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, affuence and poverty, harmony and turmoil.

“Musicians often pay a high price for sharing their art with us. Underneath the glow of success can often lie loneliness and exhaustion, not to mention the basic struggles of paying the rent or buying food. Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave raise important questions – and we need to listen to what the musicians have to tell us about their working conditions and their mental health.” Emma Warren (Music Journalist and Author). “Singing is crying for grown-ups. To create great songs or play them with meaning music's creators reach far into emotion and fragility seeking the communion we demand of it. However, music’s toll on musicians can leave deep scars. In this important book, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave investigate the relationship between the wellbeing music brings to society and the wellbeing of those who create. It’s a much needed reality check, deglamorising the romantic image of the tortured artist.” Crispin Hunt (Multi-Platinum Songwriter/Record Producer, Chair of the Ivors Academy). It is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detailed study of recording and performing artists in the British music industry, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave turn this view on its head. By listening to how musicians understand and experience their working lives, this book proposes that whilst making music is therapeutic, making a career from music can be traumatic. The authors show how careers based on an all-consuming passion have become more insecure and devalued. Artistic merit and intimate, often painful, self-disclosures are the subject of unremitting scrutiny and data metrics. Personal relationships and social support networks are increasingly bound up with calculative transactions. Drawing on original empirical research and a wide-ranging survey of scholarship from across the social sciences, their findings will be provocative for future research on mental health, wellbeing and working conditions in the music industries and across the creative economy. Going beyond self-help strategies, they challenge the industry to make transformative structural change. Until then, the book provides an invaluable guide for anyone currently making their career in music, as well as those tasked with training and educating the next generation.

The Crisis of Classical Music in America by Robert Freeman focuses on solutions for the oversupply of classically trained musicians in America, problem that grows ever more chronic as opportunities for classical musicians to gain full-time professional employment diminishes year upon year. An acute observer of the professional music scene, Freeman argues that music schools that train our future instrumentalists, composers, conductors, and singers need to equip their students with the communications and analytical skills they need to succeed in the rapidly changing music scene. This book maps a broad range of reforms required in the field of advanced music education and the organizations responsible for that education. Featuring a foreword by Leonard Slatkin, music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, The Crisis of Classical Music in America speaks to parents, prospective and current music students, music teachers and professors, department deans, university presidents and provosts, and even foundations and public organizations that fund such music programs. This book reaches out to all of these stakeholders and argues for meaningful change though wide-spread collaboration.

Scholars and musicians from many different backgrounds will find this book helpful as it deals with psychic problems in both professions. This book might help scholars and musicians to find a way out of their psychic dilemmas. From classical musicians to rock stars, from curriculum theorists to music teachers, from anthropologists to philosophers, this book takes the reader through a rocky intellectual terrain to explore what happens when one can no longer play or work. The driving question of the book is this: What do you do when you cannot do what you were called to do? This is what the author calls The Crisis of Psyche. The theoretical framework for this book combines curriculum theory, psychoanalysis and phenomenology. Here, the author looks at issues of emotion and the working through of crisis points in the lives of both scholars and musicians. Psychoanalytic theory helps to flesh out and untangle what it means to suffer from a damaged musical psyche and a damaged scholarly psyche. How to work through psychic inertia as a scholar? How to work through through psychic inertia as a musician? From Pink Floyd to Laurie Anderson, from Marion Milner to William F. Pinar, this book draws on the work of a wide range of musicians and scholars to find a way out of psychic blocks. From Philip Glass to Pablo Casals, from Michael Eigen to Mary Aswell Doll, this book draws on the work of composers, cellists, psychoanalysts and educationists to find a way out of psychic meltdowns.

Argues that United States' creative class is fighting for survival and explains why this should matter to all Americans.

How do musicians play and talk to audiences? Why do audiences listen and what happens when they talk back? How do new (and old) technologies affect this interplay? This book presents a long overdue examination of the turbulent relationship between musicians and audiences. Focusing on a range of areas as diverse as Ireland, Greece, India, Malta, the US, and China, the contributors bring musicological, sociological, psychological, and anthropological approaches to the interaction between performers, fans, and the industry that mediates them. The four parts of the book each address a different stage of the relationship between musicians and audiences, showing its processual nature: from conceptualisation to performance, and through mediation to off-stage discourses. The musician/audience conceptual division is shown, throughout the book, to be as problematic as it is persistent.

The Healing Forces of Music explores the shamanistic practices and musical cosmologies of the ancient world, the worlds of Eastern and Western classical forms, as well as contemporary resources. McClellan takes us into basic acoustics, the process of hearing and the vibratory nature of the human body. He presents a healing method through cymatics (the effect of vibration on physical matter), and also systems of healing with sound, voice and mantra, Tantric therapies and the utilization of the Endocrine Gland system and Chakra energies. He presents a thorough investigation of the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual effects of music, the characteristics of healing music, procedures for using music as a healing agent and advocates a new philosophy of music as a transcendent experience. -- Back cover.