The Experiences of Gig Musicians in Calgary

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2016 Living in an Artistic Labour Market: The Experiences of Gig Musicians in Calgary

Wall, Laurent

Wall, L. (2016). Living in an Artistic Labour Market: The Experiences of Gig Musicians in Calgary (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26776 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/3235 master thesis

University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Living in an Artistic Labour Market:

The Experiences of Gig Musicians in Calgary

Laurent Wall

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SOCIOLOGY

CALGARY, ALBERTA

AUGUST, 2016

Musicians who perform for pay are seen in every city in the world, but the work of musicians is rarely framed as a practice which warrants sociological attention. Instead, popular culture discourse systematically focuses on the work of musicians by talking about individual artists, their ingenuity and their inspirations. People may view musicians as professionals, but this profession is rarely understood as a practice which has many layers and nuances. This study provides such an understanding by asking musicians who play gigs for a living in Calgary about what they do to survive as artists. Through in-depth interviews with sixteen individuals and ethnographic analysis of the various activities that musicians do, this study reveals the diversity of orientations and ways in which musicians do musician work, and the profoundly important social context in which musicians are able to sustain themselves as cultural workers.

ii Acknowledgements

As I learned the hard way, a thesis takes time and is not written alone. There are key people who are the backbone of this thesis, and I would like to express my thanks to them in this formal way.

I am extremely grateful for the long conversations, the gentle prods, and the many words of encouragement at every stage of this process from my supervisor, Dr. Liza McCoy. Your calm and patient attitude towards ethnographic work has really imbedded itself within me, and will be carried through every step of my life. Liza, you have has been a kind, rigorous, and extremely helpful mentor, and your style of working with your students has made my work so much better.

To Kate, I would like to say, thanks for waiting. Writing this thesis has been a long and difficult process – and finally I can look you in the eye and tell you “Yes, I am done my thesis!!”

As my zookeeping partner in all of our wonderful adventures together, you have been with me for so many years and now we won’t have this thesis stand between us anymore. Instead, we can go on caring about each other and enjoying our lives in new ways.

A special thanks to those who donated their time and wonderfully eloquent words to me.

Without you all, especially a particular friend who helped jumpstart the recruitment process, this study would never have been so rich and fruitful. As anonymous people, I want to thank you for your thoughtfulness, your passion, and your drive to play live music. I hope you see that your words are the ones that make up this thesis and that I have done justice to them.

Finally, I would like to give a nod to a graduate student from the sociology department who has shared my interest in cultural studies, Nazario Robles-Bastida. Through our own little drinking club, we managed to talk about Bourdieu, art theories, the consumption of culture, aesthetic judgement, and music snobbery in both profound and frivolous ways, and we even deliberately chose to forget about school work when we wanted to. To you Nazario, I say salud!

iii Table of Contents

ABSTRACT ...... II

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... III

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... IV

LIST OF TABLES ...... VI

CHAPTER 1: THE WORK OF MUSICIANS AS A SOCIOLOGICAL FIELD OF INQUIRY ...... 1

CHAPTER 2: STUDYING MUSICIANS - THE RESEARCH CONTEXT ...... 9 2.1. The Work and Lives of Musicians ...... 9 2.1.1. Sociological research methods for studying musicians ...... 9 2.1.2. Musician labour markets ...... 11 2.1.3. Social capital and musicians ...... 14 2.1.4. Why do musicians play? ...... 16 2.1.5. Making music ...... 17 2.1.6. Music genres ...... 18 2.1.7. Musicians and gender ...... 21 2.2. The Context of Musicians’ Work ...... 24 2.3. The Sociology of Art: Becker and Bourdieu ...... 26 2.3.1. Art Worlds ...... 26 2.3.2. The Field of Cultural Production ...... 28 2.4. Relevance and Summary ...... 30 2.4.1. How does this all relate to musicians? ...... 30 2.4.2. Summary ...... 32

CHAPTER 3: SETTING THE TONE – METHOD AND METHODOLOGY ...... 34 3.1. Methodological Influences ...... 34 3.1.1. Art Worlds ...... 35 3.1.2. The Field of Cultural Production ...... 39 3.1.3. Summing up Becker and Bourdieu ...... 41 3.2. The Research ...... 43 3.2.1. Recruitment ...... 43 3.2.2. Interviews and analysis ...... 49 3.2.3. Summary ...... 55

CHAPTER 4: WHAT DOES A GIG MUSICIAN DO? ...... 56 4.1. Music Work and the Calgary Gig Market ...... 57 4.1.1. What is gig work in Calgary? ...... 57 4.1.2. Music genres and gig work ...... 61 4.1.3. Summary ...... 72 4.2. Supporting the Music ...... 73 4.2.1. Non-music work ...... 74 iv 4.2.2. Music related work ...... 75 4.2.3. Merchandising ...... 78 4.2.4. Grants and awards ...... 80 4.2.5. Summarizing non-gig work ...... 81 4.3. The Seasonal Market of Gig Musicians ...... 82 4.4. Managing Poverty ...... 87 4.4.1. Strategies for making ends meet ...... 87 4.4.2. Reframing systemic poverty ...... 90 4.5. Summarizing What Musicians Do ...... 92

CHAPTER 5: THE COMMUNITY OF MUSICIANS ...... 94 5.1. The Strategic Selection of Activities ...... 94 5.2. Orientations Towards Gig Pay ...... 98 5.3. Musicians in a Social World ...... 101 5.3.1. Collaborating in the community and interacting with others ...... 104 5.3.2. Networking as positioning ...... 106 5.3.3. Networking as an ongoing activity ...... 108 5.3.4. Networks, hustling, and DIY self-promotion ...... 111 5.3.5. Networks and merchandising ...... 121 5.3.6. Networks of labour ...... 123 5.4. Gearing into the Calgary Gig Market ...... 126 5.5. Concluding: How Do Musicians Keep Going? ...... 130

CHAPTER 6: CONCLUDING MUSICIAN WORK ...... 132 6.1. Becker, Bourdieu and the Sociology of Art ...... 136 6.2. The Sociology of Music Work ...... 137 6.2.1. How musicians keep going ...... 138 6.2.2. Musicians as entrepreneurs ...... 139 6.3. Music Genre Cultural Studies ...... 140 6.4. Research Reflections ...... 141 6.5. Returning to Gig Musicians ...... 143

REFERENCES ...... 147

APPENDIX A: RECRUITMENT POSTER ...... 153

APPENDIX B: THE MUSICIANS ...... 154

APPENDIX C: MUSICIAN INTERVIEW GUIDE...... 162

v List of Tables

Table 1: Initial View of Interview Participants...... 48

Chapter 1: The Work of Musicians as a Sociological Field of Inquiry

Gig musicians are performers who perform in local venues for pay, most often in the form of cash.

A gig, a term coined in the early twentieth century, is a form of musical engagement where performers are employed to play a set of songs for a certain period of time at a particular location.

Most often, these are clubs, coffee shops, bars, pubs, restaurants, weddings, studios, orchestra concerts and festivals, and may last up to three hours in length. The pay for gigs varies drastically, and typically the most paid are orchestra and festival gigs, and the least are bar gigs. Gig musicians are not rich people, and these musicians are not seen by many people as professionals who do a multitude of tasks in order to make ends meet. Instead, non-musicians focus on their music, their background, their inspirations, their favourite pieces, and the pleasing aspects of life1, and not on how musicians make it possible for themselves to be gig professionals.

The work of musicians is not incidental, and it requires much more than musical proficiency. Musicians do not have to be full-time professionals in order to do musician work, but what emerges from “doing” the work of a musician in order to make a living is a complex mosaic of activities which vary from one individual to another. Consider Stephen Avenue in downtown

Calgary. This pedestrian commerce street, which includes clothing outlets, restaurants, food trucks, and bars, has recently been turned into a busking street with the implementation of new city-sponsored instrument amplification plug-in sites which are placed at regular intervals. These moves were enacted in order to combat the rise of homeless populations that used Stephen Avenue as a spot to hang out and walk through, by attracting new commerce to the street. However, it is

1 For an example of a common style of interview with a musician, see http://jonmccaslinjazzdrummer.blogspot.ca/2012/12/the-calgary-scene-gareth-bane.html. In this interview, part of the talk is geared towards trendy topics such as their favourite eats, their favourite beer, and their favourite coffee, in addition to music related topics. 1

now easier for a musician to busk on Stephen Avenue because of the ability to be heard through these amplification sites. As such, this street offers some gig opportunities to musicians and as such the people who busk there (an activity that I consider as a gig) organize a part of their lives around making money performing in Stephen Avenue. Musicians need to travel there, set up shop there, play there, and find the right peak times to do so in order to maximize busking revenue.

While it may be true that musicians are particularly brilliant for composing and performing in certain manners, this study does not focus such aspects of music work that are so prevalent in popular discourse. Take this excerpt from an interview2 with a professional musician which was posted on a music blog:

4) What sort of things are you practicing or developing musically these days? I’m trying to really focus on vernacular so I’ve been transcribing a lot. Right now I’m working on Nick Brignola’s solo on Billie’s Bounce off of Baritone Madness. I’m also taking several different lines and concepts through 12 keys using the blues as a framework. I’m also working on “Odd Meter Etudes for All Instruments” by Everett Gates and trying to do as much writing as possible.

There is clearly much do be said about the many aspects to music for the interviewee. However, instead of focusing on those particular aspects I am drawn towards all of the unspoken and background activities that this particular musician does in order to be in the position to say that he is playing this, practicing that, working on this, and writing that.

As the work of musicians is not incidental and revolves around where they play, if conceptualized uniquely as paid labour, this labelling does not aptly help us understand musician work. It may be paid in the instance of a gig, but most activities that musicians do outside of performing for pay are not paid, yet they are not hobbies either, as musicians need these activities

2 http://jonmccaslinjazzdrummer.blogspot.ca/2012/12/the-calgary-scene-gareth-bane.html 2

to be done in order for the gig to take place. One scholar in particular has been interested in the lives of professional artists by looking at art as a product which is collectively achieved, and not as the product of a single artist (Becker 2008 [1982]). Becker calls the world in which artists live art worlds, and debunks traditional notions of cultural producers by systematically showing how artists need a number of enabling conditions to be met in order for art to be produced. These conditions rely on the collaboration of others and the community in which artists live. Art creating conditions may be as simple as having someone make saxophones so that saxophonists have instruments to perform with, but it also involves the ways in which art is consumed at venues. For example, for most gigs to take place, there needs to be a venue which supplies chairs, tables, drinks, food, speakers, a stage, etc. As such, musicians are involved in a number of activities which enable them to be performers both individually, such as performing live, and collectively, such as being hired by an organized festival to play for two days. All of these series of activities and practices which are connected to one another I call musician work.

As physical spaces for the practices of musicians, cities are responsible for shaping their experiences. Cities are the hubs for gig markets, and musicians experience these cities in different ways. Take New York City, a city known for the different aspects of its arts culture, such as its world renowned orchestra, its avant-garde art displays, and its jazz community. Musicians living in New York draw upon the different venues which have live music, and these venues all have their own characteristics. Many of them are famous and draw large audiences, but there also exists a multitude of less known venues in which to perform. Contrary to that, living in a small town as a musician is a very different experience. There may be a couple venues that offer live music, but two venues are not enough for musicians to make a living in, and so musicians have to find other areas to perform in and this may include touring in other towns.

My interest in the work of musicians emerges from a desire to tease out all of the different activities that musicians do as professionals. Two broad research questions are involved in this.

