Women's Musical Lives: self-managing a freelance career

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Women's Musical Lives: Self-Managing afreelance careerVictoria ArmstrongPublished online: 09 Nov 2013.

To cite this article: Victoria Armstrong , Women: A Cultural Review (2013): Women's Musical Lives: Self-Managing a freelance career, Women: A Cultural Review, DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2013.850598

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Women’s MusicalLives: Self-Managing afreelance career

Abstract: While opportunities for women have certainly improved and they are farbetter represented today in a range of music sectors, Creative and Cultural Skills(2010) found that women occupy only 32.2% of all music industry related jobs, theyearn less, give up their careers sooner and experience more barriers to progressionthan their male counterparts. It has been shown that while ‘creative labour’ can berewarding and fulfilling it is also a source of (self-) exploitation, is insecure, involveslong hours, entails working for low or no pay, through the gifting of free labour,requires high levels of commitment from a normatively younger worker and resultsin bulimic patterns of work. It appears that the contested nature of creative work mayhave particular implications for female freelance musicians but, hitherto, very littlecritical attention has been paid to their experiences. Using an innovative methodo-logical approach combining visual social research methods and digital ethnography,this paper presents the findings of an exploratory study into the working lives of fiveprofessional female musicians based in London and the South West of England. Itexamines the nature of their work and seeks to understand how freelance careers areexperienced, supported and developed. The findings suggest that this is oftencontingent on the context of the work, its purpose, the types of work the musiciansundertake and the meanings they attribute to their various musical activities.

Keywords: women, music, freelance, digital methodology, creative industries

Women’s involvement in music has a long and complex history,as their attempts to claim a professional identity as musicians have oftenbeen met with resistance and hostility, their musical contributionsmarginalized, their access to music education restricted and the desire forpublic recognition of their work perceived as a threat to their femininity.As Citron notes in her discussion of female composers, in order to claimprofessional status, women have been forced to develop strategies whichenable them to assert ‘their creative voice in patriarchy’ and to resist the

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construction of gendered discourses about musicians, whether as creatorsof music (composers) or as music-makers (performers and conductors)(Citron 1993: 77). Given the scope of the musical activities discussed inthis article, the term ‘musician’ will therefore be used to describe all thoseworking in the field of music as performers, conductors and composers,thus following Bennett’s conceptualization of a musician as ‘someonewho practices within the profession of music in one or more specialistfields’ (Bennett 2008: 14). This range of specialist fields is reflected in therich body of feminist musicology which demonstrates women’s import-ant, but often neglected, contributions to western art music (Bowers andTick 1987; Cook and Tsou 1994; Gillett 2000; Pendle 2001; Porter 2012;Solie 1993) as composers (Barkin and Hamessley 1999; Citron 1993; Fuller1994; Halstead 1997; Seddon 2013), conductors (Halstead 2006) andperformers (Barger 2007).

However, while these texts are undoubtedly important, in the mainthey tend to focus on the work of female western art musicians longdeceased. In contrast, we know very little about the lives and experiencesof classically trained female musicians working in the music sector today,despite the fact that women make up 41.5 per cent of UK musicundergraduates (Farrar 2007). Bennett’s study of the classical musicprofession in Australia offers some helpful insights into the work thatgoes into building a sustainable freelance career in music and theentrepreneurial approach musicians take in the self-management of theircareer (Bennett 2008), while Cottrell looks at the working lives ofprofessional musicians in London (Cottrell 2004). However, neitherstudy addresses the gendered nature of this work. This omission isreplicated in the growing body of research in the field of cultural studies.While the ‘cultural turn’ in the examination of the nature of work in thecultural industries has offered important insights,1 only partial attentionhas been paid to the gendered nature of such work (Banks and Milestone2011; McRobbie 2010; Swanson and Wise 1998; Taylor 2011). Further-more, although the term ‘cultural industries’ encompasses the field ofmusic, which in the UK has a turnover of £3.9 billion per annum (UKMusic 2011), very little of this research has focused on the music sector,with a few notable exceptions, specific to the pop, rock and music-recording sectors (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011; Leonard 2007;Toynbee 2003). Taken together, these are significant omissions in lightof the fact that, while opportunities for women have certainly improvedand they are far better represented today in a range of music sectors,according to a recent survey carried out by Creative and Cultural Skills,women occupy only 32.2 per cent of all music-industry-related jobs, earnless, give up their careers sooner and experience more barriers to

1 The UK Departmentfor Culture, Mediaand Sport uses theterm ‘creativeindustries’, whichencompasses the fieldsof music, design,architecture,advertising, theperforming arts, crafts,film and video,computer games,publishing, televisionand radio, and thevisual arts(Department forCulture, Media andSport 2001).

