaviors that heighten female sexuality are the norm’ (1987: 6, emphasis added). Consequently, I suggest that the segregated gender roles in Athenian popular music performance, albeit indicative of a traditionally male-dominated terrain, should not be mistaken as a testimony to current female powerlessness but as compliance with gendered performative norms (on and off stage). Veronica Doubleday (2008) has described women’s deprivation of instrument-playing as a result of male control over technology. Consequently, she regards the increasing claim of women over instrumental music-making as a declaration of empowerment.19 I argue, however, that in the social world of Athenian musicking, the performance of instruments is rarely connected to an acquisition of power. In fact, many female singers and entrepreneurs would regard the role of the instrumentalist as undeniably inferior. Moreover, the occasional employment of female instrumentalists is a strategy which, despite its intentional semiotic declaration of anti-conformism, should not necessarily be seen as a power-reversal. I will close this section with a telling case narrated to me by Katerina, a female bass player who performs primarily in the Athenian ‘alternative’ scenes: One day I got a call from S – ’s (male pop singer) maéstros who asked me to play for a TV show with their backing band. I was surprised because I had never worked with them before, so I didn’t know the songs at all! ‘Don’t worry’ he said, ‘the music is going to be pre-recorded. We’re just going to show up and pretend to be playing.’ They just wanted me for the image! I don’t know why, maybe the poor guy who regularly plays the bass, is old and bald. I didn’t go of course. Evidently, working for the backing orchestra of a famous pop-star failed to capture Katerina’s idea of empowerment.

Deviance, identity and self-perception In Greek society musicians have kind of a low status, I mean, they ask you what you do for a living and if you say you’re a musician they look at you funny. They don’t realise it can be a real profession; they think we’re just having a laugh. . . . So then musicians don’t take themselves seriously either. (Kostas – guitarist)

A community of experience 67 Richard Jenkins has contributed to an understanding of ‘identity’ as a process of ‘becoming’ (2004: 5). He stresses that the term only becomes useful if we ‘remember that it always implies “identification”. It is not a “thing”’ (Ibid., emphasis in the original) He also explains that ‘identity’ is not a matter of self-definition but rather, of a two-way, reciprocal understanding of ‘who we are and of who other people are’ (Ibid.). In this sense, ‘identity’ lies within an intersubjective realm of perceptions that constantly redefine it: our view of ourselves exists in dialogical association with our view of others and others’ views of us. After looking at musicians’ perceptions of their work in the professional industry, I will, now, turn to an examination of their view of themselves and the way in which they appear (or they think they appear) to others. Ethnomusicological literature has, since its earliest stages, elaborated on the connection between professional musicianship and socially constructed perceptions of ‘deviance’. Alan Merriam, through a comparative analysis of different ethnographies of both small-scale and urban music cultures regarding the social role ascribed to professional musicians, has identified a constant pattern of ‘low status and high importance, coupled with deviant behavior’ (1964: 137). According to Merriam, deviant behaviour among professional instrumentalists seems to be cross-culturally expected and, to some extent, tolerated due to the importance that society prescribes to their role. This, however, does not mean that musicians are afforded an elevated social status more widely. In fact, as studies among Romani musicians have particularly shown, patrons often seem able to combine an appreciation for the musician’s presumed talent with a general social distaste towards their ethnic or social background, without any profound sense of contradiction (see Beissinger, 2001; Silverman, 2007; Van de Port, 1999). Elsewhere, Merriam and Mack argue that the generalised anti-social behaviour observed among musicians can be explained by ‘the attitude that [they] are different from other people and, because of their artistic creativity and way of life, better than others as well’ (1960: 212), a view that seems to survive in contemporary Athens judging from my conversation with Petros that opens this chapter. Merriam’s views are also echoed by Bohlman in his discussion of musical professionalism in Europe (2004: 222–223). Bohlman asserts that the specialist status awarded to instrumentalists due to their acquired skill does not necessarily reflect a wider ‘public sanction’. On the contrary, he gives the example of the becar in SouthEastern Europe who are ‘sometimes regarded as ne’er-do-wells or troublemakers (and, not insignificantly, attractive lovers)’ (2004: 223). The perception of professional musicians as skilful yet deviant social actors has been thoroughly discussed in the work of Howard Becker. The life of dance musicians exemplifies for Becker a career in a deviant occupational group, that is, ‘a group of “outsiders” that considers itself and is considered by others to be “different” ’ (1963: 101). Becker locates the socially deviant character of dance musicians primarily in their view of family life as a constraint for their musically creative lives (1963: 114–119). They, accordingly, express a wider rejection of conventional society, which is perceived as unable to provide a suitable terrain for the artistic expression of the gifted musician. In Becker’s work, musicians claim

68  A community of experience to be ‘completely different from and better than other kinds of people and accordingly ought not to be subject to the control of outsiders in any branch of life, particularly in their artistic activity’ (1951: 137). Becker’s informants go as far as to propose their extreme sensitivity and unconventionality as factors contributing to their unique ability to sexually satisfy women. The discussions of the pattern of ‘low status and high importance’ in the image of professional musicians share two important common themes. The first is that musicians’ deviant behaviours do not develop despite their specialist status but rather, because of it: Merriam presents the high importance of the musician’s role as the basis on which his20 deviance is tolerated, while for Becker it is the musician’s actual skill that generates the need for deviating from the conventional societal norms in the first place. The second theme relates to the interaction between society and musician in the construction of the latter’s identity. Although society’s perceptions of musicians do not necessarily match musicians’ perceptions of themselves, it is the interaction of those views that ultimately defines the musician’s social identity. This opposition between social status (external view) and self-perception is presented in the earlier quote by Kostas, a young Greek guitarist. The fact that the wider audience does not perceive their work as a ‘real profession’, Kostas asserts, affects not only the musician’s societal status but, also, his or her self-definition. Tolis, another young guitarist and close friend of Kostas, told me: ‘it’s a dreamjob really isn’t it? I mean, you play around with your friends, having fun, and you get lots of money for it!’ Musicians in their self-descriptions shift between these two interpretations with great ease: they are misunderstood by a general audience that does not take them seriously and, simultaneously, tricksters who manage to make a living out of their own enjoyment. This latter view of musical professionalism as ‘enjoyment’ appears to contradict the ‘hardship and frustration’ rhetoric that I elaborated on earlier. I propose, however, that these views actually co-exist and become interchangeably invoked by the appropriate discursive context. Ultimately, musicians seem to entertain an idea of themselves as being able to turn the most frustrating situation into sheer enjoyment through their trickster agency. One of the most positive compliments a musician can receive from his colleagues about his attitude is that he is ‘crazy’ (trelós). ‘Being crazy’ summarizes a list of enviable character attributes that add to an image of ‘coolness’, namely: not caring about social norms, being provocative, unpredictable and willing to prioritise humour over self-dignity. For example, I’ve heard several versions of a story of how a well-known Athenian drummer caused panic when, midway through a transatlantic flight, he started walking up and down the aisle pretending to have a conversation with his girlfriend on his mobile phone. Many narratives involving instrumentalists displaying signs of ‘craziness’ refer to the closing show of a long nightclub season. Musicians who work in backing orchestras for popular singers regard the last show of a season as an opportunity to play excessive pranks on each other without running the risk of getting fired. During the two seasons that I worked in nightclubs of this type I witnessed several such pranks. I remember musicians changing the rhythm patterns in order to

A community of experience 69

Figure 3.1 Musicians, dancers and sound engineers drinking together during a flight to Cyprus

confuse their co-performers and laugh at their mistakes or playing songs in the wrong key making it impossible for the vocalists to sing. The most ludicrous of those pranks gain wide reputation and they eventually achieve a mythic status within the community. Such is the case with the story of ‘the keyboardist and the fart-sample’. According to this story, a keyboard player in a popular band, fed up with his musical director’s complaints that the ‘orchestra-hit’ sound sample that he was using for the finale of a song was not loud enough, chose to replace it for the last show with a fart sound sample. In order to make sure no one missed the joke, he increased the volume of the sample making it ten times louder than the original. The joke, however, backfired when the sound sample blew two of the speakers on stage. The story of the notorious keyboardist was narrated to me by three different musicians, all of whom claimed that they were present during the incident, each placing it, however, in a different nightclub. Another theme contributing to the musician’s profile of deviance, widely popular both in the literature and in local narrative, refers to drug use. Wendy Fonarow, in her study of British Indie music has shown how the trickster’s cross-culturally established attribute of insatiable hunger has transformed within the rock imagery into a specific hunger for illicit drugs (2005: 228–239). Most of the musicians with whom I discussed the matter, seemed to draw a line between what they called

70  A community of experience ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ drugs. Most of them claimed to have been consuming, occasionally or systematically, ‘soft drugs’ (‘whatever grows on the ground’), while they consistently expressed their disapproval of chemically processed substances. Drug use among professional musicians in Athens needs to be understood within the aforementioned ‘trickster’ personification. One of the humorous transgressions that I repeatedly witnessed while working as a keyboardist at a popular nightclub, involved smoking marijuana on stage. Alongside the instrumentalists, the music show employed a ‘stage manager’, whose only responsibility during live performances was to remove the young ‘groupies’ who jumped on the stage and prevent them from making physical contact with the pop singer.21 During the times when the stage-manager was unoccupied, he would occasionally light up a marijuana cigarette and pass it to the musician closest to him. This musician’s responsibility (after he had a few pulls) was to pass the cigarette around to the rest of the group without being noticed by the musical director, the singer, or the club’s staff and management. Although the frequency with which this practice occurred would suggest that it was possibly noticed and tolerated by the power-holders, the musicians claimed that being caught would result in serious punishment. Two personal experiences from touring with jazz musicians involved getting away with bringing weed on the trip. In the first instance, a bass player went through extraordinary measures to bring a plastic bag full of weed on a ferry to Crete, during the Olympic Games in 2004, in the midst of overwhelming police presence. After bragging and laughing about the incident for days, the bag returned with him to Athens untouched. Similarly, a guitarist managed to get a small plastic box with several marijuana joints through airport security in Athens, only to leave it behind by mistake in his hotel room in North Macedonia. What should be noted, however, is that, despite the enjoyment that the instrumentalists seemed to obtain by smoking marijuana cigarettes on stage, or smuggling them through security officers, during our seven-month collaboration I rarely witnessed them practising it in private. This corresponds with their personal declarations that drug consumption is a practice in which they only engage ‘for the laugh’ (gia tin pláka) and not habitually. The identification with a ‘trickster’ role is a central characteristic of the musicians’ view of themselves. This tendency, I propose, serves a purpose of disassociation: by engaging in behaviours that ridicule the practices of mainstream music-making and its social order, musicians exemplify their alienation. Their behaviour, thus, operates as a ‘symbolic transgression’22 of the structural norms within which they are expected to operate. In so doing, more than showing who they are, the musicians declare who they are not. By claiming that they’re ‘only having a laugh’ within the professional milieu, they are not taking themselves less seriously; they, rather, assert that the music industry employing them does not deserve their seriousness. They realise, however, that their self-disassociation with the mainstream music industry is worthless if not recognised by the social spectators, in this case their colleagues and related groups (employers and audience). The public advertisement of their trickster characteristics acknowledges the twofold process of identification: the role needs to be embodied by the individual and subsequently recognised by the spectators.

A community of experience 71 This practice resonates with sociologist Robert Stebbins’s theory of ‘role distance behaviour’ (1969). Referring to jazz musicians as an illustrative example, Stebbins shows how the presence of particular vocal behaviour, gestures and deeds (as well as absence of ordinary behavioural codes) is employed as a strategy of disassociation from performances that are perceived as a ‘threat to [the actor’s] self-conception’ (1969: 406). He moreover notes that ‘such behaviour should not be conceived as a refusal to play out those expectations. Rather, it is best seen as an adaptive strategy whereby the performer can more or less fulfil his [sic] role obligations while maintaining his self-respect’ (ibid: 407). In his article, Stebbins specifically refers to activities such as smoking or joking with one’s peers while performing as explicit signs of role distance behaviour. Another useful approach to the professional musician’s attitude relates to James Scott’s (1985, 1990) view of the ‘hidden transcript,’ the dissonant, subversive discourse that develops among subaltern groups. According to Scott, ‘a partly sanitized, ambiguous, and coded version of the hidden transcript is always present in the public discourse of subordinate groups’ (1990: 19). It is within this discourse, Scott argues, that the trickster figure serves as a folk hero, by managing to ‘outwit his adversary and escape unscathed’ (1990: 41). Within the Athenian music industry, the ‘folk hero’ is the one who acted ‘crazy’ enough to create an incident deserving mythical status, while managing to get away with it in order to remain employable, and, thus, a member of the professional community. If the identification as tricksters serves for musicians a need for disassociation with the mainstream music industry that employs them, which are the factors generating this need? This question brings us to the discussion of two important components of the instrumentalist’s identity: aesthetics and ideology.

Aesthetics as ideology I was working as a DJ at a summer club and the boss asked me to play more skyládika23 so I quit. I’m serious! And then I panicked without a job, what could I do? Luckily, I met my mate’s brother on the street and he said ‘man, we’re stuck for a bass player! Can you come and play with us at the magazí?’ I said yes! A friend of mine had an electric bass that I could borrow, so I went and played with no rehearsals. It was the worst skyládiko in the world! There were three singers who would only hit a couple of correct notes a week! (Petros – bassist)

Petros recounted the story of his first job as a bassist without a comment on the obvious paradox: he quit a job as a DJ because he was asked to include more skyládika songs in his playlist, and then immediately accepted a job as a performer in ‘the worst skyládiko in the world’. This apparently illogical behaviour can be explained in a number of ways: a musician’s payment is usually much larger than the DJ’s, so Petros would be more ‘justified’, as he would be ‘selling out’ for a higher price. Alternatively, it could be argued that it was after ‘panicking without

72  A community of experience a job’ that Petros realised that there is no room for aesthetic statements when making a living is at stake. Any of these explanations, however, would suggest that Petros had a ‘change of mind’, which would be mentioned in his narrative. Consequently, I am inclined to suggest a more consistent viewpoint emerging from his account: one that acknowledges the perceived affiliation between musicians and the music they listen to, as opposed to the music they might occasionally perform. Since a DJ is typically perceived as an expert in (and a dedicated aficionado of) the music he or she compiles, Petros found the role of a backing instrumentalist less endangering for his perceived musical integrity. This was simply because, as his colleagues would surely be aware, musicians rarely perform professionally the kind of music that they like. Nikos, a professional drummer, also illustrates this tension between one’s initial musical preferences and their working environment: You need to understand that many of the current musicians had to grow up listening to their parents saying: ‘put down that electric guitar! Do you want to be like one of those punks you have on your walls?’ And those parents probably listened to laïká [urban-folk]. Imagine the irony of becoming a musician as a rebellious act, and ending up playing laïká anyway! As Nikos’s words suggest, personal musical preferences provide a link to adolescent memories, and they serve as a reminder of the reasons that drove his colleagues into becoming professional musicians, sometimes against their parental guidance. Even when instrumentalists end up performing genres contradictory to their aesthetics (or maybe most importantly then), keeping their musical taste ‘intact’ is a very important component of their identity. Listening to, and occasionally performing, ‘quality music’24 – what musicians simply call ‘playing’ – is to be cherished as a personal accomplishment illustrating a musician’s course towards excellence, despite their engagement with ‘disregarded’ music genres, which is understood merely as ‘work’ – a means for economic survival. Accordingly, professional musicians in Athens tend to talk about their ‘aesthetics’ in an engaged and personal way (see Tsioulakis, 2018). Choice and taste in music is conceptualised as an ideological declaration of individual value and authenticity.25 The meaning of musical choice featured as the theme in a lengthy conversation that I had with Haris Lambrakis, a very established néi player of the Athenian éthnik-jazz scene: Ioannis: Did you never use to listen to pop music? Even when you were growing up? Haris: Not really; although, I would listen to some older pop songs. I mean, Beatles and things like that. But not current pop, no. And that’s the thing, I never listened, and only later I discovered that there was nice music being written. Just for reactionary reasons, you know, ‘I won’t listen to what everybody else likes.’ [. . .]

A community of experience 73 I: H: I: H: I: H:

I: H:

Greek music? Éntechno etc? No, no. Friends and relatives were listening to éntechno but I wouldn’t. So you were listening to traditional and jazz? Yeah, traditional, jazz, not éntechno or anything that was massively popular at the time. [. . .] Were you ideologically against pop music or did you just not enjoy it? This is a huge discussion, you see. The question, I suppose, is this: is there truth and falsity in music? And, if there is, is the other person’s ‘truth’ also your ‘truth’? . . . These are hard questions, I don’t know if anyone will ever be able to answer them. There is, however, this simple matter: You’ve got a little garden. In this garden there’s a tomato growing. Now, on the other side, there are glasshouses with tons of tomatoes produced. When you have grown your own tomato, no matter how little, you won’t take the big artificial one that the glasshouse guy is trying to sell to you. This is the issue with the industry and their music production. It’s massive, while there are musics that aren’t meant to be massively produced. So it’s not like you would like your kind of music to be more mainstream. You enjoy listening to something more alternative. No, wait. There is a subtle issue there. Everyone wants to communicate. Everybody would like to turn on the radio and hear their favourite music playing. You wish the whole world would listen, being able to talk to your neighbour about music; that would be great. But let’s not get carried away. Music is not so important after all. I mean, there are more important issues in the world. . . . Of course you want to communicate, but it’s not ideology, you won’t fight and try to change anybody’s mind about it.

Haris supports a view that music taste is not ‘important’ enough to be considered an ideology. Yet, both his life narrative and the metaphors he uses to talk about music, illustrate that he attaches great importance to his musical preferences. Elsewhere he states: No, I’ve never worked in settings where I didn’t like the music. Well, there was the occasional studio recording where I didn’t know what to expect, right? But as soon as I  discovered that I  didn’t like the music, I’d find an excuse and go. I never stayed for the money. And not for any ideological reasons, I just couldn’t! I argue that Haris’s choice not to associate musical preferences with ideology says more about his view of ‘ideology’ than about his view of music. Ideology is perceived by Haris as a mental construct, composed by elaborate rationales of how life should be conducted, a collection of ideas worth ‘fighting’ for and persuading others. Music, on the other hand, is something personal and experiential in Haris’s

74  A community of experience analysis; an attribute of his identity which, although he would enjoy sharing with others, mainly conceptualises in relation to his integrity as an individual. This fact, I would argue, makes Haris’s view indicative of a musical ideology at play. His music evaluation, more than an abstract aesthetic construct, is an opinionated stance connected to his existential preoccupations. Since the early fifties, scholars associated with the Chicago School of Sociology, have illustrated the complex discourses that lead to identification with an occupation. Becker and Carper (1956) have proposed that such identification develops into a ‘professional ideology’ through a ‘mechanism’ of specialisation and socialisation. Hughes, on the other hand, has suggested that conceptions of professionalism and, furthermore, relationships between professionals and their work products or services need to be assessed in relation to specific working milieux, with little possible generalisation (1952: 424). In accordance with this perspective, my specific ethnographic enquiry is: how does the discrepancy between personal music aesthetics and the genres of the mainstream music industry affect the ‘occupational ideology’ (Merriam and Mack, 1960: 211) of Athenian professional musicians? Moreover, is such an ideology monolithic and uncontested? On a Sunday afternoon in May 2009, I, along with other musicians, was invited to Manolis’s house for dinner. Manolis was a jazz-trained guitar player who had acquired quite a reputation over the past few years because of his collaboration with a series of well-established singer-songwriters of the éntechno genre. While we were having dinner, the Greek music TV channel was playing in the background. At some point, Manolis pointed to the TV screen and said ‘Hey! Is this Achilleas in the video-clip? Is he playing with K – ? [male pop singer]’. After everyone went closer to the screen and verified that the young bassist in the video was indeed their friend Achilleas, Manolis said with contempt: ‘look at him dancing and jumping around! I mean, it’s one thing to work for those people and another to pretend that you like it!’ As also suggested by Petros’s earlier DJ story, identification with a particular ‘disregarded’ music genre is perceived as a grave danger for a musician. Nikos, another bass player, also referred to Achilleas’s attitude in a private interview: ‘It’s really a shame, he is such a talented musician and all he wants is to be the next big maéstros for skyládika and pop’.26 Individual utterances and professional behaviour among Athenian instrumentalists suggest that the main component of occupational ideologies relates to the construction of limits. Musicians appear to ‘draw lines’ defining acceptable professional behaviour and it is in accordance with those lines that they judge their colleagues. These limits are meant to protect the individual from complete identification with the ‘decadent’ music industry. What is significant in Manolis’s accusation of Achilleas, is the word ‘pretend’. Manolis is not accusing Achilleas of liking the music (which would be considered preposterous) but rather of ‘pretending’ to like it in order to achieve his own ends. According to Manolis, however, this behaviour implies that Achilleas identifies with popular music practices. Additionally, in the critiques of both Nikos and Manolis, one can also sense their disapproval of Achilleas’s ambition to move to a more powerful class within the work arena, that of the maéstros.27

A community of experience 75 In a later personal interview, Achilleas expressed to me his professional aspirations: I would like to work as a musical director for popular music. What people call “maéstros”, although I hate the word.28 . . . I don’t love the music. You know it and I know it. But the audience does. And being up there and giving them joy is a good feeling!’ Achilleas here makes an effort to justify his choices by proposing an occupational ethic according to which musicians should conform to the music tastes of their audiences, since their job is to entertain them. In this way he explains his career objectives without embracing the produced music itself. Later in the interview, however, Achilleas confessed: The other day I was watching this music show, Live at the Abbey Road, and Jamiroquai were on it. So the main band is in one room, and a string section in another, and then the brass. . . . They’re all playing together and it’s so wellrehearsed, so tight, so beautiful! I started crying, tears were running down my cheeks and I couldn’t stop! I was crying so much, I couldn’t breathe! Because this is what I’ve always dreamt of hearing in my work, but I know it will never happen. Because everything here is crap! Evidently, the balance between personal musical aesthetics and professional survival is conceptualised as both an ideological matter and a deeply emotional issue. These two essences were also illustrated by Kostas, a young bassist: I had many gigs that I would call ‘pure work,’ you know what I mean? But I always tried to hold on to my . . . well, I don’t want to say ‘dignity’ . . . but at least to do things that were compatible with my aesthetics. Not to drift too far away from it. . . . Because, after a point, you won’t be as pure and innocent as when you started. Something is destroyed inside you. I know people who have gone half mad because of that! . . . You can’t keep a good aesthetic while playing at the magaziá. And all this ‘aesthetic’ discussion might sound a bit ‘theoretical,’ but ultimately we’re all trying to be ok, you know? And the thing is, if we don’t follow what we feel musically, sooner or later we’ll have problems; physical and psychological problems. For Kostas, keeping faithful to his personal aesthetics is more than an ideological construct; it is an existential necessity which ensures his mental health. Another bass player, Panagiotis, also echoes Kostas’s sentiments, but contextualises them within the ideal balance of professional engagement and musical enjoyment: In the job, you soon realise that you need a balance between something that satisfies you musically and something that keeps you working; either of the two extremes are unhealthy. As my teacher used to say, ‘music is one’. I think

76  A community of experience what he meant by this is that music quality is defined by the people who play it, not by absolute genre criteria. I mean, I have played jazz, the music that satisfies me a hundred percent, and I  felt that I  had no chemistry with the other players. And then I have played commercial music that I don’t like per se, but I felt like I had good laughs, good colleagues, that I gave the music what it needed as an individual instrumentalist, and that the audience enjoyed it. . . . I have friends who only play the music they want and at the end of the month they can’t pay their bills, and others who only work in commercial music and they find themselves constantly reminiscing about a past when they were creative. Panagiotis’s testimony encapsulates the whole dichotomy of work vs play as an issue of balance between necessity and enjoyment. He is, however, quick to note that a context of ‘play’ does not ensure enjoyment, and neither does ‘work’ equal a wholly negative experience. This kind of argumentation illustrates why the issue is one of ideology: in their rehearsed and firm utterances, musicians know that the way that they position themselves within these debates is crucial for their projected subjectivities. What is more, this ideology needs to be affirmed by an alignment between words and actions. As another musician tellingly confessed: I recorded for a CD a couple of years ago and it was so bad that I asked the producer not to list me in the credits. “But you’ll lose the royalties”, he said. I didn’t care. It was a small price for avoiding the shame. (Pantelis – trumpet player) Among the 63 unstructured interviews that I conducted with professional musicians, there hasn’t been a single one that did not refer to the discrepancy between individual musical tastes and professional performances. Yet, the criteria according to which lines are drawn and colleagues are judged differ significantly. What one musician proposes as a code for acceptable behaviour could be judged as ‘snobbery’ by his or her peer. Diverse justifications are considered for one’s choices, such as ‘I respect that he is trying to support his family’, or ‘she has to establish her name before she can have better options, I did the same so I get it’. Nevertheless, it could not be denied that the consideration of music aesthetics impacts on the way instrumentalists make decisions and, consequently, on their perceived public image. In this sense, more than a disengaged assessment of artistic value, aesthetics have to be described as a core component of identity, ideology and community-making.

Conclusion: a second approach to work vs play Rapport and Overing have proposed that ‘community, its members often believe, is the best arena for the nourishing of their whole selves’ (2000: 63). Moreover, as Martin Stokes argues, music encourages people to ‘feel that they are in touch with an essential part of themselves, their emotions and their “community” ’

A community of experience 77 (1994: 13). As should be clear from the discourses presented in this chapter, this is not the case for Athenian professional musicians ‘at work’. Although the community assembled by the described actors serves as a terrain for constant socialisation, this terrain is far from successful at fostering their ‘whole selves’. And this is where I locate the crucial difference between imagined and experiential communities. I regard professional musicians as a community of experience. I argued that such an experience generates a series of social discourses, narratives and intimacies that are passed down to the younger members of the professional scene as a type of sacred community knowledge. Through these narratives, members learn what it is to be a ‘professional musician in Athens’. Thus, the credit of having ‘worked’ (preferably ‘in the night’, as discussed in the previous chapter) could be seen as a ‘symbol’ (Cottrell, 2004: 11–12) that holds together a community which is ‘imagined’ to the extent that it includes members who have not necessarily socialised together. The constitutive basis of this group, however, is the (painstakingly real) experience of work rather than any imaginary constructs. The imagination, on the other hand, serves as the refuge for all the components of their identity that musicians feel unable to express within the community of work. In this sense, the imagination functions as an impediment to a sense of belonging in the professional community rather than a unifying factor. Shared imaginaries between certain musicians lead to other types of affiliation, which fantasize the subversion of the social order of the mainstream professional milieu. In other words, while ‘work’ is conceptualised through experience, the imagination leads to the emergence of communities of ‘play’.29 The individual aesthetic dispositions that musicians fail to express within their ‘work’ are channelled in subcultural creative environments, an example of which is the jazz scene (Tsioulakis, 2011a, 2013, 2019a; Vavva, 2020; Patsiaoura, 2019). What needs to be made explicit here is that ‘experience’ and ‘imagination’ operate as two opposing forces in the construction of communities. Within the community of professional instrumentalists, it is the former that provides the ground for social unification. Furthermore, I  would argue that the logic of the shared rhetoric (hardship – frustration – alienation – disassociation) resembles the development of a type of ‘class consciousness’. This is not to suggest that professional musicians form a unified societal class but rather that they assume a class ‘role’ upon their entry to the music business. This is, consequently, a ‘performative class’. The power negotiations and struggles that bring this class into being will be discussed in the following chapter.

Notes 1 Ingrid Monson has also stressed the importance of being ‘viewed by the public in the role of professional musician’ as a key aspect for the constitution of communities of jazz musicians (1996: 13). 2 Magazí (pl. magaziá) literally translates as ‘shop’. Musicians often use this term to refer to the ‘mainstream’, popular-music nightclubs which feature the most prominent star-singers of the Athenian music industry (See, also, glossary of terms).

78  A community of experience 3 For a discussion of similar circumstances of battling competing engagements within the lives of professional in the ‘creative industries’, see McRobbie (2016), Bennett (2018), Lorey (2011) and Jian (2018). I have also explored these rhetoric tensions on issues of ‘hardship’ in Tsioulakis, 2018. 4 Néi is a type of Turkish/Arabic flute that gained popularity within the Athenian neotraditional scene after the 1980s. For an analysis of the role of ‘eastern’ instruments in Athenian music and the ideologies and aesthetics of their performers, see Kallimopoulou (2009). 5 The practice of ‘touring’ as a key component of musical work has not been examined very widely in ethnomusicology. Jocelyn Guilbault, for example, indicates that we need to provide more adequate answers to the question ‘what do our studies of touring musicians or diasporic musical networks add to discourses on mobility or discourses on mediation?’ (2014: 324) Some studies, however, have shown the centrality of this practice to the development of musicians’ identities, and significantly to their gendered aspect. For example, Ottosson, in his research among Aboriginal ‘desert’ musicians explains that These men also tend to engage in a “talking-up” discourse of their and others’ touring experiences. This real and imagined elevation of male and musician status is based on two main interactional aspects of touring: engagements with whitefella music workers and a “mainstream” (non-Indigenous) music industry; and being involved in a broader Aboriginal musical brotherhood. (Ottosson, 2009: 102) Nóvoa has further attested that ‘Seeing the road, doing the road, feeling the road is just something that has to happen for them. It is part of who they are. The mobility of a musician is a performance that not only enables people, in general, to recognise musicians as such but it also helps the musicians to recognise themselves, playing a decisive role in the production and reproduction of their identities’ (Nóvoa, 2012: 367). 6 As Chapter 5 will argue, in the wake of excessive precarisation with The Greek Crisis, many musicians have argued that they were well-equipped to deal with the new circumstances because they have ‘always been in crisis’. Therefore, as I argue in that chapter, musicians serve as an example of a particularly ‘trained precariat’. 7 Faulkner and Becker report a similar gender imbalance within the US context, arguing that ‘The music business is overwhelmingly a male business, almost all the women involved being singers’ (2009: 3). 8 In their discussion of the absence of female homosexuality in rural Greece, for example, Loizos and Papataxiarchis assert: ‘None of this holds good, we must stress, for the larger cities, where lesbian identities are to be seen’ (1991b: 229). 9 Marie Virolle (2003) has explored similar restrictive gendered norms and discourses within the early raï music industry in Algeria. 10 Female singers are always portrayed as sexually desirable by male instrumentalists. In fact, love affairs between members of these two professional groups are far from rare. However, male musicians often argue that although tragoudístries are ideal for a ‘short-term’ relationship, they would ‘never choose them as life partners’. The reasoning is variably based on their perception by the public as ‘objects of sexual luring’ or to the immoral character that they allegedly embody. In their utterances, the mythologised external view of the tragoudiára seems to inform the moral judgement of the female singer. 11 It is worth noting that in his chapter entitled ‘Social Behavior: The Musician’ (1964: 123–144), Alan Merriam uses consistently and exclusively masculine pronouns to refer to instrumentalists around the world. 12 For an excellent cross-cultural study and literature review regarding female musicality and the use of instruments, see Doubleday (2008).