The first is how do gig musicians perform, do, and manage their ongoing practical and professional activities? The second is, what is involved in the process of being able to make music?

To put these two questions simply, I am interested in what musicians do to “make it happen,” with the understanding that what they do is a complex series of ongoing activities that are frequently unpaid and involve others to different degrees. In treating what they do as conditions that must be met in order to produce art, and bringing sustained analytical attention to their professional lives, my goal is to reveal the intricacies of musician work for working musicians, and show how it is more than just performing and practicing. Specifically, I argue that gig musicians are only able to do the work that they do by supporting themselves in a variety of ways and interacting with their community in very nuanced ways.

I use the term musician work to refer to everything that gig musicians do in order to have this kind of music career. Musician work includes more than practice, writing, and playing. To make these typical musician activities possible, musicians are engaged in a multitude of tasks, and these enabling tasks are what I focus on. I am not the only one interested in this type of focus on musicians. In my experience, musicians and people from non-profit musician organizations are well aware that the actions of musicians are not trivial and have a particular purpose behind them; they know musicians do more than sit in a basement for eight hours a day and practice. For the sixteen people whom I interviewed for this study, doing musician work was significant precisely because it allowed them to do what they loved and cherished – playing, writing, and thinking about music – and they wanted to talk about their lives. For them economic hardship was part of the package, and people treating them in ways which undervalued their work was another part of it.

For these people this study meant something, as it was a way for them to reach out to a community and talk about how vital their work is for them.

In academia, the lives of musicians have been an ongoing topic of sociological inquiry since the legitimization of music as a sociological topic in the early twentieth century (Turley

2001). Since then, the sociology of music has sparked an even larger influx of scholarship in the twenty-first century (Roy and Dowd 2010). However, to my knowledge, professional musicians in Canadian cities have not been frequently studied in social scientific scholarship. With the exception of a few studies such as that of Partington (1995), limited scholarship exists on the experiences of musicians outside of American and European cities. Not only that, but even though scholarship on musicians in Canadian cities has been published, I have yet to come across empirical studies which examine the work of Canadian gig musicians in a sociological manner.

This gap needs to be addressed.

This study is focused on musicians living in Calgary. As a particular physical space for

“doing” musician work, Calgary provides an interesting site in which to study how musicians are able to, for lack of a better phrase, make it happen. Calgary is a city with a particularly young working population compared to other municipalities. It has a population of approximately

1,200,0003, making it the largest city in the province of Alberta, and offers a high income for many of these workers. This demographic pattern is due to the thriving corporate oil and gas economy that is centered in the city. Importantly, within this wealthy corporate city, a pervasive work ethos centered around financial productivity remains, and this has bearing upon the ways in which

3 For more demographic information on Calgary, see the 2015 Calgary census (http://www.calgary.ca/CA/city-clerks/Documents/Election-and-information- services/Census2015/Final%202015%20Census%20Results%20book.pdf). 5

individuals, and especially workers in Calgary experience the city. Therefore, Calgary’s unique labour market make it an interesting location for studying musician work.

Since the 1970s, workplace shifts have contributed to increasing amounts of temporary and non-standard forms of employment (Menger 1999), and these temporary positions are the jobs that musicians make use of in order to make ends meet. In Western nations, gig musician life may not have significantly changed since the twentieth-century, but stable employment options that musicians have been able to draw upon to support themselves are slowly being replaced by temporary kinds of work. Although a shift is taking place in the types of work available, opportunities for employment outside of the field of music are typically in abundance in Calgary4, and the city offers a higher-than-average pay for many of those who have these jobs because of the wealth drawn from oil and gas. Because of the amount of money in Calgary, this wealth transfers into well-paid gig opportunities for many musicians, and importantly, as musicians will almost certainly have other jobs in order to make ends meet (Banks 2012; Clawson 1999; Coulson

2012; Menger 1999; Thomson 2013; Umney and Kretsos 2014), the higher-than-average pay of non-music jobs also offers a unique context in which to explore the work of musicians. By exploring the working lives of cultural workers in a contemporary Canadian urban setting, I offer an account of how we can reframe musician work as a survival mechanism, and not simply as the performance of art.

My interest in studying the practicalities of musician work stems from my own passion for music. As a serious electric guitar hobbyist who has performed live a handful of times, I came into

4 This may not hold true today due to the current economic recession which has affected tens of thousands of workers. Due to the poorer economic conditions that have been widespread in Calgary since the summer of 2015, numerous oil and service related jobs have been cut. 6

music during my classically trained upbringing on the flute and piano, but I became obsessed with it during my early adult years when I started listening to heavy metal and learning to play this music on the guitar. Since then, I have transferred my passion for music into this study, specifically by learning more about people who do the work of gig musicians. As a musician, I knew a few music teachers who gigged regularly and have had a multitude of insightful interactions with them as a student, but I was not aware of the vast plethora of skills that musicians harness in order to make ends meet. What I did know was that these people experienced periods of financial insecurity, and that they were in a profession that I could never do myself because of those particular economic conditions. As a person who was passionate about music, I became interested in this precisely because this line of work allowed gig musicians to do what they loved, despite being in positions where having little to no disposable income is normal.

In the chapters which follow, I set up a framework for studying the actions of musicians in Calgary and offer an account of the multitude of activities that they do, many of which are not directly related to the performance of music. Chapter two lays out the theoretical and empirical foundations on which this study is situated, and delivers an overview of the ways in which musicians have been studied in past scholarship. In particular, I draw out key ways in which previous scholars have contributed to the shaping of this study, and I offer an interpretation of my place within this literature by outlining my approach to the study of musicians. Chapter three sets out the empirical and theoretical approaches that have informed my exploration of musician work as a distinct practice which warrants sociological attention. I draw from Howard S. Becker and

Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of art perspectives, and numerous empirical studies in order to explore the many professional aspects of gig musician life. By doing so, I offer a particular methodology which focuses on the work of musicians.

In chapters four and five, I present my empirical analyses of sixteen interviews with gig musicians who “do” musician work in Calgary. I make visible what musicians do, where they work, and what is particularly important as a shaping factor of their lives. This involves presenting a comprehensive account of the gig market in which gig musicians participate, as well as a vivid description of the various activities that they do, some of which are not directly related to performance work. In these chapters, I weave my account entirely around an exploration of the multitude of activities that musicians in Calgary talked about in order to make ends meet. Finally, after discussing the setup of this study, providing a framework for the actions of gig musicians, and delivering in-depth accounts of what participants do in Calgary as gig musicians, in chapter six I return to the large view, and re-introduce the arguments I began with, as well as the relevance of this study for academics and gig musicians.

Chapter 2: Studying Musicians - The Research Context

My goal in this chapter is to lay out the theoretical and empirical foundations of this study by surveying existing literature that is relevant to the experiences of performing musicians. My research draws on a number of theoretical and empirical works. Specifically, I use Howard S.

Becker’s seminal piece Art Worlds (2008) and Pierre Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production

(1993 [1987]) to theoretically inform and justify my methodological choices, but the existing empirical literature on musicians also offers a wide scope of research projects and I situate myself within the intersection of all of these studies.

2.1. The Work and Lives of Musicians

This study is located in relation to a number of previously completed empirical studies of musicians. In this section, I draw out past scholarship by using select examples of literature which exemplify how musicians have been studied. By doing so, I endeavour to link these examples to my analytical approach. Although certain studies are not explicitly related to the ongoing practical and professional of musicians, I present these studies in themes in order to contextualize this study within a broader series of scholarship on musicians and artists.

2.1.1. Sociological research methods for studying musicians

A core division in the sociological research on musicians revolves around the methodologies used to study the lives of such performing artists. Quantitative and qualitative methodologies have been used to study the lives of musicians in a variety of ways. Survey, observational, and interview data are especially popular amongst researchers. Seeking to create large-scale generalizations, as seen with Pinheiro and Dowd’s (2009) hypotheses of social capital and genre, quantitative researchers have primarily utilized survey data, respondent driven forms of sampling and regression analysis

(Dowd and Pinheiro 2013; Heckathorn and Jeffri 2001; Jeffri 2003; Pinheiro and Dowd 2009;

Zwaan et al. 2009). One frequently used dataset, compiled by the Research Center for Arts and

Culture (RCAC) at Columbia University Teachers College (used by Dowd and Pinheiro 2013;

Jeffri 2003; Pinheiro and Dowd 2009), was created in the early twenty-first century. Composed of

572 jazz musician respondents in the large American metropolitan centers of New York, New

Orleans, Detroit, and San Francisco, this survey sought to question an extensive number of jazz musicians, as one of the goals was to estimate the size of jazz player populations in these cities.

Questions pertaining to music practice, employment, income, and networks were also included.

In contrast to this positivist research that sought out generalizable musician facts, interviews and observations have been the two primary methods of qualitative research in previous scholarship on musicians and music scenes. These methods were used in order to create nuanced accounts from the standpoint of participants as well as descriptions of the practices in the world of music (Banks 2012; Clawson 1999; Coulson 2012; Grazian 2004; Sargent 2009a; Sargent 2009b;

Umney and Kretsos 2014; Umney and Kretsos 2015). For example, in a study of the Chicago blues club scene, Grazian (2004) utilized observations in blues clubs and interviews with key informants in order to argue that blues performances in popular Chicago clubs are not composed solely of performances where one band comes in, plays, and then leaves. Instead, blues club performances require a staged and coordinated activity which is enabled by complex interactions between club owners/managers, musicians, music producers, and club clientele. On the other hand, in her study of bands with women bass players, Clawson (1999) interviewed nineteen women musicians, and these women were recruited through a large Boston festival where both small and colloquial names perform. Through the accounts of women in a masculine dominated rock scene, Clawson argues

that these women challenge notions of what a rock music player on stage should be like, while they are simultaneously wedged within hegemonic discourses of appropriate femininity.

Sociological mixed methods studies on musicians (Schmutz and Faupel 2010; Thomson

2013; Wilks 2013) do exist, although they are rarer than solely quantitative or qualitative sociological musician studies. Rather than solely making claims about generalizable social facts and in-depth descriptions from the standpoint of participants about music world practices, these studies seek to bridge the two types of data by complementing the two with one another. Stemming from a dataset created by The Future of Music Coalition, a collection of extensive interviews with

80 professional American musician participants as well as survey results from over 5300 professional US-based musician participants, Thomson (2013) argues that American musicians in the post-2010 era are shifting towards holding numerous musician roles and income sources because of professional and financial barriers. With the vast majority of participants holding 2-4 roles and income sources, the author demonstrates that the reality of a contemporary musician involves maintaining more than one role and income source in order to make ends meet. Thomson uses survey data to initially sift out the types of roles, income sources, and career characteristics that musicians generally have, and then uses interviews with participants in order to flesh out the nuances of these different areas.