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progression than their male counterparts (Creative and Cultural Skills2010). It is for this reason that women are placed centre stage in thissmall-scale study. This sets the backdrop for the first aim of this article,which is to offer insights into the nature of the work that goes intodeveloping a sustainable career as experienced by contemporary femalefreelance musicians.

The second overarching aim of the article is to understand how thesewomen balance the potential tensions of sustaining a freelance careerthrough a form of work which is conceptualized as simultaneouslyfulfilling and rewarding, and insecure and potentially exploitative. AsHesmondhalgh and Baker observe, the prevailing neoliberal model ofcreative work in the cultural industries (described as ‘creative labour’by Hesmondhalgh and Baker) focuses too narrowly on the so-calledbenefits of creative labour as flexible, creative, satisfying, pleasurable,and affording high levels of autonomy for the worker (Hesmondhalghand Baker 2011: 9). This overly celebratory tone is said to havecharacterized policy discourses under the previous Labour government(Banks and Hesmondhalgh 2009), reproducing a somewhat outmodedromantic notion of ‘the artist’ whose creative labour is wholly focusedon the possibilities of this type of work as a means of self-expressionand self-actualization (Gill and Pratt 2008; McRobbie 2002). Thesediscourses reinforce the notion of creative work as a ‘calling’, which, inturn, produces a mentality whereby workers are prepared to accept poorworking conditions that in any other sector would be seen as nakedexploitation (Gill 2010). Critical analyses reveal that while this work canbe creatively rewarding and fulfilling, it is also a source of (self-)exploitation. It is insecure (Banks and Hesmondhalgh 2009; Gill 2010;Ross 2009), involves long hours that far exceed legal limits (McRobbie2002; Ursell 2000), involves working for low or no pay through thegifting of free labour in the hope that it will lead to paid work (Ursell2000), requires extraordinary levels of commitment from a normativelyyounger worker unencumbered by family responsibilities (McRobbie2002), and results in bulimic patterns of work (Gill and Pratt 2008),which require workers to take on ‘filler’ and second jobs to make endsmeet. For many, this is often a purely economic necessity, due to theuncertain nature of this work, rather than an active choice (Banks andHesmondhalgh 2009). While there is certainly evidence to supportthese claims, Hesmondhalgh is right to criticize perspectives whichsuggest that there can be no such thing as ‘good work’ or fulfilmentin the creative industries (Hesmondhalgh 2010), and my findings,presented below, support this argument. The findings show thatwhile female freelance musicians’ creative labour can be a site for

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both self-actualization and exploitation, this is often contingent on thecontext of the work, its purpose, the types of work they undertake andthe meanings the women attribute to their various musical activities.From their narratives, there appear to be many positive aspects of thistype of work, although McRobbie would probably reject this inter-pretation (McRobbie 1998, cited in Taylor 2012: 44). She argues thatthe attraction of creative work is based on an illusion, because workersfail to realize the limited rewards of their work. What McRobbiefails to take into account is that the concept of ‘rewards’ is likely to becontext-specific and may depend on a range of factors, including theperson’s career stage, the balance between paid and unpaid work, andthe quality of the work in which they are engaged. Here, Luckmanoffers a more helpful and nuanced way of thinking about thesebinaristic perspectives, which moves away from narrowly viewingcultural work either as precarious and shackled to the discipline of24/7 creative employment or as ultimately fulfilling, arguing that wemust acknowledge

the affective messiness of trying to live well—however we may seethis. This is neither to celebrate the failures nor to encouragethe personally or community damaging effects of (self-)exploitationand long hours, but rather to recognise the far more commonquotidian problems and strengths of negotiating creative employ-ment. (Luckman 2012: 10)