A community of experience 79 13 The view of the division of instruments as a sign of gender complementarity has been critiqued by Veronica Doubleday. She remarks that the ‘suitability’ of certain instruments for female use is dictated by male power-holders, while ‘we see no evidence for any such reverse process, whereby women tell men what instruments they should or should not play’ (2008: 21). 14 A similar situation has been described by Hassinger (1987) regarding the American jazz scene. She explains that although ‘the long established tradition of training genteel black and white young ladies in piano and music theory provided the entree for many women into jazz playing and arranging’ (1987: 196), ‘declarations of women’s lesser strength and the shockingly unladylike features of the jazz subculture’ resulted in their ultimate exclusion from the jazz stage (ibid: 197). 15 Eleni Kallimopoulou, an aspiring neo-traditional musician herself, has presented the case of Sofía Lampropoúlou, a female kanonáki player within the Athenian subculture of paradosiaká (2009: 179–196). In fact, in a personal interview in 2006, Sofía reported to me that her position as a female instrumentalist in the Athenian revivalist scene was less awkward than her experience within the source-culture of Istanbul, where the masculine connotations of the instruments were far more established. 16 Significantly, two of the very few prominent female session musicians in Athens are openly homosexual. This verifies Ellen Koskoff’s assertion that ‘females not in [the heterosexually active] category – young girls, older women, homosexual and “marginal” women . . . may assume certain musical roles that deny or negate their sexuality’ (1987: 6). Regarding the use of instruments as a component of lesbian identity, see, also, Doubleday (2008: 23). 17 During the break of a show at a large Athenian magazí, a female vocalist told me: ‘I don’t know who to hang out with! The musicians keep talking about their pedals and amplifiers and the dancers about which make-up brand lasts longer under the stage lights. Is there anyone normal around here?’ Since the specific club only featured male dancers, the second part of her comment also implied a critique towards the gender behaviour of the latter professional group. 18 Wendy Fonarow has also noted how guitar solos are regarded by indie fans as ‘selfindulgent, pretentious, narcissistic displays often likened to masturbation’ (2005: 67). 19 Deborah Wong (2006) has similarly shown how Asian-American women’s appropriation of taiko drumming (a practice exclusively linked to male musicality within the source culture) served as a (literally) loud statement of female presence in the modern social space. 20 Gender specificity in the original. 21 For a discussion of ‘stage policing’ in Athenian nightclubs, see Tsioulakis (2019b). 22 Vincent Crapanzano (2006) has elaborated on the play between the symbolic and the physical in transgressive erotic behaviour. He describes erotic transgression as existing in the ‘limits of symbolism – on and in the gap between symbol and symbolised, word and thing’ (ibid: 177). Crapanzano’s work shows that the recognition of the ‘symbolic’ character of transgression does not deny its real, literate and bodily aspect; rather, it enriches and expands its socio-cultural meaningfulness. 23 Degrading term for the laїká (urban-folk) genre and the clubs that host it. (See glossary and Introduction for a definition of genres.) 24 I examine the issue of ‘quality’ in local music-making in Tsioulakis, 2013. 25 Pierre Bourdieu, in a series of highly influential socio/anthropological texts, has argued that cultural consumption and distinctions of taste can serve as a means of affirming class identity and preserving social domination. Bourdieu’s views on artistic taste and aesthetics will be discussed in Chapter 4. 26 It should be noted here that not all musicians hold the same disregard for the laїkó genre. Bouzoúki players, for example, would have been directed to the instrument by their love for laїkó music. Nonetheless, some of them might still criticise the ‘decadent’

80  A community of experience strand of laїkó that is referred to as skyládiko (See Introduction for a discussion of the current genres of popular music). The position of bouzoúki players as ‘soloists’ in the context of laїkó music clubs, however, renders their experience different than the one of the background instrumentalists that are examined here. 27 Chapter 4 will elaborate on the power dynamics between the different ‘performative classes’ of the music workplace. 28 He actually uses the term ‘musical director’ in English in this quote. His immediate statement that he hates the word ‘maéstros’ comes from the word’s association with the skyládiko circuit. 29 I have examined one of those types of communities based on what I called the ‘cosmopolitan imaginary’ in Tsioulakis (2011a).

4 Power and performative classes

A popular singer, his agent and the bass player of his backing band are talking backstage after the end of a successful tour abroad. ‘What will you do with the money?’ the agent asks the singer. ‘With the traffic the way it is in Athens, I always wanted my own helicopter. Now I’ll be able to get it!’ he replies. ‘And what about the rest of it?’ the agent asks. ‘Well, I’ll probably invest the rest. What about you?’ ‘You know,’ the agent says, ‘for quite some time my wife had her eye on this beautiful beach-house on Naxos Island, it’s about time we bought it.’ ‘Oh nice,’ the singer remarks, ‘and what about the rest of it?’ ‘Yeah, I think I’ll invest the rest too,’ the agent says. ‘And what about yourself?’ they both ask the bassist. ‘I will probably get an iPod, it’s about time I had one of those!’ he replies. ‘Oh?’ the singer utters all surprised, ‘and what about the rest of it?’ ‘Yeah . . . well. . .’ mumbles the bassist, ‘I’ll borrow the rest off my mum.’

The popularity of the joke among Athenian instrumentalists reveals their selfconception as the underdogs of the music industry.1 As mentioned in the previous chapter, despite their respectable fees (especially compared to other types of local professionals), musicians present their work as a financial struggle. This is largely due to their frustration about the large difference between their kassé2 and that of other professional castes of the industry, especially the singers and entrepreneurs. A large amount of the literature on urban music scenes portrays musicians as an undifferentiated category with common practices, objectives and strategies. According to Wikström, for instance, ‘although the size of the recorded music industry is bigger than the live music industry, from the artists’ point of view, live music generally is a more important source of income than recorded music’ (2009: 58). Although the previous statement might be completely true from a quantitative point of view, it is problematic insofar as it equates all ‘artists’ under a common ‘point of view’. In the Greek context, Despina Michael (2009) has provided a valuable account of the aspirations and self-definitions of ‘popular musicians’. Focusing on the emerging similarities in the testimonies of an admittedly widely representative sample of musicians (in terms of their role in the performance, the music genre they represent, their age, gender, economic background and recognisability/fame) she concludes that what guides their engagement with the music

82  Power and performative classes scene is primarily an ‘aesthetic imperative . . . more than the more prosaic need for fame and fortune’ (2009: 397) By concentrating on the similarities, however, Michael misses the significance of the discrepancies between the musicians’ selfconceptions and the rhetoric used in their verbalisation. Specifically, she argues: Other reasons why musicians do what they do, of course, are linked to their own personal needs, values, and belief systems. Whether narcissistic or altruistic, emotionally balanced or troubled, Greek musicians tell us that the driving force for what they do is ultimately the need to create. (Ibid) For Michael, therefore, while the similarities in musicians’ utterances testify to a common aesthetic imperative, the differences in their proposed aspirations are only evidence of their individualism. They are, thus, dismissed in favour of a distilled understanding of the wider cultural context. Conversely, I identify a ‘middle step’ between a homogenised collective of ‘popular musicians’ and their collapse into individual personalities. My research among Athenian professional musicians illustrates an important division between different ‘classes’ of performers. This division can be equally documented by the observation of practices within the music workplace and the rhetoric employed by musicians in the description of their professional experience. The differentiation between singers and instrumentalists serves as a strikingly visible example. Popular singers are not only on a different payroll than their backing musicians, but their experience of the musical life is also qualitatively different. While the pop singer is being ‘marketed’ by the entrepreneurial circuit of the music industry, instrumentalists struggle to ‘market themselves’ against the economic precarity of their profession (see Haenfler, 2018; Threadgold, 2018; Long, 2015; Morgan and Wood, 2014; and for perspectives from the wider ‘creative industries’, Raunig, 2011; Lorey, 2011; McRobbie, 2016). While the successful pop singer aims for fame and/or artistic recognition, freelance instrumentalists strive for professional stability and enhanced working conditions.3 Furthermore, as this chapter will illustrate, even when all the implicated performative groups are motivated by an ‘aesthetic imperative’, the desired form and result of the creative process is far from uncontested. Equating instrumentalists, musical directors, popular singers and composers (to name but a few professional groups involved in music-making processes) under an umbrella term such as ‘performers’, ‘artists’ or ‘musicians’ is not only an oversimplification but a grave methodological mistake. The division between popular singers and their backing orchestras, however, far from summarises the social terrain of the music workplace. Instrumentalists are also situated in different positions of power within their category. These positions are defined by a variety of criteria, some of which are official and uncontested resulting in specific ranks (e.g., musical director, lead guitarist, support-act bassist) while others are ambiguous and constantly negotiable (age, knowledge, expertise, recognisability). Singers, on the other hand, are predominantly ranked

Power and performative classes 83 according to their success in the industry, a factor which shapes the power relationships within their group and their association with the instrumentalists. This social milieu is additionally complicated by the participation of other professional groups such as a variety of entrepreneurs (agents, club managers and producers) and the ‘technicians’ (technikoí ) including sound engineers and lighting specialists. According to Foucault, ‘while the human subject is placed in relations of production and of signification, he [sic] is equally placed in power relations that are very complex’ (1982: 209). In accordance with Foucault’s view, this chapter will propose a view of ‘performative classes’ within the field of popular musicmaking. This approach will contribute to an understanding of the different social roles that musicians assume upon entry to the workplace and the power negotiations that define them. As will become evident, the view of ‘performative’ classes does not imply that they are any less real in their social manifestation. The term, rather, encompasses their dual link to performance: (1) they are created and maintained by a setting of performance (music workplace) outside of which they largely become suspended, and (2) they become literally performed on and off stage. My approach to the performative class of Athenian instrumentalists will emerge through the examination of social micro-struggles within the music environment and the criteria that define their outcome. In doing this, I aim to unveil what Foucault calls the ‘micro-physics of power’ (1977: 26). For social struggles, Foucault asserts, should be deciphered in a ‘network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess’ (ibid). Simultaneously, I will inspect the accounts of professional musicians in order to identify the extent to which they are engrained with class rhetoric.

Pierre Bourdieu: social space, cultural capital and the distinction of taste Pierre Bourdieu’s models of analysis are particularly useful in my attempt to describe the social workings of the music workplace. Bourdieu’s balance between sociology and anthropology has contributed to an understanding of the ‘social’ that benefits from anthropology’s attentiveness to experiential ethnography as a particularly revealing component of research, examined through sociology’s sensitivity to power relations and their ability to shape cultural discourses. One of Bourdieu’s most important theoretical contributions is the definition of the ‘social space’ (1985). In a critique of the essentialist view of class advocated by the traditional Marxist model, Bourdieu proposes an understanding of the social space as a ‘field of forces, i.e., as a set of objective power relations that impose themselves on all who enter the field and that are irreducible to the intentions of the individual agents or even to the direct interactions among the agents’ (1985: 724). He, moreover, suggests that this field is multi-dimensional, providing a terrain for endless power struggles of different magnitudes among its participants, even when they do not necessarily conceptualise their actions within frameworks of pre-defined antagonistic groups (1985: 736). This description of the social space allows for

84  Power and performative classes a poststructuralist approach to the inner workings of any social setting. Such an approach acknowledges the existence of power schemes, while simultaneously accounting for the role of individual agency in maintaining and challenging them. This individual agency and its possible applications, Bourdieu asserts, need to be examined in direct relation to the position an actor occupies within the social space (1985: 734). In a further effort to challenge the determinism and one-dimensional character of orthodox Marxist analyses, Bourdieu speaks of three ‘forms of capital’ (1986), the flow of which defines the operation of what he calls ‘cultural economy’. In addition to economic capital, which serves as the primary scope of traditional Marxist approaches, he advocates the importance of ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ capital. ‘Social capital’ refers to the development of a network of relationships capable of supporting and, thus, empowering a social actor. These relationships are conceptualised as ‘capital’ insomuch as they can serve as a ‘credential which entitles [its possessor] to credit, in the various senses of the word’ (1986: 51). The idea of ‘cultural capital’, on the other hand, is broadly connected to the possession of knowledge. Bourdieu classifies three states in which the cultural capital becomes manifest: the ‘embodied’, the ‘objectified’ and the ‘institutionalized’ state (1986: 47). The ‘embodied’ state refers to the acquisition of any kind of skill and competence across the traditional dichotomy between mental and bodily knowledge. The ‘objectified’ state depicts the circulation of all cultural artefacts fulfilling educational, artistic, practical or entertaining purposes. Last, the ‘institutionalized’ state describes the types of knowledge that are affirmed by official educational qualifications. Bourdieu’s theorisation of the forms of capital helps the construction of an allencompassing view of the social space. The workings of the economy of culture are defined by individual and collective claims to capital in its different manifestations which are not reducible to their convertibility. Although the social and the cultural capital can, under the appropriate circumstances, be converted to economic capital, this fact does not suffice in summarising their importance. The three forms of capital, more importantly, describe the different individual and collective aspirations that drive social interaction caused by the actors’ struggles for the acquisition of power and prestige. This potency resulting from the recognition and legitimisation of economic, social, and cultural capital is what Bourdieu, in turn, calls ‘symbolic capital’ (1989: 17). This process of exchange of capital has a dual significance: at the individual level, it works as a means for empowerment (possession of symbolic capital) while, from a wider perspective, it facilitates the preservation of dominance and hegemony. In Bourdieu’s view, by participating in the hunt for symbolic capital, social actors recognize and reinforce relations of domination which are evident in interactions between persons and institutionalised mechanisms of control (1977: 183–184). These analytical concepts become additionally useful when applied to the processes of cultural production, consumption and evaluation. In a series of works (1969, 1980, 1984, 1993), Bourdieu has examined the milieu of (mostly Western

Power and performative classes 85 European) artistic production as a field engraved with power. In his writings he has effectively demonstrated how ‘agents within the intellectual field acquire “positional properties” dependant on their position within the social structure’ (1969: 89). Consequently, an artistic product (objectified cultural capital) must be viewed in relation to the power negotiations that define the setting within which it was produced, what Bourdieu calls the ‘field of cultural production’ (1993). Despite the Romantic Movement’s notion of independence and emancipation of the artist (1969: 92), this field is described by Bourdieu as a terrain of multiple forces and struggles, a ‘space of literary or artistic position-takings’ (1993: 30). Within ethnomusicology and popular music, these theoretical suggestions mean that one should reveal the power negotiations that are involved in any musicking process, along with the creative intentions of the eponymous artist. Aesthetic discrepancies, contested roles and struggles of authority between various individuals and groups must not be overlooked in favour of a focus on the artwork itself, severed from the social field that produced it. A final important point for the examination that follows comes from Bourdieu’s inductive application of the forms of capital to aesthetics and taste, elaborated in his book Distinction (1984). Artistic evaluation, Bourdieu argues, operates predominantly as an indicator of class. Taste translates as knowledge of the rules dictating the value of any artistic creation. Aesthetical judgment, therefore, demonstrates the possession of cultural capital. This process is socially significant for the position-taking of individuals: To the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers. This predisposes tastes to function as markers of ‘class.’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 1) Subsequently, in Bourdieu’s logic, the dichotomy between the so-called ‘pure’ and ‘popular’ aesthetic (the earlier being concerned with ‘form’ and ‘manner’, while the latter respectively with ‘function’ and ‘matter’) reveals an intention for social distinction: Intellectuals could be said to believe in the representation – literature, theatre, painting  – more than in the things represented, whereas the people chiefly expect representations and the conventions which govern them to allow them to believe ‘naively’ in the things represented. . . . Art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences. (ibid: 6–7) Bourdieu has even supported this thesis through quantitative study. In his work ‘The Aristocracy of Culture’ (1980), he has employed extended quantitative research in order to illustrate the correlation between an individual’s social

86  Power and performative classes background (class) and their ability to recognise artists (composers, painters and so on) and evaluate their work according to established intellectual rules.4 In this light, I intend to examine the micro-struggles of the music workplace as indicative of existing power formations and the way they are maintained, reconfigured, or reversed, by individual agents. This effort will employ three types of analysis: (1) by looking at the musicians’ statements about other professional groups, I will examine the social dynamics in their verbal manifestation; (2) through the scrutiny of three incidents that I observed during my employment as a musician in an Athenian magazí,5 I will show how social positions are negotiated in practice; (3) by inspecting a specific musician’s life-story and his extraordinary encounter with the popular music industry, I will provide an example of power reversal and identify the dynamics that characterised it. This chapter, therefore, simultaneously examines domination and its flip-side: resistance. As Foucault advocates, taking resistance as a starting point for a study of power, can be fruitful for the connection between theory and practice (1982: 211).

Rhetorics of separation: the view of other professional groups This section will look at the way professional instrumentalists speak about their associates in the music workplace. My primary objective is to show that the rhetoric used to distinguish the experience of being a session instrumentalist (mousikós) from being involved in professional music-making in other capacities, is engrained with discourses of power. Through their descriptions of other occupational groups, professional mousikoí bring to life ongoing antagonisms over diverse fields of authority. These descriptions, however, are more than simple revelations; as this section will suggest, they are also formative factors in the power discourse manifest in the music workplace. Private interviews with instrumentalists, as well as the conversations that I have witnessed among them, focus predominantly on three occupational groups whose activities are seen as having an important impact on the musician’s work: the singers (tragoudistés), the music producers and agents6 (paragogoí) and the venue owners or managers (magazátores, the owners of magaziá). This part of the chapter will examine the way in which musicians describe these three types of actors and the power relationships that emerge through their utterances. The singers As discussed in Chapter 2, the term mousikós (musician) is used in the Athenian music industry in quite a narrower sense than its English translation would suggest. The job description of a professional mousikós includes a person who is paid to perform a musical instrument on stage. Thus, even singers who play an instrument for accompaniment, or write their own songs, are perceived as belonging to a different occupational group than mousikoí (pl.). This distinction is attentively preserved by both groups: instrumentalists claim an exclusive

Power and performative classes 87 possession of musical knowledge (cultural capital), while singers are usually credited for their ability to connect with audiences and entertain them (social capital) or for the quality of their voices which is largely conceptualised as a natural gift.7 Consequently, when mousikoí speak about the singers with whom they collaborate, they often stress that the singers lack musical training: Most of the singers and songwriters play by instinct. And, of course, they do make some good stuff by instinct. But this is not enough, because it always reaches the limit of non-knowledge. You can only explore yourself so much . . . some of them dropped out of schools of economics because they’re making more money by singing and playing a bit of guitar. But the industry should make special guitars for them with only three frets. Beyond those three there’s no money! (Vasso – guitarist) Only rarely do musicians recognise the musical training and talent of their singing collaborators: A – is an exception. He might be a singer and songwriter, which as you and I know is different than being a musician, but he knows his music. He has a wider knowledge of instrumentation and composition. So he likes being surrounded by musicians who are willing to experiment and push his music forward. He is like a mousikós in that he cares about the actual music and not only his career and publicity. (Mihalis – drummer) A further proof that musicians are consistent in their criteria of ‘musical knowledge’ (or lack thereof) regarding popular singers, is provided by Alexandros, another professional drummer. When asked about the subject, Alexandros chose to refer to the same artist as Mihális: A – is the only person I know who really gave space to his backing musicians; because he is himself a musician on top of being a singer. I’d love to be working with him. He let them do their thing and his music benefitted from that. But he is an exception. (Alexandros – drummer) What should be noted here, however, is that A – ’s ‘exceptionality’ as a musician, is primarily located in his decision to ‘give space’ to the instrumentalists. In other words, what Alexandros and Mihalis suggest here is that A – knew enough to understand that it was in his best interest to encourage the backing musicians to perform freely rather than to attempt to direct them. Thus, ultimate knowledge is still portrayed as existing within the ranks of instrumentalists.

88  Power and performative classes Even when a singer’s musical knowledge is recognised, his or her position in the music industry is perceived differently than the instrumentalist’s. This, I argue, is a testimony to power inequality. Due to the fact that the Athenian music industry mainly promotes solo singers (rather than bands or solo instrumentalists) as popular stars, the instrumentalists are required to serve those singers as temporary workforce: they perform far behind them on stage, their names and contribution often remain unacknowledged, and their payment represents a small fraction of that of the singer.8 The huge difference in the income of the two types of performers is often discussed by musicians as a frustrating situation: It’s not like we don’t get enough money, of course we do! Compared to other hardworking people I mean. But when you work for 300 euro per night and you find out that the singer is getting 7000, you can’t help it. You get angry. I understand that all the people are here to see the singer, but what about us there in the back? Are we just a bunch of morons or something? (Stefanos – keyboardist)9 As a result, mousikoí mainly regard the singers as their employers. They often refer to them as ‘the Boss’ (afentikó), or ‘the Uncle/Aunt’ (theíos/theía), both labels stressing their role as power-holders and guardians rather than fellow musicians. My private interviews with instrumentalists were frequently used as outlets for their frustration about the relationship with their singer-employers: K – was not very nice to us. I mean, he would listen to what we had to say, but he was very moody and he always took it out on us. He always cursed and told us off, even on stage. (Tolis – guitarist) It’s important that the singer is friendly and polite, so that the atmosphere is not too tense. A – was generally nice, but when she was in a weird mood she could easily embarrass you in front of everyone. (Alex – bassist) I worked with F – and that was a terrible collaboration. Not only because the gigs were badly paid given the amount of work and rehearsals, but also because his attitude was very arrogant and sarcastic towards musicians and there was no respect toward us. For example, a few months into the collaboration we played a big concert and he couldn’t remember my name. That says a lot. (Kostas – bassist) The thing is that all the popular singers are a bit mentally unstable. [Laughing] And one of the predicaments of our profession is that we have to put up with their moods. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t blame them. They are the

Power and performative classes 89 ones in the front; whatever goes wrong they will have to deal with the pressure coming from thousands of people who came to see them specifically. But psychologically it’s often hard for us to handle. (Achilleas – bassist) A central aspect of the critique towards the singers concentrates on their tendency to constrain the free expression and creativity of the mousikós: They don’t want to sit down and really play music. No intention of creating anything, you know? They just want to get the work over with. . . . And you feel like you have a speed limit. That you can go at 120 kilometres per hour and they won’t let you go more than 50. Take for example when I was working with P – [éntechno singer]. He was a great boss; relaxed, good fun to hang out with and all. But he was a terrible musician. Imagine, he added us to his band so that the whole thing would be a little more sophisticated than with his previous group. And instead of him trying to get better and play at our level, we had to get down to his! We couldn’t wait for the one song he wasn’t singing so we could play some music. (Petros – bassist) The bands are good, but the singers who are controlling the game are very dodgy. And they make you play dodgy cause if you’re good then it’s obvious how dodgy they are. If you’re both dodgy then they get away with it. (Alexandros – drummer) The singers sometimes are completely ignorant, and they don’t even realise how ignorant they are. They’re trying to show that they’re on top of things, so they are always telling you how to play and you get fed up. You try to object, to make them realise that you know your instrument better than them, but eventually you just give in and you’re like ‘fuck it, I’ll do whatever they’re telling me and get the job over with.’ F –, for example, told me once ‘I want you to play a bit more pentatonic, like David Gilmour, you know?’ And I’m like, ‘well, pentatonic is all I know! I couldn’t have been playing anything else.’ So he says ‘no wait, let me show you.’ And he got the guitar and started playing, in his. . . ‘Gilmour style.’ God, it sounded awful. So then I just humoured him and said ‘oh right, I understand.’ Then I played the exact same thing that I was playing before and we were both happy. They just want to keep their musicians on their toes and have them follow directions. Then they feel they justify their role. (Alekos – guitarist) All the quotes represent a vibrant rhetoric of solidarity between instrumentalists and separation from the occupational rank of singers. This rhetoric is characterised by two important elements: a consciousness of intolerable subordination and

90  Power and performative classes a constant reference to knowledge. These two elements become more meaningful in their interaction: the subaltern status of mousikoí is even more unbearable because of their self-perception as exclusive holders of musical knowledge. In other words, their frustration is reinforced by the fact that their cultural capital (knowledge) is not duly recognised, thus becoming practically insolvent. Subsequently, in the musician’s rhetoric, the singer serves as the iniquitous dominator of a perverted system of values. The producers and artists’ agents Whenever asked about their experience of music producers (paragogoí), musicians have a plethora of anecdotes to recite. The common conclusion in their stories is that the producer’s role has been enormously misinterpreted in the Greek industry. In their view, Greek music producers are largely incompetent people who have managed to succeed in the music business through questionable networking strategies. Not only their musical knowledge but also their comprehension of the music business is constantly ridiculed by instrumentalists: A record producer once asked me to play the bass in a way ‘sounding like the steps of the dinosaur approaching from afar.’ What was I supposed to do with that? No idea! (Labros – bassist) I was recording for a pop singer’s album and the producer asked me to play some accompanying riffs on the electric guitar. So I  kept playing different ones but he didn’t like any of them. He was like ‘these riffs are very nice for me and you, but we need something for the average Greek housewife!’ I couldn’t stop laughing! (Myron – guitarist) This representation of the good-for-nothing Greek music producer is contrasted with the perception of the international producer, who is believed to be capable of directing the scene in a creative way: The producers abroad are not like ours, random people who finished a business school and used their dad’s money to open a record label. Abroad they know how the music scene works. They can predict where the music is going and push the artists go forward. Here they keep us back! You try to do something new and they’re like, ‘what, are you pretending to be revolutionary? You have a contract here. Do you want to see it cancelled?’ (Stefanos – keyboardist) It was only when I worked with Manfred Eicher from ECM that I realised what a producer is supposed to do. First of all he is a true musician. He can play bass, properly play. Second, he has listened to so much music, he knows

Power and performative classes 91 what he’s talking about. He is opinionated and has ideas that would be very advanced for us here. (Haris – néi player) Conversely, the Greek producer is regarded as a person whose only merit is the familiarity with the key persons in the industry’s promotion networks and his or her sociability. Accordingly, the role of the music producer is ambivalently merged with that of the artist’s agent. Ultimately, producers and agents exist in the instrumentalist’s consciousness as undifferentiated actors who wield undue power to decide the future of aspiring artists. This view is also occasionally reported by singers: Why would we need producers and agents? They are like vultures. All the agents I’ve met are genuinely evil people. Sorry for saying that but it’s true. And I think most of them wanted to be musicians or singers and they couldn’t; so now they have made it their life’s purpose to see us suffer! [Laughing] No but seriously, it’s very unfair. The poor musicians make their fingers bleed and the singers destroy their throats in order to do what they do best. And you Mr Big-shot producer make the same money for being blasé and sociable? (Anastasia – singer) Similarly to the case of singers, paragogoí are represented by the rhetoric of the mousikós through a focus on power asymmetries. The domination of the instrumentalist by the singer and the producer is possible through the marginalisation of cultural capital and the overemphasis on the social and the economic capital. In other words, instrumentalists argue that although their musical training (allegedly more advanced than any of the other actors) ensures their employment in the music industry, it does little to give them agency within the social field. Seen through this perspective, the previous utterances are more than mirrors of everyday occurrences; they are acts of verbal resistance (see Tsioulakis, 2011b) The venue owners The way musicians speak of the owners (or managers) of the venues where their performances take place is similarly embedded with power contestation. The primary factor of criticism here, however, is a perceived misinterpretation of the musician’s artistic role: Whenever I talk to club owners it feels like I’m trying to trick them into buying something they don’t need. I’m playing myself up, present my music in a specific way. Although I know that what I’m doing is good, I feel like I’m some kind of a pushy salesman. I don’t like that. I wish that someone else would do it and I’d just go out and play my music. (MC Yinka – rapper/bassist)

92  Power and performative classes The magazátoras is presented as a cynic financier, who, due to his or her lack of music appreciation, is only able to evaluate the profitability of a performance. This fact is portrayed as an additional obstacle for the instrumentalist’s creativity: The magazátoras treated us like his employees, same as the waiters. He didn’t realise that we were a band that had something to say musically. He used to call the bartender to see what time we started playing, and he forced us to include more Greek songs because he thought this would sell more tickets. He counted the club’s earnings every night to decide if we had played well. (Yiorgos – drummer) Oh, don’t even ask me about them [venue owners], I’m so tired of them. Having to bargain every time with people who use their cash register as the criterion of how good a musician you are . . . it’s awful. (Dimitris – saxophone player) The relationship between the magazátores and the musicians, however, is portrayed as additionally challenging due to the common belief that the former are linked to the Athenian criminal underworld (Tsioulakis, 2019b).10 That’s how the magaziá work, you see. Sometimes the manager will say you didn’t sell enough tickets, while you know you did. They might not even give you anything. If you fight them too much they’ll take their guns out. It has happened to me! (MC Yinka – rapper/bassist) A lot of people warn you about playing ‘in the night’, but I don’t think they mainly mean the working hours and conditions as much as the ‘sleaziness’ of those bosses who are all part of the underworld. (Labros – bassist) For this reason, standing up to a magazátoras is seen as quite a risky choice, offering a quasi-mythical status to musicians who have been known for doing it. Consequently, the power relationship between the musician and the nightclub owner is defined not only by subordination but also by fear. Kostas, a bass player who is also an elected official in the Greek Musicians’ Union, explained that the power and notoriety of club owners is the exact reason why they need to be fought collectively rather than individually: When we talk about ‘nightclub owners’, sometimes this is an overgeneralising term. The problem, and our struggle, is against those big owners who are also implicated in the exchange of big capital, the ones who control the big magaziá. But the important thing is that musicians develop a degree of collegial consciousness and solidarity, so they can make claims collectively, wherever they find themselves working.

Power and performative classes 93 As a result, this subjugation and fear that is involved in being hired in big nightclubs increases the instrumentalists’ alienation from the popular music workplace as well as enforces their class-like rhetoric. Musicians are often eager to narrate stories of criminal behaviour, especially in order to stress the adventurous character of their profession to outsiders. In our interviews and their private discussions, however, musicians referred to these events primarily as proof that this scene offers a hostile environment for creative artists where music itself is of minor importance. The discussion of the musician’s feeling of creative constraint is, of course, not new. Cottrell has illustrated how musicians of the symphonic orchestra find their participation in such large ensembles restraining for their individual expression (2004: 77–101). Christian (1987) has also discussed how semi-professional jazz musicians in the UK have to compromise their musical aspirations in order to find opportunities to perform. Robert Faulkner’s work similarly focuses on the resentment that freelance musicians in the Hollywood recording industry express about the contractors who control their careers (1985: 143–160). In their comprehensive study of professionals within the creative industries, including a lot of musicians, Hesmondhalgh and Baker dedicate significant lengths to study ideas of ‘freedom’ (2010) and ‘autonomy’ (2011: 81–112), as well as their articulation by participants on both the managing and the creative side. As they argue, creative autonomy represents a ground of conflict and negotiation in contemporary cultural-industry work-places. This has been the case for many decades, but it seems that the expanded social and economic role of the cultural industries may have added to the impetus of those forces that emphasise commercial imperatives over artistic and professional ones. (2011: 111) What my examination reveals, however, is that the specific rhetoric used to describe the power inequalities that result in the Athenian musician’s feeling of constraint rather than engaging with an individualised rhetoric of autonomy, it more resembles a verbalisation of class consciousness. This is not to suggest that instrumentalists form a specific class in a broader view of contemporary Athenian society. In fact, outside of the workplace, instrumentalists might belong to quite different socio-economic strata. A middle-class drummer from the posh northern suburbs of Athens, and a Roma keyboardist from the western parts of the city, could easily find themselves together accompanying a singer belonging to any possible class background. Remarkably, however, upon their entry in the music business, mousikoí seem to adopt a class rhetoric that transcends the differences in their prior backgrounds. It is this kind of alignment that I refer to as ‘performative class.’ This examination reveals a consistent way of articulating this class consciousness. The groups that dominate the performative class of mousikoí are identified and the sources of their social power thoroughly explained: popular singers gain authority from their recognisability among the audience multitude, music producers become powerful through their networking within the music

94  Power and performative classes industry, and nightclub owners are established due to their economic assets and gangster-style machismo. Mousikoí, on the other hand, the beholders of knowledge that permits the operation of the entire entertainment industry (as they regard themselves), remain in the lower ranks of payment, authority and public visibility. Evidently, within the Athenian music industry, the value of cultural capital is smaller than the social and the economic. This perceived insolvency of cultural capital is summarised in the popular phrase discussed in Chapter 2: ‘the “papers” won’t make you a musician’. In this context, the instrumentalists’ utterances work as discursive resistance (see Tsioulakis, 2011b). According to Janet Maybin, ‘social conflict is evident . . . in the way language is used to put a particular interpretation on experience’ (2001: 65). It is in this sense that I argued, earlier, that the rhetoric does not only reflect but also shapes power dynamics. As Margaret Wetherell asserts, a discourse ‘is constitutive of social life . . . discourse builds objects, worlds, minds and social relations’ (2001: 16). The consistency of the way that powerholders are portrayed within the musicians’ rhetoric suggests a use of language as an instrument of opposition. Subsequently, the previous utterances can be seen as examples of ‘heteroglossia’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 291). Bakhtin’s useful term captures the way in which different discursive manners shape (and are shaped by) a dynamic multiplicity of social meanings. Bakhtin, moreover, speaks of the ‘taste’ words acquire through their use by a specific profession, political party, age group, literary genre and so on (ibid: 293). When my informants spoke of their dominators with contempt, and when they ridiculed the power scheme that those other professionals represent, they did so without hesitation or reluctance. Their comments were uttered with confidence, sounding like well-rehearsed statements, and they seemed to be expressed with a degree of pleasure. This kind of rhetoric can only be developed through a long process of socialisation, what I proposed in Chapter 2 as the constitutive factor of a community of professional musicians. Thus, to echo Bakhtin, these words are populated with the group’s ‘semantic and expressive intention’ (ibid: 293). The mousikoí are vehicles of a rhetoric with a specific purpose to challenge what is perceived as a perverse system of authority. It is worth noting, however, that the way in which this rhetoric is constructed resembles Bourdieu’s (1984) earlier-mentioned dichotomy of ‘pure’ vs ‘popular’ aesthetic. The musicians complain because, instead of being creative artists (concerned with form/manner), they are forced to serve as entertainers who facilitate economic profit (performing a function/matter). They, moreover, propose their advanced knowledge and understanding of music as an argument in favour of their unrecognised value: shouldn’t they, as the beholders of cultural capital, be the masters of the game? In this sense, the use of the ‘pure aesthetic’ in their rhetoric does not attempt to preserve a class system (as Bourdieu argues) but to reverse it. The discourse of knowledge and taste, in this instance, becomes a form of ‘hidden transcript’ (Scott, 1990), a language of resistance among the subaltern performative class of mousikoí.