2.1.2. Musician labour markets

The lives of musicians have been an ongoing topic of sociological inquiry since the early twentieth century (Turley 2001). A significant amount of this sociological inquiry on musicians has been focused on the labour markets that musicians are immersed in. In particular, certain sociologists have geared themselves towards studying how musicians engage in practices that change with shifts in labour markets (Banks 2012; Coulson 2012; Martin 2006; Menger 1999; Sargent 2009a;

Umney and Kretsos 2014; Umney and Kretsos 2015). Most importantly then, what matters to these sociologists are what the conditions of musician labour markets are, and if any shifts have taken place, how these shifts affect musicians. In this particular school of inquiry, in a seminal article

“Artistic Labor Markets and Careers” Pierre-Michel Menger (1999) argues that in Europe and the

United States there has been a large influx of artists since the 1970s, despite decreasing opportunities for standard and non-precarious forms of paid music work. Different explanations of the root of this pattern exist, such as Lingo and Tepper’s (2013) argument that such an oversupply of artists is due to a lack of barriers to entry in addition to the perpetual underestimation of the risks involved, or Gibson and Klocker’s (2005) argument that the abundance of artists is due to the discursive shift in neoliberal societies which masks how current models of entrepreneurship contribute to a glorification of creative and artistic work. Despite these explanatory differences,

Menger (1999) argument that musician labour markets encourage short-term contractual, sub- contractual, and non-contractual forms of musical employment is not refuted. As such, precariousness, arising out of these work forms, becomes the norm and artists must learn to operate as entrepreneurs of their own work, each acting as a sort of contract labourer.

Musician labour markets provide opportunities for musicians to generate income through a variety of work types and these labour markets have certain characteristics. Some government organizations have made information available related to the labour market of musicians. For example, the Alberta Government’s Alberta Learning and Information Service (ALIS) aptly portrays the fiscal position of professional musicians. As so-called self-entrepreneurs,

“[m]aintaining other sources of income until businesses are well established […] is recommended”

(ALIS 2014a) as “incomes can fluctuate dramatically depending on how much work is available”

(ALIS 2014b). Furthermore, when referring to specific types of musicians such as singers, the

Alberta Learning and Information Services notes that “singers often have other jobs as well” (ALIS

2016b) and “many musicians work at other part time jobs to supplement their income” (ALIS

2016a). Despite this discouraging government perspective, people choose and continue to work as musicians.

Given that working as a musician means that musicians have to supplement their income through other means, the precarity of music work is what musicians must manage (Umney and

Krestos 2014; Umney and Kretsos 2015). Musicians have to manage precarity because the gig work opportunities available in the job market are short-term in nature and are often poorly paid.

In this context, these cultural workers cultivate their personal portfolios by working numerous informal and formal jobs over time, and may rely on other steady income streams to sustain their musician activities (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2010, Umney and Kretsos 2015). This simultaneous cultivation of music portfolios and maintenance of other income forms is a part of what Umney and Kretsos (2015) call managing precarity.

Non-performance income streams for musicians have drawn a particular amount of attention from social scientists. One of the main conclusions from such research is that musicians will hold other jobs. In a context where the increasing amount of short-term music work requires the management of precarity, holding a secondary form of employment to support musical careers has become the experience of (almost) every performing musician who is not an internationally recognized star (Banks 2012; Clawson 1999; Coulson 2012; Groce and Cooper 1990; Menger

1999; Sargent 2009a; Thomson 2013). Even seventeen years ago in 1999, a time recognized to not yet have been significantly changed due advances in the internet, such as the way music is distributed (Sargent 2009a; Thomson 2013), Clawson (1999) notes that in her sample of American institutionalized music festival players who held record contracts, regularly performed, and had

some form of (inter)national renown, performers worked a variety of day jobs such as music teacher, courier, or studio engineer. Studies of musicians routinely demonstrate that another form of work or source of income supports a musician’s career.

2.1.3. Social capital and musicians

As a subject of analytic focus in the sociology of music, social capital has remained a vibrant topic of inquiry since Howard Becker’s (1963) discussion of “connections” as a vital source of employment for jazz musicians. To be clear, in earlier works Becker never used the term social capital, but rather he used terms like connections and collective activities to refer to nuanced ties between people in a social space who are involved in making music. The term social capital has been borrowed from Bourdieusian scholarship (Bourdieu 1986). It is used as the sum of resources accrued from a durable network of relationships and acquaintances, and applied to newer studies because of the utility of the analytic concept. This application has resulted in a number of studies who engage directly with musician social capital (Dowd and Pinheiro 2013; Sargent 2009a,

Pinheiro and Dowd 2009; Zwaan et al. 2009). For everyday professional musicians, this resource has received a particular amount of attention because of the ways it enables musicians to gain employment.

Interestingly, even at a quick glance, there exists a divide in the musician social capital research in the use of sociological research methods. Proponents of quantitative surveys operationalize social capital through the amount of acquaintances, close ties, and support networks that musicians have, in order to better understand how social capital affects musicians. As Zwaan, ter Bogt, and Raaijmakers (2009) argue in the case of 340 Dutch pop musicians, individually oriented attributes such as social networks and peer networks have a positive impact on the career success of gigging pop musicians. Similarly, using the RCAC survey of jazz musicians in four

American metropolitan cities, Pinheiro and Dowd (2009) argue that the amount of informal and formal connections among jazz players has a positive effect on the financial success of these musicians.

Building on this field of research in a qualitative manner, interview research has shed light on many aspects of the concept of social capital by focusing on how individuals mobilize this resource and build it over time. For example, Sargent (2009a) argues that for the musicians she interviewed in Richmond and Charlottetown, Virginia, social capital (a resource comprised of social ties which gives access to resources and supports) is significant for her musician participants precisely because they have a need to directly talk to and engage with audiences on and off-line in order to gain “elusive financial rewards.” (2009:472,475-476). Similarly, Coulson (2012) remarks that many of her interview participants in England deemed networks to be the primary form of recruitment for music performance work and peripheral music work such as organizing gigs, teaching, recording, managing, and small-scale publishing. Whereas surveys may operationalize social capital by looking at how much social capital affects individual musicians on a population level, it remains evident that notions of being a musician, especially in terms of how networks unfold for specific people, can be greatly enriched by holding a dialogue with those who are at the heart of this analytic concept.

Interestingly, modern technologies play a crucial role in the networks of musicians (Sargent

2009a; Thomson 2013). Sargent (2009a) adeptly portrays the recurring scenario in which musicians who perform regularly for wages utilize an increasing amount of on-line mediums in order to create and maintain networks, in addition to fostering these networks through face-to-face interactions. Based on interviews with urban American musicians in Virginia, she suggests that being a local performing musician pushes musicians to take on networking activities as a form of

second job. What remains important in her account of these gigging musicians is the bridging role that these on-line mediums and technologies of communication have when musicians try to create ties with new and current audiences. By focusing on the desire to establish new audiences and maintain current audiences through the creation and maintenance of websites such as band webpages, Facebook pages, and song sharing websites (Sargent 2009a), or the number of local musicians known by name (Pinheiro and Dowd 2009), this field of inquiry directs our attention towards social capital as an analytic concept with practical empirical implications.

2.1.4. Why do musicians play?

Under the assumption that there exists a reason for engaging in this line of work, grasping the motivations behind why musicians stay in their artistic occupation has produced a significant amount of scholarship. Whether committed in the traditions of career psychology (Partington

1995; Zwaan et al. 2009) or through a sociological framework (Banks 2012), significant effort has been placed into finding out why people choose to continue to work as musicians. For example,

Zwaan et al. (2009) examine some of the personality traits of 340 professional Dutch pop musicians and attempt to correlate these traits to career success. In a completely different manner,

Banks (2012) conducts interviews with 40 Greater London Area black and minority jazz musicians to tease out motivations for playing jazz music professionally as an ethnic minority in England.

Other social scientists such as political economists Gibson and Klocker (2005) tie the overabundance of low paid artists to discourses which glorify the freedom of entrepreneurship.

Writing as part of the scholarship on the creative industries, Lingo and Tepper (2013) maintain that the continual reinforcement of an artistic identity, an identity used to continuously make sense of their own economic conditions, their successes, and their failures, is achieved through their own social support networks, their artistic creativity and a series of part-time jobs.

2.1.5. Making music

A trend in research on musicians has been to utilize psychological and biological frameworks of analysis by focusing on the processes and effects of making music. To name a few of these topics, research focuses have involved psychological traits and career success of musicians (Zwaan et al.

2009), surgery for musician movement impairments such as hand dystonia (Charness 2013;

Rozanski, Rehfuess, Botzel, and Nowak 2015), musculoskeletal pain (Leaver, Harris, and Palmer

2011), brain structures among musicians (Gaser and Schlaug 2003; Rosenkranz, Williamon, and

Rothwell 2007), performance anxiety (Lockwood 1989), and making music in the symphony orchestra (Partington 1995).

In sociological traditions, making music has been studied by analyzing the motivations and the social contexts of performers. Some sociologists have focused on the motivations for making music in a low-paid music career. For Banks (2012), jazz is a unique social practice as it is based on distinct rewards, goods, and values, which contribute to the endurance of jazz as an ongoing cultural activity. Other sociologists have studied how making music is profoundly tied to substance use by focusing on the specifics of musician circles. In a manner set out by sociological deviance studies, a tradition launched by Becker’s (1953; 1963) approach to understanding marijuana user socialization processes and marijuana smoking jazz musicians, scholars have published deviance studies to demonstrate the social intricacies of substance use for musicians (Bennet 1980; Groce and Cooper 1991; Gronnerod 2002). For example, in Gronnerod’s (2002) study of Finnish amateur rock bands at rehearsals and performances, the alcohol and cannabis use of participants was portrayed by rock band musicians as an inevitable activity, as it helped “set up” the mood for the right kind of music. Even though not all rock musicians partook in these drugs, rock musicians treated substance use as something that just happens in rock.

2.1.6. Music genres

As a subfield of study, music genre scholarship has demonstrated how utilizing genre as an analytic tool may contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the practices within a music genre’s realm.

In this series of scholarship, genres boundaries are not specifically the focus of inquiry (such as what makes jazz jazz). For these researchers the genre a musician performs is considered because of the relevance that it has on the audiences and players of such music. Previous scholarship on music genres demonstrates that participants embedded within certain music genres draw upon the stocks of knowledge and the practices available within the discursive realm of a genre (Banks

2012; Byrd 2014; Christian 1987; Clawson 1999; Mullaney 2007; Umney and Kretsos 2015;

Walser 1993; Wilks 2013; Zwaan et al. 2009).

For the most part, sociological genre scholars are reluctant to concretely define genres and boundaries, and they focus on the specifics of how genres are used by insiders. For example, during the recruitment phase of Zwaan et al.’s (2009) survey of Dutch pop musicians, as long as survey respondents identified themselves as being a pop musician, the authors included them in the sample. Similarly, in Clawson’s (1999) interview study of women in Alternative Rock music, she sifted through and identified musicians of this genre by recruiting at a festival which was known to play that specific kind of rock music. As she says, “the Rumble [Music Festival], provided a systematic selection of working musicians, […] operating within the same set of commercial and artistic structures” (1999:197). For Clawson, genre was part of a set of commercial and artistic structures, and participants talked about what it was like being a woman within these particular structures.

Contrary to this series of studies which explore how participants experience genres, Lena and Peterson (2008) focus on music genre formation as a group process rather than on how people

experience semi-formally defined genres. For Lena and Peterson, the focus is on genre as being shaped by people rather than on genre as the shaper of people’s experiences. Interestingly, the authors argue that this study is done precisely in order to address the lack of consensus in defining genres in sociology. Instead of defining concrete genres however, in their content analysis the authors identify “the recurrent processes of development and change across musics” (2008:697) in order to document the origins (such as countercultural origins and industry origins) and trajectories (such as being appropriated by industry interests) of specific music genres in the United

States. Despite this unique scholarly thrust, the majority of social scientific music genre studies use semi-formal researcher guidelines as well as the word of participants in order to study what it is like being in a music genre.

In his book, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal, Robert

Walser (1993) discusses three particularly important aspects of music in heavy metal: lyrical meanings, musical sequences, and the visual images that give rise to this genre of music.