Similarly, Gill’s assessment (2008, cited in Taylor and Littleton 2012: 38),that we should try to avoid ‘producing a patronizing and politicallyoffensive model of the subject as (variously) victim of “false conscious-ness”, governed “docile subject” or “cultural dope”’, offers a moreagential perspective, and better encapsulates the decisions and choicesarticulated in the narratives of my female participants, who do notpresent themselves as either docile or passive (Gill 2008, cited in Taylorand Littleton 2012: 38). They recognize that there are both rewards andchallenges, and yet, working within the acknowledged constraints of thistype of creative work, are managing to forge meaningful, fulfillingmusical lives and careers.

In order to support my claims, I will draw on a small-scaleexploratory empirical study carried out during the period April–July2012 and involving five female musicians working in a diverse range ofmusic genres and specialist fields (see Table 1). The women discussed inthis article closely resemble those cultural workers studied by Luckman(2012), who were engaged in ‘creative occupations’ which were located


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Table 1 Background information of the research participants.

Pseudonym Age Ethnicity Music education Music activities Instruments played Genre/s

May midtwenties

British-Chinese

undergraduate degree, gradeexaminations

composer, conductor, pianist piano, violin, organ classical

Layla latetwenties

blackBritish-Caribbean

undergraduate andpostgraduate degrees, gradeexaminations

composer, arts administrator voice, violin, piano classical

Cora earlytwenties

whiteBritish


performer, sound recording engineer double bass, piano, bassguitar*, cello*

classical,folk

Libby earlytwenties

whiteBritish


violin teacher, composer, singer-songwriter, sound recording engineer

violin, voice, piano,kora*, guitar*, sanxian*,charango*

classical,popular

Charlotte lateforties

whiteBritish


composer, performer, singing teacher,community workshop organizer,conductor

piano, clarinet, voice classical,folk, jazz

* This instrument was self-taught.

WOMEN’S

MUSIC

ALLIV

ES:

SELF-M

ANAGIN

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FREELANCECAREER

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neither in a single place of work nor within one particular organization(Higgs 2007, cited in Luckman 2012: 12). Their musical activities werecarried out across a wide geographical location (travelling around the UKand abroad to rehearsals, performances and workshops) and in a broadrange of spaces, including the home, recording studios, pubs, clubs,festivals, concert halls, rehearsal studios, churches and art galleries.Consequently, it would not have been logistically or financially possibleto undertake fieldwork using traditional ethnographic methods, whereone embeds oneself with the research subjects over a period of time. Thesearch for a solution to this methodological problem resulted in devisingan innovative methodological approach which drew on approachesgleaned from visual social research methods and digital ethnographywhere digital means were central in the collection and recording of thedata (Murthy 2008). This allowed me to capture the variety and scope ofthe participants’ activities, as each was asked to upload a weekly ‘digitaldiary’ into a dedicated password-protected online storage space (Drop-box) over two 5-week periods. This resulted in a rich array of ‘found’data (Worth 1980, cited in O’Reilly 2012: 164) detailing their musicalactivities and working lives, which comprised sound files (from rehear-sals, studio recordings and gigs), musical scores, screenshots, links toYouTube videos, performance and rehearsal videos, and photographstaken on mobile phones (in addition to promotional material forconcerts and gigs). While I could have undertaken traditional interviewswithout any visual images or sound files, I would not have been able toget a sense of the ‘day-to-day’, and it would have been unlikely that thewomen would have been able to recall all of their activities over the two5-week periods. Moreover, the interviews would have been more on myterms than theirs. By enabling the participants to make their owndecisions about what constituted ‘found’ data, I was able to ‘demargina-lize the voice of respondents in these accounts’ (Murthy 2008: 839), as theauthority of the subject was central to the study’s concerns. This alsounderpinned my approach to the interviews. Although some researchershave suggested that it is feasible to apply visual research methods whichdo not involve interviewing research participants, Wagner argues that itis not possible to interpret images accurately without hearing directlyfrom the people whose perspectives we seek to understand (Wagner2002). Consequently, the ‘digital diaries’ were used as a starting point fortwo interviews with each participant (one at the end of the first fiveweeks of data uploading, and then again after the second five-weekphase). The content of the diaries was not analysed, but, using a form ofphoto elicitation (Collier and Collier 1986), the women wove narratives


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around their ‘found’ data, which allowed for themes about the nature oftheir work to emerge and be explored through open-ended questioning.