Power and performative classes 95

Negotiations of power in a pop music magazí After examining the rhetoric used by musicians to refer to the occupational groups surrounding them in the workplace, I will concentrate on the way that power relations become manifest in practice. As will become clear, the one-way application of social hegemony to mousikoí described in their individual utterances, becomes continuously challenged and renegotiated in the context of work. The ethnographic examples that follow will show that the micro-struggles taking place in the social field of popular music-making are not canonised, nor is their outcome predetermined. Despite the fact that mousikoí portray their hegemony by other groups as complete and inexorable, they still engage in numerous power battles, many of which they eventually win. What follows is the scrutiny of power negotiations as I encountered them during my employment at a large Athenian popmusic magazí (see, also, Tsioulakis, 2013, 2018, 2019b). In July of 2008, I was called by a band named Rustik, with whom I had collaborated in the past, with a proposal to join them as a keyboard player for a season at an Athenian nightclub. Rustik was a funk-rock cover band comprising mainly jazz-trained instrumentalists, who, despite their young age, had been working individually as professional session musicians for the previous five years. The Greek-American vocalist of Rustik, Mick, had convinced S –, a Greek male popstar, to employ the entire group as his backing band.11 Additionally, the band had succeeded in persuading the singer and his musical director, Demis, to allow them to appear on stage on their own, as a 40-minute-long opening act. When S – entered the stage for the main part of the show, however, they were expected to move back and perform as his backing instrumentalists. The members of Rustik (vocalist Mick, guitarist Babis, drummer Spyros, bassist Achilleas and I), were to be joined for the main show by maéstros/guitarist Demis, and Stefanos, serving as an additional keyboardist. The rehearsals started in September of the same year and lasted for about three months. The unexpected length of the rehearsal period was due to the fact that the club owner did not finish the renovation on time, so the music show could not be finalised as this would require a number of rehearsals on a stage that was yet to be built. As a result, the rehearsals turned into a terrain for endless negotiations among a plethora of people involved in shaping the show. S –, the main singer, Demis, the musical director (maéstros), the instrumentalists of Rustik, three backing vocalists, a singing comedian/actor, a choreographer, a lighting designer with his assistant, a team of three sound engineers, S – ’s personal assistant who also served as his prompter, and a stylist, were all actors in this process of arranging a four-hour-long music show. Significantly, all of these professionals had overlapping duties, expectations and authorities, turning the simplest decision into an unprecedented drama. The position of the musicians on stage, for example, needed to take into account the preoccupations of a number of people: the instrumentalists wanted a position where they would be visible to the audience, but the lighting designer was adamant that the space in front of the projector had to remain

96  Power and performative classes clear. At the same time, the choreographer dictated that all of the instrumentalists should use wireless equipment in order to be able to move around according to the theatrical needs of the show. This proposition, however, was rejected by the sound-engineering team who asserted that too many wireless signals would compromise the quality of the sound. The occasional appearance of the club owner (who was not short of an opinion on the aesthetics and technicalities of the project, or the eagerness to loudly express it) and S – ’s record producer (who, although not directly involved in the project, was ensuring that the result enhanced the artist’s public image) added to the existing tension. Thus, what started as minor disputes concerning technical issues, gave rise to theatrical performances of contesting authority (see also, Tsioulakis, 2013). Moving beyond their initial technical preoccupations, different professionals engaged in struggles in order to protect their occupational authority. And their behaviour was far from subtle: I witnessed chairs fly off the stage when someone thought they were placed against his directions, a lighting technician physically assault a sound engineer over the use of an electric socket and the choreographer quit two days before the opening after a minor dispute with the club owner (only to return to work the following morning). It was against this background that the last month of rehearsals took place. As expected, the atmosphere of general power antagonisms did not leave the

Figure 4.1  Sound and lighting technicians setting up the stage

Power and performative classes 97 arrangement of purely musical matters unaffected. Through the examination of three specific examples of dispute concerning the actual music-making, I  will identify some of the main criteria of power within the social field of the pop-music nightclub. Subsequently, I will illustrate the connection between these criteria and Bourdieu’s forms of capital. A song’s ending: on knowledge, seniority and cosmopolitanism One of the main distinguishing characteristics of S – ’s pop-music show was its perceived cosmopolitan aesthetic.12 This aspect was consciously advertised, and significant effort was dedicated to building a performance aligned with westernised musical and visual sensibilities. The club’s Greek previous name was changed to the anglicised Glitz, the new internal decoration was (allegedly) inspired by a music bar that the owner frequented in New York City and, instead of chairs and tables that was the norm for most Athenian magaziá, the spectators were accommodated on couches and small stools. This last choice aimed at disassociating the performance from the established practice of food consumption during the show. At the same time, some of the conventions that were considered central to the ‘magazí experience’ (significantly, the more profitable ones) such as selling flowers to be tossed to the performers, and the employment of photographers who went around taking pictures which they subsequently attempted to sell to the audience, were preserved and cherished.13 This aesthetic disemia,14 proposing, on the one hand, a new style of nightly entertainment, and relying, on the other, on well-established norms, was also mirrored in decisions concerning purely musical matters. The reason why a band of young musicians was selected to accompany the pop singer rather than a group of established musicians of the magaziá circuit, was the modernising aim of the show. These instrumentalists looked youthful and fashionable, they were full of energy and (presumably) were familiar with current Anglo-American playing styles in a more experiential way than their older and more established colleagues. They were, in sum, authentic cosmopolitans (Tsioulakis, 2011a). Conversely, Demis, the maéstros of the show, was a guitarist in his fifties, who had long experience in organising magaziá shows and had worked for a plethora of pop and laїkó singers in the past. He thus represented a ‘safe’ option: his job was to make sure that the ‘innovative’ character of the performed music would not jeopardise the popularity of the magazí among Athenian audiences. More specifically, a preoccupation repeatedly verbalised by the magazátoras concerned the target audience. In his view, too much ‘modernisation’ would certainly attract younger and more cosmopolitan audiences, but it could result in the alienation of the older clientele. It was that latter group that the club circuit relied on financially, due to their stronger spending power. This tension between familiar/local and modern/cosmopolitan music aesthetics was respectively incarnated by two musicians: Demis, the official maéstros, and Achilleas, the bassist of Rustik, who had assumed the role of assistant musical

98  Power and performative classes director and was in charge of the ‘foreign’ part of the program (ta kséna). Demis and Achilleas constantly argued over issues such as the effects on the electric guitar, the keyboard sounds, the rhythm patterns and the order of the songs. One such occasion emerged during the arrangement of a classic American funk-soul piece for S – ’s main part of the show. The band played the whole song and copied the ending of the original American recording: a fill on the drums leading to an offbeat kick in the tonic chord. Demis interrupted them and said: ‘No, no! What are you doing? You can’t end it like that!’ ‘That’s the original ending’, replied Achilleas. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter’, Demis asserted, ‘we’re going to finish with a rallentando [gradual slowing down] and then hold the last chord as a halí [background drone, literally meaning ‘carpet’] so we can connect it to the next song’. ‘What?’ yelled Achilleas, ‘this is such an ellinikoúra [negative term for something that is perceived as ‘excessively Greek’]. It will sound ridiculous! This is a “black” funk song; they would never end it like that’. Evidently irritated, Demis replied, listen to me, Achilleas, we’re in a Greek magazí here, what do you think this is, the Bronx? If you end the song like the original, it will ruin the flow of the programme. People won’t know if they need to clap or if the song is still going. ‘Well it’s definitely not the Bronx’, a sound engineer interrupted, ‘it’s clearly Uptown Manhattan, do you not see the huge skyscrapers in the pictures on the walls?’ he said in mockery of the excessive decoration. Everyone laughed, but Demis continued seriously: ‘come on guys, we’ll never finish here. This is how it’s going to be: rallentando, halí, link to next song’. ‘This is complete magazíla [magazí style of playing], I thought we were trying to do something more informed [enimeroméno] here. I guess I was mistaken!’ Achilleas answered provokingly. Listen, boy [agóri mou], stop thinking you know everything. If you want to do well in this job, you need to know how to make a show work out. You think you’re fucking good [gamás] just because your groove sounds like a black bassist’s? Let me tell you, there’s more to it than this. This example presents a dispute over a seemingly trivial musical decision: the ending of a song. At first glance, the outcome of this micro-battle verifies the norm of the specific social field: the older and more established maéstros imposes his will on the low-rank instrumentalist. What is interesting, however, is the contradicting use of ‘knowledge’ in the rhetoric of the two musicians. Demis’s claim to knowledge comes from his prolonged experience in professional music-making, which allows him to predict and guide the audience’s response. Achilleas, on the other hand, attempts to shift the discussion towards a different type of knowledge connected to cosmopolitan authenticity (‘they [African American musicians] would never end it like that’). By emphasising his familiarity with ‘black’ American music, he asserts that he is more qualified to decide how a ‘foreign’ song

Power and performative classes 99 should be arranged. Additionally, his use of the words ‘magazíla’ and ‘ellinikoúra’ is meant to ridicule the established conventions of musical arrangement of the magazí, thus rendering them undesirable within the group. Conversely, he refers to his approach as more ‘informed’, namely one that is more up to date with cosmopolitan aesthetics. Demis, on the other hand, identifying Achilleas’s aesthetic judgement as a threat to his authority, brings the dispute back to a matter of seniority (by addressing him with the word ‘boy’) and experience. Notably, Demis’s assertion that ‘you need to know how to make a show work out’, could be interpreted both musically (knowing how to arrange the songs) and socially (knowing when to remain silent and follow orders). Finally, Demis mocks Achilleas’s claim to cosmopolitanism (sounding like a ‘black bassist’), therefore rejecting it as a source of authority. What should be remarked here is that the official rank of the two musicians is never brought up explicitly in order for the dispute to be terminated. Demis could easily have used his position as a musical director in order to end any further negotiation. Instead, he chose to keep ‘knowledge’ at the centre of the dispute. Even when the criterion of seniority entered the discourse, it was used to strengthen a claim to experience (a type of knowledge) rather than as a factor of power in its own right. This strategy comes from Demis’s realisation that power schemes in this milieu are constantly negotiable, not permanently fixed. He, thus, needs to establish criteria of power (experience/seniority) that will give him an advantage in future micro-struggles. Strumming the guitar the ‘fresh’ way: on the performance of power and the value of knowledge A dispute similar to the previous emerged while rehearsing one of S – ’s original songs. Since this was a Greek pop song, its arrangement fell under Demis’s complete authority. Babis, Rustik’s guitarist, nonetheless, chose to alter his playing style for the chorus of the song, adding a ‘grunge’ distortion effect to his sound and choosing to strum rather than play arpeggios as initially directed by Demis. Hearing this change to the chorus, S – turned to Babis and, without interrupting the song, gave him a thumbs-up gesture, showing his appreciation. Having missed the singer’s gesture of approval, Demis ordered all the musicians to stop and scolded Babis for not playing as directed: ‘How many times do we need to go through this? Clean sound arpeggios at the chorus!’ ‘Wait, wait!’ objected S –. ‘I liked it! Don’t be a grumpy old maid! This modern, fresh stuff is what we need. You know, like a Brit sound. Let the boys play as they like’. ‘Oh ok S – ’, replied Demis, ‘no problem. But at least he needs to find a better distortion effect. This sounds like a cheap car-stereo’. This example can be analysed in two ways. First, it could be argued that the perceived ‘freshness’ and cosmopolitanism (resemblance to the ‘Brit sound’) represented by the young instrumentalist, wins the aesthetic dispute. This suggests a reversal of the earlier dominance of seniority over cosmopolitanism. In this

100  Power and performative classes process, the use of the word ‘boys’ shifts from its derogatory connotation in the previous example, to a sense of fashionable innovation, as it is contrasted with the characterisation ‘grumpy old maid’. In a second reading, however, the fact should not remain unacknowledged that the subaltern instrumentalist won this micro-battle against the maéstros through the agency of an even more powerful figure: the pop singer. Interpreted from the singer’s perspective, this incident could be regarded as his attempt to preserve his own authority. After having been witnessed by a number of participants encouraging the young guitarist’s initiative, remaining passive to Demis’s comment could compromise S – ’s own power role. According to this second reading, both S – ’s reaction and Demis’s eventual compromise could be regarded as performances dictated by a fixed power play. A few hours after S – left the venue, the rehearsal was still going on. During a short break, Demis took out his mobile phone and proudly read to everyone the text message he had just received from S – : ‘I’m sorry for earlier. I’m a bit tense with all the preparations. You’re the man’. ‘He always sends me these “love notes” after he messes up’, Demis explained. I know that if I agree with him when he’s acting angry, he will regret it afterwards. Besides, he knows that without me he can’t pull this show off. Don’t get me wrong, when he’s on the stage he’s like a God. But without me arranging all the background where would he be? With this declaration, Demis portrays his knowledge as a key factor contributing to an almost invisible power. Demis’s words suggest that, although he and S – have to assume the roles of the subordinate and the dominator for public display, the power relations between them are more complicated. This is due to Demis’s indispensable knowledge of arranging a music show. Victor Turner has thoroughly discussed this type of tensions within what he calls a ‘social drama’ (1982: 61–88, 1986: 33–46). As Turner illustrates, social dramas are ‘propelled by passions, compelled by volitions, overmastering at times any rational considerations. Yet reason plays a major role in the settlement of disputes which take the sociodramatic form’ (1986: 90). It is this sense of ‘reason’ that we can identify in Demis’s passivity in the previous example.15 Rustik’s set: who knows best? After the end of the first night’s show, Rustik were called by the musical director. It was Achilleas who answered his mobile phone. ‘Guys can you come upstairs to S – ’s dressing room?’ Demis asked. ‘We need to discuss how it went tonight’. They immediately realised what that meant. The band knew that their own set did not work as well as expected; too many audience members were talking and taking toilet breaks instead of listening and dancing. ‘They’re going to try and cut our appearance as a group’, said Babis, ‘we can’t let that happen’. ‘We have a word in this, guys’, Mick assured them. ‘We’ll hear what they have to say and negotiate. They can’t just cancel our whole act. This would mean more songs for the main

Power and performative classes 101 set, which means more rehearsals. No one wants that’. They decided that they were not going to give up without a fight. They were willing, however, to accept some directions on how to make their set work better in the flow of the show. S – ’s dressing room was located in the building next to the main venue. The only way to access it was through a narrow staircase behind the stage (the band members always wondered where that staircase led). They climbed upstairs one by one, walked down the corridor and knocked on the door bearing the name of the popular singer. Demis opened the door and welcomed them in. They were astounded by the size and luxury of the dressing room. Theirs was about a quarter of the size of this one, and as it was located directly above the bar area and had no ventilation, it was always filled with cigarette smoke. S – ’s dressing room, on the other hand, was very spacious. It had a shower and was decorated with paintings on the walls and an abstract sculpture on the coffee table. Instead of the chairs that the musicians had borrowed from the bar to furnish their tiny dressing room, S – ’s private space had two large leather couches and a few comfortable-looking armchairs. At the time when the band members of Rustik entered the room, the luxurious sitting room was occupied by S –, his major music producer, the club owner with his sister, the club’s financial manager and two other unidentified males. As the members of Rustik had predicted, the discussion focused on the weaknesses of their individual appearance in the show. Although everyone thought they did a great work as a backing orchestra for S –, their own set was deemed problematic. ‘You are playing both at the start and during the break after S – ’s first appearance’, Demis said. ‘We need to cut the second set out’. A murmur of disappointment was heard among the instrumentalists of Rustik. ‘Listen guys, you saw it yourselves. It doesn’t work. No one was listening, it was such a low point’, said the producer, who had never addressed them directly in the past three months of rehearsals. ‘But that was our agreement; two sets’, Babis muttered. ‘Are you joking?’ protested the club owner. ‘I’ve invested millions in this, and drinks were not moving at all tonight. People left after the end of the first half to go to other magaziá, to listen to bouzoúkia. We can’t have that!’16 ‘Let’s calm down’, said S –. ‘Guys, do you know what your problem is?’ he said looking at Mick. You’re trying too hard to be ‘alternative’. I thought you wanted to be successful. Was I wrong? If you don’t listen to the people who know how this business works, you’re going to stay in the margins. Take them for example [he pointed to the two previously unidentified men]. If they had listened to me they would have made a big hit. But no, they wanted to sing in English. ‘Greek doesn’t go with rock music’ they kept saying. Now they’re too old to do anything. The two musicians smiled awkwardly. S – continued: we brought you here because you’re young and aspiring musicians. We wanted you to bring some of your energy and your alternative sound to the show. This doesn’t mean that you get to do whatever you want. This isn’t like

102  Power and performative classes the underground clubs that you used to play in. They might like this “anticonformist” attitude there, but here people don’t buy it. Then Demis took over: ‘so, to sum up: you need to have more Greek songs, and to reduce the length of your set’. What is remarkable about this negotiation is the constant shift between issues of profit, discipline and music aesthetics. While the discussion starts off with a problem in the performance (the lack of audience’s participation during Rustik’s set), it soon shifts to a consideration of profit (low alcohol consumption). Then S – suggests that this is ultimately a problem of aesthetics: the group does not realise that this is neither the time nor the place to play alternative music. If they want to succeed, they are to follow the path dictated by those who know how the industry works. This proposition, however, leads to a consideration of discipline. While the ‘alternative sound’ of the band is welcomed, the ‘anti-conformist attitude’ that presumably accompanies it in other (subcultural) contexts is not to be tolerated. Aesthetics and discipline, thus, become intertwined as the discussion progresses. All of Bourdieu’s forms of capital are manifest in this discourse. The pursuit of profit (economic capital) and the achievement of popularity (social capital) are connected to ‘knowing’ (cultural capital) the music industry. But this is not a kind of knowledge that musicians already possess through their training. Their skill and cosmopolitan aesthetics make them, according to S –, employable and give them a potential for success, but it does not grant them power within the mainstream nightclub network. Rustik came back the following week with a counter-offer. Instead of having more Greek songs, they had arranged a new set where they would collaborate with the club’s DJ. The new act would comprise a medley of current Anglo-American pop hits, where the DJ would play some parts on his decks while the band would intersect with singing parts and solos. Although sceptical about that idea, Demis agreed to let them try it out. Rustik’s expectations were fulfilled. Since the new set was more upbeat, and the DJ’s presence gave it a character of a dance event, the audience was noticeably more responsive and fewer people left the club midway through the show. This new arrangement kept everyone satisfied throughout the rest of the season. Rustik called their successful strategy ‘the American solution’. This last development shows the improvisational character of social negotiations. Rustik understood the inter-connectivity of economic and aesthetic preoccupations in the evaluation of their performance. They, however, refused to allow direct orders to shape their actions. Instead, they relied on what they considered to be their most important merits: musical creativity and cosmopolitan awareness. In this sense, not only did they keep their two appearances in the show intact, but they also proved that they could challenge the authority of the power-holders and get away with it. This verifies Foucault’s assertion that, although there is no social setting deprived of power asymmetries, ‘the “agonism” between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence’ (1982: 223). As Stuart Hall also explains, power ‘does

Power and performative classes 103 not radiate downwards, either from one source or from one place,’ it circulates (1997: 50). Rustik showed their willingness to adapt to the social setting, but refused to be strictly ‘governed’ in the Foucauldian sense: having their possible field of action rigidly structured by others (Foucault, 1982: 221). Even more importantly, they illustrated that their ‘experienced’ employers were not the only ones who understood the workings of the magazí. In this sense, the instrumentalists’ struggle was against what Foucault calls régime du savoir (‘regime of knowledge,’ 1982: 12). By finding their own ‘alternative’ (in both the aesthetic and the literal sense of the word) way of making their music work within context, they challenged the power-holders’ exclusive claim to knowledge of the industry.17

‘Night and day’: making sense of an uncommon power reversal18 This section will follow the life-story of a jazz-trained saxophone player and his unique encounter with the ‘night’ music industry. Through this narrative I will examine how internal power negotiations of the professional music-making milieu are affected by the clash with wider societal rules, namely the State’s juridical system. This analysis will provide a perspective of the music power struggles in public context. Antonis is a saxophone player, who at the time of our interview in 2009 was 32 years old. He was born in Trikala, a town in Northern Greece, where he received his early music education: I started with music when I was 12. My first instrument was the guitar, classical guitar, you know. But it didn’t go great [laughing]. It was too hard for me. I mean, in order to be a classical guitar soloist? God! You need to give your every waking hour. Plus it was also hard professionally. My family wasn’t rich or anything. What kind of work was I going to get in Tríkala as a classical guitarist? So we [the family] decided that I was going to switch to the saxophone. For the Army brass band, you know, I’d be a military musician. They were hiring a lot of people at that time. Antonis described his earlier years of music education with contempt. Since he could not find a proper saxophone teacher in Trikala, he started his training with a clarinettist. After a few frustrating years of ‘very little technical advancement’, Antonis was, eventually, directed to a saxophonist who resided in Larissa, the nearest city. It was during one of his visits to Larissa that he watched a concert of The Blues Bug, a reputable Athenian funk-soul band: They had saxophones, trumpets, a whole brass section! There were like fifteen people on stage. And it made me think, ‘wait a minute, they are improvising and playing all this funky stuff, and I’m going to stay here and play marches for parades on national holidays? No way!’ So I forgot about the army and

104  Power and performative classes everything. Because I realised how amazing the instrument was, you know what I mean? I thought, ‘if they made it, I can make it too. I’ll study hard; I’ll do whatever I need to do.’ I was 18 years old at that time. A few years later Antonis moved to Athens. He started studying with a highly recognised jazz saxophonist and, simultaneously, undertook some training in classical and jazz music theory, composition and orchestration. He managed to gather various music degrees (‘papers’) which secured him some sporadic teaching jobs and orchestra placements. But his finances were far from healthy: When I arrived in Athens I was 22 years old. I needed to support myself. Especially after giving up on the army idea, I couldn’t ask for my family’s support. So I worked as a waiter for a while. Restaurants, coffee-shops, you name it. In the meantime I started getting hooked-up with different bands. We played funk, jazz, things like that. But these bands never pay, you know how it is. And I had a hard time arranging my schedule between gigs and nightshifts at work. I did that for a few years, but it was exhausting. Luckily, after 2005, Antonis started participating in some more ‘professional’ music projects. He worked as a backing instrumentalist for a few successful singers and managed to have a steady (if low) income. Finally, in the spring of 2008,

Figure 4.2 Antonis performing with his jazz quartet at Small Music Theatre, Athens

Power and performative classes 105 Antonis received a quite promising proposal: N –, a well-known singer of the laïkó genre, required a full horn section for his orchestra: A colleague, trumpet player called me. N –, he said, wanted to make his orchestra more.  .  .  ‘glamorous.’ You get the story. He wanted five horns! I accepted of course. I thought it would be good money. I’d save a good bit, and then I’d be able to do whatever I wanted for the next year. It was only for the summertime. The band was really impressive. About 25 musicians, string sections and stuff, all in their black suits . . . it didn’t feel like a skyládiko at all. But the music and the working hours were typical of a skyládiko. We played for 5 hours: midnight to 5 am. This was Antonis’s first experience of properly working ‘in the night’ (sti nýhta).19 Unfortunately, the collaboration did not go as smoothly as planned. The shows started on 29 May 2008, after a month of (unpaid) rehearsals. But three weeks later, the whole horn section was fired. When I first asked Antonis about the reasons behind their lay-off, he focused on economic disputes: They told us, ‘you either stay for half the money, or you go.’ They had a group of young Macedonians that were going to replace us. You see, we were getting 180 euro per night at that stage, and they found these kids who would play for 100. Although the simplistic economic explanation of the lay-offs seemed to make some sense, this would be a rare occurrence in the popular music industry.20 If not for any reasons of professional ethics, firing the whole horn section a month into the showseason would present the music producers with the inconvenience of having to train the new instrumentalists. After questioning Antonis about that, he proceeded with what he considered a ‘deeper’ reason for the termination of their employment: You see, the other musicians and the maéstros felt that their prestige was in danger. They were like ‘these guys are better musicians than us. They spend less time on stage and get the same money! We better get rid of them.’ While the interview was being conducted, I remember reacting with scepticism to this part of the narrative. How grounded was Antonis’s claim that the newcomers were ‘better’ than the senior members of the band? Surely, since the other musicians had been collaborating with N – for longer, they must have had more professional experience. I asked Antonis to elaborate on what he meant by ‘better musicians’. What exactly intimidated them? Antonis explained: Well, you see they didn’t have proper musical training. For example, they brought us these scores, and they were full of mistakes! We had to correct them. So when they saw that they couldn’t justify their role as our superiors in the band, they felt threatened; especially the maéstros.

106  Power and performative classes What is worth noting here, therefore, is that the entire negotiation of power is entangled with a discussion of knowledge and competence. The endangered ‘prestige’ of the official power-holders (maéstros, senior musicians), and their failure to justify their positions within the social setting, are explained by Antonis as a result of their perceived lack in ‘proper’ training when compared to the horn section. Moreover, it should be remarked that what the established musicians seemed to be lacking, was not ‘experience’ or the ability to play well, attributes that would correspond to Bourdieu’s ‘embodied cultural capital’ (1986: 47). Instead, their inferiority is located by Antonis in their score-writing skills, an ability that is primarily cultivated through formal musical training, relevant to Bourdieu’s ‘institutionalised cultural capital’ (Ibid.). The persistence of formal musical training as a legitimate criterion for musicality is not unjustified in Antonis’s words; this is, after all, the proposed differentiating factor between ‘musicians’ and ‘singers’. After being fired, the horn section decided to proceed to litigation. They contacted the official trade unionists and got in touch with experienced lawyers who helped them file a lawsuit against the club owner and the band manager. According to Antonis, although the singer was the main decision-maker behind the incident, he did not occupy an official position that would justify his prosecution in this case. In the lawsuit, the musicians maintained that they had been unjustifiably fired by the club’s management, while their agreement dictated that they would be employed for the whole summer season. Moreover, they supported that at that late time, midway through the summer club season, it would have been impossible for them to find any employment. Therefore, they claimed monetary compensation that would cover both their unpaid rehearsal hours and their loss from the rest of the concert season. Although they had no written contract, the lawyer assured them that the court would recognise the validity of a ‘verbal contract’, as dictated by the nature of their occupation. In Antonis’s account, the subsequent trial unfolded like a parody. The club’s production team testified in front of the judge that ‘the horn section was fired because they were not up to the required playing standards’. Significantly, they chose to direct the litigation again to a matter of competence and skill. ‘What? All of them?’ The judge responded. ‘And it took you one month of rehearsals and another three weeks of shows to discover their incompetence?’ she allegedly remarked. According to Antonis, the judge proceeded to explicitly mock the representatives of the production team: ‘The whole courtroom was laughing for about half an hour’. He quoted some of the judge’s comments: ‘So what was wrong with them exactly? Were they playing out of tune? Out of rhythm? What? Your report here doesn’t make it clear’. Later, she reportedly asserted: From the musicians’ CVs, I see that each of them have a long list of music degrees, and they are employed in the orchestra of ERT [Greek National Broadcasting Network]. What kind of musicians does Mr N – [the singer] need after all, if they are “not up to his standard?”

Power and performative classes 107 The trial concluded with the judge deciding in favour of the laid-off musicians. According to Antonis, the amount of money that they received as compensation was larger than what they would have made even in the most optimistic scenario of a successful season at the club. This case study provides an extraordinary example in the music industry. Instrumentalists before The Crisis were rarely fired during a playing season, but even when they were, they seldom considered prosecuting their employers. This strategy would generally be considered catastrophic for a career that is largely based on personal relationships.21 What makes this case study worth examining, however, is the impact of an official power-holder of the State (judge) on the dynamics of the music workplace, and more specifically, on the value of cultural capital. The possession of systematic musical training, particularly in its institutionalized form (as it appears on recognised degrees and CVs) might not be valued in the ‘night’ industry, but it is recognised by the judge. Therefore, as far as the court is concerned, the ‘papers’ unmistakably make you a musician. In this sense, the court decision restores not only justice (punishment and compensation for the unlawful lay-offs) but also social order: the knowledgeable agent is duly empowered. This explains why Antonis’s narrative insisted on the issue of musical competence in the trial; the way the issue was handled resulted in an inversion of the hierarchies of the ‘night’. An additionally important aspect comes from the judge’s comparison between N – (the laïkó singer) and the ERT orchestra.22 The high status of a state-funded symphonic orchestra is perceived by the judge as a proof of the members’ musical competence. In her view (as quoted to me by Antonis), this competence should be more than enough for a laïkó singer’s orchestra. Thus, interestingly enough, the ground on which this court decision is made, is provided by a culturally specific aesthetic judgment: that a symphonic orchestra (high art) inevitably requires more advanced skills than a laïkó magazí (popular entertainment). This brings us full circle back to Bourdieu’s view of the social supremacy of the ‘pure’ over the ‘popular’ aesthetic. This fact should not, however, be mistaken as a verification of Bourdieu’s theory that the distinction of taste necessarily correlates with class backgrounds. As Antonis’s life-story suggests, an engagement with the ‘pure’ aesthetic (in this case jazz and classical music) can be motivated simply by an impressionable first encounter (the funk-jazz concert in Larissa). Antonis, moreover, chose to follow this aesthetic, not because of its perceived high social status, but conversely, despite the fact that it contributed to his own low socio-economic position (having to work as a waiter in Athens). Similarly, within the social stratification of the music workplace, the ‘pure’ aesthetic is not necessarily connected to the power-holders. One more often finds it within the performative classes of the labour-force: the instrumentalists. In this sense, the power reversal in the court case is presented by Antonis as an optimistic occurrence: one where the instrumentalists received much needed recognition. Antonis not only recounts one of his few moments of pride during his involvement in the popular music scene but also advocates his decision to fight against

108  Power and performative classes the established hierarchies of the popular music industry. In this effort, he carefully orchestrates the protagonists of this narrative (the popular singer, the entrepreneurs and the judge) and their words in order to serve his narrative of subversion. In fact, one of the elements of the story consistently stressed by Antonis was the judge’s gender. I take his frequent smiles when referring to the words of the dikastína (female judge), as a subtle suggestion that this was a dual power reversal: not only do the subaltern instrumentalists win the battle against their dominators, but they do so with the help of a woman.