Performing this genre of music is argued by Walser to be a hypermasculine performance as it draws upon misogynist vocabularies, grim tonal sequences, and accelerated musical beats.

Furthermore, the exclusion of women altogether as legitimate participants in this field is a practice that is profoundly related to this metallic construction of masculinity. Walser argues that in this specific world, women rarely appear on stage, and if they do they are routinely portrayed as sexual and mythical objects, such as valkyries, angels and succubi. He frequently argues that as participants in the heavy metal world, musicians draw upon the stocks of knowledge and the practices available in the discursive realm of this genre in order to legitimate themselves as performers.

Following this type of music and gender studies, Jamie Mullaney (2007) demonstrates the utility of contextualizing the accounts of straight edge hardcore music genre participants within broader cultural gendered frames of reference. In her interview and observational study of forty- seven women in this genre, she notes that women in this subculture never reach the degree and depth of participation that men do. These findings echo what Walser (1993) argues in heavy metal scenes. However, while Mullaney (2007) demonstrates that there are unique intricacies and tactics of legitimation (what she calls “going rates”, “doings” and “not doings”) within the genre itself, she routinely shows how there are broad similarities between hardcore straight edge participants and non-hardcore straight edge people in how they delegitimize the position of women. For

Mullaney, participants in this subculture do not only use their own subcultural frames of reference, as the talk and experiences of women can be placed within a larger cultural discourse of gender.

Thus, while the lives of hardcore straight edge music insiders certainly have their own unique ways of making sense of their lives, much of the talk and actions of these insiders are done through

Western gendered frames of reference.

Numerous scholars support the argument that people in particular genres have idiosyncratic ways of organizing themselves. For example, according to a survey of Dutch musicians, local pop performers in the Netherlands tend to restrict their notions of success to financial gain (Zwaan et al. 2009). Given the commercialized tendencies of pop music, this supports the notion that genres of music offer musicians (and listeners) certain ways in which to organize everyday life. In opposition to this form of success, both qualitative and quantitative studies suggest that jazz players are among the least paid of all music performers, but internal reward systems and notions of personal satisfaction systematically encourage them to persevere and perform jazz (Banks 2012;

Jeffri 2003). According to these cases, acting within the confines of a particular genre has serious implications for what it is musicians do and how they navigate their everyday lives.

Music genres are also used to challenge social and economic conditions. Outside of the confines of North America and Europe, Regev (1997) has also discussed the ways in which MTV’s popular music genre was not assimilated in Israel during the 1990s. Through various groups of producers, performers and fans, Israelis legitimized their own native music by pushing their local music in that era onto the air instead of accepting the forced entrée of British and American popular music and its conjoint consumer culture. In Charlotte, North Carolina, Byrd (2014) interviewed 25

Latino immigrant musicians and conducted participant observation with these musicians for two years in their music sites. Byrd analyses the ways in which Latino immigrant music performers challenge oppressive political conditions of exclusion by using music genre position, struggle, and legitimate themselves as political actors. Through the contestation of political, social and economic conditions with music, Byrd argues that Latino musicians in North Carolina embed this music genre into politics, never separating one from the other. In this type of scholarship, genres are treated not as separate analytical categories, but rather as fluid boundaries which are continuously contested and maintained.

2.1.7. Musicians and gender

In addition to music genres, empirical studies convincingly demonstrate the gendered dimensions of music worlds. The ways in which gender is continually enacted and reproduced in the world of music is key to sociologically examining gender and music. In conjunction with the findings of

Walser (1993) and Mullaney (2007), numerous authors argue that musicians are engaged in a highly gendered framework, and exhibit the hierarchical tendencies found in popular culture

(Clawson 1999; Groce and Cooper 1990; Roy and Dowd 2010; Sargent 2009b; Schippers 2000;

Schmutz and Faupel 2010). According to these scholars, the experiences and acts of musicians differ between women and men, especially as musicians are not in any position of prestige or wealth that may counteract these musical and cultural stratifications. Even at young ages there are gendered differences in musical experiences (Hallam, Rogers, and Creech 2008). According to

Hallam’s et al. (2008), in a survey of tens of thousands of English children enrolled in music between kindergarten ages and 19 years of age, children steer themselves towards particular instruments because of cultural notions of what girls and boys should play.

At the institutional level of analysis, in Schmutz and Faupel’s (2010) study of national music icons in American national and cultural discourse (musicians who arguably have positions to challenge barriers), the legitimation techniques for men routinely portray them as naturally legitimate participants in a music world. Women musicians included among the “greats”, are limited to certain types of legitimacy, such as being included because of their affiliations with iconic men, such as a famous masculine artist. For example, in regards to reviews of Carole King,

Schmutz and Faupel write “the reviewer also suggests that her success is partly due to the influence of her friend and fellow artist, James Taylor” (2010:702). Furthermore, women are never perceived as challenging, they aren’t lauded as people who strain themselves, push boundaries, and shake the establishment. Rather, they are displayed in cultural discourse through gendered cultural schemas. According to the authors, in John Lennon’s case reviewers lauded his greatness because he “appropriately finished the sessions by shredding what was left of his vocal cords on two takes of ‘Twist and Shout’” (2010:703). Contrary to that, women artists rarely receive this kind of praise, rather, women’s emotional authenticity, their personal networks, and their professional networks are cited reasons for their inclusion amongst the great musicians.

These studies vividly display accounts in which gender is continually enacted and reproduced, and suggest looking at the gendered experiences of music performers and audiences.

As the musical world is one that remains profoundly gendered, of upmost importance is the issue that masculinity accomplishments are continuously reasserted at the expense of women (Clawson

1999; Groce and Cooper 1990; Mullaney 2007; Sargent 2009b; Schmutz and Faupel 2010; Walser

1993). Although the world of music certainly offers musicians a flexible public setting where norms of gender may be challenged, and a place where these norms are not always accepted unconditionally by participants (Clawson 1999; Groce and Copper 1990; Wald 1998), gender as a cultural schema with which to make sense of daily life remains at the forefront of this artistic domain.

At the individual level of analysis, the policing of instrument use and music roles are two contested realms based largely upon hegemonic notions of gender (Clawson 1999; Dunn and

Farnsworth 2012; Groce and Cooper 1990). In their study of 15 women from two southern United

States cities who performed in local rock bands, Groce and Cooper (1990) draw from interviews with these women in order to explore how band roles are fueled by masculine notions of legitimate and illegitimate players. In their study, participants talked about how they experienced stigmatization and backlash when taking on “unwomanly” roles such as asking to play the guitar for the band. Not only that, but participants frequently reported that they felt a daily push from audiences and from the men in their band to take on the singer role. For these woman, playing guitar, bass, or drums at a gig meant that they were doing the unexpected for audiences, as audiences expected a woman to sing. Similarly, for the women who played those instruments alongside masculine bandmates, they were in often positions where they were asked to accentuate their sexuality during performances, in addition to taking on more visible roles like singers.

Although it is difficult to fully ascertain the ways in which participants may experience issues of gendered policing, and doing gender on and off the stage, considering gender as an analytical framework for studying the lives of music world participants is uniquely informative.

Studies demonstrate that women and men experience different realities, as women are at a disadvantage compared to men in the music realm in terms of what is expected of them, how they are legitimized, and how they are talked to. Thus, gender remains a revelatory framework with which to explore the lives and work of musicians, as it is a medium utilized to justify particular positions and roles.

2.2. The Context of Musicians’ Work

Having outlined a review of the ways in which musicians have been studied in past scholarship, I will now discuss key literature that bears on the context in which the work of musicians takes place. Twentieth century urban scholarship has had a particular impact on the way that musicians experience the city. Specifically, the work of Richard Florida (2002) called The Rise of the

Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life started an urban revitalization movement that city planners have taken up in droves (Peck 2005). What this means for musicians is that “creative city strategies” (2005:764) are put into place by city planners in order to attract the creative class5 and revitalize urban hubs. Due to their disposable income, their modern technological know-how, and their willingness to foster inclusive environments, creative workers are sought after by city planners (2005). This urban planning

5 The creative class consists primarily of well-paid contract workers with few attachments and high disposable income. They are broadly defined as people who use their “creativity” to make a living, as contract intellectual labourers. For an insightful discussion on who is a part of the creative class, see Peck (2005). 24

context is important to consider because it helps us understand policies in which musician work takes shape. What these creative city strategies do for musicians is offer opportunities for paid performance work, as these strategies take the form of city-sponsored festivals or city-approved spaces for busking.

In this urban context, the cultural experiences of residents are framed as the target of public investment by city planners and because of these policies some forms of gig employment may arise. However, as these strategies are designed for the neoliberal landscape which favours short- forms of contractual employment over expensive long term employment, musicians are simply a resource and workers for this type of creative-city development. They are looking for the next gig, and are not part of the creative class that urban planners seek to attrack and dote upon. However, by doing the work of musicians, musicians generate artistic pieces that systematically contribute to a regional economy’s vitality by providing a flow of goods and services that are consumed locally, and also occasionally exported (Markusen and Schrock 2006). As such, one manner in which this cultural shift in city and regional policy affects musicians is by offering some musicians increased opportunities to gig.

Problematically, as Banks and Hesmondhagh (2009) note, creative industries policy encourages competition between workers for the available work opportunities by promoting entrepreneurial skills. This type of policy in turn “takes little account of the particular and risky nature of the labour market for cultural workers such as musicians” (Coulson 2012:260). As

Coulson further writes:

The establishment of the ‘creative industries’ and their subsequent link to the ‘creative economy’ has done a disservice to musicians and perhaps others with their own distinctive work practices in what used to be termed ‘the arts’. They have been subsumed into a discourse that gives value to an innovation and business-focused agenda (2012:260).

What Coulson problematizes is that contrary to the belief that detachment from standard employment types allows musicians to contest conventions, they are not able to do so. Just like other workers, musicians also draw upon the value systems of contemporary capitalism. Even though musicians certainly have a fair amount of idiosyncrasies (Coulson 2012; Lingo and Tepper

2013; Thomson 2013; Umney and Kretsos 2014; Umney and Kretsos 2015), the uniqueness of musician work may not allow musicians to be sufficiently countercultural to the degree that they can seriously challenge the capitalist hegemony. Unlike accounts such as those of Byrd (2014),

Dunn and Farnsworth (2012), and Regev (1997), music in the urban setting is not necessarily a site for social change.

2.3. The Sociology of Art: Becker and Bourdieu

2.3.1. Art Worlds

In the sociology of art, previous art sociologists have supported functionalist readings of art, which presuppose that activities must occur in a particular way for the art social system to survive (Becker

2008:6) and structuralist readings of art, which maintain that art works and art producers are results of art systems, that these art systems are not shaped by individual products and producers, and that individual pieces (products and people) can be studied without referring to the overall context

(Bourdieu 1984:178). Moving away from these inquiries, in his seminal work Art Worlds (2008)

Howard S. Becker proposed to conceptualize art as a jointly created product. He positions the traditional artist (a writer, a painter, a musician) as a person who is a part of the chain of art production, and also as someone who has the privilege of being labeled as the sole producer of art in contemporary western discourse. Art Worlds had a tremendous impact on the sociology of art, and the sociology of culture in general. As Cluley (2012:202) writes:

[Becker’s] analyses move beyond the individual artist to show us the interacting network of people who work around them, providing them with materials, teaching them to turn those materials into art, distributing that art for them, and, eventually, consuming it. Becker (1982) calls this interacting network the art world.