Without exception, the career biographies of the five musicians in thisstudy were comparable to those of other types of creative workers, suchas the new media workers studied by Gill (2009). Their biographies werenon-linear, flexible and self-managed, and often involved extensiveperiods of working alone for long hours. There were often veryconcentrated periods of activity, usually associated with a deadline,such as preparing for a gig or concert, or completing a new piece forperformance, although not all of these activities were paid. What wasparticularly striking in the women’s narratives was the amount of effort,commitment and ‘behind-the-scenes’ preparation they put into theirwork, irrespective of whether or not it was paid. This appeared to playan important role in enabling them to maintain their professionalidentity as musicians—undertaking high-quality work, irrespective ofits monetary rewards. Similarly to the designers and photographersinterviewed by Taylor (2011), personal satisfaction was paramount intheir work choices, further highlighting the limitations of McRobbie’snarrow conceptualization of perceived ‘rewards’ as illusory (McRobbie1998, cited in Taylor 2012: 44). However, this is not to deny the potentialfor self-exploitation here, because, even when the work was paid, it wasnot always commensurate with the amount of effort actually expended,as Charlotte’s description of her preparations for a home-based residen-tial madrigal weekend demonstrates. During her second interview, afterthe madrigal event had taken place, she said the weekend had gone well,but she was at pains to point out that, in a previous ‘digital diary’, shehad, in fact, spent a whole week recording the vocal parts for all of themadrigals. She then sent these to the participants so that they could comefully prepared for the workshop (as few of them read music or couldsight-read fluently). As we listened together to one of the tracks she hadrecorded, she observed that:

With the weekend residentials, the work appears to happen all inthe weekend, but the preparation for some workshops—for oneearlier in the year I actually spent five whole days writing all themusic for it, so it looks like you’re earning £1000 in a day or twobut in reality it isn’t that.

However, she did not think she was being exploited because she consideredthe highly personalized service she offered to be ‘an investment’; thosewho registered for these events had often been before, and new participantswere often alerted to these workshops via word of mouth.


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Although working at a more international level than Charlotte, thisdisparity between the work that goes into the final product and what oneis paid also featured in May’s account of her preparation for a concertshe had been contracted to conduct. Throughout the first phase of theproject, photographs of her bedroom-cum-study dominated her diaries. Itcontained a bed, a piano, a desk and shelves overflowing with books andscores (see Figure 1), and she said this image characterized her currentworking life, which was frequently solitary and very highly structured.

At the time the study was carried out, conducting (rather thancomposing—her other professional activity) dominated May’s profes-sional paid work, and this required ‘a good six to eight hours every dayworking on a score. When you’re learning scores, you literally sit by

Figure 1 May’s bedroom-cum-study, Phase 1.


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yourself in a room, in silence, memorizing it and just learning it’.Describing her preparation for this concert, she said:

I found it takes about eight to nine months to learn a score for aconcert. And so if I’m hired to do a concert, I get paid part beforeand part once I’ve done the concert. So, the preparation time is upto me. Because I’m preparing for that concert, in a way, it’s paid,but in a way it’s not because they’re just paying for therehearsal time.

Despite this huge time investment, this was accepted as ‘the norm’ forsustaining a successful freelance career at this level. While this pragmat-ism characterized all of these women’s work patterns, it could be arguedthat it masks what many would see as a punishing, yet self-imposed,schedule. However, May could justify this as she was being paid toconduct an international concert, so the expectations and stakes wereespecially high—producing less than first-rate work would be detrimentalto future employment.