Conclusion: positional suffering in mousikós’s class Through an examination of the instrumentalists’ rhetoric about – and against – other occupational groups of the music industry and the presentation of a number of case studies illustrating the way in which power circulates in this social field, I have suggested a view of ‘performative classes’. I propose that, while ‘at work’, musicians and other professionals form alliances that are engrained with class consciousness, which becomes manifest in both their actions and their words. These class roles are very real in the ‘night’ experience, but they vanish after the performative social groups disperse into the ‘real’ world of the ‘day’. Throughout my analysis I have adopted the perspective of the mousikós in this class hierarchy, due to my familiarity with the discourses and experiences that define this perspective. I am confident, however, that other occupational groups such as singers or ‘technicians’ similarly articulate their experiences in a socially significant way. Moreover, I have shown the centrality of ‘knowledge’ in the power discourses of the music industry. Different groups claim possession of cultural capital in contradicting ways. In this game, significant effort is dedicated to the legitimisation of diverse forms of knowledge that can lead to the acquisition of symbolic capital within the micro-community of the magazí and the wider industry. Official educational qualifications, work experience, cosmopolitan awareness and versatility, serve as versions of cultural capital that are all competing for social recognition. In this context, professional musicians propose that their knowledge is habitually connected to powerlessness. Within the performative class of mousikoí, the discussion of aesthetics and the value of cultural capital are socially significant. However, rather than working towards the enforcement of the social establishment as suggested by Bourdieu, these concepts serve a subversive discourse, employed by the subaltern musicians in an effort to undermine the existing order of power. How does one make sense of this experience of powerlessness? Bourdieu is again suggestive here with his idea of ‘positional suffering’ (1999: 4). This useful term captures the painful experience of occupying an inferior position in a specific social microcosm. This inferior position does not necessarily mirror a widely perceived low status in society. In fact, Bourdieu explains, ‘the experience is no doubt all the more painful when the universe in which they participate just enough to feel their relatively low standing is higher in social space overall’ (Ibid). It is not by chance that Bourdieu himself, in an effort to explain this idea, refers to

Power and performative classes 109 Patrick Süskind’s play The Double Bass, as ‘an especially striking image of how painfully the social world may be experienced by people who, like the bass player in the orchestra, occupy an inferior, obscure position in a prestigious and privileged universe’ (Ibid). As this chapter has revealed, however, the musicians do not necessarily accept their position incontestably. Power struggles of various magnitudes are the norm in their occupational activities. These are mainly what Foucault calls ‘immediate struggles’, that is incidents where ‘people criticize instances of power that are the closest to them’ (1982: 211). In contrast to actions of revolutionary scale that aim to end all class struggle, these micro-battles are intended to reconfigure the relative position of the individuals in the social field. This attitude comes from the musicians’ belief that the terrain of ‘work’ will always be defined by subordination.

Notes 1 In this regard, of course, the Greek music industry is not an exception. In his examination of the Arabesk music practices in Turkey, Martin Stokes also asserts that the circuit ‘revolves around star vocal performers, the names of whose accompanying musicians are largely unknown to the general public’ (1992: 117). 2 ‘Payment rate’ (see glossary of terms). Also see Chapter 2 for a discussion of kassé as a criterion of success in the popular music industry. 3 This has been increasingly the case since the beginning of The Crisis (see Chapter 5), but as we will see in this Chapter, the inequalities of the music industry that pre-existed austerity and recession were instrumental for the asymmetry with which precarity affected music professionals. 4 Some of Bourdieu’s work on forms of capital as well as Distinction has been criticised either for its over-reliance on economic metaphors (a summary of these criticisms can be found in Lebaron, 2003) or its monolithic view of ‘high’ culture as a dominating mechanism (Gartman, 1991). In the course of this chapter, I also illustrate some ways in which Bourdieu’s view on the ‘pure’ aesthetic can be reversed to designate resistance from the bottom up. These critiques notwithstanding, I find Bourdieu’s influential analysis to be a particularly useful tool in the examination of power dynamics in a field such as the musical economy, where all forms of capital become continuously entangled with one another. 5 Literally meaning ‘shop’, this term is colloquially used among musicians to describe the big nightclubs of the commercial popular music industry. See Glossary of Terms. 6 Although the duties and activities of a music producer and an agent are quite distinguished in the international music industry (see Wikström, 2009; Caves, 2000), in Greece the two roles are quite often served by the same person. This ambiguity is, as we will see, one of the main points of criticism by musicians. However, record producers’ increasing interest in live events might be a result of the international development of the live music industry and the simultaneous decline of record sales (see Holt, 2010). 7 This fact explains why, at least from the instrumentalist’s viewpoint, a singer does not qualify as ‘professional musician’. As we have seen in Chapter 2, a successful professional musician combines an acquired skill with the social dexterity necessary to advertise it. This balance between cultural and social capital is quite delicate. Singers are seen by their backing instrumentalists as relying too heavily on the latter form, while their institutionalised musical knowledge is perceived as quite limited. Thus,

110  Power and performative classes they might be professionals, but they are not ‘musicians’. Similarly, Martin Stokes has shown that in the Arabesk music culture of Turkey, musical training is absent in the myth constructed around the lives and identities of popular singers. Singers, Stokes asserts, ‘are simply discovered, possessing “natural” talents and abilities’ (1992: 117–118). 8 It is hard to calculate the exact difference between a singer’s and an instrumentalist’s payment. This is because, while the instrumentalists are very open about their salaries that are usually agreed upon in advance, the singer’s payment is never publicly discussed. This fact has made the singer’s salary a popular subject of speculation and gossip among musicians, often leading to extreme exaggeration. A popular singer’s agent, however, confirmed to me in a private discussion on our way to a concert outside Athens that the singer was to receive a payment of 4000 euro, an amount representing more than half of the entire concert’s budget. The instrumentalists, on the other hand, had agreed to perform for 200 euro each. 9 This testimony, as with all the ethnographic data in this chapter, was collected before the wake of economic recession and austerity as a result of The Greek Crisis. As Chapter 5 will show, the frustration of musicians with the inequality that they experienced with regard to the more prominent singers in the music industry, grew even more when their own earnings failed to cover their everyday needs and as their work precarity increased. 10 Although the stereotype of the gangster-magazátoras could be over-generalised, during my fieldwork I came across at least three incidents that were officially presented by the police as vendetta hits between criminal organisations: a nightclub where I was working was attacked by armed robbers just one hour after the musicians and audience had departed, another one was severely burned after the bouncers were assaulted by hooded perpetrators and a nightclub owner was shot dead outside his club, in front of several audience members who were on their way out after the show. Competing clubs were, afterwards, blamed for organising all the previous attacks. 11 The names of the band, the nightclub and the individuals involved have been changed here for reasons that will become clear. For another examination of the band’s battles around musical meaning, quality of work and enjoyment within Athenian music scenes, see Tsioulakis (2013). 12 For a discussion of the aesthetic and performative differences between ‘pop’ and ‘folk’ (laïko) nightclubs, see Tsioulakis (2019b). 13 The style of entertainment offered by the different types of Athenian magaziá was discussed in the Introduction. 14 Herzfeld (1987: 111–117) has used this word to denote several dualisms that tantalise modern Greek culture and consciousness, such as ‘East’ and ‘West’, Orthodoxy and secularism, modernity and tradition. 15 As I have argued elsewhere (Tsioulakis, 2019a), rehearsals are rife with these types of power dynamics. The shaped outcome of a performance in public is a result as much of aesthetic negotiations as it is of social dynamics that are often about extra-musical challenges of authority. 16 Bouzoúki (pl. bouzoúkia), the urban-folk instrument, is the quintessential symbol of the laїkó genre which was not represented at all in Glitz club’s music show due to the general pursuit for modernisation. To the best of my knowledge, Glitz was the sole large Athenian magazí during the season of 2008–2009 not featuring a bouzoúki. 17 Robert Faulkner’s (1973) article focusing on the social dynamics between orchestra conductors and instrumentalists has also suggested that the application of authority is not a straightforward and unquestioned process. In the quoted interviews, musicians assert that it is the conductor’s task to ‘convince’ (ibid: 151) them about his (gender specificity in the original) authority, through his ability to give clear and consistent directions.

Power and performative classes 111 18 This section has been published in similar form as part of a previous article (Tsioulakis, 2011b). 19 For the significance of nýhta-work in musicians’ professional status, see Chapter 2. 20 As I will discuss in the next chapter, lay-offs became a lot more common after 2010 in the wake of The Crisis. However, at the time of Antonis’s account, which took place in 2008, this practice was quite rare. As the monograph has argued thus far, work in the magaziá was considered one of the most secure and lucrative routes of employment for professional musicians within the popular industry. 21 In Chapter 2, I elaborated on the delicate social strategies through which musicians achieve success within the music business. 22 For more on the ERT orchestra and its employment of musicians, see the next chapter as well as Poulakis (2015).

5 Locating the music precariat in The Greek Crisis

Greek musicians, not unlike their compatriots in all fields of employment and social life in the past ten years, continuously discuss ‘The Crisis’ (krísi).1 A multilayered and elusive term, The Crisis is evoked in conversations both private and public, from journalistic accounts to academic debates and everyday sociality to stand for an assemblage of different and often contradictory processes (see Knight, 2012; Theodossopoulos, 2013; Herzfeld, 2011). Most notable among them are the economic recession and austerity but also the concomitant political instability, exposure of corruption and even the rise of the far right (Kirtsoglou, 2013).2 In this environment, musicians’ descriptions of – and responses to – The Crisis are especially intriguing in the way that they grapple with two widely accepted facts: that musical labour has always been precarious, and yet that somehow this new era of austerity and recession has affected their livelihoods and self-conceptions in unprecedented ways. Take, for example, the reaction of keyboardist Stefanos, when he was told that I was researching musicians ‘in crisis’: ‘Crisis! Crisis! Everyone going crazy about it, it’s all you hear. But were musicians ever not in crisis? Welcome to our world, you “normal” people! See how you like it’. His close friend and collaborator, bassist Vaios disagreed: ‘It was a different lifestyle back then [before The Crisis]. Musicians were buying houses with a few years of work! Now you just about make ends meet, and you stress over how many gigs you’ll get every month’. Seemingly contradictory testimonies like these are typical among musicians whom I interviewed. As professional instrumentalists, composers, singers and recording artists repeatedly told me, making music in recession Greece is an infinite source of frustration but not entirely unfamiliar. In the latter of the two quotes, Vaios suggests that the lifestyle of many musicians, especially those who enjoyed a degree of success that could be monetised in significant gain, has dramatically changed. However, this precarity that for ‘normal people’ (not musicians) is a new state of being, is seen by many of my interlocutors, including Stefanos quoted earlier, as a mere exacerbation of their previous conditions. Musicians, they often argued, were always ‘in crisis’. This chapter will examine the ways in which professional freelance musicians in Greece articulate their work and lives within recession and austerity. More

Locating the music precariat 113 specifically, through a focus on the words of those creative artists, I will argue that The Crisis forms new subjectivities for musicians, deeply affecting the ways in which they strategise their everyday conduct but also shaping their own selfunderstanding. Drawing on Isabell Lorey’s concept of ‘governmental precarization’ (2015, 2019), I will argue that austerity is experienced as a rupture in linear time and an incentive for individual introspection, which in turn gives rise to a narrative genre that I will call ‘precarity stories’.

Crisis, austerity, precarity As explained in Chapter 1, ‘The Crisis’ discourse bundles together a number of maladies and ‘emergencies’ that have been unfolding within Greece and, arguably, across the globe since the financial collapse of 2008 (Powers and Rakopoulos, 2019; Bear, 2017; Blyth, 2015; Bear and Knight, 2017). The key components of this reality (and the discourse that develops within and against it) in relation to the lives of musicians in the Greek industry are the imposition of austerity and resulting precarity. Mirroring the ethnographic testimonies that open this chapter, academic analyses of austerity balance between two views: first that austerity is not particularly new as a technique of economic and social governmentality (Rakopoulos, 2018; Powers and Rakopoulos, 2019) and yet, second, that the type of austerity that has been imposed on the European South as a result of the ‘Great Recession’ is a project of such magnitude, severity and world-wide attention, that it deserves particular attention and critique (Dalakoglou et al., 2018; Knight and Stewart, 2016). As Bear and Knight explain, austerity policies, which they define as ‘the practising of fiscal contraint’ (2017: 2), have been described in recent economic literature as both a ‘great failure’ (Schui, 2014, cited in Bear and Knight, 2017: 1) and somehow simultaneously ‘the new reality for governments running public finances for the coming decades’ (Burton, 2016, cited in Bear and Knight, 2017: 1). A more critical and attentive way of appraising austerity, however, is to define it not through what it is but rather through what it does. As Powers and Rakopoulos powerfully posit, austerity appropriates public goods toward private hands – redistributing wealth from the middle and lower classes, concentrating it among the elite – and enacts violence on the bodies of poor and working-class people, fundamentally transforming their lifeworlds and their capacity to live a life devoid of disease, illness, and premature death. (2019: 8) Austerity, therefore, should be seen as a process that entails two simultaneous modes of transference: one of positionality and one of domain. First, austerity is imposed from the top (through transnational economic and legislative bodies such as the EU and the International Monetary Fund, as well as national governments

114  Locating the music precariat and institutions) but most radically affects the lives of the precarious – the working class, migrants and minorities (Panourgia, 2018) – and does so in an additionally gendered way (Athanasiou, 2014). Second, austerity is propagated by the neoliberal capitalist class as an economic necessity, but it transfers itself to the social domain, feeding into existing inequalities and simultaneously defining subjectivities, belongings and exclusions anew. It thus operates as ‘a form of financialization of everyday life’ and ‘as a policy dogma that aims to change social formations and re-evaluate the worth of people’s lives’ (Rakopoulos, 2018: 2). As Athanasiou further argues, [n]eoliberal governments use the ever-present emergency of crisis, with all its accompanying affective apparatuses of fear and insecurity, in order to legitimise the necessity to take action in the direction of managing uncertainty and establishing a new and secure normality. Crisis necessitates the realism of constant management – both pre-emptive and reparative. (2018: 15) This double transference (top to bottom, economic to social) shapes a ‘field’ (Kirtsoglou, 2013: 3, cf Bourdieu, 1985) where previous social contracts are rendered void, as ‘society at large, regardless of stratifications or culpability, is called on to pay an indebted state and/or banking system’ (Rakopoulos, 2018: 2). But to what extent is austerity a novel phenomenon? The spectacle-isation of crises in Europe (and most remarkably Greece) in the last decade through mass media, as well as the testimonies of rupture that are prevalent in ethnographic data, make it tempting to treat austerity as something unprecedented. As Knight and Stewart argue, Austerity differs from endemic underdevelopment and poverty, in that it applies to situations where societies or individuals that formerly enjoyed a higher standard of consumption must now make do with less. . . . Austerity, then, is not just an economically constrained static circumstance; its particularity for social analysis lies in the dynamics of reversal and the ongoing responses to it. (2016: 2) In that sense, even if we regard austerity as part of a continuum of neoliberal governmentality, its unique expressions and historical manifestations since the Great Recession warrant it a concentrated and nuanced analysis, especially within the Greek context: Perceiving the Greek crisis as one of the many episodes of capitalist structural adjustments may end up ignoring its qualitative differences. Thus, it may prohibit us from conceptualising the multiple experiences of the changes taking place in the current socio-political context. (Dalakoglou et al., 2018: 2)

Locating the music precariat 115 At the same time, critical writings in the anthropology of austerity alert us to the need for comparative examination and contextualisation. In an essay on anthropology’s obligations within this critical political and economic moment, Laura Bear (2017) traces remarkable similarities between what she had found in her ethnography of economic neoliberalisation in India in the 1990s, and the emerging austerity policies that have been prevalent in the UK and across Europe in the last decade. As Powers and Rakopoulos further attest, economic policies that included the privatization of state functions, the introduction of cost recovery for social services, the elimination of exchange controls, and currency devaluation . . . have set the agenda for a global restructuring that has been centripetal in nature: encroaching the “center” (e.g., Europe) from the “peripheries” (e.g., Africa). Indeed, the imposition of SAPs [Structural Adjustment Programmes] across the Global South during the 1980s constituted an earlier wave of austerity, and, while the branding of SAPs has changed, the social, political, and economic effects of austerity continue to be reproduced across the Global South today. (2019: 2) The answer to the debate around whether austerity is ‘old’ or ‘new’, and the extent to which it exemplifies breaches or continuities with the past, cannot, however, ignore the ethnographic standpoints from which these narratives are articulated. In an in-depth analysis of labour precarity in Greece, Kesisoglou and Nikolopoulou (2019) identify three contradictory linguistic repertoires that their informants used to describe ‘The Crisis’ as a ‘state of exception’, as ‘common place’ or even as ‘myth’. Similarly to their findings, as the opening quotes from this chapter illustrate, musicians in Athens experience austerity and crisis both as familiar (perhaps more to them) and unprecedented (mainly for ‘others’, the ‘normal people’). After all, some analyses might ‘emphasize historical breach partly because they report on subjects who enjoyed stable employment. However, in “pre-austerity times”, this material condition was representative of only a fragment of the population almost everywhere’ (Rakopoulos, 2018: 4). A defining characteristic of the late capitalist era, which is augmented and intensified by austerity, is the prevalence of precarity in the lives of all working people (Weeks, 2015; Panourgia, 2018; Athanasiou, 2014, 2018). In order to productively engage with discourses of precariousness/precarity, however, it is first necessary to clarify some terms. Much of the academic discussion on precariousness has been marked by Judith Butler’s seminal book Precarious Lives (2006). In this paradigm-defining monograph, Butler proposes that grief and desire are central in perceptions of worth and vulnerability in relation to human life. In her view, precariousness is located in our need for relationality and connectedness, and as such, it is a common feature of all humanity. Vulnerability, she attests, ‘precedes the formation of “I”. This is a condition, a condition of being laid bare from the

116  Locating the music precariat start, and with which we cannot argue’ (2006: 31). As she powerfully argues, it is particularly grief and desire that show the thrall in which our relationships with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. (2006: 23) This is not to say that this fundamental precariousness of being awards all human life equal value. As Butler painstakingly argues through an examination of war, death and different types of biopolitics, lives’ worth is measured through a nexus of intersectional positionalities which result in unequal experiences of precariousness between different humans. Drawing on Butler’s work, Isabell Lorey (2019) further elaborates on precariousness as the vulnerability that springs from our state of dependence on others (be it persons, institutions or environments). This precariousness, as much as we strive to diminish it through mutual support, should ultimately be embraced, even celebrated as a human condition. Precariousness, however, should be distinguished from ‘precarity’, which Lorey (2015, 2019) posits is a historically established and hierarchical form of precariousness, deeply rooted in neoliberal capitalist governance. Lorey sees precarity as a continuously unfolding process, which she calls ‘precarization’: Precarization means more than insecure jobs, more than the lack of security given by waged employment. By way of insecurity and danger it embraces the whole of existence, the body, modes of subjectivation. It is threat and coercion, even while it opens up new possibilities of living and working. Precarization means living with the unforeseeable, with contingency. (2015: 1) As Lorey argues elsewhere, ‘precarization is becoming the motor of productivity’ (2019: 186), which means that the increased insecurity of labour in different domains of production is used strategically by those who manage workforce in order to subjugate them to more effective control, increase their workload and diminish their pay, demands and benefits. Drawing on Foucault, Lorey calls this managing technique ‘governmental precarization’. She explains: Governing through precarization means that the precarious are no longer solely those who can be marginalized to the peripheries of society. Due to the individualizing restructuring of the social welfare state, the deregulation of the labour market, and the expansion of precarious employment conditions, we currently find ourselves in a process of the normalization of precarization, which also affects larger portions of the middle class. In this normalization process, precarization has become a political and economic instrument of governing. (2019: 186–7)

Locating the music precariat 117 This is overwhelmingly true in fields of work which are based on ‘soft’ skills of communication and creativity, such as in the arts and media industries (Lorey, 2011: 84–86). Lorey further posits that in neoliberal global capitalism, ‘[w]ork is becoming excessive and simultaneously negated as work that should be paid, especially when it comes to creative and cognitive work’ (2019: 185). In other words, as the domain of labour expands over all aspects of our social and affective lives, the distinctions between work and leisure become blurred, thus allowing significant amounts of our occupations to go unacknowledged and unpaid. This is not a particularly new phenomenon – Lorey (ibid) argues that it goes back to the 1970s – but it has become exacerbated by recession and austerity. Within these circumstances, job precarity has been elevated into a lived reality for large segments of populations across traditionally conceived notions of ‘class’, even arguably introducing a new class consciousness, what Guy Standing (2011) calls ‘the precariat’. Standing proposes that ‘[t]he precariat can be identified by a distinctive structure of social income, which imparts a vulnerability going well beyond what would be conveyed by the money income received at a particular moment’ (Standing, 2011: 12). As a result, the precariat is defined less by the resources in their disposal (their class background, education or current income) and more by the instability of their employment and the lack of personal economic sustainability. Furthermore, for the precariat, ‘[t]he workplace is every place, diffuse, unfamiliar, a zone of insecurity. And if the precariat does have occupational skills, those may vanish or cease to be a reliable ticket to a secure identity or longterm sustainable life of dignity’ (ibid: 131). This de-alignment between the acquisition of skills and a pathway to a concrete labour identity is again particularly true for those who work in the creative industries. As Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011: 55–60) have argued, much of the scholarly work focused on creative industries has underplayed the element of labour, partly because of a fascination with either the product or its reception by audiences. As their meticulous study reveals, working for the creative industries entails pathways more challenging than a straightforward translation of skills into employment. This endeavour takes place within circumstances where ‘the line between paid and unpaid work, between “professionals” and “amateurs” is often blurred’ and where ‘[i]t is not unusual for unpaid work to provide the basis of a reputation that allows people to turn professional’ (ibid: 13). In the context of musical labour, accounts of the lives of professional musicians always depict the struggle to balance between creative accomplishment and stability of employment. Take for example the following 1931 extract from the Musical Times, celebrating the publication of a manifesto by the Council of the Incorporated Society of Musicians in England. The article reads: Music is both an art and an industry. It is right that the musician should have his head in the clouds; his feet, however, are on the ground. In other words, he has something to sell – something that has cost him in labour and capital at least as much as goes to the founding of many a business. (Musical Times, 1931: 1074)

118  Locating the music precariat Calling for the strengthening of public funding for music professionals (and despite the understandable for the time, if unfortunate, limitations of gender and emphasis on classical/art music) the article acknowledges that musicians almost a century ago faced similar challenges of precarity that stood in the way of a secure and fruitful career. Recent research on professional musicians across strikingly different cultural contexts has shed light on the vast array of strategies that those workers employ in order to survive in the diverse local industries that they inhabit. As part of their everyday conduct, musicians become proficient in juggling multiple engagements, all the while negotiating their identities: they establish sophisticated systems of deputizing (Cottrell, 2002), they balance between recording and performing engagements (Moehn, 2012), they embrace ‘polymusicality’ (Cottrell, 2007), they often find themselves performing music that they don’t enjoy (Tsioulakis, 2011b, 2013, 2018) or they even turn their own ethnic identities into marketing tools by self-orientalising for audiences (Silverman, 2007; Beissinger, 2001). Musicians’ identities are also defined by a life in flux, whereby they tour excessively (Nóvoa, 2012; Ottosson, 2009; McKerrell, 2011), they temporarily relocate in different countries (Rasmussen, 2012), or even lead entirely nomadic lives (Silverman, 2012: 241–268). Ultimately, contemporary professional musicians within conditions of neoliberalism manifest what Christina Scharff calls ‘entrepreneurial subjectivities’ (2018: 113–134), whereby they embrace a type of ‘self-directed’ competition (ibid: 114) as an everyday fashioning of the working self. Perhaps the most crucial aspect, however, of freelance music labour, is its affective essence. As Ana Hofman has powerfully argued, music labour is affective insofar as it requires ‘emotional skills and somatic productivity’, while its success is constantly tested against its ‘ability to build social networks based on shared sonic affect’ (2015: 4). In her evocative study of kafana musicians in socialist Yugoslavia, Hofman acknowledges that her interlocutors are far from unique among their colleagues elsewhere, all of whom operate within ‘working environments, in which pleasing the patrons is the most important aspect of survival in their professional lives’ (ibid: 2). As my ethnographic material from crisis-stricken Greece will show, producing affective labour becomes even more challenging within circumstances of unprecedented precarity. With even fewer opportunities of concrete employment than they are accustomed to, musicians struggle to gain control over their conduct, experiencing precarity in ways that radically redefine how they act and ultimately who they are.

‘Before and Now’: musicians narrativising the Greek crisis Even though, as I have argued earlier, precariousness, instability and a life in continuous flux is central to the identity of the musician to some extent crossculturally and in different historical periods, this new era of The Crisis has affected musicians in ways that they find unprecedented. Musicians in professional orchestras had their income diminished or even their ensembles dismantled, popular

Locating the music precariat 119 instrumentalists and vocalists within the commercial mainstream industry saw their performances and recording sessions becoming rarer, and music teachers experienced a decrease in number of students and had to significantly lower their tuition fees.3 A significant point of convergence in the Crisis-narratives that I collected from working musicians, was that they portrayed the new reality as a sharpened and intensified version of a struggle they have been experiencing all along. If, as Chapter 2 argued, the rhetoric of hardship and exploitation serves as a community-making mechanism for professional musicians, these narrativistic tropes have been injected with new potency in The Crisis. As Kostas, a bass player and active trade unionist in his thirties argued, In the 90s there were musicians who were able to support a whole family by just working in the clubs, and even many of them got pensions out of it. This is definitely not the case now. . . . But even when musicians were making good money, they were still exploited by their employers. They were never getting compensated proportionally fairly for the revenue that was going around in the business. This understanding of past and present lives within the music industry is also shared by younger professional players. As informants across age, gender and sector were anxious to tell me, working in music has always entailed a tricky pursuit of numerous and often contradictory engagements. Even if The Crisis has exacerbated the urgency of finding the right balance, the nature of the occupation hasn’t profoundly changed. Vasilis, a younger bassist who only entered the music business after the recession was already in full effect, emphasised this point: ‘People say that things are a lot worse now, but I can’t imagine that there was ever a time that a musician was so well-paid that they wouldn’t have to do other things like teaching and so on’. In that sense, freelance musicians fall into what Isabell Lorey (2011) calls ‘virtuosos of freedom’. These virtuosos, Lorey attests, are engaged in extremely diverse, unequally paid project activities and feepaying jobs, and consider themselves entirely critical of society. Sometimes they do not want a steady job at all; sometimes they know it is something they can only dream about. Yet such cultural producers start from the assumption that they have chosen their living and working conditions themselves, precisely to ensure that they develop the essence of their being to the maximum in a relatively free and autonomous manner. In the case of such virtuosos, I refer to self-precarization. (2011: 84) This perceived continuity between the pre- and during-crisis working experience, however, didn’t stop musicians from articulating their lives through a binary of ‘before’ vs ‘now’. Knight and Stewart have proposed that ‘one of the profoundest effects of the ongoing economic crisis has been the way it has stimulated people

120  Locating the music precariat to rethink their relationship to time’ (2016: 13). Among my informants, this tendency appears in the way that they insert the beginning of The Crisis as a ‘rupture’ moment in the linearity of their recounting of the past. The moment of ‘rupture’ was usually located somewhere around 2010, when the imposition of the first ‘Memorandum’ by the Troika and the Greek government of the time, made austerity an official and far-reaching state policy. In these narratives, the times ‘before The Crisis’ are often idealised, or presented with a degree of irony as the ‘plentiful’ or ‘grand’ years, in a rhetoric that serves to illustrate the difference with what followed and the naivety with which musicians’ former selves first encountered the new reality. As Efi, a singer in her early forties reminisced in 2016, I entered the industry as a singer just a few years before the crisis, so I saw the end of the ‘good days’, when you would still get some ‘grand’ opportunities. You know, where they would invite you to play with good technical support, background organisation and planning, full audiences, decent pay and so on. Now all that is over. Anything you do is only down to exhausting personal effort, and it rarely ends up being worth it. Even though musicians recognise that the imposition of austerity has affected them in unequal ways depending on the nature of their core activities, their relative success (social capital) within the music business and their skills and ability to diversify (cultural capital), the narratives of the impact that The Crisis has had on working musicians collectively appear quite uniform: I first sensed the crisis in 2010 when the payments started diminishing. In the first few years, they were only reducing the salaries of session musicians so that the pop stars would keep their earnings, but now that the whole industry has gone to shit, everyone is struggling and panicking. . . . Until 2009, busy session musicians like myself would make more than 3000 euro per month and now we stress over making 500 or 1000. This year I started rehearsals in three different clubs that never actually opened for the public, so that was completely wasted time. (Vaios, bassist, interviewed in 2016) For Vaios, an established bass player in his late forties, the impact of austerity was immediately felt (or so he recounts in 2016) from the beginning of the new economic policies. Tellingly, however, the impact that he identifies on session instrumentalists was disproportionate because of the inherent structural inequalities of the music industry, which, as the previous chapter explains, predated The Crisis. According to Vaios, upon being alarmed by the impeding economic recession, industry power-holders (among which ‘pop stars’ are always the most identifiable by labouring musicians) swiftly sought to offload the decrease in revenue by diminishing the pay of session musicians, in the hope that the top earners would remain unaffected. But as Vaios’ narrative progresses, the realisation of the magnitude of the recession and its long-lasting effects hit the core of the industry,

Locating the music precariat 121 which caused widespread panic across the strata of workers, agents and entrepreneurs in the popular music scenes. If the recession was felt strongly by musicians who had relatively steady employment within the massive nightclub circuit, those who relied on occasional collaborations within less lucrative scenes, and whose work was more scarce and opportunistic, present an even bleaker narrative. Despo, a mandolin player and vocalist in her late thirties who mainly performed within the festival scenes, gives the following account: Up until 2004 I played a lot of festivals around Greece, in the periphery. These were good working gigs. They required a lot of traveling and of course we had no social insurance, but they paid decently. We were getting 400–450 euro per gig. So this was a great income opportunity for freelance musicians before The Crisis. . . . With The Crisis there are a lot of changes at the same time: the gig payments are lower, even in the small scenes where musicians were getting paid pennies anyway. Also festivals are only looking for major popular acts anymore that will attract bigger audiences, so smaller groups don’t get many invitations. The students are also a lot fewer, and there are fewer opportunities to get permanent teaching jobs in the public schools. So it has really affected me, my income is half of what it was during better times. Significantly, for musicians who relied on several different engagements to make ends meet, and who had already been balancing their busy schedule between performances with several groups, rehearsals, recordings and teaching, austerity and recession had a devastating effect. This was because the closure of venues, the shrinking of professional bands, the decrease in tuition fees, the diminishing investment of families in private music lessons and the near-extinction of the domestic commercial recording industry which funded studios and session musicians, all coincided, hitting musicians simultaneously in all the possible avenues that they could follow. As Themis, a violin player and sound engineer in his early thirties recounted in 2014, I have been performing and simultaneously running a recording studio as a manager and sound engineer. But the studio is barely surviving any more with the crisis. At the same time, I was playing with ______ [female popular singer] until 2011, but then they [production team] decided to shrink the band because of economic concerns, so I had to go. What followed was difficult times for me economically. Or, as Yiannis, a saxophone player in his early forties recalled, I was lucky with my gigs and I survived very well until 2012, but then the crisis really hit me. 2012–13 were very difficult, the payments for gigs had essentially been halved and most of my private lessons were gone, so I didn’t know what to do.