The book focuses on the social organization of the world(s) of art, by attempting to flesh out how art producing worlds actually do produce art, while assuming that one particular individual is not responsible for the production of art. The ones responsible are people who routinely participate in the making of art by exercising and understanding a shared/challenged set of conventions. In

Becker’s thinking, art is a term to signify a product of human collaboration which has specific cultural and aesthetic connotations. Art is something that is typically created for aesthetic purposes, but it achieves such a name by being labelled through conventions. The term “Art world” is a term used by Becker to frame the joint actions of individuals who collectively produce a work of art.

Deviation is an expected part of a system of art production. Becker points out that nothing is static in an art world. Change, although it may be met with particularly strong reactions, tends to be unremarked upon and committed in fairly unconscious ways. This non-obvious form of change is especially apparent in artistic deviations, such as when a blues musician plays the same song three nights in a row, but plays it slightly different each night because they are inspired by new forms of music. Becker also stresses how change may be unremarked upon for larger art world changes. Rock music in the 1950s and 60s used song structures similar to American blues music from that era, but until advertising and publishing firms used new methods to reach young people who had never consumed this kind of recorded and live music, the rock art world never existed, and after that rock music boomed and became a formally recognized institution separate from the blues world. Because industry people brought in new art world participants, marketers created change by bringing in new people to cooperate with rock musicians. Deviations thus have subtle

effects in the ways they may alter what art is produced. For Becker, the goal of art world analysis is to build as good a picture as possible of the conditions of the production of a particular art and understand that however informative that lens into the art world may be, it is never exact. To strive for anything less, however, is to commit poor sociology.

2.3.2. The Field of Cultural Production

In Pierre Bourdieu’s field of cultural production view (Bourdieu 1993), art is not the product of individual acts, but a manifestation of the field as a whole, that is, a manifestation of the relations between the various actors, institutions, and powers involved in a field (Royseng 2010).

Bourdieu’s main thesis is that in order to avoid instances of improper analysis, such as those relying on internal readings of art works and so-called detached and external readings of art, analysis of art must look to the structure of the relations of social actors, and the “position-takings”

(1993:30) of the cultural works within a given field. This must be done in order to avoid the traps of various styles of art analysis. As Bourdieu writes, this “enables us to make a radical break with the substantialist mode of thought […] which tends to foreground the individual, or the visible interactions between individuals, at the expense of the structural relations” (1993:29).

Bourdieu has in mind cultural apparatuses such as the literary field and artistic fields of any given period, such as nineteenth century orchestral music, and he is particularly interested in

“reading” works through his framework, especially as the position of works change over time.

Although the reading of the works of music is not the goal of this study, two concepts are offered by Bourdieu that are relevant to studying music performers in the field of Calgary music. The first term is “artistic position taking” (1993:30) and the second is “the space of possibles” (1993:176).

For Bourdieu, a field of cultural production is a field of position taking: “artistic position taking” involves the shifting positions that the works in question (e.g. live music) have at a particular

moment, and the position that actors (individuals, groups, institutions) hold. For researchers, using this analytical framework involves fleshing out the position of the individual performer by exploring areas such the various places that the performed art is distributed and consumed, who consumes it, the struggles performers have in making art, and the tensions relevant to performing the music.

Bourdieu’s discussion of methodological choices for studying cultural works proposes that in fields of cultural production there exists a “space of possibles” around the individuals, groups, and institutions who are involved in them. What he is referring to are possibilities of actions, thoughts, habits, social conditions, economic conditions, and so forth, that exists beyond individuals and “functions as a system of common reference which causes contemporary directors, even when they do not consciously refer to each other, to be objectively situated in relation to the others” (1993:176). Directors are the agents within a particular cultural field that are involved in the production of cultural works, whether they be individuals, groups, or institutions. The space of possibles emphasizes the multitudes of options that individuals within a field are able to draw upon. Although written in reference to cultural works, Bourdieu’s proposed methodology is important, as the unit of analysis in this study is one of the “creators,” known as the musician, and

I focus on their ability to perform/produce art. The space of possibles then, points us towards a particular system of common reference that musicians have as they support themselves as cultural producers. Furthermore, this system is also embedded within a particular cultural field which has its own restrictions, justifications, symbolic values, tensions, and people.

Importantly for Bourdieu, the space of possibles is written in reference to the possibilities that any given field at any point in time may take. Bourdieu refers to possibles such as the tensions between the romantic style of fiction novels and the more banal and realist novels during the

nineteenth and twentieth century in the English literary field. However, as individuals are always imbedded within these fields, they are also partly responsible for the direction, stagnation, and change within fields. They are the ones who act with particular pasts and with particular experiences, and these are all shaped by the field. Of particular interest is the way that in

Bourdieu’s view, any art in question requires different forms of economic and cultural capital to consume. As individual people who have a role in the production of music, gig musicians offer a unique standpoint into a music field, as their possibilities will be shaped by those who consume their art.

2.4. Relevance and Summary

2.4.1. How does this all relate to musicians?

In this study, I am proposing to empirically explore how the lives of individual gig musicians are maintained, practiced, and positioned within the social and urban framework of Calgary. In order to do this, qualitative methods prove to be particularly adept at creating rich accounts of musicians’ standpoints. I use qualitative methods as opposed to quantitative methods because my research questions pertain to the nuanced stocks of knowledge of musicians. I want to know more about their experiences as musicians, especially their experiences related to what gigs are like, how they are obtained, and how they are managed. I want to explore the context of what it is like to be a paid music performer in Calgary. As the goal of this study is to produce rich accounts of artists who navigate the conditions of Calgary in their own particular ways, I utilize qualitative research methods to achieve this.

In Calgary, the relevance of creative-city strategies on local musicians is discussed in the fourth chapter. Although it is not the focus of the analysis, urban political scholarship suggests

looking at whether these policies are just another form of work for musicians to draw upon, or if these policies are actually beneficial to gig musicians within the neoliberal landscape as less money is being put into long term arts programs, and more is put into quick fix ventures such as festivals

(Gibson and Klocker 2005; Peck 2005). Within this type of scholarship, urban creative-city strategies are not necessarily favourable to artists. As I focus on the professional practices, the survival and the career strategies of musicians within one city, taking into considering this context of urban planning is important.

Considering the theoretical frameworks of analysis of Art Worlds and The Field of Cultural

Production, I am drawn towards using these frameworks in particular ways. Art Worlds guides my inquiry towards different dimensions that make up the gig musician’s world. As a focus for the multitude of actions committed by producers, art is distinct because it is always changing, continuously produced, and cultural discourse frequently positions it as “wishy-washy”, rather than concrete. As such, music is routinely understood in different ways, valued differently, and used to distinguish people differently. With the exception of cultural stars, gig musician life has not significantly changed since the twentieth century: it is generally undervalued and underpaid.

Not only has gig work remained relatively unchanged over time, but new technologies are constantly arising and used by musicians (Sargent 2009a; Thomson 2013), and furthermore musicians are not the only ones responsible for producing live music (Cluley 2009; Grazian 2004), as venue managers and sound engineers sometimes play a crucial role in a music performance.

Given these technological and social and nuances, I examine in a contemporary setting how the actions of musicians are interconnected with those of others in order to do the work of the musician.

These actions are shaped by the current art world of the Calgary gig scene, and this includes all of the technologies at hand.

While Becker and Bourdieu differ in their analysis of art domains, they offer strong analytical paths to sociological inquiry which are not incongruent with one another. Becker stresses that art is made by people and not any one person, and Bourdieu is adamant about positioning art as a reflection of relations and powers. Bourdieu even explicitly distances himself from the Art Worlds perspective by stating that unlike Becker’s consideration of an artistic field

(i.e. an art world) as a collectively organized system of art production, “the artistic field is not reducible to a population, i.e. a sum of individual agents” (Bourdieu 1989:35). For Bourdieu, a proper art field analysis does not only consider such populations and their interactions. However, despite this disjunction in macro-micro orientations, I do not see a significant problem with regards to my inquiry by utilizing both theoretical frameworks. What I take from Becker is the emphasis on the multitudes of coordinations and shared practicalities that allow musicians to perform their sonic and visual art. From Bourdieu, I am geared towards the multitudes of options, the possibles, and position myself towards understanding and piecing together the navigations and position takings that musicians have as professionals as a reflection of these possibilities.

2.4.2. Summary

In the beginning of this chapter, I offered a survey of existing literature on musicians and considered the ways in which previous studies inform my research. Existing empirical studies have focused on why musicians play music, the effects of musical professions on the body, and the psychological characteristics of musicians; however, these are not particularly relevant to this research. Of note, however, is scholarship on sociological research methods for studying musicians, musician labour markets, musician social capital, music genres, why musicians play, making music, the gendered world of music, and on the context of musician work.

The lessons of the existing literature in regards to musicians points us towards understanding gig musicians in a particular way. Gig musicians are people who routinely receive pay for performing music. These musicians exhibit some characteristics peculiar to modern times.

Musicians generally show up and deliver a practiced set of songs, but short-term contractual and informal types of music and non-music work are becoming increasingly more numerous. In order to make ends meet, musicians have to support their music through other jobs. Moreover, musicians are immersed in a world where the production of art is tied to the activities of others, and they have at their disposal different navigations, or possibles, within their respective fields. I will address the methodological implications for this in the next chapter.

In this chapter I have delivered a review of past scholarships on musicians. Musicianship may be understood through this, but as I learned through the simple act of talking to musicians in person, their lives are immensely more complex than this review suggests. Thus, by gearing ourselves towards the experiential accounts of musicians as professionals, I aim to first talk about how I went about and talked to them, but also how I made sense of their accounts during the analytical phase. These two goals will be addressed in the next chapter. The work of the musician is much more than playing music in front of audiences and particular attention needs to be placed upon the possibilities of musicians. Given that this study is about Calgary musicians in general and not on any specific genre of musician, musicians’ experiences will differ depending on who consumes their music, and this has an important effect on what they are doing as musicians.

Importantly, what is missing in the above literature are accounts of scholarship of Canadian musicians. By exploring how the varied experiences of musicians in terms of their professional and practical activities in Calgary, I modestly contribute to the subfield of sociological studies of musicians.

Chapter 3: Setting the Tone – Method and Methodology

My goal in this chapter is to show how the framework for this study was informed by empirical and theoretical literature. First, I outline my analytical framework and follow this with a description of how the study unfolded. The process of recruitment, data collection, transcription, and analysis was fairly linear, and I want to give readers an account of what it was like setting up the sociological problem at hand, and what studying the lives of sixteen individuals who professionally perform live music in Calgary was like. During the discussion of the interviews, I offer a short initial description of the participants in this study.

3.1. Methodological Influences

The method used for this study was in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Although observational data could have been used to bolster the results of this study, due to the time restrictions of a

Master’s thesis interviews were chosen. For example, Gold’s (1958) positions of participant as observer or observer as participant could have been used to alleviate misunderstanding informants.

However, for the purposes of this study I chose to solely rely on interviews as the recruitment styles used for interviews such as purposive sampling are favourable towards completing the data collection phase in a timely and effective manner, especially for musicians (Coulson 2012;

Heckathorn and Jeffri 2001).

After surveying the empirical and theoretical sources that were relevant to studying musicians and their experiences, I engaged in this project with two dominant theoretical influences.