Even where the musical activity is unpaid, a similar professional workethic is discernible, and this can be a very clear-sighted decision linked tolonger-term musical aims and career aspirations. A promising composerin her late twenties, all of Layla’s commissions since graduating had beenpaid, and there was an expectation that, as an aspiring professionalcomposer, this would be the case. However, she had recently been on ashort course run by the Royal Opera House, which resulted in herhaving a short scene performed at the Linbury Theatre. Layla wassufficiently self-aware to recognize that writing a piece, for which she wasnot paid, for this particular organization was a ‘huge opportunity’, as shewas able to work with ‘fantastic musicians’ and the performance eventwas very prestigious. This example alerts us to the importance ofunderstanding the context in which unpaid work is undertaken and thereasons behind the choices these women make. A further example can befound in Cora’s narratives, although she was in a very different situationto Layla, as she had a full-time career as a sound recording engineer—ajob she enjoyed very much. She was also a very good double bass player,who secretly hankered to be a full-time professional double bass player,but had reservations about making that type of commitment because sheperceived the work to be too precarious:

Cora: I think, secretly, I’ve always wanted to be a bass player, like,professionally, but I don’t have the guts to do it.

Researcher: It’s tough, isn’t it, to do that.


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Cora: My boss at the moment used to be a professional violinist andhe’s just got so many horror stories of his life in that world that itjust puts me off doing it completely full time.

Having the financial buffer of a full-time job in music allowed her to seekopportunities to continue playing, providing another example of thequality of the work being more important than payment. A folk bandthat she had recently found on Gumtree (an online classified advertisementssite), and with whom she had recently started working, dominated herdiaries throughout the study. Although she was not paid for these gigs,her first-phase diaries show that she dedicated a significant proportion ofher spare time to composing, transcribing and learning double bass partsfor their set list (see Figure 2). She was initially given a set list of 16 songs

and I just had to learn them in about three or four days. I didn’thave much time to do it, so I thought my best way was to justtranscribe what I was going to play—that’s the way that mymemory works, so that’s what I was doing here, just listening to itand writing out the chords or particular notes that I wanted to play.

As she normally got home from her ‘day job’ at around 7 p.m., thisinvolved her working until 3 a.m. on several occasions in order to meetrehearsal and performance deadlines; her desire for a fulfilling creativeoutlet outweighed the potentially self-exploitative aspect of this

Figure 2 Cora’s double bass parts for the first folk band rehearsal, Phase 1.


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additional unpaid workload. Furthermore, it could be argued that theanticipation of success and the possibilities for self-affirmation andcreativity is what keeps musicians like Cora interested, when money isnot the main motivator (Ursell 2000). In Cora’s case, this ‘gifting of freelabour’ (Ursell 2000: 806), which is so common in the creative industries,actually paid off, as the band started to get higher-profile gigs—one ofwhich included a set at the 2013 Glastonbury Festival—and gigs inFrance.

As I have highlighted, while there may be considerable potential forself-exploitation revealed in the above narratives, what came throughvery forcefully was the women’s insistence that any work they tookon—whether paid or unpaid—had to have an affective component,affording them some level of enjoyment, and giving them a sense offulfilment and opportunities to explore their creativity. As other studieshave shown (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011; McRobbie 2002; Ursell2000), there is significant pleasure to be had from participating in creativelabour, and Libby, Charlotte and Layla all talked of ‘loving’ what theydid musically. Despite not earning any money from it yet, and makingmost of her living from violin teaching and the occasional sound-recording gig in order to support her songwriting, Libby describedsongwriting as ‘her passion’. Charlotte, for whom teaching and runningworkshops were currently her musical and financial mainstay, said sheloved ‘this ridiculous variety’ in her musical life, stating that: ‘I thinkthat’s what keeps me learning’. Banks and Milestone might argue thatthis is an example of workers making a ‘virtue out of a necessity’ (Banksand Milestone 2011: 86). Certainly there is concern that the positivereframing of ‘labour mobility’, and holding down a second job in orderto support one’s creative work (Taylor 2012), could be seen as anotherexample of the celebratory discourse applied to creative work, whichpresents it as ‘a self-actualising pleasure, rather than a potentially arduousor problematic obligation undertaken through material necessity’ (Banksand Hesmondhalgh 2009: 417). However, a more balanced perspectivewould take into account McPherson et al.’s observation that a ‘fulfilledmusical life’ must include characteristics of expressivity, communicabil-ity and flexibility, and they suggest that this may be one reason whyhighly skilled orchestral players often form or work with smallensembles to achieve musical fulfilment (McPherson et al. 2012). Thisobservation could certainly be applied to the women here, as they searchfor musically fulfilling activities as part of their freelance careers.