122  Locating the music precariat In that sense, the recession not only diminished the compensation that musicians hoped to receive for their labour but also increased their working hours and eroded their time of rest, leisure and holidays. As vocalist Virginia lamented, ‘some of the years in The Crisis, I had been gigging full time and still had no money or time to take a holiday or even go to my friends’ performances’. This phenomenon is further proof of Isabell Lorey’s reading of precarisation in late capitalism, whereby as ‘sociality is made productive, it is not easy to grasp everyday social activity as work that must be paid. This contributes to the widespread belief that what is fun need not be paid’ (2019: 186). Additionally, the imposition of austerity did not only hit musicians’ payments through the decline of the industry but also compromised their social security and welfare. As Kostas, a bass player and elected official in the Musicians’ Union explained to me, the first Memorandum of Economic Policies that was signed in 2010 directly impacted on musicians’ entitlement to social benefits and healthcare access: Already with the first Memorandum, musicians were excluded from the benefits of being identified as ‘hard and unhealthy labour’. They also equated our working hours’ threshold with other employees, meaning that any musician who was working less than 8 hrs a day was considered to be working ‘part time’. As if any musician could possibly be performing for 8 hrs a day like an office worker! These were circumstances of The Crisis that most people, even professional musicians, don’t know much about, but they have deeply affected freelance session musicians. In their effort to narrativise the impact of The Crisis on their lives, musicians in interviews often referred to the experiences and stories of unnamed friends and colleagues. As Jannis, a male guitarist in his early thirties who mainly performs within an experimental underground scene confessed: The Crisis hasn’t affected me directly in my music work, because I was never involved in scenes that were lucrative anyway. But many of my friends who played for the nightclubs tell me that it made a big difference to them. In another interview, bassist Vaios recounted the story of one of his colleagues: I have a friend who worked for the biggest names in the industry. He was getting 500 euro per night. And in the first season after The Crisis the managers went to him and they offered half of that. He said no, thinking that his phone would be buzzing the next day with offers. He was struggling for years after that, and he is still regretting it. This story-telling trope, whereby musicians referred to colleagues’ experiences to complement their own account of life within The Crisis is important in

Locating the music precariat 123 collectivising the narrative (see, also, Knight, 2013; Georgakopoulou, 2014). My interlocutors’ unique perspectives were enriched by drawing on similarities in the career trajectories of other musicians, thus elevating the predicament into an inescapable shared reality. In other cases, however, these comparisons served to illustrate differences, with the purpose of identifying better or worse strategies of coping in The Crisis. In the previous quote, Vaios evokes his ‘friend’s’ difficulty of finding subsequent employment as a ‘paradigmatic narrative’ (Josephides, 2008: 53–80), which serves to emphasise the importance of strategic thinking. Underestimating the gravity of The Crisis, the musician ‘said no’ and as a result ‘he was struggling for years’. Therefore, the narrative tells us, the new reality needs to be met with a recalibration of strategies and considerations. Drawing on testimonies primarily before the recession, Chapter 2 illustrated that designing a professional strategy is a crucial skill for musicians in order to financially survive and aim for success. As comparative story-telling in The Crisis shows, these strategies are profoundly recalibrated within the new economic realities, with musicians realising that their criteria in pursuing and accepting employment need to be considered anew.

Crisis as an internalised narrative among musicians What is remarkable about musicians in a ‘crisis-scape’ (Brekke et al., 2014) is that, while reflecting on their new circumstances, they do so in an awareness that this precarity is also part of their collective identity. Take for example the testimony of Sissy, a composer and instrumentalist in her early 30s, who after a few years of successful employment in the music business, found herself in the midst of The Crisis having to work as an assistant for her father, a painter: I was there holding a paintbrush and found myself wondering: ‘wait a minute, who am I?’ . . . I don’t think it’s even because of The Crisis. It was always difficult for musicians. We have chosen a path that we knew from the start that we will never be secure. In Sissy’s testimony, The Crisis is a watershed moment of reflection, which ends up revealing a more long-existing truth: that musicians’ lives are defined by insecurity, which is only exacerbated by the current circumstances of austerity and recession. According to this narrative, musicians are a trained precariat, always fighting for control in an environment that is not of their own making.4 I argue, however, that this subjectivity of The Crisis is new, insofar as it pushes musicians to an almost ontological reflection (‘who am I?’), out of which emerges a person eager to reconfigure their actions, strategies and ultimately their own self-conception. This phenomenon, as Isabell Lorey has shown, is a direct result of the monetisation of affective and emotional labour within conditions of precarity, whereby we can detect ‘a tendency for the whole person to become labour power, body and intellectual capabilities included’ (2019: 185). For musicians,

124  Locating the music precariat this condition brings about a whole questioning of their current selves, as pianist Stathis evocatively illustrates: I had to take some time to recall why I  started playing music in the first place, and that required some real time off and introspection. I  eventually remembered that it was because of the creativity and the experimentation, not simply to get the job done. (Stathis – pianist) In the summer of 2014, I interviewed Themis, a jazz violinist with whom I had collaborated in music ensembles for several years before the economic recession. When I asked him how The Crisis has altered the ways in which musicians think of themselves and their work, he responded with a personal anecdote: Last summer I went to Crete and played as a busker with a friend for three months. I made my holiday expenses and some extra . . . I would never have thought of doing that in the 2000s; it would be pretty embarrassing. . . . I met a guitarist from Paris there, he invited me over this Spring; he has a comfortable couch he said [laughing]. I’m thinking about it! The transformation of subjectivity is very evident here. In the wake of The Crisis, Themis has turned from a person who would have found busking to be ‘pretty embarrassing’, to someone who not only engaged in it as a professional activity but even values it as a networking opportunity for the future.5 In his examination of the Greek crisis, anthropologist Daniel Knight argues for the central role of narrative as a coping mechanism for individuals. He argues that ‘[n]arratives are an important expressive tool for people negotiating periods of dramatic social change. Exchanged both in public and private spheres, narratives collectivise crisis experience around central shared themes’ (Knight, 2012: 56). In that sense, the dichotomy between ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ becomes blurred when we pay attention to the words of crisis-subjectivities. Even when they appear individualistic and personalised, testimonies from participants collectivise the experience by engaging with tropes and discourses that are shared widely, forming a repertoire of crisis story-telling. Viewed in this light, the narratives that emerge from this prolonged state of crisis among musicians share two main characteristics: first, musicians that I  interviewed seemed to internalise The Crisis as a moment of personal anxiety, which even though widespread among Greek citizens in general, is experienced as an individual state of emergency; second, the narratives are accompanied by utterances of reclaiming agency, which are again quite individually driven. Yiorgos, an accomplished oud player, composer and teacher, gave one such example in an interview in 2016: The musician is a little like the farmer. You will harvest whatever you planted. . . . A few years back I had a personal crisis of constant anxiety,

Locating the music precariat 125 where I felt that I was at the wrong place doing the wrong things. Now I am concentrating on defining myself and investing my effort in things that will take me where I want to be. And this is mainly teaching and only selective performances. The ‘farming’ metaphor is rich in significance in Yiorgos’s words. Besides the common linguistic reference to the biblical expression ‘you reap what you sow’, the likening of musicking to farming evokes a narrative of labour that requires someone to work alone, within (or even against) an environment over which they have little control and yet be expected to calculate results and plan ahead for the future. Dimitris Theodossopoulos, an anthropologist who has researched farmers on the Greek island of Zakynthos, has elaborated on the theme of manual labour as ‘struggle’ (páli). His informants, Theodossopoulos explains, ‘see the process of cultivating the land, or any other manual work on their farms, as a process of struggle, a contest with the physical limits of both the labourer’s body and the environment’ (2003: 59). Similarly, in Yiorgos’s previous testimony, The Crisis has effectively shaped the music industry into a hostile and uncontrollable environment, leading musicians into a ‘personal crisis of constant anxiety’. Navigating this new crisis-scape requires a reconditioning of the self and a recalibration of priorities and effort. This, in Yiorgos’s case, means distancing himself from public performances as the main source of revenue and seeking other alternatives (mainly teaching) to make ends meet. Other musicians appeared to internalise the crisis-scape as a condition that emboldens them and provides them with purpose. In one such utterance, Alexandra, a vocalist and band-leader described how being faced with the economic crisis makes her more determined to pursue her goals: I have many dreams and crazy aspirations and I have decided that nothing’s going to stop me. Not Greece, or The Crisis, or the [lack of] networking (koné), or clientelism. I have concentrated on my own work, I have constructed my very own reality, and whatever everyone else is saying I am refusing to listen. Here the individuation of collective discourses of The Crisis paves the way into a form of personal escapism. In her words, Alexandra packs together a sum of maladies that are often considered typical traits of Greek society and instrumental in the unfolding of The Crisis (clientelism and the lack of meritocracy) and instead proposes a path of determination and hard work as a strategy for pursuing aspirations that, given the circumstances, would otherwise be perceived unachievable (‘crazy’). This narrative resembles what Nigel Rapport, drawing on Nietzsche, calls ‘genius’, which is ‘greatness [acquired] not by virtue of something miraculous but via a certain seriousness and industry, energy and endurance which is potentially within the grasp of every one’ (2003: 6–7). For Rapport, this process unfolds as a struggle for ‘control’, which is ‘an existential power that individuals possess over and against an impersonal, social-structural or institutional power’ (ibid: 5). I will return to this quest for ‘control’ later, and in more detail in the

126  Locating the music precariat next Chapter, but first it is imperative to see how the narrativisation of The Crisis unfolds within precarity story-telling.

Precarity stories: Aggeliki, Mike and Babis As I have argued thus far, the way in which The Crisis has been experienced as an intensification of the conditions of ‘hardship and frustration’ leads to a new genre of story-telling among musicians. Within these circumstances, some stories were utilised by my interlocutors as evocative parables that captured nodal moments in their encounters with precarity. Musicians, of course, are not alone in using narrative as a coping mechanism for The Crisis. Based on ethnography in the small northern Greek town of Trikala, Daniel Knight has shown that ‘[n]arratives of famine, suicide, and colonisation form the bases for solidarity and collective suffering in a time of severe turmoil and are one medium to connect culturally proximate historical moments with a critique of present socioeconomic conditions’ (2012: 55). It is through these narratives, Knight argues, that ‘people draw on history and project the future in complex polytemporality’ (ibid: 56). As I have illustrated elsewhere (Tsioulakis, 2011b), life narratives often serve musicians as modes of ‘discursive resistance’, whereby they construct their selfperception and socially position themselves through speech, with a specific purpose to challenge what they perceive as a perverse system of authority in the music industry. Within The Crisis, such stories gain additional significance as affective expressions of moments of rupture, which are worth being listened to. I call these ‘precarity stories’. What follows are three such tales of precarious musical lives that recount dramatic encounters respectively with the State, the night club circuit and close friends and colleagues. Each of the stories, in their unique articulation, alludes to wider themes of how precarity is narrated and interpreted, and how it radically shapes relationships of inequality in the field of musical labour. Aggeliki’s story: from permanency to unemployment In August 2013, I interviewed Aggeliki, a French-horn player who had until recently been employed as a member of the Orchestra of ERT, the Greek National Radio and Television Broadcasting Corporation.6 Two months before our interview, the conservative Greek coalition that governed Greece from 2012 until 2015 had decided to shut down ERT, along with its numerous side-projects including orchestras and choirs.7 After this decision was suddenly announced on 11 June 2013, Aggeliki and her numerous colleagues (journalists, technicians, administrators and creative artists including musicians) found themselves unemployed. As Aggeliki explained, this decision was the latest assault on the permanent employment of musicians in state-funded orchestras and institutions, which was already in full motion as part of the austerity agenda: ‘The Orchestra of Colours had already closed down, then many conservatoires started closing, so for most of my colleagues the ERT orchestra was their only occupation left.’8

Locating the music precariat 127 Aggeliki was quick to note that the ERT orchestra was not necessarily a ‘healthy’ organisation, but its endemic administrative issues were used by the State spokespersons to justify the closure of the whole initiative: It was the senior administrators that let the whole organisation down. They were corrupt and unproductive, which brought the whole thing into disrepute. But that was not the musicians’ fault, or the journalists’ and technicians’ who were all vilified in the wake of the decision. On the days following the shutdown, employees occupied the central building of the National Broadcaster and continued broadcasting over the internet in defiance of the government’s orders. This campaign created a whole movement of solidarity, with members of the public gathering in the courtyard of the occupied building and engaging in symbolic acts of support and resistance, including talks, fares, ‘strike news broadcasts’ and concerts. Musicians of the ERT Orchestra alongside their diverse colleagues in the organisation were the central figures in this campaign, which, in the summer of 2013, developed into a key locus of the anti-austerity movement. We created a solidarity fund, especially for those in temporary contracts who were let go without as much as a symbolic compensation. . . . Some people are in denial, others are giving up and leaving for their places of origin. But most colleagues are still there, keeping the place working, in resistance and solidarity. As Efthimios Papataxiarchis has argued, ‘when “social cohesion” is under threat in conditions of austerity, solidarity becomes a project, an “alternative horizon” aimed at combating alienation and atomisation’ (2016: 205).9 Theodoros Rakopoulos has further proposed that, within crisis-times, solidarity should be seen as a ‘bridge concept’, which saves us from viewing the solidarity economy as simply filling in the gaps left by the welfare state’s collapse. . . . Solidarity’s bridges among people, the re-establishment of sociality connections, are in part a product of the critical engagements that these people have undertaken in trying to refashion their lifeworlds. (2016: 146–7) Echoing Papataxiarchis’s and Rakopoulos’s remarks, Aggeliki’s account drew attention to ERT’s solidarity campaign as a collective exercise that served to resist and question the austerity rhetoric from below. A key message of the campaign, as Aggeliki emphasised, was to celebrate the public culture that had been historically fostered by the State Broadcaster and to challenge the narrative that portrayed the orchestra as unnecessary public spending in the context of The Crisis. In this

128  Locating the music precariat effort, the contribution of musicians was additionally important since they were in possession of expressive and affective abilities that were unique to their own line of work. The weeks after the closure decision I realised how important the profession of the musician is, not only for their own psychology, but also for everyone else’s. Music gave all of us strength and passion to resist. After the closure we played more concerts that we did before, just for solidarity and to raise awareness, and we also gave strength to other colleagues in ERT, who don’t have these avenues of performance and expression. . . . I feel very fulfilled and a lot of gratitude for my work in the ERT orchestra. I gave it my whole life, but it also taught me everything I know. And this is why since the closure I haven’t missed a day of voluntary work there. It is my home as it is for all the other people who worked there. However, as much as collective performances created momentum and helped raising awareness, the reality of unemployment and impeding precarity was experienced by Aggeliki as a personal moment of rupture. One of the events organised as part of this series of demonstrations was a concert of the Orchestra of ERT, where musicians, tears in their eyes, performed in what they believed would be their last public appearance in that capacity. In our interview, I asked Aggeliki about that particular moment. She responded: The worst thing after that concert was that I woke up not knowing who I was anymore. I kept hearing on TV, on private channels, people saying that we were all ‘lazy civil servants’; that we never practiced or rehearsed! And I kept thinking: ‘that surely can’t be me, I practice three hours a day’. I used to think of myself as a valued artist, many of us did. All of a sudden I felt so naïve. So, even though musicians in their solidarity campaign were able to assert collective claims of self-worth, the reality of professional precarity that was dawning for each of them individually was experienced as a source of self-defining, existential anxiety. Knowing that the campaign was unlikely to provide any long-term solutions to her career predicament, Aggeliki reflected on her future options: I don’t know what I am going to do now. I may have some opportunities for other orchestras, but most of the remaining ones are not professional, in the sense that they can’t support a full-time musician. I am thinking of joining orchestras in the periphery, or even moving abroad for better chances. The change of government in 2015 with the electoral victory of the left-wing SYRIZA party brought the reinstation of the National Broadcasting Organisation along with the orchestra. However, the deepening of austerity meant that the new conditions of employment for musicians were in-keeping with the precarious

Locating the music precariat 129 models prevalent in the private sector. As Kostas, a trade unionist who has worked closely with state-employed musicians told me: Even in the state funded orchestras there is a new worrying climate. For example when the new government reinstated the ERT orchestra, the musicians’ contracts were not of ‘indefinite duration’ like their predecessors, but short-term for specific performances, projects and so on. Or in some cases they even have so-called ‘internships’ whereby musicians are hired to perform unpaid, with the pretence of this being an educational thing. So the undoing of work security is very wide-spread. Aggeliki’s ‘precarity story’ illuminates the tensions between collective and individual experiences and strategies within austerity. The passion and optimism in her recounting of the collective campaign, the occupation and the solidarity actions is juxtaposed to the personal anxiety that surfaces in the reflections over her own self-doubting and future. In that sense, the story provides an example of how austerity and precarisation, especially in a field as fluid as musical labour, obliterates opportunities for collective resistance and drives musicians to a process of introspection and isolation, what I have been calling a crisis-subjectivity. This is one of the numerous examples of my interlocutors expressing The Crisis in terms of a personalized moment of rupture, calling into question not only their professional livelihood but also their core self-conception. In Aggeliki’s words, it is not only the impending economic precariousness that is troubling, but mainly the way in which she lost control over her self-definition. Her subjectivity had all of a sudden to grapple with two contradicting images: on the one hand her self-conception as a hard-working musician striving for artistic excellence and, on the other, an external portrayal by mainstream media and the conservative government as a ‘lazy civil servant’ who was enjoying undue privilege. This new precarious subjectivity of The Crisis is additionally disturbing because it evokes well-established perceptions of creative workers by other sectors of the public as undeserving beneficiaries.10 Mike’s story: precarity as violence The second story in this section was narrated to me by a singer in his forties, whom I will call Mike.11 Mike was born and raised in New Jersey, as a second generation Greek-American. He moved to Greece in the late 1990s, partly because he wanted to reconnect with his roots and in the hope that he could built a musical career as a singer there. In one of our conversations, Mike recounted a story from the early years of The Greek Crisis. Finding it hard to find a steady gig in Athens in the early 2010s, he had decided to take a job offer as a backing vocalist at a ‘dodgy folk music nightclub’12 outside Patra, a medium-sized city in South Greece. Session work for singers in the Greek music industry is often even more precarious and underpaid than for instrumentalists. Based on the (partly justified)

130  Locating the music precariat assumption that singers will take any job for some visibility, nightclubs systematically exploit backing vocalists who work very long hours under appalling conditions for minimum pay.13 But this particular club owner had gone one step further. He told backing vocalists that, in order for them to perform, they needed to buy their own cordless condenser microphones, which were very pricey at the time. If they could not afford one, then the club would purchase it on their behalf and then withhold their salaries until the microphone was entirely paid off. Mike reluctantly agreed, but a couple of weeks into the gigging season he realised that he was working endless hours, paying for food and accommodation out of his own savings and had yet to receive any salaries. Frustrated and tired, at 6 am one morning after finishing his all-night performance, he made a rash decision: he packed his clothes, shoved the expensive microphone to the bottom of his suitcase and boarded a bus to Athens, never to return. Mike told me that he was terrified of the repercussions, especially given that even during his limited time working in the nightclub he had already witnessed enough to convince him that his boss was intimately connected to the local mafia. His fears turned out to be well-justified when he returned to his Athens apartment one evening to find his roommate in distress. As the roommate told him, the nightclub’s muscle had come all the way to Athens, knocking on their door and looking for the money Mike owed. He stayed under the radar for a while, until he eventually found a steady gig in Athens and paid back some of the money, which persuaded his former boss to leave him alone. Even though most musicians I encountered did not get routinely terrorised by mafia bosses, Mike’s story is not unique. It portrays in very stark terms the hostile environments in which musicians often find themselves operating, where defiance of the power-holders can result in intense vulnerability and even physical harm. The role of violence, as actuality or threat, has been well documented in the literature on precarity (Butler, 2006; Athanasiou, 2014; Lazar and Sanchez, 2019; Powers and Rakopoulos, 2019; Lorey, 2015). Michael Herzfeld (2011) has argued that even The Crisis itself lends itself to a metaphor of ‘violence’ whereby the whole nation is portrayed as a victim. As Athanasiou explains, vulnerability to violence is a central aspect of neoliberalism in its capacity as ‘an encompassing regime of neoconservative governmentality that regulates the terms of livability by unevenly distributing resources and vulnerability among different bodies – differently racialized, gendered, and classed bodies’ (2014: 1). Within this context, Mike’s story offers us a paradigmatic narrative of the omnipresent threat of dispossession (Butler and Athanasiou, 2015) of one’s own body and safety in the everyday life of The Crisis. Individual precarity stories illustrate this essence of the ‘everyday’ as a domain of both hegemony and resistance. In her recent book on austerity lives in Greece and further afield, Nadia Seremetakis (2019) draws attention to this evocative potential of everyday stories: I do not propose everyday life as a sanctuary or as a recessed zone distanced from the structural violence of the state and the market. Rather, I see everyday

Locating the music precariat 131 life as a condition of im/possibility, unable to be lived as such but still an encapsulating habitus. (2019: 3) Mike’s story indeed gives such space to both the possible and the impossible, insofar as his exodus from precarious working conditions was chosen as the (perhaps sole) mode of possible resistance, while at the same time rendering him vulnerable to violence. Babis’s story: divisive precarity During a visit to Athens in the Autumn of 2016, I contacted two good friends and long musical collaborators of mine: bassist Achilleas and guitarist Babis. Knowing that they were very close with each other and had been performing as part of common projects for several years, I messaged them together on Facebook, asking to meet and catch up when they had some common free time. The Facebook message was ‘seen’ by both of them within minutes, but several days later I still hadn’t heard back from either of them. About a week later, I received a private message from Babis saying, ‘I will meet you, as long as he is not there’ (meaning Achilleas). ‘Did something happen?’ I replied, to which he responded, ‘I will tell you when we meet’. I met Babis and, after a couple of drinks and general friendly chat, I asked him about Achilleas. Babis then told me the story of how Achilleas had joined a very prominent Greek pop-rock band as a bass player and defacto musical director two years previous. When the band’s guitarist quit to pursue a solo career, the lead guitar spot was suddenly available, and Achilleas asked Babis if he was interested. Babis went through an audition, was enthusiastically accepted in the band and he immediately joined rehearsals for an upcoming busy season of gigs. At that point in the story, Babis emphasised that – as I would probably know very well myself – rehearsals are unpaid and intensive work. They are only worth the investment of a musician’s time because they are accompanied by the promise of a lucrative performing schedule during the nightclub ‘season’. He also made sure I knew that he had several other job offers, but he was keen to play with that particular band partly because he enjoyed their music but also (and this was particularly emphasised) because he’d be playing again with his good friend Achilleas. But then, just before the performances were about to begin, the former guitarist asked to rejoin the band. ‘He must have realised that guitarists don’t make it solo in Greece, what world was he living in?’ Babis commented mockingly. Sadly, for the narrator, the band decided to take back the ‘prodigal son’, effectively leaving Babis in a very precarious employment position. Being so close to the start of the nightclub season, Babis would find it very difficult to join another outfit, which meant that he might have had to spend the whole winter under-employed and broke. What was more, Achilleas did not stand up for him

132  Locating the music precariat in the negotiation, which, given their long friendship, was taken by Babis in grave offence. ‘I wasn’t expecting him to quit the band in solidarity’ he told me, ‘but him calling me to break the news and justifying them was too much. I never want to see him or talk to him again after that’. Luckily, Babis did find another steady gig in the following weeks, with a well-known folk singer. ‘The music is not nearly as close to what I like playing, but at least I’m respected as a professional’, Babis concluded. As Chapter 2 has argued, networking and success within the Athenian music business heavily relies on friendships and mutual support between freelance instrumentalists.14 As this story shows, however, in the wake of economic recession, the fierce competition between musicians over the limited lucrative spots remaining in the diminishing nightclub circuit gets in the way of long-lasting collaborations and collegial comradeship. Judith Butler considers the ‘undoing’ of relations as a defining feature of human precariousness: I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. . . . Let’s face it, we’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. (2006: 23) In the transformation of precariousness into ‘governmental precarization’, however, social relationships within and outside the workplace become subjected to the insecurity and individuation of the (re)structuring process of austerity. In his definition of the precariat, Guy Standing warns us that The precariat is not a class-for-itself, partly because it is at war with itself. . . . Tensions within the precariat are setting people against each other, preventing them from recognising that the social and economic structure is producing their common set of vulnerabilities. (Standing, 2011: 25) Tellingly, despite its ‘happy ending’ of finding stable (if less desirable) employment, Babis presented this story to me primarily as a traumatic moment of a friendship lost in the turmoil of labour antagonism. Overall, the three narratives in this section provide accounts of Isabell Lorey’s (2015, 2019) ‘governmental precarization’ in different scales. The encounters are experienced by the narrators as moments of rupture connected to the loss of employment and simultaneously the dismantling of collaborative relationships. Significantly, however, the perpetrator in each case is different. In Aggeliki’s story it is the State apparatus, which – in the hands of a conservative government and under the shadow of EU austerity agendas – turned one of the most secure sectors of the music workforce into a precariat overnight. In Mike’s story it was a club owner, who – aided by his entourage in the underworld – exploited and

Locating the music precariat 133 then terrorised his former employee. Finally, and perhaps most devastatingly, in Babis’s story the imposition of precarisation comes from his own bandmates including a life-long friend. Those different sources of power over the precarious (in some instances coming from within their midst) justify Lorey’s reference to Foucauldian ‘governmentality’ in her discussion of precarisation (2019: 186) insofar as power appears to be diffused within a nexus of actors rather than coming from a singular, monolithic oppressor.

Potential futures: post-Crisis imaginary and the quest for control As opportunities and agency are diminished for musicians within the Crisis environment, the imperative of control becomes more urgent, and personal reflections bring it into the centre of strategies for survival. This is nowhere more apparent than in the way in which musicians articulate their visions and hopes for the future. This was also detected in crisis ethnography by Knight and Stewart who remark that ‘[d]rawing on past events to contemplate uncertain futures arises as one strategy for resolving the aporia of crisis’ (2016: 5). Turning once more to Isabell Lorey’s analysis, we can regard this futurity as a postponement of the present, which is directly dictated by precarisation. In her words, ‘by investing the self in what is supposedly one’s “own” future, the doubly indebted personality consciously accepts precarization in the present. The fantasy of shaping the future means accepting precarization in the present’ (Lorey, 2019: 188). Here I argue, however, that references to the future can also work as a resistance to the individuating predicament of The Crisis. In their reflections on an ideal future, musicians tended to evoke two dominant elements: a quest for relative stability and the ability to regain control over their conduct and make choices. As singer Virginia expressed, The main thing I’m hoping for is to have less stress [agonía] and insecurity. To start each year from scratch and not know how it is going to end. Longterm, I hope to try my luck also in a different country . . . I feel that things here are very closed up, that there are no opportunities for musicians to do creative things. I’m not sure if everything is necessarily better abroad, maybe it’s a fantasy, but it’s an appealing one. The deepening and durability of The Greek Crisis has evidently shaped a narrative where escapism from precarity is linked to mobility abroad. As Evi Chatzipanagiotidou (2018) has argued through research among Greek migrants in Cyprus, The Crisis might even incentivise young people to undertake multiple migratory trajectories, whereby ‘[f]urther mobility is imagined and enacted, whenever possible, as a strategy of dealing with the conditions of uncertainty and liminality, and a way of achieving progress and “moving on” ’ (2018: 7). As Chatzipanagiotidou further attests, ‘[m]igration in this case is not, as often

134  Locating the music precariat assumed, a linear, one-way direction, but an ongoing process of decision making around new opportunities, destinations and mobilities’ (ibid: 2). In Virginia’s testimony, while the immediate goal is battling the everyday anxiety of job insecurity, the ultimate vision of ‘creative opportunities’ cannot be realised within the Greek national borders. This attitude, of course, draws on an idealising cosmopolitan imaginary (Tsioulakis, 2011a) that was prevalent among musicians long before The Crisis. But the conflation of austerity with a failed national project feeds into this imagination, which despite its globalist articulation is quite vernacular and time-specific. Interestingly, my constant probing for future visions in interviews rarely resulted in unrealistic fantasies of success. As Jannis, guitarist and technologymaker confessed, all I hope is to have a steady income through the pedal-making business to support me – I have no illusions that I will ever make a lot of money – and be able to create my music, that is never going to be profitable anyway. This grounded optimism was a common theme in virtually all testimonies that I got from musicians, many of whom embedded their modest aspirations within a journey of self-improvement. Stathis, a piano player in his late thirties, presented his ideal as being ‘able to build an “identity” as a musician, to have time to practice, study, and make myself better while also performing on stage’. Significantly, then, the current circumstances of precarity are seen as restrictive even to the ability of constructing one’s ‘identity’, which (as we saw in Chapter 3) is heavily reliant upon making aesthetic choices and performing them in public. Finally, in the process of imagining a more promising future post-Crisis, musicians returned to ideals of collectivism. As singer-songwriter Alexandra attested, I’m not primarily making a living from performing, but I haven’t given up on the idea that I might one day. . . . In the future, I hope to have the options in front of me and have the means to fund them. To be able to hire good collaborators, who know more than me in their fields, and be able to do creative things that go beyond my own limits. Yiorgos, a traditional instrumentalist who specialises in lute-shaped instruments of the Eastern Mediterranean, further echoed this quest of collaboration, coupled with the affordance of choice: I want to have the luxury to make unorthodox choices. Not to play the same old, time and again, but have spaces where I can create new music. But the most important is to collaborate with other people of course, not on my own, in my head.

Locating the music precariat 135 These last two testimonies by Alexandra and Yiorgos bring to the fore one of the core stakes in musicians’ desires: the coupling of personal agency with collective expression. The oppression of governmental precarisation, then, does not translate into a desire for some kind of individualist power but rather to a longing for mutual affective spaces, accomplished by the emergence of collectivities based on common aesthetic and social aspirations. As I have argued elsewhere (Tsioulakis, 2013), discourses of ‘quality’ among Athenian musicians are intimately connected to ideals of ‘mutuality’, which are as much about inclusion of musical companions as they are about excluding perceived outside forces of undue control.

Conclusion: a third approach to work vs play Focusing on ethnographic data before The Crisis, chapters 2 to 4 have illustrated how musicians during the times of ‘prosperity’ articulated their positionalities within the Greek popular industry. Within those articulations emerged two major patterns of thinking around the dichotomy of ‘work’ vs ‘play’: the first (in Chapter 2) had to do with the skills that made a ‘good musician’ (who could ‘play’) as opposed to the strategies that made a ‘successful musician’ (who could ‘work’); the second (in Chapter 3) concerned two contrasting types of communities, one of ‘experience’ (the ‘working’ community) and one of the ‘imagination’ (a community of ‘play’). In a time of ‘crisis’, affected by state-imposed austerity and within generalised precarity, the concepts of ‘work’ and ‘play’ are redefined and obscured but still relevant. Seen through the theoretical lens of Isabell Lorey’s ‘governmental precarization’, the ethnographic testimonies that I examine in this chapter make the division between work and play (or labour and leisure in wider sociological terms) seem like a remnant from a distant past ‘before The Crisis’ or, as the last section has shown, perhaps also a post-Crisis future. Issues of economic and social survival within the turmoil appear to dominate the discourse in a way that makes play-scapes within the Athenian musical world increasingly unimaginable. This is because the work vs play dichotomy before The Crisis assumed a structure of work that provided a degree of professional and economic security, in turn allowing the indulgence of ‘play’ as a field of creativity and experimentation that did not require compensation (see, also, Tsioulakis, 2013). Returning to Lorey and Butler, ‘play’ can be seen as celebrating the precariousness of being human through indeterminable forms of musical expression that gave pleasure; an end in themselves. This domain of playful performance, however, was accomplished in the backdrop of relevant security through a successful ‘working’ career. The intensified precarisation of musical labour has demolished some of the structures that made this balance operable. As neoliberal austerity made uncertainty and indeterminacy the ‘state of work’, and precarisation turned into a technique of governmentality, ‘play’ has to be work, or it is nothing; it commands no value. And yet, musicians still play. As the final chapter will show, in their effort to find

136  Locating the music precariat ways out of The Crisis that resist its tight grip on their conduct, instrumentalists, singers, composers, teachers and music technology-makers forge pathways of work that do not interfere with their playing, and they make space and time for play that is not work.