The first was Howard S. Becker’s Art Worlds (2008) and the second was Pierre Bourdieu’s The

Field of Cultural Production (1993), as discussed in chapter two. These sociological stances encouraged me to visualize the activities of musicians within a vibrant and complex series of

interconnected actions which lead to art products. I was led towards understanding a music world by seeking out and delineating a broad system of market opportunities, music industry structures, artistic institutions, and socio-musical history as a framework with which to place the complex and varied actions of musicians in. By utilizing these perspectives in this manner, I place the complex set of possibilities and navigations that performers and art products have within a compelling urban system. Having previously alluded to some possibilities that these two frameworks offer, I will first go into more depth into the methodological implications that I have taken from Art Worlds and The Field of Cultural Production before I discuss the specifics of this study.

3.1.1. Art Worlds

In Art Worlds (2008), Becker does not lay out any clear methodological choices for the study of an art world, rather, he offers an art world framework. He omits these prescriptions in part to alleviate the risk of telling us how to do social scientific inquiry, which in his mind may dangerously come to be taken as preaching the “right way” (Becker 2009:4), and thus the only way. Furthermore, Becker argues that the theoretical perspective should drive the methodological choices made in any sociological analyses (Becker in Cluley 2012:202). However, because of

Becker’s choice to omit methods of systematic inquiry into art worlds, we are left with a theoretical perspective and no clear indication of how and where the analysis should unfold. Without any original authorial interpretations of what methodological choices should be made I am left with my own decisions of how this particular theoretical perspective drives my methodological choices.

In this section I endeavour to pick out core ways in which the Art Worlds framework shapes my own methodological choices.

The Becker style of Art Worlds (2008) inquiry into cultural production has key assumptions about art. An art world is a complex network of people who are jointly involved in the creation of

a product called art. In this study’s case, the art in question is a live performance of music for which musicians are paid (i.e. a gig). Furthermore, I am focusing on individual performers of gigs and not on any other art world participant. In this case, art world participants include the managers of venues and the producers of instruments; however, I am interested in the working lives of musicians and narrow my focus onto such experiences. Through the Art Worlds lens, I seek to build accounts of what musicians do to sustain themselves and this inevitably involves others because of the assumption that no art product is solely produced by an individual artist. By investigating the lives of gig musicians in this sense, I am interested in where individuals are situated in the chain of joint actions that produce live music, and to what degrees others are involved with gig musicians. For example, I need to explore where they gig, how they obtained a gig, who they are interacting with, and who accepts/challenges their work.

According to this theoretical perspective, such questions evoke the conventions of a particular art world. According to Art Worlds, conventions involve the habituated actions that produce particular types of art, the connections and networks necessary for this art to be produced and distributed, the distribution channels, the styles of collaboration between the participants of any art world (for example, intra- and inter-band dynamics of bands on tour, or the relationship between a musician and the producer who edits their albums), the ways of paying for or obtaining the art, the conservative and changing aspects, and the aesthetics of the art world (the reasoning behind what that particular form of art is and its credibility). Conventions provide a useful point of departure for exploring what gig musicians do in order to be able to perform music. Utilizing conventions for an analytical purpose requires questions such as: “What style of music are you playing?” “Where do you play shows?” “How many people are in the audience?” “How did you set up the booking for that show?” “How much do you charge for a particular gig?” and so on. My

methodological choices had to be able to provide me with data that demonstrate the type of actions that musicians do, who they interact with, how their actions may be the same for certain situations, and how they may differ in others. Becker points out that focusing on “practical realities”

(2008:240) is one route to elucidating the conventions of an art world. For Becker, practical realities are general requirements that must be fulfilled for art to be routinely produced, such as having audiences pay for tickets to hear a musician. Therefore, building up accounts of the practical realities that underlie the lives of gigging musicians must be a focus if one is to uncover the conventions of the Calgary gig musician’s art world. Utilizing this framework, I am able to build a vivid glimpse of their lives by gathering as much detail as possible about participant experiences which must be fulfilled in order to perform a gig.

When setting up the framework of an art world, Becker utilizes four ideal types of artistic positions within an art world, and one applies to gig musicians. These positions are integrated professionals, mavericks, folk artists, and naïve artists. The position that applies to gig musicians is the integrated professional. He argues that being a professional artist (in the sense that you make a living out of art) integrates artists into the conventions of an art world. To make an income from performing, an integrated artist understands and utilizes (most of) the shared rules, conventions, and skills of an art world in order to be understood and hired. I am focusing solely on the artist of the art world, and studying gig musicians provides an opportunity to explore how integrated professionals in Calgary survive with these rules, conventions, and skills. Furthermore, Becker argues that since integrated professionals utilize and do not challenge art world conventions to a high degree due to the desire of generating income in as smooth and regular a manner as possible, their actions will appear seemingly routine. Thus, asking about how integrated gig musicians do certain tasks, build their skills, and are tied with others in various ways appears to be a good

methodological orientation in order to explore the practical realities of musician life. This methodology provides us with a relatively stable aspect of “the way things are done” for musicians.

Therefore, asking about topics of routine actions such as setting up gigs is a way to learn about how musicians set up conditions for their own livelihoods. It captures art world conventions, such as generally accepted practices, and practices committed in a manner to encourage smooth and regular forms of income. Although conventions are not solely made up of practices, they play an important role in integrated artists lives.

For example, one classic convention of jazz guitarists is discussed by Becker. Before the publication of Art Worlds, Becker (1963) positioned jazz musicians as people who are particularly dependent on their social capital for work opportunities. For these jazz musicians, numerous opportunities for paid performance work come through reputational networks as well as friendship and peer circles. As a subject for analysis in the sociology of music and occupational sociology, musician social capital has remained a vibrant topic of inquiry since Becker’s (1963) discussion of musician “connections” as a key source of employment for jazz players in Outsiders (e.g.

Coulson 2012; Dowd and Pinheiro 2013; Pinheiro and Dowd 2009; Sargent 2009a; Zwaan et al.

2009). Drawing on Becker and other studies, I asked about relations between individual musicians and others, and how this related to their employment. I wanted to know about topics such as: “Who sets up the equipment?” “What did you talk about to the manager of the Ironwood?” “What do you post on your Facebook band page?” “How did that person contact you to hire you?” and so on.

From the long tradition of studies in the social capital of musicians, I took that the actions of musicians were particularly intertwined with that of others, as their livelihoods are so dependent on reputational, friendship and peer connections. I therefore sought to tease out key parts of an interacting network of people around musicians (i.e. an art world). Figuring out how others were

involved and to what degree they were involved became one of the focuses of the interview, as I wanted to learn out about the specificities of musician “connections.”

Following the Becker style then, meant positioning my interviews in ways that help build detailed accounts of the various practices of musicians, and sensitizing myself to their accounts in particular ways. Musician accounts are the data with which I build a vivid account of the Calgary music world. As I will show throughout the next two chapters, it was a delight to piece together the multitudes of actions that musicians disclosed by thinking of this work as a type of action that is set up to unfold in as smooth a manner as possible. Musicians, as we will see, have plenty of things to keep themselves busy with, and gearing myself towards the routinization of their tasks and daily lives, while simultaneously piecing together the numerous agents involved in their professional lives, proved to be a powerful method for learning about the complexity and nuances of their lives.

3.1.2. The Field of Cultural Production

Although it was more important to my analysis and less important to the shaping of my interview strategy, Bourdieu’s theoretical underpinnings of the field of cultural production provided me with an analytical focus into the structuring conditions of the varied actions of musicians. Emphasizing how actors within a particular sphere are looking to maintain and improve their conditions, but also shaped by the limitations of their particular sphere, Bourdieu’s analytical framework was important when I sought to contextualize individual actions.

Contrary to Becker, Bourdieu sets up certain methodological guidelines for inquiries into particular fields of cultural production in The Field of Cultural Production (1993); however, he never discusses specific methodologies for studying the practices that musicians have in order to make a living. With the focus placed on so many elements of a field in a macro-oriented way,

Bourdieu is not only interested in a cultural producer (a musician, a writer, a painter, an editor, an academic), he is especially focused on the existing space of possibles that is both seen as possible directions for actions and dispositions for particular individuals, but also for works of art and the field as a whole. The space of possibles is the possibilities that any given field at any point in time may take. For Bourdieu, no cultural field exists without any influences. It has its own internal inertia, people, tastes, justifications and so on, but a field also experiences external factors such as a recession, or the rise of a new popular art form which takes away interest from another pre- established one. Tensions between various elements shape the possibilities of any given field.

In this case, I am left with a powerful and enigmatic theoretical framework, and in this section I outline how Bourdieu’s field theory helped shaped my inquiry into the lives of musicians.

Although Bourdieu offers case studies of inquiries into fields of cultural production such as Homo

Academicus (Bourdieu 1988), the working materials I have are substantially different. For example, I am not analyzing processes of legitimation and the dynamics of the production of scientific and literary works. I am exploring the multitude of experiences of specific cultural producers. This study is not about the tensions between classical music and popular music, observed in instances where the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra’s performance list is becoming increasingly filled with “the pops”6; it is about what the individual cultural producers are doing as music professionals, whether they be jazz drummers, rock guitarists, or folk singers. This study therefore involves looking at a certain moment in a musician’s life by placing it within its respective field of possibilities. A musician’s practices and actions are inevitably shaped by their

6 A term used by Neil and Charlotte to signify iconic popular culture pieces translated into an orchestral form, show tunes, and easy/light iconic classical pieces. Presentations of “the pops” are frequently played with a video in the background, as seen in performances titled Video Game Symphony and The Little Mermaid. 40

surroundings. In order to do their accounts justice a proper consideration of the ongoing context of participants’ lives needs to be offered along with their experiences.

By utilizing Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, I sought to build nuanced accounts of the lives of sixteen music performing agents in Calgary. Understanding that musicians are both shaped by and shape their field, I was interested in gathering up accounts of participants at particular points in time. During my conversations with these sixteen musicians, I engaged with their pasts to build up their timelines. What became clear to me was that musicians were at their own particular stages in their career, and that musicians worked within their own section of the Calgary field of music production. Thus, utilizing musician accounts in order to elucidate part of the space of possibles through the standpoint of each professional music performer became one of my goals after engaging with Bourdieu’s theoretical insights.

3.1.3. Summing up Becker and Bourdieu

Translating the utility of Bourdieu’s theory into my own methodological choices was not easy during the analytical phases of this study. Despite certain criticisms, this study utilized both Becker and Bourdieu7. Whereas one is apt at framing the world of musicians as a complex network of individuals who jointly create art, the other pushes my gaze towards how cultural producers are restricted within a certain space of possibilities, and in tension with those around them, as musicians are always competing with others for limited opportunities. Although Art Worlds has been criticized as too micro-oriented (Becker 2008) and Bourdieu’s field theory as too macro- oriented (2008), I propose a complementary use of both of these theories.

7 See H. Becker’s dialogue with French sociologist Alain Pessin in the 2008 edition of Art Worlds, where Becker argues against the naïve efforts of graduate students who try to merge Becker and Bourdieu. 41

In my mind these two theorists may work together. With the goal of exploring the lives of musicians in a Canadian city, the arguments of both perspectives allowed me to develop my analysis. By talking about a space of possibles and the practical realities of musicians who continuously try to earn money in as smooth a manner as possible, I do not offer any way of teasing and splitting certain parts of this analysis as Becker’s or Bourdieu’s. There is no analytical line drawn. Although Becker and Bourdieu may talk about the same actions in different ways, I borrowed from these two theorists in order to inform my own methodological choices. By using insights drawn from these two theorists, I shaped my interviews towards particular topics, and I opened my analysis towards particular lines of inquiry. This study is not a case study of an Art

Worlds inquiry or a Cultural Field inquiry; it is a study of the ongoing practical and professional lives of musicians which utilizes two prominent and informative theoretical frameworks at hand.