Another significant feature of all of the women’s musical lives was theinvestment in their own professional development and a pronouncedentrepreneurialism in their approach to building up and sustaining a


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successful career—activities which were, by and large, self-financed. Interms of professional development, this might involve composition orconducting lessons, or attending an advanced-level summer school (May),vocal coaching (Charlotte), ad hoc instrumental lessons (Cora and Libby)or working regularly with an influential mentor in their field who wouldprovide feedback on their work (May and Layla). There was arecognition that it was crucial that they continue to hone and developtheir skills in order to carry out their practice at the highest level.Pursuing these self-managed careers required a great deal of entrepren-eurial drive, and it was evident from their diaries that, irrespective of thelevel at which they were working or their field of expertise, there wererecurring examples of the women actively seeking opportunities andoutlets for their work—a sense of ‘putting in the time’ in order to buildand sustain their musical careers. Throughout the study, Layla’s diarieswere peppered with screenshots of websites she had visited offeringcomposition residencies and other compositional opportunities. Sheexplained that this research

represents what my next goal is. I’ve had a number of commissionsand I’ve got commissions in the pipeline, and that’s great, but I dowant to kind of move it on to that next level. And I think, to a certainextent, you have to be, well, you are strategic about it, or actuallyhave a focus about what you want to get on to next.

The need to be proactive in planning and investing in the future was animportant activity in Layla’s working life and, during the study, shenoted that: ‘there are, like, three, four, five [opportunities] out there atthe moment. So for the next few weeks, I will only be doing theseapplications and researching into that, and I’ve put time aside for that’.As an unpublished composer, she was realistic about what she needed todo to achieve her goals, and adopted an entrepreneurial approach to thistask. It was interesting to note that Charlotte—a successful composer andsinger in her late forties and the oldest participant in the study—stood instark contrast to Layla, having made a considered decision to stoppursuing these sorts of compositional opportunities. The sort of‘research’ that occupied a significant proportion of Layla’s time wasabsent from Charlotte’s diaries, and her goals and priorities were quitedifferent to those of the younger composer. When I pointed out that shehad not uploaded any data relating to her compositional activities duringthe study, she stated that this was not the focus of her work at that time.While she still enjoyed composing, she was no longer chasing commis-sions, as it was ‘very, very hard to earn a living from it [composing]. It’s


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really hard and I just got fed up. I don’t want to do endless fundingapplications’. She said that she was at a point in her life where she could‘tailor design’ her own work, as her current musical activities (runningworkshops, singing with a professional jazz ensemble and teaching)enabled her to ‘earn a good living… and I can earn that living at homeand I think I’ve spent so much of my musical career travelling… livingout of a suitcase.. I don’t want to do that anymore’. This appears toreflect McRobbie’s observation that, as workers get older, their focusshifts (McRobbie 2002). She argues that creative industries rely on youthand that ‘the expectation and indeed the legitimacy of some degree ofstruggle and even failure to “make it” reduces with age as otherrequirements for status and authority replace youthful resilience’ (110).If compositional opportunities came her way, she would take them, butCharlotte no longer actively sought out compositional commissions withthe drive witnessed in Layla’s narrative, preferring now to direct herconsiderable energies to other aspects of her music career.

Libby—one of the two recent graduates in the study (the otherbeing Cora)—took an equally entrepreneurial approach, which waslinked to her goal of devoting more time to songwriting and perform-ing, which she described as her ‘passion’. When I pointed out that herdiaries ran the gamut of musical activities (composing, writing music fortelevision indents, songwriting, sound recording and mixing, andteaching), she noted that she had ‘to do a hell of a lot of stuff at themoment to sort of make ends meet’. She had recently lost her contractwith a company who commissioned music for advertisements, and shewas spending a lot of time putting together a curriculum vitae (CV) andshowreel, and sending this out to different companies in order to get ontheir freelance list; this was both costly and time-consuming. While thisillustrates just how much effort is required on the part of the individualto generate paid work, as noted in Layla’s narrative, this level ofpersonal investment was not couched in negative terms, but was framedas working towards her long-term goal of making composition morecentral to her musical life:

I enjoy the composing for the adverts. What I like about it is that itmakes me feel, like a professional composer. So, getting paid for thecompositions is a boost, and it’s good on the CV and it’s more inthe direction of what I love doing—composing.

