Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work

The Classical Music Profession

Christina Scharff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367351267
• eBook ISBN: 9781317375098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What is it like to work as a classical musician today? How can we explain ongoing gender, racial, and class inequalities in the classical music profession? What happens when musicians become entrepreneurial and think of themselves as a product that needs to be sold and marketed?

Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work explores these and other questions by drawing on innovative, empirical research on the working lives of classical musicians in Germany and the UK. Indeed, Scharff examines a range of timely issues such as the gender, racial, and class inequalities that characterise the cultural and creative industries; the ways in which entrepreneurialism – as an ethos to work on and improve the self – is lived out; and the subjective experiences of precarious work in so-called 'creative cities'. Thus, this book not only adds to our understanding of the working lives of artists and creatives, but also makes broader contributions by exploring how precarity, neoliberalism, and inequalities shape subjective experiences.

Contributing to a range of contemporary debates around cultural work, Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of Sociology, Gender and Cultural Studies.

Chapter 1

Setting the stage

The cultural and creative industries, entrepreneurialism, and the classical music profession

DOI: 10.4324/9781315673080-2

This chapter contextualises the analysis presented in this book by introducing wider debates and existing research on the cultural and creative industries, cultural work, entrepreneurialism, and the classical music profession in Germany and the United Kingdom. It begins with a critical discussion of the rise of the ‘creative industries’ concept (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2015) and subsequently demonstrates why I embed my analysis of the classical music profession in wider research on the cultural and creative industries and cultural work (e.g. Banks, 2007; Banks et al., 2013; Conor et al., 2015; Conor, 2014; Gill, 2002; 2014; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; McRobbie, 1998; 2002; 2015; Ross, 2003: 2; 2008; Taylor and Littleton, 2012; Wreyford, 2015). This body of work has highlighted various features of work in the cultural and creative industries, which are pertinent to my inquiry, ranging from the prevalence of inequalities and entrepreneurialism to the joys and pleasures associated with cultural work.

The second section of the chapter homes in on the notion of entrepreneurialism by introducing Foucauldian perspectives (e.g. Brown, 2003; 2015; Burchell, 1993; du Gay, 1996; Foucault, 2008; Gordon, 1987; Lemke, 2001). These approaches to entrepreneurialism have argued that the enterprise form is extended to all forms of conduct, inciting individuals to become autonomous, and to demonstrate self-initiative and self-improvement. Due to the cultural sector’s emphasis on autonomy, self-application, and competition, cultural workers seem to be paradigms of entrepreneurial selfhood (McRobbie, 2002; 2015; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Ross, 2008). Crucially, ‘young women’ have been positioned in similar ways in media, public, and policy discourses (e.g. Baker, 2008; Gill and Scharff, 2011; Gonick, 2006; McRobbie, 2009; Ringrose and Walkerdine, 2008). By revisiting these debates on entrepreneurialism, cultural work, and young femininities, the second section introduces the theoretical framework that underpins this book’s focus on early career, female, and classically trained musicians. As cultural workers and young women, my research participants were twice positioned as entrepreneurial.

The third section turns a critical eye on the classical music profession by exploring the working conditions prevalent in the sector. Resonating with wider research on cultural work, the classical music profession can be experienced as intensely fulfilling, especially during moments of ‘being in the zone’ (Banks, 2014; Jordan et al., 2017), but it is also precarious and characterised by ongoing inequalities and an ethos of entrepreneurialism. Moving away from theoretical and analytical considerations, the fourth and final section of this chapter introduces the research methodology underpinning the study presented in this book. This section provides detailed information on the qualitative in-depth interviews that I conducted, the composition of the sample, as well as my interpretative framework, discourse analysis. As such, the chapter lays the theoretical and methodological groundwork for the ensuing analysis of inequalities, entrepreneurial subjectivity, and precarious work in the classical music profession in London and Berlin.

The cultural and creative industries, cultural work, and inequalities

The cultural and creative industries

In many contemporary Western societies, the ‘creative industries’ have been hailed as a key growth sector of the economy, source of future employment, driver of urban regeneration, and promoter of inclusivity. Cultural policy conceived and conceptualised under the ‘New Labour Government’ (1997–2010) in the United Kingdom played a key role in this development. In 1998, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) defined the creative industries as “those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property” (DCMS, 1998, cited in DCMS, 2001: 5). According to this definition, the creative industries include several subsectors, ranging from advertising and designer fashion, film, video, software, and computer services, to television, radio, music, and the performing arts. The mapping exercise thus brought together a range of sectors under the heading ‘creative industries’.