For me, in the context of Becker and Bourdieu the exploration of what Spradley (1979) calls “actualities” meant that these musician actualities are composed of day to day actions, routines, patterns and rationalizations. The theoretical frameworks of Becker and Bourdieu would suggest that actualities for musicians have some specific characteristics which shape them. For example, musicians rely upon others to perform music, they acquire a complex set of patterns which may or may not be shared by others, their work opportunities shift based on who consumes their music, and they adapt their set patterns over time in order to make an income in as smooth a manner as possible. Exploring the actualities of gig musicianship also means locating the actions of musicians within the larger music field of Calgary. This requires insight into the various income opportunities, the way music is distributed, the reward systems for music, the various institutions at play, and the value system(s) of the field that musicians are imbedded in. By focusing my inquiry towards specific types of experiences and the various agents involved in the lives of musicians, I

am able to contextualize the variation of experiences musicians talked about. Through this type of framing, I contextualize the range of experiences within an influential field of practice, as I flesh out a dimension of a space of possibles for the Calgary music field by focusing on what individuals are doing within their field. In conjunction with that, I recognized that these possibilities are part of a series of joint actions which lead to art production. Although Becker’s work was used to a greater degree for shaping lines of inquiry during the interview stage, both theorists strongly informed my analysis.

3.2. The Research

3.2.1. Recruitment

My original plan was to have 15 interviews with gig musicians. In the end, I conducted sixteen interviews as I included one pilot interview in this study. In order to learn more about gig professionals, I had a few key recruitment guidelines/requirements in order to exclude certain musicians such as new entrants and casual players, to learn more about the regulars of the music gig world, and to encourage the inclusion of a wide range of experiences. I used a purposive sample strategy in order to recruit participants from a wide range of experiences. This purposive sampling was designed to provide a range of differences in terms of time in the business, music genre, age, and gender.

The first two requirements were set up to limit the scope of this study to regular gig players.

During recruitment, I asked that participants played three gigs a month on average, and that they had been playing for pay at least two years prior to the interview and were invested in doing this frequent gig work in the future. As a third recruitment guideline, I did not limit my study to any particular music genre. I opened up the possibility for musicians of any genre to participate because

I wanted to see how different music genres shaped the experiences of musicians in Calgary. For example, jazz musicians are among the least paid of all music performers, but internal reward systems and notions of personal satisfaction systematically encourage them to persevere and perform jazz (Banks 2012; Jeffri 2003). In contrast, small-time pop musicians in the Netherlands were focused on attuning their music and themselves to audience tastes in order to generate more income (Zwaan et al. 2009), instead of achieving a form of musical nirvana. As it has strong implications for the lived experiences of gig musicians, I sought out as extensive range of performers as possible from different musical backgrounds and genres in order to enrich the experiences that I drew upon.

Another part of recruitment involved seeking a broad range of ages in order to learn about music careers at different stages. Interestingly, Menger (1999) notes that after 35 years of age, musicians who are not famous tend to withdraw from the profession due to the stagnation of their musical careers and/or because of other responsibilities such as maintaining full-time employment to raise children. However, as I will show at the end of this chapter, even though musicians tend to withdraw after 35 years of age, this does not mean that more experienced gig musicians inevitably withdraw from a musician career.

Lastly, I set up this study to include a relatively equal proportion of men and women. With the original plan of recruiting fifteen participants, I set up a target to include at least seven women, and no more than eight. This was done in order to encourage a breadth of experiences as gender is argued to unfold in more disadvantageous ways for women in the world of music (Clawson 1999;

DeNora 2013; Groce and Cooper 1990; Sargent 2009a; Roy and Dowd 2010; Schmutz and Faupel

2010). Throughout the recruitment process, I routinely asked participants and those who expressed

interest in my study for referrals to gigging musician women, and I reached my goal of recruiting at least seven women.

I had a particular goal with my purposive sampling strategy, but in order to recruit this broad range of musicians I initially set up a snowball sampling strategy where I would start in a few musician nodes. I use the term musician node to refer to a person within a network of peers and acquaintances that consists of professional and casual musicians. In other words, musician nodes involve networks of people which involve musicians. As certain studies demonstrate, snowball and referral forms of sampling are particularly useful for recruiting music world participants for social scientific inquiries (Coulson 2012; Heckathorn and Jeffri 2001; Mullaney

2007), as even with the use of gatekeepers, reaching a target population of musicians is not an easy task.

I planned to use my personal networks to start recruiting participants in three main starting points/nodes. I had a friend and frequent gig player as a first node. For a second node, I knew a music professor and gig player who had a number of professional contacts, and lastly, I had my own networks of friends and family who offered to distribute my poster to people who fit the criteria of this study. My recruitment poster is attached in Appendix A. I planned to asked these specific people if they could pass along my recruitment poster to anyone who they thought fit the criteria. I knew that these specific people had a number of musician contacts and that because of my good relationship with them my chances of recruiting eligible participants through referrals were good.

Throughout the recruitment process, I employed a snowball sampling strategy by asking specific musicians if they could refer my poster to their peer networks, and by asking referred musicians to refer me to other eligible participants. The beginning of recruitment was not as

encouraging as I hoped. Following a first pilot interview, I struggled to gather more participants.

I even talked about my call for participants on the radio on a local weekly French radio segment at CJSW radio. Following a discouraging period of two weeks, I only had one participant,

Malcolm, and he was a friend who was happy to help out and participate. However, suddenly after the second interview, things changed rather dramatically. As I like to joke, I was able to use a method of recruitment called avalanche sampling. Adam, the second participant who was referred to me by Malcolm, asked if he could post my recruitment poster on the web after the interview.

Minutes later, after telling him that he had my wholehearted permission, numerous musicians and the local organization Music YYC found my recruitment poster, and I was able to start recruiting more musicians. After getting in touch with me, the administrators of Music YYC distributed my poster through their channels. This distribution importantly included their Facebook web page.

Little did I know that this organization was one of the focal points of web surfing for many local musicians. With the dispersal of my poster through Adam’s channels and Music YYC’s channels,

I received an avalanche of inquiries to participate in my study in the following days – even as soon as I was taking the train back from my meeting with Adam, people were contacting me. Due to the plethora of inquiries to participate in my study, I was able to put a quota sampling strategy into action. As I originally planned, I tried to gather as broad a range of experiences as possible, ranging from solo artists, small band artists, and large band artists, having both younger and older musicians, having participants with the minimum two years of experience, and those with more than twenty years of experience. Additionally, I was able to meet my quota of seven women by routinely asking people to refer me to women musicians who fit the criteria of this study.

Following the influx of inquiries, in a period of two weeks I had fourteen additional interviews booked. The sixteen interviews took place during the months of October and November

2014. It was to my benefit to seek out musicians of different experiential backgrounds by selectively choosing different participants from the pool of inquiries. Due to the ease that I had in picking participants who had a wide range of experiences, I had a diverse sample, and I was able to draw upon many details and experiences for the analysis. Even though not all inquiries to participate turned into an interview, those who agreed to participate were eager to take part in this study. This topic was very important to them, as Adam confided to me during our time together.

The following table is an initial glimpse of the participants in this study. More information on participants can be found in Appendix B. The information in Table 1 and Appendix B are relevant to participants at the time of the interview.

Table 1: Initial View of Interview Participants Pseudonym8 and Age9 Years as a Instrument(s) 10 Genre(s) Gig income source(s) gender (M, W) performing musician 1. Malcolm Reynolds 27 6 Electric guitar Progressive Clubs, bars, pubs, touring (M) instrumental rock 2. Adam Gibson (M) 37 20 Electric bass Pop, multi-genre Clubs, bars, pubs, touring as a side-man 3. Neil Baird (M) 30 15 Trumpet Classical Orchestra, occasional private venue 4. Carey Daellenbach 22 6 Voice and acoustic Folk Clubs, bars, pubs, coffee (W) guitar shops, festivals 5. Diane Nguyen 37 21 Zither instruments Instrumental Busking, coffee shops, (W) music, multi- recording, busking, private genre venues 6. Jack London (M) 30 6 Voice and acoustic Folk Private venues, clubs, bars, guitar pubs, touring 7. Wesley 27 5 Voice, acoustic Folk, jazz Busking, bars, pubs, Montgomery (M) guitar and electric guitar 8. Luke Talbert (M) 22 3 Voice and electric Post-psychedelic Bars, pubs, clubs, underground guitar rock venues 9. Gabrielle Fournier 36 18 Voice 80s Synth pop Bars, pubs, clubs (W) 10. Brian Colburn 40 20 Saxophone Jazz, big band, Private venues, hotels, (M) classical restaurants, casinos, orchestra 11. Elaine Shayipova 29 10 Violin Classical Weddings, private venues, (W) orchestra 12. Charlotte 68 40 Cello Classical Weddings, private venues, Atkinson (W) recording 13. Morgan Reid (W) 35 18 Voice and drums Aboriginal, rock, Bars, pubs, conventions, blues-rock private venues 14. Fiona Klassen 32 11 Voice and string Folk/root, sci-fi, Conventions, festivals, (W) instruments Celtic, medieval conventions, coffee shops, bars, pubs, private venues 15. Nicholas 45 25 Drums Hardcore punk Bars, pubs, clubs, underground Wetherel (M) venues 16. Mark Gordon 24 3 Voice and acoustic Indi/Folk Bars, pubs, coffee shops (M) guitar

8 All names are pseudonyms given to participants to protect anonymity. 9 Age and years as a performing musician are answers or best estimates that were derived from interview transcripts. Such questions were not always broached directly, and were often derived from participant accounts. 10 The instruments and the genres are to be taken in a general meaning in order to gain a sense of the types of work that these musicians obtained. If specific genres were mentioned they were noted, otherwise they should be thought of as the principal genre(s) of music played at gigs. 48

3.2.2. Interviews and analysis

In the tradition of qualitative research, the interview process may be understood as a co- construction between interviewee and interviewer within a particular cultural time and place

(Hosltein and Gubrium in Berg and Lune 2012:108; Holstein and Gubrium 1994:266-267), and this process is an intimate way of gathering rich insider knowledge of a particular situation through a respondent as understood by a researcher (Berg and Lune 2012). Qualitative interviews are perfectly attuned to my goal of elucidating the everyday world of Calgary gig musicians, as this data collection technique encourages an ethnographic exploration of the “actualities” or the practicalities of day to day life (Spradley 1979) in order to examine the daily practices of musicians and their understandings of the themselves as actors within a greater community. These musician actualities evoke the “practical realities” (Becker 2008:240) of artists that must be enacted in order for art to be produced. I used semi-structured, in-depth interviews in order to bring vivid, detailed, and rich descriptions of the worlds of gig musicians, and focus on the practicalities of day to day life.

Although my principal method of investigation was semi-structured interviews, I routinely included small written notes during my interviews, my frenzied note taking periods following the interview, and as I was transcribing these conversations in order to support my textual data with visual and emotional cues. I wanted to bolster textual data with fresh memories of what these experiences were like. As a rich interview is an active achievement taken on by both researcher and participant, part of the process of recreating an interview with fidelity and nuance through transcription required me to make note of such cues (Berg and Lune 2012). Thus, I made notes of cues such as memorable introductions, hysterical laughter, cheerful attitudes, comical quips, discouraged expressions – anything that would help me better convey the experiences of meeting

musicians, taking part in the interview with them, and departing from our dialogue. I wanted to present with fidelity and nuance the actualities of the interview by sensitizing myself to my surroundings. By doing so, I sought to enrich the ways in which I could present my account of their experiences in their musical worlds.