While these narratives could be interpreted as examples of the relentlessjob-searching (Hesmondhalgh 2010) which characterizes the lives ofcreative workers (and I would certainly not wish to deny that there is a


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downside to having to invest so much time and effort into generatingpaid work—time that could be spent on their creative musical activities),I would suggest that the activities which go into supporting thesewomen’s practice could be thought of in more holistic terms. I wouldargue that, in fact, as Libby’s comment illustrates, this could exemplifythe type of ‘holistic practice’ which, according to Bennett, classicalmusicians engage in (Bennett 2008: 1), affording them the flexibility tonegotiate the uncertainties of a protean career because they do not relysolely on achieving ‘success’ in one particular specialist field. Somecommentators might take issue with this wholly positive conceptualiza-tion of work as flexible and varied because it may obscure many negativeelements which can become the basis for self-exploitation (Hesmond-halgh and Baker 2011; Ursell 2000). Alternatively, if we see flexibility inBennett’s terms, as a positive aspect of work that allows musicians tobuild a sustainable career (Bennett 2008), then the women in the studycome to exemplify the protean careerist who maximizes her income byexploring all the creative opportunities afforded by her extensive musiceducation. This also offers a less negative reading of the potentialproblems of juggling ‘double life’ commitments (Taylor and Littleton2012), which can see creative workers struggling to balance paid/unpaidand ‘creative’/‘non-creative’ labour. The creation of one’s own ‘workbiography’ or do-it-yourself biography (Gill 2009; McRobbie 2002) hasbeen identified as a key feature of creative work. These biographies arecharacterized by the need to be adaptable and to be ready to have a go atanything; certainly the narratives above chime with this observation, asmusicians are required to construct multiple selves as they inhabit a rangeof professional roles in their musical practices (Burnard 2012).

Taylor makes the interesting point that creative workers’ immersionin their work to the exclusion of other activities and other peopledemands a ‘masculine selfishness’, which often conflicts with thegendering of women as traditionally ‘other-orientated, attending tothe needs of others and heeding their preferences’ (Taylor 2011: 367–8).It is worth noting that none of the women in the study had children orother caring responsibilities, so it might be reasonably assumed that this‘norm’ would be differently perceived, challenged and negotiated byfemale musicians who do have these responsibilities. While I recognizethe limitations of the study, given its small cohort and predominance ofyounger female musicians, I believe that the findings do highlight someimportant themes which would warrant further investigation. As notedearlier, we need to interrogate the competing discourses that constructcreative work as wholly positive or negative in order to betterunderstand how protean music careers are experienced, supported and


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developed, and the challenges women, in particular, face in pursuing acareer characterized by uncertainty, poor pay, ‘bulimic’ work patterns,and youthful drive and energy. The findings from this study do suggestthat female classically trained musicians who continue studying music atundergraduate level have a good chance of carving out a sustainablecareer for themselves, as my participants demonstrate. Certainly theirvaried careers were made possible in no small part by their high standardof musical education, enabling them to take on a range of musical roleswhich they often found stimulating, musically rewarding and creativelyfulfilling. Furthermore, the significant musical resources they were ableto call upon—as all were highly skilled in their respective fields—alloweda significant degree of autonomy and personal ownership of their workthrough entrepreneurial activities. However, throughout the develop-ment of their freelance careers, it was evident that the women wererequired to balance autonomy and choice against a range of constraints(Brannen and Nilsen 2005) based on financial need, career stage,availability of time and pragmatic decisions about the amount of workrequired to produce a musical outcome or activity to the highestprofessional standards. Nevertheless, these women were able to buildsuccessful, fulfilling and rewarding professional musical lives.

Acknowledgement

I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the women who gave so generously oftheir time, and who kindly shared their musical lives with me. Thanks must also go tomy research assistant, Tom Kilworth, for his help and support throughout the project.Finally, I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Research and EnterpriseCommittee at St. Mary’s University College, London, in funding this study.

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Women's Musical Lives: self-managing a freelance career

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