Notes 1 As discussed in Chapter 1, I have been capitalising the term ‘The Crisis’ throughout this monograph in order to emphasise its pervasive role as a discourse alongside the reality of living within conditions of austerity, economic recession and political instability. For an anthropological analysis of The Crisis in Greece, see Chapter 1. 2 Chapter 1 has provided a review of the major issues that ‘The Crisis’ encompasses, as it has been discussed particularly in anthropological literature. 3 Cassandre Balosso-Bardin (2016) has similarly shown how the Spanish economic crisis has affected traditional musicians in Mallorca, devastating a bagpipe tradition that had been revived and flourishing for several decades up until 2008. 4 Elsewhere I have argued that dichotomies of ‘power’ vs ‘powerlessness’ among Greek musicians are correlated with conceptions of ‘play’ vs ‘work’, based on research that preceded the economic crisis (see Tsioulakis, 2013). 5 This is in line with what Christina Scharff (2018) has documented among precarious classical musicians in London and Berlin. As she explains, political discourses around a need for social change are completely absent among musicians in precarity: ‘[i]nstead, desires for change are directed away from the socio-political sphere and turned inwards, thereby calling for the self to transform itself’ (2018: 113). 6 Aggeliki presents an exception among my interlocutors in that she identifies as a ‘classical musician’ rather than a participant of the freelance popular music industry. However, her testimony here is important to show how even the more ‘secure’ sections of musical labour (as state-sponsored classical orchestras are often seen) can abruptly enter the precarious scene as a result of austerity policies. After all, as Scharff (2018) has shown, the work of international classical musicians is defined by conditions of precarity as much as the conduct of their interlocutors in popular music or other professional cultural/creative industries. 7 See Costas Douzinas’ account in The Guardian. www.guardian.co.uk/commentis free/2013/jun/12/ert-greek-state-broadcaster-cultural-calamity (Accessed 20 February 2019). See also, Poulakis (2015: 105–106). 8 In his research on the impact of The Crisis and austerity on Western Art Music institutions in Greece, Nikos Poulakis (2015) reports that State funding was severely slashed, in some cases up to 75%. Together with the closure of some institutions (Camerata Orchestra, Orchestra of Colours, Orchestra of ERT), and the diminishing of salaries as well as postponement of pay for musicians in orchestras, austerity effectively crippled the operation of such institutions since 2009 (Poulakis, 2015: 105–106). 9 For some other accounts of emergent solidarity networks within the Greek Crisis, see Rozakou (2016), Rakopoulos (2015) and Douzina-Bakalaki (2016). 10 For some discussions of how musicians conceptualise their perception by audiences, see Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011: 206–210), O’Donnell and Henderson (2017) and Tsioulakis (2013). 11 The remaining two stories are not supported by lengthy direct quotes because these stories were not given to me in formal, recorded interviews. As the narratives will make clear, these stories emerged from social encounters that I had with two close friends, outside of the space of ‘official’ field research. Subsequently, both musicians have given me permission to tell their stories in the context of this book but have asked me to change their names. As a result, names of individuals, bands and venues in these two sections are either removed or replaced by fictional equivalents.

Locating the music precariat 137 12 As explained in Chapter 4, some of the distaste of professional musicians towards venue-owners (magazátores) is based on the (often justified) presumption that those owners are connected to the criminal underworld. Within this context, the term ‘dodgy’ (perithoriako, in Greek, which literally translates as ‘marginal’) has a range of social, legal and cultural connotations that for Mike make it an undesirable place of work. 13 For a discussion of folk music nightclubs and the positionality and performance of singers within those spaces, see Tsioulakis (2019b). 14 Stephen Cottrell (2002) has analysed similar strategies among professional musicians in London as part of their practice of ‘deputizing’.

6 Ways out Teaching, artisanship and micro-scenes

‘Is The Crisis an opportunity?’ This question has not stopped reverberating in my head since I  first decided to document how my interlocutors and friends in the Athenian music industries cope with recession and austerity. My own experience first as a musician and then an academic, in both precarious and ‘permanent’ employment positions, had me equipped with a profound disdain for the neoliberal trope of crisis as an ‘opportunity’ (or, as a former head of my University used to articulate it, a managerial practice of ‘knocking people out of their comfort zones’ as a motor for productivity and innovation). Yet, since the beginning of my fieldwork in crisis-ridden Athens, I was confronted with two unmissable phenomena: first that many of my informants were using the language of ‘opportunity’ to refer to some of the consequences of The Crisis on their lives, and second, a proliferation of musical events and creativity across the city, contrary to the state of silence and devastation that I was – perhaps naively – expecting to find. As a way to address the debate around The Crisis as a creative impetus, this chapter will examine how musicians engineer ‘ways out’ of their economic and social predicament of precarisation and situate these ‘ways out’ within the dichotomy of subjugation vs resistance that has dominated much of the literature on ‘creativity’ within austerity and neoliberal capitalism more broadly. Some of the writings on The Greek Crisis have been quick to locate instances of ‘opportunity’ within the turmoil and represent individual strategies of survival as evidence of creative resilience. For example, in his examination of an array of economic entrepreneurial tactics among his informants in the town of Trikala, Daniel Knight has suggested that ‘[d]espite prominent narratives of turmoil and destitution, crisis fashions spaces for opportunities and diversification through business innovation and enforced changes to livelihood strategy’ (2015: 137). Opportunity, he further explains, ‘should thus not be theorised as the purpose for action, but should be viewed as a pathway through which people negotiate and exploit unremitting cultural patterns and values through innovation and diversification’ (ibid: 123). He proclaims this as evidence that ‘[s]ometimes, in the deepest darkest corners of social turmoil there is a glimmer of opportunity’ (ibid: 139). Can this type of ‘opportunism’ and ‘innovation’ (Knight, 2015) be detected within Greek cultural production in The Crisis? On the surface, the expansion

Ways out 139 of cultural creativity that happens in conjunction with (or even direct response to) The Crisis suggests traces of such ‘opportunism’. In a recent edited volume on the cultural politics of austerity edited by Dimitris Tziovas (2017), several contributors examine the creative potentials and material for inspiration that The Crisis has offered artists across different expressive forms. In the introduction of this volume, Tziovas describes ‘an explosion of creativity . . . particularly in the areas of theatre, film and performance’ (2017: 4; see, also, Styliou, 2019), including the flourishing of poetry in public spaces, a resurgence (and more positive funding landscape) for Greek cinema and new genres of literature emerging that take inspiration from The Crisis. Rather than drawing on canons of the past and established Greek cultural production, these new expressive forms ‘seek to represent hard lives and uncertain futures in times of social and economic precarity’ (ibid: 6). More specifically, as Tziovas argues, in some cases what emerges is ‘a particular kind of creativity which is about resourcefulness and restoring what is seen to be lost rather than challenging the state or becoming mobilised to hold it into account’ (ibid: 4). In that sense, this emergence of cultural forms can be seen to fall squarely into Knight’s observation of ‘opportunism’ (2015), whereby individuals strategically exploit the attention that The Greek Crisis has attracted across global media, what Erato Basea calls ‘ “spectacle of the crisis,” an inexhaustible reservoir of images of suffering, which are reproduced, (re)appropriated, debated, and massively disseminated through various photographic and cinematic forms in Greek and international “mediascapes”’ (2016: 62; see, also, Alexandrakis, 2016 and Papailias, 2011). Specifically in the musical field, Katerina Levidou (2017) reports on the unexpected flourishing of festivals of Western Art Music, especially in the Greek periphery, since The Crisis. However, as Levidou makes clear, ‘the blossoming of such festivals is less a matter of satisfying an existing large demand for this repertoire than a question of increasing the supply in order to facilitate the key purposes such festivals serve, namely, networking, education and tourism’ (2017: 184). Recalibrating their funding sources in order to rely less on public money and fuelled by the reciprocal networking of Greek musicians and the volunteering effort of international aficionados (ibid: 190–192), these festivals confirm a general pattern of artistic endeavour within The Crisis: it mainly happens thanks to the investment of time that creative artists can spare due to their underemployment, and it rarely generates economic revenue. As Levidou concludes, ‘although the festivals of classical music themselves are blossoming, musicians, artistic directors and production companies do not benefit financially in any significant way’ (ibid: 193). As a result, the sole incentive for artists, is that ‘participating in such events is one way of remaining in the spotlight of musical life in Greece’ (ibid). The coupled phenomena of economic resilience strategies and explosion of creativity with The Crisis as its source of inspiration could suggest a correlation between austerity and the invention of new forms of survival and expression. A critical perspective on this process, however, could question whether this merits it the label of ‘opportunity’, as well as its novelty. Critical writing on ‘creativity’

140  Ways out within late capitalism has focused on deconstructing the tropes of ‘adaptability’, ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ that have become buzzwords in both state and private-sector rhetoric on new labour conditions, especially within the socalled ‘creative industries’ (see especially McRobbie, 2016; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010, 2011; Raunig et al., 2011). Through these buzzwords, some of them inspired by the rhetoric of creative artists themselves, governmentality within the creative industries has forced labourers into a constant pursuit of new initiatives, essentially leading them to a self-afflicted process of precarisation. As Maurizio Lazzaratto explains, This idea of the individual as an entrepreneur of her/himself is the culmination of capital as a machine of subjectivation. . . . s/he brings the subjectivation process to its pinnacle, because in all these activities s/he involves the ‘immaterial’ and ‘cognitive’ resources of her/his ‘self’, while on the other, s/ he inclines towards identification, subjectivation and exploitation, given that s/he is both her/his own master and slave, a capitalist and a proletarian, the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement. (2011: 48) Angela McRobbie (2016) further attests that precarisation within the creative industries has long worked as a laboratory to test strategies for a much larger radical redefinition of labour relationships. In her words, ‘there is a dispositif that drives the growth of the new creative industries’, which in turn, supports the creative industries of this arriviste middle class, allowing them to act as guinea pigs for testing out the new world of work without the full raft of social security entitlements and welfare provision that have been associated with the post-Second World War period. . . . The creative workforce might be relatively small, but it is being trained up to pave the way for a new post-welfare era. (2016: 34–35) The reason why this condition of insecurity is attractive to many aspiring artists and entrepreneurs is because it is presented through a rhetoric of ‘freedom’, which, as earlier chapters in this book have shown, is directly drawn out of the discourse of creative workers themselves.1 But, while ‘freedom’ is propagated by artists as a condition for authentic creativity, neoliberal governmentality turns it into a harbinger for insecure labour, whereby the creatives are released into a specific sphere of freedom, of independence and self-government. Here flexibility becomes a despotic norm, precarity of work becomes the rule, the dividing lines between work and leisure time blur just like those between work and unemployment, and precarity flows from work into life as a whole. (Raunig, 2011: 199)

Ways out 141 Several contributors to a special issue on Do-It-Yourself (DIY) music careers in Cultural Sociology have brought these debates into the centre of discussion around music industries. While authors celebrate the skills that involvement in DIY music cultures has cultivated among some aspiring entrepreneurs, in the same breath they caution against misinterpreting this process as a genuine opening up of opportunities. For example, as Ross Haenfler illustrates through research among ‘straight-edgers’ in the US, while these musicians ‘create sustainable careers that allow them to make a living and even, in some cases, fulfilling careers reflective of their values [they] simultaneously reproduce neoliberalism even as they help (some) participants become more competitive on the job market’ (2018: 188–189). Or, as Silvia Tarassi reports through her ethnography among DIY musicians in Milan, independent music culture and the DIY ethos retain the same power and are informing the mythologies and contradictions of creative labour today in which the desire of being autonomous, flexible and independent goes hand in hand with the precarious and insecure working conditions of creative workers. (2018: 221) In that sense, looking at strategies of coping among musicians within DIY scenes, alerts us to ‘a style of career path that is designed to negotiate the more pathological effects, both political and economic, of post-industrialisation and the concomitant onset of risk and uncertainty’ (Bennett, 2018: 146). Over-celebrating these types of career paths might, hence, blind us to a potential ‘unwitting neoliberal conspiracy that encourages young people to accept and live in an unstable situation as an increasingly personalized economic unit, precarious work conditions, and excessive self-exploitation (Jian, 2018: 237). These cautionary analyses relate directly to an examination of coping strategies among people who live under the predicament of prolonged austerity, and they are echoed in my ethnographic encounters. Musicians whom I interviewed also reflect this debate between The Crisis as a generative opportunity or a burden that stifles creativity. For example, Themis, a violinist in his early forties told me: ‘The crisis is good for me, it motivates me. The moment you put some money in my pocket, I become idle’. This striking declaration seems to have fully embedded the neoliberal talk of ‘crisis as opportunity’ within this musician’s self-conceptualisation as a person who can only be genuinely creative within conditions of uncertainty. As I explained in the previous chapter, Themis was a musician who eagerly embraced a new crisis-subjectivity, by engaging in activities that he would previously have regarded unacceptable, such as busking and backpacking abroad in search for performance opportunities. Sissy, a composer in her early thirties echoed some of this rhetoric in her idea of ‘diversification’: Many of the musicians who have been finding it more difficult in the crisis are the ones who were not able to diversify. If you don’t see yourself as a creative

142  Ways out artist, who can direct himself or herself to different paths, then you’re trapped in a box, and those people have been hit more by the crisis, this is how I see it. Even though Sissy does not go as far as seeing The Crisis as a motivating factor for artists, she still evokes an idea of creativity that serves as an asset in navigating precarity. For Sissy, the creative artist becomes elusive and harder to contain ‘in a box’, exactly because they are already capable of channelling their creativity in different pathways. Furthermore, Sissy’s quote draws a distinction between ‘creative artists’ and those musicians ‘who were not able to diversify’. Christina Scharff has argued that ‘drawing boundaries’ is a central feature of what she calls ‘entrepreneurial subjectivity’ (2018: 132). In this process, she elaborates, musicians engage with a discourse of ‘hard work’ vs ‘laziness’ in order to ‘construct themselves as entrepreneurial’, and ‘this construction simultaneously involves the repudiation of those who do not work hard and a lack of empathy if they do not achieve’ (ibid). This relates to a growing literature on ‘resilience’ within ethnomusicology. Mainly referring to whole musical cultures rather than individual musicians, Jeff Titon has proposed the concept of resilience as ‘a strategy, a means toward the goal of sustainability’ (2015: 158). Drawing on ecological literature, Titon explains that ‘resilience refers to a system’s capacity to recover and maintain its integrity, identity, and continuity when subjected to forces of disturbance and change’ (ibid, see, also, Lake, 2013). Titon in fact correlates the strategy of cultural/musical resilience with the pursuit of ‘diversification’, which he considers to be ‘an adaptive risk management technique’ (ibid: 181). However, Titon also draws an important distinction between resilience and resistance; the latter term refers more to the ability to fight back against a disturbance or even prevent loss to the ‘system’ altogether, while the former terms ‘means the ability to bounce back’ (ibid: 179). Bridging the consideration of whole ‘systems’ with the lives of individual performers, Jonathan Gregory (2018) has adopted the ‘resilience’ model in his study of mixed-race, working class troupes of the Kaapse Klopse carnival in Cape Town, South Africa. In his ethnography, Gregory illustrates that the participants use the collective efficacy of performance to bounce back from the inequality, structural violence and poverty to which they are quotidianly subjected. Leah O’Brien Bernini (2015) has also utilised the concepts of resilience and resistance, in ethnographic circumstances very similar to this book, focusing on professional traditional musicians within the neoliberal music economy of Ireland. As she argues, ‘resilience strategies help artists embrace new resources and technologies and access alternative capital to fund production, marketing, publicity, and distribution, thus improving probability of economic success’ (2015: online). The danger with the discourse of ‘resilience’, however, is that it somewhat verifies the neoliberal talk that wants individuals to creatively cope with the removal of ‘safety nets’ in governmental precarisation. To put it simply, if individuals are ‘resilient’, then what is the purpose of stable and supportive working conditions in the first place? In line with this sentiment, some of the musicians whom

Ways out 143 I interviewed were quite hostile to the idea of precarity as a creative source. As Virginia, a vocalist in her early 30s attested, One of the things that have happened with The Crisis is that engagements have multiplied but they are a lot smaller. So yes, I suppose we might be playing a lot more gigs, but this is out of necessity, not choice. And at the end of the day, we make a lot less money. Katerina, a bassist in her thirties, explicitly positioned herself against that rhetoric, in a way suggesting that this was not the first time that she had to articulate those points: There is a theory that The Crisis might result in more ‘authentic’ music, with musicians really pursuing their creativity in more romantic ways. But this could only be true of amateurs, who, since they don’t have employment anyway, might start creating music out of boredom. But this doesn’t apply to professionals, who can only thrive when there is proper support, compensation, security and so on. The juxtaposition between ‘amateurs’ and ‘professionals’ is telling, since, as this book has argued from the outset, ‘professionalism’ is a hard-earned identity for musicians. Confirming the criteria of professionalism that I outlined in Chapter 2, Katerina is unable to conceive of music professionalism without a viable supporting industry, which in the times of austerity is becoming scarce. In facing austerity and precarisation, some musicians have been looking for ways to restore a degree of economic security by even abandoning music altogether. As Vaios, a bassist in his forties told me, ‘I’ve tried to find other ways out. For example last year I tried to open a restaurant in Zakynthos, but that didn’t work either. I had a lot of competition and they fought me hard, so I gave up’. The remaining of the chapter is divided into three parts, each documenting a different ‘way out’ of The Crisis for musicians, namely teaching, artisanship and the emergence of micro-scenes. Distancing the analysis from the trope of ‘Crisis as opportunity’, these sections will look at how musicians invest their efforts and limited capital in order to establish domains of ‘work’ that make them less vulnerable to precarity, while at the same time establishing new micro-scenes that protect their ‘play’ from governmental precarisation (Lorey, 2015, 2019). In the conclusion, I will revisit the work vs play dichotomy in order to argue that musicians reinvent it as a strategy of resistance to crisis-subjectivation.

(re)Discovering teaching: tuition against precarity Literature in ethnomusicology and popular music studies has long been preoccupied with processes of teaching and learning (see, for example, Stock, 2003; Nettl, 2005: 388–403; Krüger, 2011; Cawley, 2020; Neuman, 2012; Hill, 2009;

144  Ways out Green, 2001; Keister, 2008 among others). Not much of this literature, however, has focused on the experience of professional teachers as a social group. When contrasted with the professional domain of performance, teaching often appears as a ‘more secure’ pathway, as reported by Brian Long’s (2015) research among orchestral musicians in Australia. And indeed, engagement with teaching has always been a reliable fall-back strategy for session instrumentalists (see O’Toole, 2018). However, a closer look at the strategies of the freelance music teacher reveals a strenuous endeavour, whereby ‘[t]o be financially successful, teachers must be able to teach a variety of genres, and they must address the varied student, parent, and music employer perspectives’ (Guest-Scott, 2008: 440). In virtually all of the interviews that I have conducted with musicians since the start of The Greek Crisis, teaching has been unmistakably proposed as a way of complementing income, especially during slower periods of gigging. But since The Crisis, even this reliable strategy presents its own challenges. In a comparative study of institutionalised music education in Greece, Anastasios Hapsulas argues that The Crisis has contributed to the decline of institutions (including private and state-funded conservatoires, secondary schools and university departments), but the issues therein can be traced to pathologies that preceded the economic recession and austerity (2015: 91). As Despo, a mandolin and guitar performer and instructor explained, ‘now with The Crisis, teaching at conservatoires is not viable. You need to spend all day and have many students, which is very difficult in The Crisis, and you still don’t make ends meet’. Vocal instructor Virginia further elaborated on the difficulties of making a living out of teaching in private music institutions: Two years ago I taught in two conservatoires, now I teach in five, some of them only for a couple of hours a week. That’s because all of us prefer working, even in small bits, rather than sitting around. But it’s difficult, because you waste all your time on the road. For example last year I even took a teaching post in Kalamata [town in the south of Peloponnese], more than three hours commute from Athens, and I did it as a day trip just for some extra cash. To make things worse, the immediate reflex of musicians turning to teaching as a survival strategy has made tuition a very saturated field, to the frustration of those music teachers who were dedicated to this endeavour since before the extreme precarisation of performance jobs. As George, an electric guitar instructor emphasised, The funny thing with The Crisis is that a lot of musicians who were only interested in performance are now resorting to teaching to make some income, which makes things more difficult for those of us who were teaching since the start. It’s like, you try to become a better teacher and to gain experience for years and then you have to compete with someone who is teaching a bit of guitar on the side, because they have learned a couple of chords on the internet.

Ways out 145 As a result, musicians who decide to dedicate themselves to education as a professional outlet, have to rethink the ways in which they engage with students, the type of specialisation that will make them ‘stand out’ within the crowded tuition market and the demographic that they will target. Furthermore, if this professional strategy is to give them back any of the agency they have lost in the course of precarisation, teaching needs to be done on their own terms. As the following case studies and testimonies will show, while refocusing their teaching philosophies and negotiating their place within educational institutions, musicians strive to regain control. On the morning after a very successful performance with his jazz trio, I met Stathis, a piano player, composer and teacher to discuss his musical life in The Crisis. Echoing many of my informants quoted earlier, Stathis spoke emotionally about the ways in which the challenges of the music scene affected his own self-esteem. ‘I had to take some time off and reserve to myself’, Stathis told me, recounting the first few years of The Crisis, when he almost stopped performing and returned ‘back to basics’, making himself ‘a student’ again. He attended master-classes and composed music alone, questioning the very fundamentals of his musical education and practice. ‘I realised I needed to create a new method of both playing and teaching’, he explained, telling me about a new learning manual for piano players that he is in the process of writing. He claimed that revisiting the way in which he had been taught, and devising a novel way of teaching others, had given him the confidence to establish his own trio and perform as a bandleader. Now a prominent freelance musician with a busy career, Stathis reflected on the increased challenges that The Crisis presents for musicians’ livelihoods, which is always experienced as a ‘personal failure’. ‘What seems to work for me is introspection, questioning my own choices and moving forward’, he told me, reaffirming numerous testimonies that conceptualise The Crisis as a rupture of selfhood for working musicians, no matter how collectively experienced and nationally devastating it might be.2 This resonates with Angela McRobbie’s assessment of neoliberal subjugations within the creative industries, whereby ‘this seeking out of one’s own creativity, as a kind of inner self, is a dominant feature of contemporary governmentality’ (2011: 127). Yiannis, a jazz saxophone player in his late thirties who has been battling with the precarity of the live music scene, also recounted his turn to full-time teaching as a trajectory of personal empowerment. After a few years of struggling to increase his live gigs as a way to survive financially, Yiannis realised that this was a ‘zero-sum game’. ‘I ended up feeling completely broken. Physically, mentally, and practically, as a professional’, he told me. My lungs couldn’t take it, my schedule was full of conflicts, and my head was not in the right place. So, I strategized, I decided that I can’t reach my forties and fifties and depend on ‘the night’,3 so I planned my teaching activities. Now I’ve reached a point where I have a steady number of private lessons at home, and I save time, expenses, and I have my own system.

146  Ways out I read Yiannis’s reference to ‘having a system’ as a rich statement around the imperative of control. First, by developing his ‘own’ pedagogical system, Yiannis manages to gain agency over teaching methods, curricula and outcomes in a way that would not be possible were he to teach within the confines of a private or public music school. At the same time, ‘his own system’ allows Yiannis to assert control over his daily schedule, his routines and the space within which these take place, while also giving him the opportunity to engage with performance opportunities of his own choosing. Alexandra, a vocalist and songwriter, also reflected on how forging a pathway into a niche domain of music education provided her not only with a somewhat stable income but also with creative avenues for writing new music: I’m teaching a children’s choir now and I’m developing a system for early vocalists that also includes yoga and other physical activities. I write pieces for them and I am now trying to develop a new theory manual for kids. Early musical education is a field that very few of my interlocutors would have considered before The Crisis. This is partly because successful professional musicians pre-Crisis mainly saw teaching as a side activity, which was there to confirm their status as instrumentalists or vocalists. In that light, many musicians would only take on students of a certain level and ability, whom they regarded as potential future colleagues and collaborators. In contrast, recent testimonies prioritise a questioning of established methods of teaching even at a young age, which gives musicians the means to impact on ideas of musicality, and how it can be fostered in dialogue with their experience in performing music professionally. This was particularly true for Yiorgos, a traditional instrumentalist specialising in oud and lute: When The Crisis hit, and public music schools started laying people off, I found myself in a situation where I had all the official qualifications but no avenues to make them profitable.  .  .  . So then I  discovered by luck a different avenue, which was cultivating musicality in pre-school kids. I just found myself playing some music in a day-care and I liked it. So I trained myself, I read, I developed a type of curriculum, and I found a job in that field. So I have avoided working ‘in the night’, which I never liked anyway, and I can balance things better between performances of my choice and a turn towards education which I find very important and constructive. For Yiorgos, then, the turn to pre-school musical education is not only a resistance to the precarisation of the live scene but also a way to rediscover self-worth. Doing something that is ‘important and constructive’ is presented in direct juxtaposition to working ‘in the night’, an endeavour that (as Chapter 3 has argued) was always regarded by musicians as a profoundly alienating experience.

Ways out 147 If some musicians seek control through designing new teaching methods and navigating unchartered milieu, the next example goes even further by creating a whole new educational institution. In December 2016, I visited the newly established popular music school MusicFor, founded by two active performing musicians, bassist Katerina and guitarist George. A married couple, Katerina and George have experience of over a decade in performing and teaching within genres of pop, rock and heavy metal music. But as they explained to me, they had recently decided to establish their own music school, driven both by a need to gather their students within ‘their own space’ and to control the ways in which teaching was delivered and instructors were recruited and compensated for their work. Located in the working-class area of Korydallos, near the port of Piraeus, MusicFor employs a number of professional instrumentalists and vocalists, who educate aspiring popular musicians of all ages, giving them also the opportunity to perform in commercial venues and make recordings of near-professional level. As George admitted, ‘We knew this was a crazy thing to do in the middle of a national financial meltdown and we still don’t know if this was the right choice. We started the school by investing our wedding gifts and our families’ savings’. Katerina further emphasised the amount of risk that was involved in this decision: We went to banks to get loans to do it, and they just laughed in our faces, so we had to do it on our own. . . . Starting a music school is also difficult because all working families are struggling, so students are always delaying payments. Or some tell you, ‘I can only do two weeks per month’, and you have to work around it. Their narrative describing this endeavour repeatedly switched between anxiety over entrepreneurial risks and the excitement of being able to facilitate popular music education in a way that addressed the shortcomings of mainstream institutions. In Katerina’s words, we have all been through typical Greek conservatoires that offer popular music lessons, but it’s always an afterthought isn’t it? It’s like ‘Oh, we mainly teach classical music, but for those who are not good enough we also offer these inferior music lessons so we can make money’. No! For us it was important to establish a school that was specifically for rock and pop music, where it could be done properly in the right space and by the right people. The phenomenon of new performance styles driving musicians to question established teaching methods, is well-documented within ethnomusicology and popular music studies (Green, 2001; Hill, 2009). As Juniper Hill emphasises based on her research within new-folk musicians in Finland, ‘Contemporary folk music activists believed that Western art music culture restricted creativity of the majority of musicians, because it provided virtually no opportunities for improvisation and limited composition to a select gifted elite’ (2009: 90). But for Katerina and

148  Ways out George, it wasn’t enough to simply devise a new curriculum; it was additionally important that this process be carried out within a new type of institution. Proudly guiding me around their school’s space, Katerina and Yiorgos pointed out the purpose-built, sound-proofed rehearsal rooms, the professional sound equipment, even an open plan bar/lounge area where they served me freshly brewed coffee while we chatted. They told me how important it was for their initiative to recruit and pay musicians properly, especially in the context of a financial recession, where musicians are exploited both in their performing and their teaching lives. As Michael O’Toole has argued about music teaching in Chicago, ‘Local music schools can be regarded not just as centers of musical learning and teaching, but as local nodes in a broader network of musical activity that shapes the actions of local musicians, audiences, and consumers’ (2018: 228). Resonating with O’Toole’s proposition, Katerina and George’s school focuses on bringing young active musicians together, in their role as teachers and students, in a collaboration that culminates into public-facing events and recordings, thus giving momentum to a local popular music scene, whereby divisions between educator and learner blur and eventually disappear. Katerina: I see the issue of teaching a bit romantically: that by teaching young people you are also shaping an audience and a scene who can appreciate music. George: I agree with that, but there is also a pragmatic responsibility for the teacher, to prepare students for the lack of opportunities and the devastation that they are likely to face. This is why with my students I try to also support them by teaching them how to do their CVs, introducing them to the right people, musicians, entrepreneurs, and so on. So that they at least get a fair chance. Through Katerina’s and George’s exchange we come full-circle back to the predicament of precarity. Analysing marketing seminars for artists in the US, Thet Shein Win has shown that ‘This crafting of the ideal entrepreneurial artist mirrors broader patterns of neoliberal orientations. . . . These expectations of entrepreneurialism serve to generate additional labor for artists’ (2014: 2). In their teaching philosophy, Katerina and George seem to have integrated this additional labour within their core curriculum. In their self-proclaimed ‘romantic’ and ‘pragmatic’ assertions, they both address the issue of a viable scene within which musicians can thrive. This requires a ‘pragmatic’ approach that can educate a well-trained precariat, while simultaneously ‘romantically’ cultivating an educated audience who will endorse and foster their musicality.