The creative industries concept has been adopted internationally, albeit with local variations (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2015). According to the Creative Economy report 2010, published by UNCTAD,¹ “an increasing number of governments, in developing and developed countries alike, are identifying the creative industries as a priority sector in their national development strategies” (UNCTAD, 2010: xix). In Germany too, the creative industries concept has proven influential and continues to inform cultural policy (German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, 2009; Berlin Senate, 2014b). A look at recent statistics supports this positive outlook on the creative industries. In the United Kingdom, the number of jobs in the creative industries increased by 15.8 per cent since 2011 and accounted for one in eight jobs in London in 2014 (DCMS, 2015). In Germany, employment in the cultural and creative industries grew by almost 2 per cent in 2014 (BMWi, 2015; see also Zimmermann and Geißler, 2012). The cultural and creative industries are particularly vibrant in Berlin. Twenty per cent of Berlin businesses are active in the creative industries and, with around 186. 000 people employed in Berlin’s creative industries, the sector is a crucial factor in the city’s employment market (Berlin Senate, 2014a; see chapter six).

Academic research, and particularly approaches informed by cultural studies and sociology, has however critiqued this positive narrative about the creative industries. Researchers have commented on the shift in terminology away from ‘cultural industries’ to ‘creative industries’. In the United Kingdom, sociologists and progressive policy makers used the term ‘cultural industries’ from the 1960s onwards, but in the 1990s policy makers began to prefer the formulation ‘creative industries’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; see also Garnham, 2005). According to David Hesmondhalgh (2008), the term ‘creative industries’ represents a refusal of the forms of critical analysis associated with the cultural industries approach. Researchers have further pointed to the problematic ways in which the creative industries concept conceives of the relationship between culture and the economy, and highlighted the policy’s failure to understand the particular ways in which the cultural industries operate (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2015; see also Eikhof and Warhurst, 2013). Given these and other critiques of the creative industries concept, I refer in this book to the ‘cultural and creative industries’ to signal a critical distance to overly celebratory policy discourses.²

Most crucial to the concerns discussed in this book, the creative industries concept has also been criticised for its lack of attention to working conditions in the cultural sector (e.g. Banks and Hesmondhalgh, 2009; Conor et al., 2015; Hesmondhalgh et al., 2015). In relation to the classical music profession, the failure to consider working conditions is evident in a report on the economic impact of three London conservatoires³ on the UK and London economies (LSE, 2012). Echoing the cheerful positivity of the creative industries policy discourse, the report draws attention to the conservatoires’ economic contributions. And while it does refer to some of the characterising features of musicians’ working lives, such as having a portfolio career involving a breadth of activities, the report does not critically discuss the often-precarious nature of work in the classical music sector.

Paying attention to working conditions in the cultural and creative industries, including the classical music profession, is however crucial. First, the promotion of the cultural and creative industries in national and international policy discourses begs the question of what it is like to work in these fields. As David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker (2011), among others, have pointed out, positive representations of work in the cultural and creative industries abound, which portray it as particularly desirable and offering greater fulfilment than other kinds of work. Second, and as I discuss in detail in chapters two and three, work in the cultural and creative industries is characterised by a range of inequalities. Contrary to common portrayals of the cultural and creative industries as meritocratic, work in these fields is not open to all (e.g. Allen et al., 2013; Banks et al., 2013; Conor, 2014; Conor et al., 2015; Gill, 2002; 2014; Oakley, 2013; Oakley and O’Brien, 2016; Taylor and Littleton, 2012; Warwick Commission, 2015; Wreyford, 2015).

Third, recent research, particularly in the social sciences, has positioned cultural workers as “role model subjects of contemporary capitalism” (de Peuter, 2014: 264; see also the introduction). According to this body of work, artists and ‘creatives’ embody the “new form of constantly labouring subjectivity required for contemporary capitalism, in which the requirements for people fully to embrace risk, entrepreneurialism and to adopt a ‘sacrificial ethos’ are often linked to an artistic or creative vocation” (Banks et al., 2013: 3). Indeed, as Angela McRobbie (2015: 11) has argued, the imperative to ‘be creative’ does some of the work of labour reform where cultural work provides a “future template for being middle class and learning to live without welfare protection and social security”. Research on work in the cultural and creative industries thus provides an important critical challenge to celebratory policy discourses, especially with regards to the representation of these industries as meritocratic, and may advance our understanding of contemporary work conditions more broadly (Hennekam and Bennett, 2016). If cultural workers are at the cutting edge of transformations in work, analyses of their working lives may generate insights that are more widely applicable.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Setting the stage: the cultural and creative industries, entrepreneurialism, and the classical music profession
• 2 Documenting and explaining inequalities in the classical music profession
• 3 The silence that is not a rest: negotiating hierarchies of class, race, and gender
• 4 Entrepreneurialism at work: mapping the contours of entrepreneurial subjectivity
• 5 “Difficult, fickle, tumultuous” and yet “the best job in the world”: analysing subjective experiences of precarious work
• 6 Structures of feeling in two creative cities: London and Berlin
• Conclusion: key contributions, directions for further research, and recommendations
• Index