Musicians turn into artisans: creativity, space and control The invocation of the term ‘artisan’ in ethnomusicological scholarship is often part of a discussion of hierarchies and value. Be it in gendered terms (Mora, 2008:

Ways out 149 231), a consideration of performance class (Neuman, 1977: 238) or a hierarchy of styles (Malcomson, 2014: 248), the ‘artisan’ often denotes a role inferior to that of the ‘artist’. While the latter masters the creativity (compositional or performative) of a musical genre, the former is seen as reproducing patterns and rules; the results of the artisan’s labour might be seen as productive but not necessarily as an innovative creation. Simultaneously, the concept of artisanship relates to an emphasis on the materiality of music-making. As Eliot Bates has advised, ‘our understanding of “music” can be greatly enriched through an increased understanding of the means of sound production, similarly requiring an attention to objects and instrumentality’ (2012: 388; see, also, Dawe, 2015). Bringing together the two considerations of materiality and value, in this section I am using the term ‘artisan’ to engage with the narratives of three musicians who, during or before The Crisis, have turned their creative effort into producing electronic music technology. The choice of the term ‘artisan’ here has a dual purpose: first to bring into the analysis a consideration of materiality as an element of regaining control, and second, to evoke some of the debates around ‘creativity’ and investigate how, in this new domain of work, it might be revalued and reassessed by the creators themselves. In January 2015, I visited the workshop of two musicians, Petros and John, who had recently founded a small business that constructed analogue synthesizers. Petros, who was mainly in charge of the aesthetic design and finish of the products, is a professional bassist whom I have known since childhood. We have collaborated in numerous bands and recordings, both as backing, session instrumentalists and in our own creative projects. John, the electrical mastermind behind the design of their pedals and synthesizers, is also a guitar player who has semi-professional experience within Athenian rock subcultures. When Petros first showed me a specimen of their new line of synthesizers, called Murmux, I was stunned by its combination of eccentric uniqueness and a professional finish. Its sound was comparable to synths produced by the multinational giants that dominate the industry, but its look was strikingly different, including exposed wooden pieces and panels covered in tweed fabric. ‘Except for the knobs everything else is handmade’, Petros boasted. I asked one question after the other on the manufacturing process, finding it hard to believe that he and his partner John had actually made what laid in front of my eyes with their very own hands. Behind my incredulity rested a long assumption about musicians as persons whose creativity lies in the domain of sounds, perhaps also words and aesthetic concepts, but certainly not material artefacts. Upon my first visit to their workshop, I  was further impressed by the space within which this creative process occurred. They had rented the ground floor of an inconspicuous building in a quiet neighbourhood in the south of Athens, previously used as a warehouse. Despite the disorderly presence of scattered electronic parts and tools – I had interrupted them during a busy production day – the space was meticulously designed, even aestheticized. The walls were painted in a striking antithesis of dark grey and bright green, with wooden shelves in the same shade as the wooden parts of their Murmux synths. One of the walls featured a

150  Ways out

Figure 6.1 John (left) and Petros (right) showcasing the Murmux synth in their workshop

graffiti proclaiming ‘We are proud wave generators’ (in English), a reference to their work of constructing synthesizers and pedals, which generate and process sound waves (see Figure 6.1). During our interview, I asked John about the issue of creative labour, and specifically how musical creativity compared to making tangible technology. ‘It’s not as creative as being a musician’, he replied, ‘or I suppose it’s only creative every once in a while, when you design something new. But at least I’m my own boss and I can work in my own space’. John’s response evidently evoked an idea of ‘creativity’ that includes a notion of ‘originality’, according to which musical performance is an inherently creative process, in ways that the manual labour of producing multiple copies of the same technological object is not. In that sense, ‘creativity’ is part of the process of conceiving of a new instrument or piece of sound technology, which only happens rarely.4 However, John immediately balanced this sense of loss over creativity with the advantage of control: being one’s ‘own boss’ and working in one’s ‘own space’. In contrast to working for the music industry, an environment that, especially in the wake of The Crisis, diminishes the control that musicians can exert over their conduct, being a self-employed artisan, a creator of material objects, helps these musicians regain agency. The

Ways out 151 aestheticisation of work-space and the unique, handmade appearance of their products is part of the same agenda. Their control over the production process and their conditions of labour is mapped onto the space and the artefacts; they are theirs. The connection between ‘space’ and ‘control’, was also evident in my interview with another musician-turned-artisan. Jannis, a prominent guitarist in the experimental electronic and jazz scene of Athens, is also the owner and main maker of Jam pedals. As Jannis recounted, his choice to receive training in electronic technology was consciously made in an effort to avoid the precarity of the live music business, even before The Crisis: I had the choice of studying technology or music at university, and I chose technology. This was conscious because I knew that as a professional musician I would struggle and I didn’t like playing as a hired session musician, so I thought by combining music and technology I would have better paths available to me. (Jannis) A brand that has been quite popular among Greek musicians but also successful internationally, Jam Pedals have ensured that Jannis was protected from the most devastating economic effects of austerity when it became widespread in Greece. As he explained, The pedal business for me is 99% international. . . . The crisis has not affected me that much in that business, exactly because the audience is very international and especially lucrative in the US. The Greek industry of course has almost disappeared, and the Italian is pretty bleak as well, so it was a blessing to have more international markets to turn to as things were getting worse. Similarly to Murmux, Jam springs out of an impressively designed and eccentrically aestheticized workshop in the south of Athens (see Figure 6.2). After offering me a tour around the several construction and rehearsal rooms of his workshop, Jannis spoke to me about the importance that the concept of ‘space’ had for him both as a musician and a manufacturer: The space is incredibly important to me. Both in the music venue, where it creates the vibe for a performance – who is there, how much attention they pay . . . and in the work space, where it gives me the conditions to be productive, rest, and have creative moments. Laying back in a comfortable armchair, with a John Coltrane record playing in the background throughout our interview, Jannis talked to me about ideas of ‘creativity’ and ‘artistic freedom’, continuously switching back and forth between his two roles as an instrumentalist and a technology maker. Most of his current

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Figure 6.2 Views of Jannis’s Jam Pedals workshop and rehearsal studio

music-making, Jannis explained, is focused on free improvisation, drawing on jazz and experimental music. In these circumstances, a rhetoric of ‘control’ could appear contradictory. However, as Chris Smith has argued in his examination of Miles Davis’ ensembles’ performances, collective improvisation is predicated upon the ‘creation and manipulation of a ritual space’ (1995: 51). Elina HytönenNg (2013: 111–128), in her ethnographic study of British and Finnish jazz musicians, has also illustrated the importance of the spatial and aesthetic arrangement of venues in allowing for the development of optimal musical experiences of ‘flow’. Hence, it should come as no surprise that musicians, in their discourses

Ways out 153 of regaining control, invoke ideas of ‘space’, insofar as these considerations have been central to their musicking concerns long before they turned into manual artisans. These ‘spatial’ conditions, however, now become more physical and literal, as the focus of creativity switches from sounds to material objects. This emphasis on artisanship and manual, visceral control is evident even in John and Petros’s short promotion video for Murmux synthesizers.5 In the two-minute-long ‘teaser’, the makers have edited together short clips from both the manufacturing production and sample performances of the instrument, accompanied by background music exclusively sampled from Murmux sounds. The clip features numerous close-ups of hands, interchangeably manufacturing (drilling, polishing and screwing parts together) and playing the synth through midi controllers. This emphasis on physicality and materiality successfully links the production process and the performance of music together into a continuum of creativity, all of which takes place within the confines of their small workshop. During the video, the words ‘synthesizer’, ‘analogue’ and ‘oscillator’ flash on screen, phonetically spelled in the Greek alphabet, pointing to the local, grassroots origin of the project. This is a conscious strategy as Petros explained to me: We are mainly targeting global musicians and producers. The Greek market, and especially musicians, are in difficult economic times, so we’re not expecting them to be our main customers. But international musicians would be attracted to something that comes from a small place, something that is not widely available in every online store, something unique. In light of this strategy, the emphasis on the handmade nature of the instrument and its local grounding in crisis-stricken Greece is important as it sets it apart from global, multinational competitors. Drawing on the appeal of what Tim Taylor has called ‘technostalgia’ (2001: 96–116), the two musicians/makers bring attention to the analogue sound of the instrument and its independent, localised production, as a means of accessing a niche international market, away from the restrictions of Greek economic recession. Local professional instrumentalists have always acted as musical ambassadors by bringing vernacular sounds to international audiences (Tsioulakis, 2018: 415). What is interesting in the context of this switch to artisanship within The Crisis, is that musicians continue to engage with this process, albeit in a recalibrated form. As Petros explained in our interview: As a musician, you have to be there [abroad] in order to become an ‘international’ artist. Well, you can put your music online, but who gives a shit about that anymore? But if you make things, technology, you can stay in your neighbourhood and have your products do the travelling. According to Petros, then, the established ways in which musicians can participate in global cultural economies are failing as The Crisis halts international touring and online music circulation is too ubiquitous to serve as a viable economic

154  Ways out option. In this crisis-scape (Brekke et al., 2014), producing tangible musical artefacts is seen as a way of regaining control, while staying ‘in your neighbourhood’ and exercising agency over your own space.

Micro-scenes: aesthetics and embodied participation in the crisis After the end of my doctoral fieldwork in Athens in 2009, when The Crisis was first starting to appear in public discourse, I had been residing across the island of Ireland, between different academic posts in ethnomusicology and anthropology. During this time, I was mainly following musical practices in Greece through brief visits in Athens several times per year, by conducting interviews with musicians either in person or from afar and by following social media. Starting at the autumn of 2016, I spent several months back in Athens, attempting to experience for myself the impact of The Crisis on local music scenes, compared to where I had left them at the wake of austerity. Even though friends and former colleagues kept assuring me that ‘there is a lot happening’, I was still surprised by the vibrancy of ‘micro-scenes’6 in Athens, which actually offered a more diverse and creative landscape than what I remembered leaving behind in 2009. In a recent article, Georgia Vavva (2020) has analysed the economic and cultural reasons why jazz music has significantly flourished within the gentrified area of Kerameikos since The Crisis in Athens. Vavva reads this as ‘a globally-informed locality and a reversal of power relations between the superculture and the subculture’ (2020: 54). My surprise in finding vibrant musical expressions, at least in the kinds of cosmopolitan music-making that I had focused in my previous research, including jazz, funk and rock music (Tsioulakis, 2011a, 2013, 2019a), led me back to the theoretical wonderment that permeates this chapter: is The Crisis an ‘opportunity’ after all? This last section of the chapter will focus on the debate around creativity within conditions of economic austerity and propose ways in which we can conceptualise emergent scenes as a response to conditions of precarity. Discussing my pleasant surprise in finding burgeoning music scenes within crisis-ridden Athens, I soon became aware that this was widely remarked among local musicians. As jazz pianist Stathis explained to me, This is the weird thing, at the same time with The Crisis, there are also new scenes created by musicians, because they have more time on their hands. And obviously they’re struggling, I don’t want to make it sound positive, but they’re also channelling it creatively. Stathis’s careful phrasing is indicative here: in not wanting ‘to make it sound positive’, he shows awareness that this discourse is out there, and he immediately clarifies his viewpoint. As explored earlier in this chapter, these debates are not unique to Crisis-affected Greece. Umney and Kretsos (2015) present

Ways out 155 ethnographic data from Jazz musicians in London who embrace precarity and even express scepticism with regards to visions of ‘stability’ in the future, which they find restrictive to their creative freedom. In contrast, Morgan and Wood who conducted interviews with aspiring young musicians in New York, assert that ‘[f]ar from embracing the vague, disparate and precarious pathways of the selfassembled careers, our interviewees struggle to come to terms with frustrated ambitions and precarious lives’ (2014: 64). Reflecting the experience of musicians who perform as their main professional outlet, Stathis’s view suggests that new scenes are emerging not because The Crisis is serving as some kind of creative inspiration or motivator but rather because musicians ‘have more time on their hands’. This resistance to a narrative that presents The Crisis as an ‘opportunity’ was common among many of my informants. As rock and metal guitarist George elaborated, The gigs in a way have multiplied in the crisis, partly because many clubs have no entrance fees for audiences anymore. The problem, however, is that the difference between professionals and amateurs has been obliterated. Clubs will just hire anyone who can bring people as an audience, and they don’t care how skilled they might be, or what their experience or the quality of their music is. As a result, even though on the surface it might appear that many new scenes are emerging and audiences find it more affordable to watch live music, this doesn’t translate into an improvement in the lives of professional musicians.7 What is more, the difference between ‘professional’ musicians who, as this book has been emphasising, have dedicated their lives and effort to the systematic cultivation of skill and experience, and ‘amateurs’ is becoming blurred, in ways perceived by my informants as a crisis within their occupational community. As has been reported by Threadgold in his research within underground music scenes in Australia, musicians are often ‘choosing poverty’ by ‘pursuing a traditional “bohemian” lifestyle, but [this] is more a result of reflexively having to strategise within the affective structure of precarity, where ontological security is prioritised over economic security’ (2018: 168). Similarly to the precarity narratives that were presented in the previous chapter, musicians’ responses to the flourishing of new micro-scenes is ambiguous and rich in contradictions. Take for example the following testimony from Yiannis, a jazz saxophone player who became a reluctant participant in a Latin-jazz group which mainly performed for dancing events: I’m working for a Latin-jazz project that is great musically, but I wouldn’t have accepted it before the crisis. The money isn’t good enough and it needed an unbelievable amount of rehearsals for the limited number of gigs that we did. But I learned a lot from that, and I actually made connections that are going to serve me well for the future.

156  Ways out As Yiannis’s view makes clear, the emergence of new bands that respond to the growing need for budgeted entertainment within the Greek capital might result in a more vibrant presence of diverse music, but it correlates with an increased workload for musicians who were already overworked. So, if the new micro-scenes are not providing economic ‘ways out’ for musicians, what good are they? In other words, why would musicians who are struggling with precarity engage in activities that do not help them navigate this landscape of austerity? In order to provide some suggestions on the role of these micro-scenes within austerity Greece, the remaining section will examine two inter-related aspects of the new performances: aesthetic resistance and embodied participation. As it is being documented within an emergent literature on crisis-aesthetics (Tziovas, 2017; Basea, 2016; Alexandrakis, 2016; Papailias, 2011), austerity and political instability have made their way into artistic expressions, profoundly defining the references, production methods and perception of Greek creative outputs since 2009. This aesthetic is also coupled with a type of ‘emergent cultural ethos and new practice of consumption’ (Malefyt, 2009: 218), that is seen beyond music in other domains of production and consumption. Some musicians have endorsed such a crisis-aesthetic and present it in direct juxtaposition to the kinds of projects in which they had been involved during the times of ‘prosperity’: We had all these grand ideas back then; I don’t think it suits us now. The last few tracks I’ve recorded were by myself or with a couple of friends that played for free. And I release them online for free as well. (Themis – violinist) In Themis’s words, the crisis aesthetic merges with the austerity ethic in a way that renders previous types of productions not only unaffordable but also out of touch with lived reality. This was strikingly observable in the types of performances that I witnessed during immersive fieldwork in 2016–2017. The impressive previous collectives that brought big ensembles together, especially within the so-called éthnik-jazz scene of the early 2000s (see Tsioulakis, 2011a, 2013, 2019a), were substituted by small groups (duets, trios, quartets), playing with less amplification, in more minimalistic stage configurations. As part of this transformation, at least within jazz music performances that I mainly focused on during that research, groups were embracing more open-ended compositional forms that allowed them space for experimentation and improvisation, which would have been difficult within bigger ensembles with more prescribed parts. As Jannis, the experimental/jazz guitarist and founder of Jam pedals from earlier, explains, the harbingers of these new aesthetics might be musicians who have found other ways of making a living: As a musician who mainly plays experimental improvisational music, my opportunities are actually better now than they were ten years ago. I think it is going well, but of course there is no money there, I know that I will never make a living from that.

Ways out 157 One band that has consciously embraced these aesthetics since its inception during The Crisis is The Johnie Thin Trio. Ioannis-Iolaos (a.k.a. Johnie Thin), is the guitarist and leader of the Trio, whose primary employment is as a secondary school teacher of Greek literature. In the group he is joined by bassist Petros (the maker of Murmux synths from earlier) and drummer Nikos, who was a very prominent professional musician until, as he told me, he decided to abandon the ‘big names’ of the popular industry and pursue his own projects. Johnie Thin explained: Since the beginning of The Crisis, many excellent musicians with constant presence in the live and recording practices started losing their steady incomes, which led them to reconsider their engagement with music, aesthetically and ethically. The story can be condensed in this: Since the paying jobs are less anyway, we may as well play in groups and circumstances where we are able to express ourselves. Having attended many of their concerts in Athens between 2015 and 2017, I was taken aback by their popularity and the engagement of their audiences, given the very niche repertoire, which exclusively covered American blues from the early 1900s. Their performances emphasised an acoustic authenticity, comprising steel guitar, upright bass and a minimalistic drum set. Many of their pieces were instrumental, while some were sung by Johnie Thin, in a somewhat exaggerated, strained voice resembling original blues recordings (or, as some commentators in the audience were quick to point out, their more recent echoes in the vocals of Dr John and Tom Waits). All songs were sung in English, but they were often contextualised in performance through lengthy introductions in Greek, explaining the origins of the songs as well as connecting them to present circumstances and historical trajectories. As Johnie Thin reported to me, these aesthetic choices were neither coincidental nor unrelated to The Crisis itself: The Johnie Thin Trio is, very explicitly, an offspring of the Greek Crisis. First for practical reasons, since payments for gigs have diminished so much that it is very difficult for any group with more than three musicians to be viable. So within this context, the alternative Athenian music scene had to adjust, and many small, acoustic ensembles emerged. The aesthetic, however, encapsulated more than the practical. As Johnie Thin made clear in performances, and he explained to me in person, the choice of repertoire had the significance of drawing historical parallels and forging imagined solidarities across different moments of poverty, subalternity and resistance: On an aesthetic level, the Trio was also influenced by The Crisis, insofar as it sought to explore the music of the disenfranchised of the American Great Depression in the 1930s. The rural blues and the workers’ protest songs are the primary material for our ensemble.

158  Ways out Turning back to the Trio’s praxis, Johnie Thin elaborated on how this Crisisaesthetic/ethic materialised in their everyday performance and rehearsal decisions: This exploration is carried out with the most minimal possible material: acoustic instruments, often without any amplification, rehearsals that are held in our living rooms, our natural habitat. The challenge from the outset was to generate the maximum possible timbral and creative outcome through the least possible means of production. The Crisis doesn’t offer ‘opportunities’; if it did it wouldn’t be a crisis. But it burdened us with the need to explore our material with minimal means and increased availability. Johnie Thin’s words address the core of the debate on ‘Crisis as opportunity’. At the same time when austerity is increasing precarity among musicians and makes previous ambitious projects almost unthinkable, especially within what he earlier calls ‘alternative’ scenes, new micro-scenes manage to propose an aesthetic that critically comments on and resists The Crisis. Most importantly, they do so by illuminating pathways of imagined solidarity, embracing minimalistic performance practices and creating spaces within which musicians are able to ‘take control of the image-making machinery’ (Roseman, 1983) rather than accepting an external definition by the crisis-scape of precarity. A constant source of frustration that was reported to me by jazz informants in the late 2000s was the absence of engaged, lively audiences that would be able to uplift the local scene into a vibrant culture (Tsioulakis, 2011a). A striking observation from my fieldwork within the jazz scene in 2016–2017 was an alleviation of that frustration. Partly because of the strategic decision of many jazz clubs and other small live-music venues to abolish entrance fees for patrons, those venues within The Crisis have managed to actually increase clientele and fill up live performances, notably with a younger demographic. Interestingly, the performances that I witnessed during this time had also transformed into more participatory affairs, with audiences standing in closer proximity to each other and the musicians, moving and dancing a lot more engagingly and demolishing a lot of the performer-audience barriers that were evident in the 2000s. This confirms some of Tziovas’s observations about the wider flourishing of performance within The Crisis, which, drawing on Ranciere, he describes as a ‘blurring of the boundary between those who act and those who look’ (2017: 4). This transformation is especially notable compared to the exact opposite trend within massive, mainstream pop music nightclubs in Athens, which have switched to more hierarchical, unilateral and policed performance spaces (see Tsioulakis, 2019b). One such example is the emergence of swing and tap-dancing among young audiences in Athens. This can be observed in many live-music clubs that have been featuring swing music performed by skilled musicians, supported by patrons

Ways out 159 who specifically attend these performances to showcase their newly acquired dancing skills.8 As pianist Stefanos confirmed in an interview, There has been a burgeoning ‘swing’ scene in Athens in the past few years. I have played in it a bit and I can tell you it’s very popular. I believe it has something to do with the crisis, escapism perhaps? I  don’t know. But it’s definitely connected. As a result of the more visceral participation of audiences in those shows, jazz musicians have somewhat reconfigured their roles from artists that need to be watched, to facilitators of a performance that exceeds the strict confines of their music-making on stage. I witnessed one such remarkable occasion in September 2016, when I attended ‘Tap Jam’, one of a series of events organised by the Athens Tap Jam Collective, founded by dancer and ethnomusicologist Natasha Martin. Taking place in a versatile, underground space in the historical centre of Athens, the event was staged in a way contrasting any Athenian jazz performance I had witnessed in the past: three very well-established jazz instrumentalists (drums, guitar and bass) were situated at the far back of the stage, allowing most of the space to be occupied by dancers who took turns in solo, couple or group formations, showcasing different styles of tap dancing. Equipped with special shoes and outfits, the dancers captured the audience’s attention, most of whom eventually took their turn on stage, culminating in a climactic collective performance at the end of the night. When I asked Serafeim, the drummer, about the experience of performing in such a setting, he specifically commented on the enjoyment that he took out of his new role: You know how it used to be for jazz musicians. You play your music and you’re hoping someone is paying attention and not just yawning while looking at their phones. It was nice to feel like I was facilitating something lively for a change! And we didn’t do that by playing ‘easy’ pieces or anything. We were playing jazz, funk and soul as we would have liked to play it anyway, with the difference that we had young people actually enjoying it. It was great! If this event was somewhat exceptional in that it was organised by (and designed for) a particular dancing community, its essence was part of a wider transformation of micro-scenes towards embodied participation. In performances by jazz-funk band Crazy People Music and swing band Belleville, I witnessed audiences creating impromptu dancing spaces, by moving tables in venues where there was no designated dancing area, to facilitate embodied participation to the music. And this tendency expanded outside the jazz scene as well. Rock concerts, traditional or rebetika nights and even Italian tarantella performances, were often attended by eager dancing crews, evidently

160  Ways out well-trained in the respective bodily repertoires who didn’t miss the opportunity to detract some attention from the official performers and facilitate group enjoyment in ways that would have been alien to the cosmopolitan scenes that I had documented in the late 2000s. In contrast to the visions of the future that were invoked in the last chapter, whereby individual musicians found solace from austerity in imagining more professionally stable futures, these embodied micro-scenes embrace a resistance through ‘presentism’. This presentism is what Isabell Lorey describes as ‘selforganising and constituting by leaps and bounds of the innumerable manifold “many” in the now-time’ (2016: 149). This ‘now-time’, Lorey argues, can serve as an ‘exodus’ from the subjectivating continuous promise of a never-materialising future, and it can only develop through a ‘with’ that is not conceptualised as a ‘unity’ but rather as ‘the possibility of an opening, or an unfolding in an expanded present’ (ibid). These embodied micro-scenes, then, are sites of resistance insofar as they articulate a conscious rejection of austerity as a moral impetus to postpone pleasure.

Conclusion: a final approach to work vs play In a powerful book about the impact of The Crisis on Greek collectives and individuals, Athena Athanasiou posits that austerity ‘strives to train us how to be (and not to be) within the crisis; how to embody these necessary norms of adjustment and self-governance which will render us available to the needs of the crisis’ (Athanasiou, 2012: 26; my translation). This grave diagnosis of crisis subjectivities seems on the surface to do justice to the ethnographic testimonies contained in these last two chapters. Be it through manufacturing new technologies – and with them, forging new careers – or embarking on new teaching initiatives, the ethnography provides snapshots of strategies with which musicians have strived to regain control over their lives in the midst of financial austerity and recession. Some of this re-conditioning of selfhoods and strategies, what in the previous chapter I called crisis-subjectivities, does appear to make my interlocutors ‘available to the needs of the crisis’, as Athanasiou laments. Moreover, and perhaps frustratingly for those of us who, in investigating responses to The Crisis, are looking for moments of collective solidarity and resistance, the narratives of professional musicians keep providing stories of individual ruptures and crises of selfhood, which give way to very lonely struggles for success, however this is imagined and assessed. However, the strategic ‘ways out’ that I discuss in this chapter also contain seeds of resistance to – and departure from – ‘crisis-scapes’ (Brekke et al., 2014). At the centre of these strategies of resistance is time. As Powers and Rakopoulos (2019) have argued, austerity (and by extension The Crisis more generally) has above all temporal characteristics: it condenses time. In their words, ‘austerity measures seem to distill . . . a specific notion of historical urgency. It is “changing times”‘ (2019: 9). For that reason, they argue, ‘resistance to austerity is often seen as inertia’ (ibid). Thinking with those authors, I argue that many of the strategic

Ways out 161 ‘ways out’ that are forged by musicians in crisis contain resistance to austerity and precarisation insofar as they refuse to abide by their urgency. Instead, musicians choose to take their time. They embark on long-term grassroots collaborative projects, they radically revisit ways of learning and teaching, and they slowly take control of the space where they can be creative. Simultaneously, by reconfiguring the ethic/aesthetic of the micro-scenes in which they participate, they reflect on the conditions of precariousness that they share with musicians across history and the globe, realising that, despite their individualised experience of anxiety before and during the crisis, they are not alone. Within those strategic decisions, the long-established work vs play dichotomy is a powerful tool for musicians. At the time when a music industry devastated by austerity is pushing them to become ‘entrepreneurial’ and make themselves ‘available’ to its dying whims, many of them instead choose exodus. (Lorey, 2019: 189) First, they do this by establishing domains of ‘work’ where they can exert control over their conduct (new artisan workshops, educational institutions and pedagogical methods). Rather than being ‘opportunistic’ (Knight, 2015), these strategies are defiant of the very nature of precarisation and its biopolitics of subjectivation. Perhaps even more importantly, these domains of ‘work’ are less connected to musical performance than at the time before The Crisis, a fact that broadens the chasm between working and playing milieu. Second, musicians do not stop ‘playing’. As the last section on micro-scenes of The Crisis has shown, these new spaces of ‘play’ are more collective, embodied, solidarious and less monetised and hierarchical. And it is this performative presentism that shuts The Crisis out of musicians’ play-scapes.

Notes 1 Christina Scharff’s research among female classical musicians in London and Berlin has also shown that creative workers articulate career uncertainty as both a predicament and a source of excitement (2018: 140–165). 2 I have explored these tensions in the previous chapter. 3 As Chapter 2 has discussed, ‘the night’ stands as a specific milieu of professional activity for musicians, related to the commercial nightclubs. This is seen as a ‘rite of passage’ for instrumentalists into professionalism proper, but it also comes with a series of negative connotations that ‘the night’ encapsulates, most importantly long hours of tiring performance and an engagement with a parasitic economy with connections to the criminal underworld. 4 For a lengthy discussion on different notions of creativity as cultural improvisation, see Hallam and Ingold (2007). 5 Video available on YouTube here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDH22uAJZU (Accessed 21 March 2019). 6 I am using the term ‘micro-scenes’ here, in order to avoid charged terms such as ‘subculture’ (Hall, 1975; Hebdige, 1988; Slobin, 1993) or ‘tribe’ (Bennett, 1999). Of course, ‘scene’ is not an unproblematic term either (see Hesmondhalgh, 2005 for a critique of all these terms), but it is the closest to the Greek skini that is used without much scrutiny by my own informants. The scenes that I am exploring in this section are not subcultures in the sense that they are largely devoid of a ‘subcultural

162  Ways out capital’ (Thornton, 1995) or a defined and stable audience of followers. Rather, these micro-scenes are small-scale constellations of musical practice that attract various and diverse participants and are exercised by musicians mainly as side-activities to their other domains of creative work. 7 Nikos Poulakis has also observed this contradictory image in relation to Western Art Music scenes in Greece during The Crisis: In practice, networks are on the one hand shrinking because the ability of certain institutions to fund the activities of western art music is diminished. At the same time, specific actors and agencies are trying to multiply their networks in order to broaden the spectrum of possible professional opportunities. (2015: 108, My translation from Greek) 8 Kristin McGee (2019) has also documented a flourishing of swing and electro-swing festivals across Europe as a ‘survival technology against larger forces of transition or crisis’.

Epilogue Musicians (always) in crisis

Man, that was so cathartic! Who knew that I had so much to say about music! But sure, no one ever asked me before.

These were the last words that Tolis, a young guitarist, uttered after our one-hourlong interview in 2009. At the end of every single interview I carried out, I asked musicians to tell me whether or not they enjoyed our chat, and if the process matched their initial expectations. Most of them replied that they were nervous at first, that they did not understand what they were expected to talk about and that even after the end of the interview they were not confident that they had given me that I was looking for. Nonetheless, they all agreed that giving the interview was very enjoyable, mainly because they were not used to having someone interested in what they had to say. In Kostas’s words: It was weird, you know, people usually tell you to shut your mouth and play! I don’t know if what I said was useful at all. And how would I, since I didn’t shut up long enough for you to ask any questions! But it was fun for me anyway. What struck me every time was that, although most musicians claimed that they had never been interviewed before, their words came out effortlessly, like wellrehearsed speeches. They wondered about my constant concern with their ‘opinions’: why theirs and not someone else’s? Who were they supposed to be speaking for? Most importantly, the question that seemed to puzzle them was: what kind of knowledge did I think they possessed that was worth investigating? As soon as they started talking about their experiences, however, any preoccupation with living up to my research expectations vanished. Their views regarding the industry, their fellow musicians and themselves were naturally sprouting out of their storytelling. Their role in my research started becoming clearer: they were there to tell me their side of the story and, in doing so, to ‘set the record straight’. All their lives they had their voices muffled, either by being the labourers of a music industry that they rarely got the chance to shape through their actions or by making their own music in the fringes of mainstream culture where they achieved little

164  Epilogue or no visibility. These one-hour-long interviews were their moments to shine; and as the testimonies throughout this monograph illustrate, they did not hold back. The views expressed to me by the interviewed musicians were powerful enough to shape the focus of my ethnographic work. I  first conceived of this research in 2005, with a primary focus on the way global music flows shape local scenes. I soon realised, however, that this perspective would be nothing more than a detached academic construct, out of touch with what the musicians were struggling to communicate. As I came to discover, many of these musicians use cosmopolitanism as a means to construct an alternative, imaginary music world in order to nurture their suppressed creativity (Tsioulakis, 2011a). This was the process that I should be looking at. And then The Crisis came. In its well-documented and often sensationalised turmoil, The Greek Crisis profoundly affected musicians’ conduct. It made them even more vulnerable to precarity, it upset the ways in which they had learned to build career strategies, and it even forced them to question how they thought of themselves, thereafter and perhaps all along. In a peculiar way, The Crisis made some musicians feel ‘at home’. Their lives had always been precarious, and as they came to realise, some of the tools to fight it were already in their possession. They knew well how to divide ‘work’ from ‘play’, and in doing so protect their creativity from becoming consumed in the everyday struggle for survival. Once again shaping my research agenda, they showed me that The Crisis, alongside chronologies of ‘before’ vs ‘now’, also alerted to continuities of ‘always’. Musicians were always struggling and yet always creating; always working and playing; always in crisis. This is not to suggest, however, that my ethnography represents a direct and ‘unspoiled’ depiction of my informants’ worldviews. This book, as any piece of writing in the humanities and social sciences,1 is deeply affected by the author’s preoccupations and ideologies, some of which precede the intention to seriously engage with academic work. As I explain in the introduction, my experience of musical ‘work’ and ‘play’, as well as the understanding of the conceptual distinction between them, came before the realisation that an analysis of the social and cultural connotations of music professionalism could be of benefit to any scholarly discipline. Consequently, the discovery and interpretation of the work vs play dichotomy was a result of quite a ‘messier’ process than the structure of this book suggests. Some of these notions were explicit in my engagement with the Athenian music environment long before I pursued studies in ethnomusicology, others emerged during my ‘official’ fieldwork, while some of the interpretations proposed in this volume were the products of reflexive writing. The conclusions of each chapter have proposed different approaches to the work vs play dilemma. In Chapter 2, I showed that ‘success’ in the popular music scene relies upon a set of subtly exercised social strategies that musicians employ in an effort to advertise themselves. These delicate social techniques and the success (albeit frail) for which they aim, are perceived as intrinsic to ‘work’. ‘Play’, in contrast, is perceived as an egalitarian environment of mutuality (Tsioulakis, 2013) where creative expression is a direct result of one’s musical skill. The second approach relates to the construction of communities. As the discussion

Epilogue 165 in Chapter 3 illustrated, ‘work’ represents a ‘community of experience’ created through extensive face-to-face intimacies and articulated through a specific rhetoric. ‘Play’, on the other hand, is realised in a community of ‘cosmopolitan imaginaries’ (Tsioulakis, 2011a), based on aesthetic affinities and shared ideals of creative expression. Having described in Chapter 4 the way instrumentalists and other professional groups negotiate their social positioning in the music workplace, Chapters 5 and 6 revisited the work vs play dichotomy in conditions of precarity and economic recession. As I argued in Chapter 5, the intensification of precarisation as a result of The Crisis, in the first instance expands ‘work’ into all domains of conduct, postponing moments of ‘play’ towards an imagined future. This demand, however, is resisted through the ‘ways out’ that are documented in Chapter 6. Musicians invent new ways of controlling their working time and space in education and artisanship, all the while forging new ethics/aesthetics that preserve their ability to play, against The Crisis. Quite often throughout this book, the division of a musician’s life between ‘work’ and ‘play’ is presented as an unbearable conviction. I have repeatedly referred to ‘alienation’ as a key characteristic of working within the popular music industry, and, in Chapter 4, I spoke of the ‘positional suffering’ connected to the performative class of the mousikoí. Discussing experiences of suffering among civil war refugees in Sierra Leone, Michael Jackson asserted: The weight of the world is a matter of how one comports oneself. According to this view, life is a struggle between one’s inner resources and external conditions. Expressed in a more existential vein, one might say that human existence is a struggle to strike some kind of balance between being an actor and being acted upon. (2005: 143) Jackson’s powerful words, even though they convey suffering of a completely different magnitude, capture the essence of the struggles that I have been describing in this monograph. This is why, in the last sentence of Chapter 2, I claimed that musicians regard the work/play dichotomy as both a subjugating force and a tool for resistance. This dualism is what restores the ‘balance between being an actor and being acted upon’ in their everyday lives. Consequently, if we follow Jackson’s proposition that suffering occurs when this balance has been catastrophically lost, then my informants’ suffering is of a different nature. Rather than states of emotional pain (or despite the fact that they are often experienced as such), frustration, alienation and suffering should be seen as rhetorical devices. This relates to Nadia Seremetakis’s discussion of the Greek word parápono (habitually translated in English as ‘complaint’): Parápono is the narrative of everyday life. It is not a complaint in the English sense of the term, for it does not necessarily require redress or rectification. It can be a sheer presentation of the substance of everyday experience which resists resolution, defies any sense of an ending. Parápono (pónos means

166  Epilogue pain) can be but the establishment of the truthfulness of that experience, and for that to happen [one] needs a sintrofiá [friendly companion]. (1994: 13) This description goes a long way towards capturing my informants’ rhetoric of suffering. Their testimonies should not be perceived as evidence of a life out of balance. Conversely, it is the communication of suffering, the uttering of parápono to their syntrofiá (a role that I often incarnated in both my roles as an ethnographer and a peer), that helps them achieve balance. Ironically, my informants’ preoccupations about not being worthy research participants (typical reactions of interviewees if I believe my anthropology colleagues) came back to haunt me as soon as I started turning this research into text: who was I representing through my writing? What kind of knowledge validated me as an ethnographer of professional musicking in Athens? Was this text just an effort to make sense of my own personal predicaments as a musician/anthropologist, and if so, what good was it? These questions will persist as the quintessential wonderments of every ethnographic work. In the meantime, I can only hope that this monograph is a fair representation of the parápono of the Athenian professional musician in crisis.

Note 1 Anthropology and Ethnomusicology have been actively and productively engaged with the question of the ethnographer’s subjectivity and its implications for ethnographic representation as a scholarly endeavour (See Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Marcus and Fischer, 1986 for anthropology and Beaudry, 1997; Rice, 1997 for ethnomusicology). This postmodern preoccupation with the author’s subjectivity, however, has also been criticised as unproductive (See Bourdieu, 2003).

Appendix Glossary of Greek terms

lit. boss, also used to describe the singer that an instrumentalist is working for anatolítika (tragoúdia): ‘eastern’ (songs) Athinaїkí Kantáda: Athenian song style of the 1930s bouzoúki: Greek lute-type folk instrument/bouzoúkia: plural of bouzouki, also used to describe the clubs featuring laїkó (urban folk) music/bouzouksís: the bouzouki-player dimotikó (tragoúdi): rural-folk (song) elafró (tragoúdi): ‘light’ (song) Éllinas (pl. Éllines): Greek person/ellinikoúra: degrading term for something that is perceived as ‘excessively Greek’ éntechno (tragoúdi): ‘art’ song epaggelmatías (mousikós): professional (musician) kanonáki: plucked zither-type folk instrument kassé: payment rate, fee kéndro (pl. kéndra): lit. centre, also used to describe music nightclubs klaríno: Greek variation of the classical clarinet, used typically in dimotikó music kséna: lit. foreign (pl.), used to describe mainly AngloAmerican popular music laїkó (tragoúdi): urban-folk (song) louloudoúdes: ‘flower-girls’, the (typically female) employees of music nightclubs responsible for selling flowers to be tossed onto the singers on stage lýra: fiddle-type folk instrument maéstros: musical director of a popular music band magazí (pl. magaziá): lit. shop, also used to describe popular music nightclubs/magazátoras: the owner of a magazí/ magazíla: degrading term describing a magazístyle performance maitre: high-ranking club employee whose responsibility is the allocation of tables to customers afentikó:

168  Appendix musician (mainly referring to the instrumentalist) type of reed flute widespread in the Eastern Mediterranean nýhta: lit. night, also used to describe the popular music nightclub circuit odeío (pl. odeía): music conservatoire onómata: lit. names, also used to describe the popular/recognisable singers oud, lute-type folk instrument oúti: paradosiaká: neo-traditional music genre paragogós (pl. paragogoí): producer písta (pl. pístes): lit. dance-stage, also used to describe the laїkómusic nightclubs poiótita: quality/poiotikí mousikí: ‘quality’ music rebétiko: Greek urban folk music style of the first half of the twentieth century Romiós (pl. Romioí): term describing the Greek people within the Ottoman Empire saizón: the nightclub season skyládika: degrading term for the laїkó genre and the nightclubs where it is featured/skyládes/skýloi the musicians who like/play laїkó music smyrnéiko (tragoúdi): song style from Smýrni, the Turkish Izmir souksé: popular song, hit synavlía: concert technikós (pl. technikoí): lit. technicians, also used to describe the non-music professionals working for a music performance (light/audio engineers etc.) theíos/theía: lit. uncle/aunt, also used among instrumentalists to refer to the singers for whom they work tragoúdi: song/tragoudiára: songstress, degrading term for female singers/tragoudistís: singer/tragoudopoiós: songwriter mousikós: néi:

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Index

Note: numbers in italics indicate a figure. Aboriginal music and musicians (Australia) 50, 62, 78n5 Achilleas (bass player) 38 – 41, 45, 74 – 75, 89, 95, 97 – 100, 131 aesthetics 7, 11, 23, 30, 149; and collectivities 135; cosmopolitan 97, 99; and the Crisis 154 – 160; and cultural capital 108; of Greek music 10, 15; as ideology 21, 71 – 77, 78n4; music 3, 12, 22, 49, 82, 85, 102 – 103, 134; personal 48; popular vs pure 94, 107, 109n4; rock 12; of venues 152; of work-space 151; see also crisis-aesthetics/ethics afentikó 88, 167 Aggeliki (French horn player) 126 – 129, 132 Alekos (guitarist) 36, 47, 88 – 89 Alex (bass player) 58, 88 Alexandra (singer-songwriter) 64, 125, 134, 135, 146 Alexandros (drummer) 41, 87, 89 amateur musicians 27 – 28, 39, 51n16, 117, 143, 155; see also professional musicians Anastasia (vocalist) 32 – 33, 91 anatolítika (tragoúdia) 10, 167 Anderson, Benedict 55 Andreatos, Gerasimos 13 Antonis (saxophone player) 57, 59, 103 – 108, 104, 111 Armstrong, Victoria 37 artisans, musicians as 23, 138, 143, 148 – 151, 153, 165; workshops 161 Arvanitaki, Eleftheria 14 Athanasiou, Athena 114, 130, 160 Athens Tap Jam Collective 159 Athinaїkí Epitheórisi 11 Athinaїkí Kantáda 11, 167

austerity 3, 6 – 8, 17, 20 – 21; agendas 126, 132, 134; and anti-austerity movement 127; cultural politics of 139; effects of 120 – 123, 151, 154, 156; in Europe 113; lives under 130, 141; and music industry 109n3, 112, 138; and precarity 23, 59, 113 – 118, 128 – 129, 135, 143, 158; rejection of/resistance to 160 – 161; and transference 113 – 114; see also Crisis, The; precarity stories austerity policies 3, 113 – 115, 120, 122 ‘autonomy’ 93, 116, 119, 141 Babis (guitarist) 38, 95, 99 – 101, 126, 131 – 133; see also Rustik Baily, John 28 Baker, Sarah 24n3, 50n4, 93, 117, 136n10 Bakhtin, Mikhail 94 Balosso-Bardin, Cassandre 136n3 Basea, Erato 139 Bear, Laura 113, 115 Becker, Howard 24n3, 25n24, 67 – 68, 74, 78n7 Berlin, Germany 29, 65, 136n5, 161n1 Blacking, J. 53n37 Bohlman, P.V. 67 Bourdieu, Pierre 16 – 17, 22, 42, 52n25, 53n29, 79n25, 83 – 86, 94; on capital 97, 102, 106 – 108, 109n4; on taste 107 – 108 bouzoúki 14, 26, 79 – 80, 101, 110n16, 167 Butler, Judith 115 – 116, 132, 135 cafés amán 10 – 11 cafés chantants 10 – 11 capital see cultural capital; social capital Chatzipanagiotidou, Evi vii, 133 Christian, H. 37, 93

Index  187 class see social classes; performative classes Cloonan, Martin 24n3, 50n4 clubs and nightclubs 1 – 2, 45 – 46; closing show 68 – 69; and the economic recession 14; entrance fees 155, 158; 39, 137n13; gig schedules 58; Lazy, Athens 38; laïko 9, 80n26; managers 66, 83, 101, 106; musicians’ earnings from 50n5, 92, 119, 121 – 122, 155; pop 24n6, 77n2, 95 – 97, 158; rock 38; as site of musical ‘work’ 14 – 16; ‘stage policing’ in 70, 79n21; Tsioulakis as observer/ performer in 18, 22 – 23, 68, 70; underground 102; see also; club owners; kéndro; magazí; mousikés skinés; písta; precarity stories; skyládika club owners 91 – 94, 101, 106; lawsuit against 22, 106 – 107; see also magazátores Cohen, Anthony 55 Coltrane, John 151 ‘community consciousness’ 55, 57 community of experience see professional musicians conservatory 144; see also music conservatory; schools; odeía cosmopolitanism 8, 8 – 11, 108; of the 2000s 160; and aesthetics 102; and authenticity 98; and knowledge and seniority 97 – 99; and music experimentation 51; and teachers 35; and world-fusion music 31 cosmopolitan imaginary 53n36, 80n29, 134, 164 – 165 Cottrell, Stephen 24n3, 28, 37, 50n7, 52n19, 56, 93, 137n14 Cowan, Jane 6, 13, 25n19 creativity 49 – 50, 67, 89, 92, 102; and communication 117; and The Crisis 138 – 154, 164; and experimentation 124, 135; vs work 124 crisis-aesthetics/ethics 156 – 158; crisisnarratives 119; ‘crisis of Greek song’ 13; crisis-scape 120, 123, 125, 154, 158, 160; crisis-subjectivities 8, 23, 124, 129, 141, 143, 160; crisis-talk 8, 20; crisistimes 127 Crisis, The (Greek economic crisis since 2010) 1 – 3, 6 – 8, 17, 19 – 23, 112 – 136; as creative opportunity 138, 141 – 146, 147 – 155, 158; crisis-aesthetics/ethics 156 – 158; crisis-narratives 119; ‘crisis of Greek song’ 13; crisis-scape 120, 123,

125, 154, 158, 160; crisis-subjectivities 8, 23, 124, 129, 141, 143, 160; crisis-talk 8, 20; crisis-times 127; instrumentalists, impact on 107; and musicians, impact on 163 – 166; music scene in Athens, impact on 44, 154; recording industry in Athens, impact on 14; see also precarity cultural capital 51n13, 87, 90 – 91, 108; Bourdieu’s concept of 53n29, 83 – 86, 102, 106, 109n4; and economic capital 84, 102; and social capital 53n29, 102, 109n7; value of 94, 107 Dalakoglou, D. 114 Davis, Miles 152 Dawe, Kevin 8, 61 DeNora, T. 48 Despo (mandolin player) 121, 144 deviance 22, 51n15, 66 – 69 Dimitriou, Antzela 13 dimotikó 24n10, 31, 167 discursive resistance 94, 126 disemia 4, 10, 97; see also Herzfeld, Michael Doubleday, Veronica 66, 78n12, 79n13 Dueck, Byron 55 – 56 ekpaídefsi 50 – 51n8 elafró tragoúdi 11 – 12, 167 Éllinas (pl. Éllines) 4, 167 ellinikoúra 98 – 99, 167 éntechno (tragoúdi) 9, 14, 16, 25n20, 73, 167 – 168, genre 27, 43, 50n3, 74; singer 18, 36, 40, 48, 89; see also tragoúdi éntechno-laїkó 12, 13n2, 24n11 epaggelmatías mousikós 29, 167; see also professional musicians Eurovision Song Contest 14 éthnik-jazz see jazz; Lambrakis, Haris ethnomusicology 32, 49; and the ‘artisan’ 148; and deviance 67; and Greek music, studies of 3, 22, 61; on musicians, professionals vs amateur 25; on musicians, social behavior of 37; on performance 18; and popular music 85, 147; and ‘resilience’ 142; and teaching and learning, processes of 143, 147; and Tsioulakis as researcher-performer 16 – 21, 154, 164, 166n1; of urban Athens 8 – 10 European Central Bank see Troika, The European Union 51n9 exodus 23, 131, 160; see also presentism

188 Index Fabbri, Franco 16, 25n25, 50n3 Faubion, J.D. 6 Faulkner, Robert 24n3, 28, 78n7, 93, 110n17 Feld, Steven 50n4, 62 female emancipation in Greece 6 female singers 24n16, 62; see also gender in music; tragoudistís Finnegan, Ruth 28, 51n16, 52n27 Fonarow, Wendy 52n24, 69, 79n18 Foucault, Michel 83, 86, 102 – 103, 116; on ‘immediate struggles’ 109; on governmentality 133 freedom 93, 102; artistic 151; creative 140, 151, 155; musical 38; musicians as virtuosos of 29, 119 Frith, F. 16, 25n25 gender and music 5 – 6, 17, 22, 30, 52n22, 57, 81, 108; and the ‘artisan’ 148 – 149; dynamics 26n28, 51n15; and identity 78n5; and instrumentalism 60 – 66, 79n13; and masculinity 8, 64 – 65; and precarity 114, 118; and vulnerability 130 gender roles 34, 63 George (guitarist, founder of MusicFor) 51, 144, 146 – 148, 154 Gonidis, Stamatis 13Green, Lucy 51n16 Gregory, Jonathan 142 Groove Geisha (band) 38 – 41, 52n21 Guilbault, Jocelyn 78n5 Hadjidakis, Manos 12, 24n13 Hairopoulos, Hristos 11 – 12; see also elafró tragoúdi hardship 11, 65, 78n2; and exploitation 119; and the ‘mainstream’ music industry 30, 49 ‘hardship and frustration’ 22, 64, 68, 77, 126; experiences of 57 – 60 Haris (néi player) see Lambrakis, Haris Hassinger, J. 63, 79n14 Herzfeld, Michael 3 – 4, 8, 10, 110n14, 130 Hesmondhalgh, David 24n3, 50n4, 93, 117, 136n10 heteroglossia 94 Hiotis, Manolis 11 Hofman, Ana 24n3, 44, 50n4, 118 Holst-Warhaft, G. 24n5 Holt, Fabian vii, 25n25 Hytönen-Ng, Elina i, vii, 24n3, 152 identity 6, 60; and aesthetics 76; collective 56, 123; construction of 19; cultural 49; and ideology 74; and the imagination 77; of instrumentalists 71 – 72; of musicians 10, 19 – 22, 29 – 30, 49 – 50, 52n27, 57, 66 – 68, 77, 78n5, 118, 134,

142 – 143; perceived 62; and personhood 5; see also musical professionalism ideology 30; aesthetics as 21 – 22, 71 – 76; and behavior 56; and emotions 26n27; and experience 23; of musicians 57 improvisation: musical 1, 25, 35, 38, 40, 103; and jazz 152, 156; social 37, 102; in teaching 147 Ingold, T. 161n4 instrumentalism see gender and music instrumentalists 19, 47; and aesthetics 71 – 76; backing 10, 15, 20 – 21, 40, 72, 80n26, 104; ‘class’ as marker for 24n8; deviant behavior among 67 – 71; firing of 107; and gender 19, 60 – 66; hardships of 57 – 60; jazz 39, 43, 95, 159; as ‘informants’ 17, 19 – 20, 25n17, 33, 41, 52n21, 56, 94, 119 – 120, 155, 158, 164 – 166; perception of 34; professional 22, 37 – 38, 77; and professional power relations 81 – 83, 86 – 95; reputation 43 – 44; self-taught 35; session 120, 144, 146 – 147; and singers 37, 44, 109n7, 110n8, 119; subaltern 20, 90, 100, 108, 157; ‘traditional’ or eastern 19, 134; training of 32; ‘western’ 19; working options 48; see also jazz musicians; kassé; magazí; precariat; professional musicians interviews of musicians: anonymity 26n30; arranging and scheduling 41, 154;research methodology and format 19 – 21, 136n11; see also [musicians by name]; testimonies Ioannidis, Alkinoos 14 Jackson, Michael vii, 165 Jam Pedals workshop 151, 152, 156 Jannis (guitarist) 122, 134, 151, 152, 156; see also Jam Pedals jazz 9, 13, 35 – 39, 73; American 63; ‘comping’ 23n1; curricula 51n17; éthnik-jazz 18, 41, 50n1, 72, 156; instrumentalists 48, 95; see also Groove Geishas jazz ensembles 11, 124; trio 145 jazz festivals in Athens 27 jazz musicians 51n17; 56; drug use by 70 – 71; Finnish and British 152; on ‘flow’ and ‘space’ 152 – 153; jam sessions among 52n22; saxophone player, life of 103 – 108; see also Antonis; Manolis; Panagiotis; Stathis; Themis; Vasso jazz scene: in America 79n14; in Athens 16, 25n26, 77, 151 – 152,

Index  189 154 – 156, 158 – 159; in the United Kingdom 93 Jenkins, Richard 67 Jian, M. 78n3 Johnie Thin Trio, The (band) 157 – 158 John (Murmux) 149, 150, 151, 153 Johnson, Bruce 52n23 Josephides, Lisette vii, 52 Kallimopoulou, Eleni 8, 24n14 – 15, 51n10, 52n18, 78n4, 79n15 Kana, Melina 14 kanonáki 79n15, 167 Kapsokavadis, Alexandros vii, 51n10kassé 44 – 46, 48, 81, 109, 167 Katerina (bassist; founder of MusicFor) 51n16, 66, 143, 147 – 148 Kavouras, Pavlos 8, 52n18 Keil, C. 8 kéndro 14, 167 Kesisoglou, Giorgos vii, 115 Kirtsoglou, E. 6 klaríno 26n29, 167 Knight, Daniel M. 7, 113 – 114, 119, 124, 126, 133, 138 – 139 knowledge 20 – 21, 60, 163, 166; community 77; and competence 106; musical 36, 51n13, 87 – 90, 102, 109n7; and power discourses of the music industry 97 – 100, 103. 108 ; and taste 94; and teaching 42; see also cultural capital ‘knowing’ see cultural capital Koskoff, Ellen 63, 66, 79n16 Kostas (bassist) 33, 75, 88 Kostas (guitarist) 57, 66, 68, 119, 163 Koutsougera, Natalia 9 kséna 98, 167 laїká 14, 79n23 laїká magaziá 14 laїkó (tragoúdi) 11, 13 – 14, 24n10, 25n20, 48, 53n34, 79 – 80n26, 97, 110n16, 167 Lambrakis, Haris 1, 58 – 59, 73 – 74, 91 Lampropoúlou, Sofia 79n15 Lazzaratto, Maurizio 140 Levidou, Katerina 139 life-narratives and life-stories of musicians 51n14, 53n35, 86, 103 – 108 Loizos 5, 61, 78n8 louloudoúdes 15, 25n23, 167 Lorey, Isabell 23, 29, 78n3, 113, 116 – 117, 119, 122 – 123; on governmental precarization 132 – 133, 135, 143; on presentism 160

Loutzaki, Irene vii, 8 loyalty 46 – 47 lýra 8, 61, 167 maéstros 34, 66, 74 – 75, 80n28, 95, 97 – 100, 105 – 106, 167 magazátores 86, 92, 110n10, 137b12; see also, club-owners magazí (pl. magaziá) 14 – 16, 18, 25n20, 57, 71, 75; laïkó 107; payment rates 44 – 47; pop music 95 – 97; profitability of 59, 111n20; as microcommunity 108; as ‘shop’ 14, 77n2; social and gendered positions within 79n17, 86 magazíla 98 – 99, 167 maître 25n22, 167 Makedonas, Kostas 13 Malamas, Sokratis 9, 14 Manolis (guitar player) 74 Martin, Natasha 159 masculinity and music see gender and music Mauss, Marcel 42, 52n25 McClary, Susan 63 McGee, Kristin vii, 63, 162n8 McRobbie, Angela 37, 78n3, 140, 145 MC Yinka (rapper-bassist) 91 – 92 Memorandum (of Economic Policies) 120, 122 Merriam, Alan 36, 56, 67 – 68, 78n11 Michael, Despina 24n5, 81 – 82 Mihalis (drummer) 1 – 2, 42, 57, 87 Mike (vocalist) 126, 129 – 132, 137n12 Milton, Kay vii, 25n27 Monson, Ingrid 77n1 Morcom, Anna 50n4, 62 mórfosi 50 – 51n8 mousikés skinés 14; see also clubs; magaziá mousikós 19, 29 – 30, 60; female 62; hierarchies among 108 – 109; professional 86 – 91, 93 – 95; see also professional musicians; instrumentalists Mouskouri, Nana 12 Murmux synthesizer 149, 150, 151, 153, 157 musical competence 25, 65, 106 – 107; see also skill; knowledge; cultural capital musical professionalism 28, 50, 161, 164; concept of 22; in Europe 67; and identity 10, 19 – 22, 29 – 30, 143; and the ‘mainstream’ 49; and musical performance 28 – 30; and “skill” 30 – 34; success, evidence of 45 – 46; three stages of 49; Tsioulakis’s experiences

190 Index of 1 – 3, 27 – 28, 44; and viability, quest for 48; and work vs play 3, 50; see also professional musicians music conservatory 27; see also odeía music ethnography 16 – 21 MusicFor 51n16, 147; see also George; Katerina musicians see amateur musicians; professional musicians Musicians’ Union 92, 122, 129 musicking see professional musicking music schools see MusicFor; odeío; schools music teaching and education 49, 138 – 149, 160 – 161; and expertise and knowledge 36, 42; as response to precarization 23, 46, 104, 119, 121, 125, 143 – 148; of traditional instruments 51n10; as a ‘way out’ 138, 143 – 148; and women 64, 146 Nana (vocalist) 59 néi 1, 58 – 59, 72, 78n4, 91, 168 Nettl, B. 64 nightclubs see clubs ‘night’ music industry 30, 103 – 108; see also nýhta Nikolopoulous, Christos 12 Nikos (bassist) 41 – 42, 59, 72, 74 nýhta 30, 36, 65, 105, 111n19, 168 O’Brien Bernini, Leah 24n3, 142 odeío (pl. odeía) 31 – 36, 51n12, 64, 168 Odeío Athinón 32 Onirama (band) 14 onómata 14, 20, 168 Ottoman Empire 4, 10, 24n9 Ottosson 50n4, 78n5 oúti (oud) 124, 146, 168 Overing, J. 55, 76 Panou, Akis 12 Panagiotis (bass player) 75 – 76 Panos (percussionist) 45 – 46 Panourgia, Neni 24n4 Pantelis (trumpet player) 76 Papanikolaou, D. 24n5, 50n3 Paparizou, Elena 14 Papataxiarchis, Efthimios 5, 61, 78n8, 127 Papapavlou, M. 9 paradosiaká 8 – 9, 79n15, 168 paragogós (pl. paragogoí) 86, 90 – 91, 168 parápono 165 – 166 Patsiaoura, Evi vii payment see kassé Pennanen, R. P. 24n9

performative classes 80n27, 81 – 109 Peridis, Orfeas 14 Petros L. (bassist, Murmux) 157; Johnie Thin Trio 157; promotion video 153; workshop 149, 150; see also Murmux Petros V. (bassist) 33, 45, 54, 67, 89; DJ story 71 – 72, 74; písta (pl. pístes) 14, 168 play-scape 135, 161; see also work vs play Ploutarhos, Yiannis 13 poiótita 13, 168; see also quality Polychronakis, Ioannis 9, 25n18, 25n19 polymusicality 52n19, 118 pop music in Greece 14, 39, 73; magazí 95 – 97; schools 147 – 148; see also Onirama (band) pop singer 25n26, 100 – 101 popular music (playing of) in Greece 16 – 17, 85 – 86; ensembles 34; foreign 39; and genres 13 – 16; Greek 12 – 15, 35; history of 10 – 13; local 44; Western 14; see also music scene popular music industry in Athens 19, 21 – 22, 53n33, 58 – 59, 86, 105, 165; gender divisions in 65 – 66; hierarchies of 108; solo stars, promotion of 88; viability in 46 Porcello, Thomas 65 positional suffering 108 – 109, 165 Poulakis, Nikos 136n8, 162n7 power and power struggles 3, 7, 22; existential 125; individualist 135; institutional 125; labour 123; negotiations 77, 85, 95 – 103, 106; and performative classes 81 – 109; reversal of power 103 – 108; see also Foucault, Michel power dynamics 30, 80n27, 94 power-holders in the music industry 23, 26n31, 107, 120; defying and/or challenging 102 – 103, 130; singers as 44, 88 powerlessness 17, 66, 108, 136n4 power rhetoric see rhetoric precariat (musicians in Greece) 78n6, 112 – 136, 148 precariousness 115 – 117; and musical identity 123, 126, 129, 141; and play 135; and pleasure 29; working 50n4 precarity 17, 28 – 29; and austerity 156, 158; and The Crisis 3, 113 – 118, 164 – 165; and creativity 142 – 143, 154 – 156; and the music profession in Greece 29, 45 – 46, 53, 59 – 60, 82, 110n9, 112, 131 – 132, 145, 148, 151; as norm 59, 112, 140, 155, 164;

Index  191 post-Crisis 133 – 135, 139; and permanency 138; and power and ideology 21; vs precariousness 116 precarity stories 23, 113, 126 – 133 precarization 50, 116 – 117, 122, 133; and austerity 129, 143; 144; governmental 23, 132, 135; self-precarization 119, 140; teaching as a response to 145 – 146 presentism 23, 160 – 161 ‘professional ideology’ 74 – 76; see also ideology professionalism see musical professionalism professional musicians 27 – 50, 52n27, 67 – 77, 81 – 83; ‘autonomy’ of 93; ‘classes’ of 82 – 83; as community of experience 52n28, 60, 54 – 77, 135, 165; definition of 30; deviance, profile of 68 – 69; drug use among 70; ‘freedom’ of 29, 93, 119, 140; ‘hidden transcript’ of 71; ideology of 74 – 76; instrument 34; music genre 34 – 35; music preferred vs music performed 72 – 75; networking 46, 52n24; options available to 48 – 49; other professional groups, views of 86 – 94; payment of 44 – 46, 81; reputation 43 – 44; self-conceptions 81 – 82, 112, 123; security 46; self-perception 22, 90, 126; self-precarization 119, 140; selfsegregation 56; self-taught 32, 35; skill, acquisition of 30 – 34; socio-cultural environment 35 – 36; social strategies and networking 36 – 43; status among 68; success, discourse of 43; and suffering 91, 165 – 166; as ‘tricksters’ 68 – 71; viability of 46 – 48; see also artisans; autonomy; deviance; freedom; identity; interviews of musicians; kassé; music teaching and education; mousikós; precariat; positional suffering; success; testimonies Protopsalti, Alkistis 14 quality in music 2, 13, 25n20, 72, 76, 155; aural 51n10; in local music-making 79n24; and mutuality 135; of sound 96; of voice 87; see also poiótita Rakopoulos, Theodoros 115, 127, 160 Rapport, Nigel 55, 76, 125 rebétiko 10 – 12, 168 refugees 6 – 7, 165 Reily, Suzel vii ‘resilience’ 7, 138 – 139, 142 rhetoric 3, 22; class 83; of collective guilt 8; of control 152; of the Crisis 120, 127,

140 – 141; of ‘hardship and frustration’ 60, 68, 77, 78n3, 119; political 13, 120, 127, 140; power 21; and practice 50; of the professional musician 64, 82, 95, 98, 108, 165; of separation 86 – 94; of suffering 166 rock bands 18, 95; see also Rustik rock club see clubs rock genres 48, 52n17 rock music 9, 13, 16, 35 – 36; and The Crisis 154 – 155; and dancing 159; guitar players 51n16, 131; imagery 69; masculine erotics of 65; rejection of 101; subcultures of 149; teaching of 147 Romiós (pl. Romioí) 4, 168 Roseman, Marina vii, 63 Rouvas, Sakis 14 Rozakou, K. 136n9 rural 5 – 6 Rustik (band) 95, 97, 99 – 103 saizón 168 Savvopoulos, Dionysis 12, 14 Scharff, Christina 50n4, 65, 118, 136n5, 142, 161n1 school (public) 31 – 33, 51n10; music teaching jobs in 121, 146; private music 147 – 148 Scott, James 71 seniority 97 – 99 Seremetakis, Nadia 5 – 6, 130, 165 shame 60 – 62 skills (musical and performance) 17; acquisition of 34; and aesthetics 107; and creative expression 164; definition of 28 – 30; and deviance (social) 67 – 68; ‘emotional’ 118; improvisational 1; of female musicians 62, 65; professional 22, 25n26, 27, 35, 155, 158; vs ‘reputation’ 53n29; as social capital 84, 102, 120; and social dexterity 109n7; ‘soft’ 117; and strategies 23, 32, 36 – 43, 123, 135; and success, discourse of 43 – 49; see also work vs play Sissy (composer and instrumentalist) 123, 141 – 142 skyládika 14, 53n34, 57, 74, 168; see also clubs; magaziá Small, Christopher 24n7 Small Music Theater 104 Smith, Chris 152 smyrnéiko 10, 24n9, 168; see also rebétiko social capital 53n29, 84, 87, 91, 94, 102, 109n7, 120; see also Bourdieu, Pierre

192 Index social classes: lower 113; middle 113; upper 11; uneducated 24n11; working 12; see also performative classes sociality 21, 112, 122, 127 Sofia (vocalist) 33 souksé 48, 168 Spartakos, Yiannis 11 stage policing 70, 79n21 Standing, Guy 132 State Experimental Music Secondary School 32 Stathis (pianist) 124, 134, 145, 154 – 155 Stebbins, Robert 71 Stefanos (keyboardist) 59, 88, 90, 95, 112, 159 Stock, Jonathan vii Stokes, Martin vii, 16, 76, 109n1, 110n7 success: discourse of 43 – 49; and loyalty 46 – 47 suffering see positional suffering taiko drumming 79n19 ‘Tap Jam’ 159 Tarassi, Silvia 29, 52n24, 141 Taylor, Tim 153 teaching and education see music teaching and education technikós (pl. technikoí) 168 technostalgia 153 testimonies: by musicians in Greece 59 – 60, 76, 81, 110n9, 112 – 114, 123 – 125, 134 – 135, 160; by rural subjects 61; on teaching 145 – 146; by women (musicians) 33 – 34, 64, 66, 136n6 theíos/theía 88, 168 Themis (violinist) 121, 124, 141, 156 Theodorakis, Mikis 12 – 13, 24n11 Thin, Johnie see Johnie Thin Trio, The Tolis (guitarist) 33, 59, 68, 88, 163 Tragaki, Daphne vii, 9, 50n3 tragoúdi 168; tragoudistís 19, 29, 78n10, 86, 168; tragoudiára 61 – 62, 78n10;

tragoudístria 62; tragoudopoiós 14, 168; see also anatolítika; dimotikó; éntechno; laїkó transgression 70, 79n22 ‘trickster,’ musicians as 68 – 71 ‘Troika, The’ (European Central Bank, European Commission and the International Monetary Fund) 7, 120 Tsitsanis, Vassilis 11 Turner, Victor 100 Tziovas, Dmitris 139, 158 universities (Greek) 31 – 32, 51n9; and The Crisis 144, 151 Vaios (bassist) 48, 112, 120, 122 – 123, 143 Varelopoulos, Dimitris vii, 9, 24n15, 50n3 Vasilis (bassist) 119 Vassilis (band leader; jazz guitarist) 1, 27 Vasso (jazz guitarist) 34, 43 – 44, 58, 87 Vavva, Georgia vii, 154 Virginia (vocalist) 122, 133, 143 – 144 Vitali, Eleni 13 Wenger, Etienne 60 Western Art Music 147; festivals 139; in Greece 136n8, 162n7 Wetherell, Margaret 94 work vs play 2 – 3, 15 – 16, 18, 21 – 23, 143, 164 – 165; as balance between necessity and enjoyment 76; final approach to 160 – 161; first approach to 49 – 50; second approach to 76 – 77; third approach to 135 – 136 Yiannis (bass player) 1 Yiannis (saxophone player) 121, 145 – 146, 155 – 156 Yiannidis, Kostas 11 Yiorgos (drummer) 33, 45, 92, 124 – 125, 134 – 135, 146, 148