With all of the interviews booked soon after the tremendous wave of participant inquiries,

I conducted two to four interviews a week for a period of a month and a half, and finished the last interview in late November of 2014. Occasionally, I held two interviews in one day. As these musicians generally did not have standard forms of 9-5 employment, I made myself available during the weekends and evenings, and those times were frequently utilized for interviews. These interviews took place in participant homes or in my office, as I wanted to maintain a level of quietness in order to facilitate transcription, and these locations offered a degree of comfort and/or familiarity to participants. The interviews were generally very long, with the average interview lasting around one hour and forty-five minutes in length, and the bulk of them lasted two hours.

While interviews had much in common, especially if participants drew upon similar types of gigs,

I was prepared to shift the structure and focus of the interview if I thought it would help me attain richer descriptions of musician practices.

My interview plan is attached in Appendix C. Shaped by my own experiences, an initial review of the literature, and by my sensitization to Becker and Bourdieu, my initial interview guide was designed to promote a detailed flow of conversation about the practicalities of a musical career in Calgary. I started with the easier biographical data and followed this with the income sources participants drew upon, how they went about their activities, and then finished the interview with a comfortable closing question. This interview guide was also shaped by the interview style of

Rubin and Rubin (2005). Interviews proved themselves to be particularly useful to explore what it

is like to be a musician in Calgary because of the inherent potential for refinement (Berg and Lune

2012; Rubin and Rubin 2005). I regularly revised this guide to fit the intricacies of particular types of musicians, yet I found that the original interview questions resonated with the experiences of participants and provided a solid basis for the initiation of a conversation with participants. With shifts in the interview, I was able to fine-tune questions in order to bring about as much detail as possible, and sometimes I decided to spend a focused amount of time on issues and experiences that I was ignorant of or confused about. Initial interviews allowed me to “open the locks” and

“obtain a broad portrait of what is going on to suggest what specifically needs to be explored in depth later” (Rubin and Rubin 2005:144). With a sensitization derived from initial interviews, I honed later interviews towards drawing as much detail and description about the practices that were relevant to being a musician, and especially towards practices that were discussed during initial accounts.

During the course of the interviews, I wanted to learn about what musicians did in order to remain as gig musicians. I was particularly interested in opening up avenues of talk which dealt with handling and making money. As I conducted more and more one-on-one interviews, I learned that certain questions like asking about income and health care were best left for the middle or near the end of the interview. Although that is certainly obvious to some, in hindsight I made a mistake by bringing this topic up during my pilot interview within the first ten minutes. Fortunately, despite an initial moment of wrongdoing on my part, Malcolm was shocked yet still opted to disclose information without appearing to close up. I also learned that even if the topic of money was brought up after a period of warming up, which involved friendly greetings and introductions as well as the broaching of easier topics during the initial phases of the interview (Berg and Lune

2012), talking about money was a hard subject to broach. As with any of us imbedded in a world

where a moralistic dimension of worth is based on the amount of money made, talking about themselves as people who do not make a lot of money was not easy for some participants.

Overall, participants wanted to talk and that was clear from the beginning. From the introductions to after the interview, participants were eloquent about their experiences. The “off the record” elements (Warren et al. 2003) of the interviews were also of note. For example, after spending two hours in an interview with one participant, we ended up chatting another hour together after the audio recorder was turned off. If interviews took place in participant homes, the

“after the interview” period was even longer. For example, three participants showed me their elaborate home recording setups and one showed me their instrument collection. Although conversations before and after the recorder was on were not always that long, they certainly took time. Altogether, the experiences between the interviewer and the participant before the recorder is on, once it was on, and after it was turned off certainly exposed a more nuanced way of approaching understanding an interview, as Warren et al. suggest. In my experience conducting this study, an interview is comprised of a jovial introduction, an informative conversation between two people, and an extended departure which often revealed numerous useful pieces of information.

Some participants were inevitably more reserved about topics then others. Some musicians, when asked about particular topics, seemed to know the kind of nuance that I was looking for, and in some ways they led my hand into the rich descriptions of the practicalities of day to day musician life. These participants offered wonderful accounts, often guiding me towards where the nuances were to them, and not where I originally imagined them to be. The insights from these instances were frequently used in subsequent interviews to gather more detail as I knew they were particularly resonating to the experiences of participants. For example, it struck me after my second

interview with Adam that I was missing a crucial topic in my interview guide when he used terms such as “recording season,” “award season” and “wedding season”. After that interview, I asked participants about the various ways in which their work changes depending on the work season. I was then able to understand in more depth how musicians’ lives are especially affected by the ebbs and flows of gig work, which I term the seasonality of gig work. Instances such as this also inspired me to inductively create my own categories and theories for analysis. As Rubin and Rubin argue,

(2005:240), allowing categories to emerge, whether it be through open coding or through insider nudges, is a regular part of qualitative analysis and this aids in the development of theory.

Obtaining richer descriptions of musician practices led me to include one participant who fits most requirements for this study, but not all of them. In this study, I included Neil Baird, an orchestral musician, for a specific purpose. Neil is a tenured orchestra trumpet player and does not play gigs (a temporary employment) very often; therefore he does not technically fit the definition of regular gigger. He is not drawing on precarious and temporary performances for work. As a full-time orchestral musician, he is a salaried employee and plays a set amount of performances each year, and occasionally takes on private venue gigs outside of the orchestra. Therefore, in my sample I technically have fifteen Calgary gig musicians and one Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra musician who occasionally gigs. Despite this, I included Neil because he provided a wealth of information about non-gig music professionals in Calgary, and helped shape my analysis by filling in certain pieces of the Calgary gig market and the institutions that are relevant to it.

Although I put effort into teasing out the ways that musician experiences may be different for men and women, the unremarked upon nature of gender proved to be just that – unremarked upon. From readings of women’s experiences in areas such as bands, as musicians in music stores, and at concerts (Clawson 1999; Groce and Cooper 1990; Sargent 2009b; Walser 1993), I was

sensitized to issues surrounding women in music, such as the challenges that women pose to masculinities in the music field and the reactions towards women positioned as challengers.

However, these topics did not come out in the interviews. Men rarely talked about gender at all, or how it may affect their experiences as music players. Some women in this study may have had issues arise over time, but they found ways to get around them. For example, I asked two participant women about the difficulties of a leering audience member at a gig, and they responded by telling me it was not very troublesome for them, as they stuck around the bartender or a band mate after a show until the leering characters left. Gender therefore was not at the part of my analysis. Although I set up certain conditions for gendered talk to arise by seeking out a sample with as close to fifty percent women as possible, and I tried to probe into certain avenues of talk which hinted at the unequal elements of gender in the music world, gendered experiences were not a focus of conversation during interviews.

Despite this particular block, conducting interviews with musicians was a pleasure.

Participants cared about the topic at hand, and this was demonstrated by the amount of talk, detail and depth that they disclosed. To my delight, musicians showed their eagerness to participate over and over. For example, during email exchanges numerous people asked whether their bandmates were invited, and at one point one participant showed up with his band mate at my office. I told these two musicians that unfortunately I was not comfortable holding a two-person interview because of my understanding of my ethics criteria (which stated one-on-one interviews as the only form of data collection) and because I wanted one-on-one talk for more depth and reflection.

Despite my refusal of an additional participant, the intended participant and impromptu band mate were not fazed by this, the band mate left, and the interview unfolded in an insightful manner.

The analysis for this project took place over a long period of time. As Warren and Karner argue, “qualitative research is not something that you begin after you completely finish collecting all the data” (in Berg and Lune 2012:367), and this was true here. All of the interviews were audio recorded and transcribed by myself in full and sorted using the software HyperRESEARCH. While transcription began right after the first interview and ended months after the last interview, periods of analysis were spread out throughout the entire process and were especially prominent after the first interview. As Berg and Lune argue about most qualitative analysis, my experience outside of academia, my experience in the field, and my experience with the literature “underpins both inductive and deductive reasoning” (2012:358). I did not conduct the analysis by solely relying on one kind of analysis. Instead, my understanding grew throughout the various stages of this study, whether it be reading literature, through epiphanies during interviews, preparing for interviews, preparing for conference presentations, talking to others about my project and data, or writing about this particular topic.

3.2.3. Summary

In the next two chapters, drawing on interviews with musicians and bolstering this data with own experiences, I look at how musicians’ everyday lives are shaped by the availability of work, by the availability of other non-performance work that they rely upon, and the income derived from their various endeavours. I explore the doings of gig musicians by outlining the various gig market opportunities of Calgary and what musicians rely upon to make ends meet. In the fifth chapter, I add another layer to the analysis of musician work by narrowing my focus onto their specific practices and experiences, while simultaneously folding these individual accounts into the conditions of the Calgary gig market.

Chapter 4: What Does a Gig Musician Do?

In this chapter, I show how the music gig market is organized by discussing the forms of gig work available and the types of income generation that musicians draw upon. Drawing predominantly on interview data, I endeavour to set up the conditions of music work while also drawing upon the specificities of participants’ accounts. After considering Calgary as a place in which musicians play music for pay, I discuss in depth the specific practices and actions of participants within the music gig market, and show how the practices and conventions of the community of musicians relate back to the space in which they are immersed. These implications will be discussed in the next chapter. By first setting up the conditions of music work, it is my goal to give an account of the relations that exist within Calgary, in order to later discuss how these sixteen musicians are working in these relations.

As windows into Calgary art world conventions and the field of Calgary music, the sixteen participants in this study had their own similarities and differences, but some interesting nuances arose during the course of the interviews. The idea of the interview as a lens into a particular participant’s life and music career at a unique point in time became apparent and allowed me to offer a more detailed discussion of the working lives of musicians. For example, the daily lives and topics of emphasis that younger participants disclosed were different from a semi-retired performing musician’s topics. What makes it particularly interesting is that as lenses into the career trajectories of this field, participants’ stories encourage me to view musician careers as not predetermined or linear in a neat and tidy way. All of these musicians work and live in the same city, and they all have their own version of how they make it work as musicians. By talking about individual music careers within the context of the Calgary gig market and the local community of musicians, I am able to discuss these individual nuances in greater depth.

4.1. Music Work and the Calgary Gig Market

4.1.1. What is gig work in Calgary?

The Calgary music market involves a number of work opportunities. Participants routinely described Calgary as a city where it is possible to gig regularly, but not a cultural hub such as

Vancouver or Toronto. The types of market opportunities for music work include symphony orchestra work (unionized, full-time, long-term contract), short-term side work (e.g. as an extra for a band or the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra (CPO), or for studio work), festivals (e.g. inner city festivals such as the Lilac Festival, as well as Albertan festivals such as the Sun Wheel Music and Arts Festival), private events (e.g. corporate events, weddings), bars, pubs, clubs, touring (in bars, pubs, and clubs for the most part), and city licensed busking. Although the local Calgary

Philharmonic Orchestra is technically not a gig site for tenured orchestra members such as Neil, it is a gig site for some local musicians who are hired to temporarily fill in a role, such as playing a baritone saxophone for two performances. The gigging opportunities in Calgary may be broadly characterized on a continuum of formal to informal gig work, where formal work involves institutionalized gig work governed by contracts, and informal includes no built in structures for dictating how work is done and how it is paid for. On the most formal end is the CPO, followed by festivals and private contract work as fairly formal, with bars, pubs, and clubs, as semi-formal, and busking as the least formal. Gig work then, encompasses all of the different precarious and temporary opportunities for performing music for pay in Calgary. One aspect of Calgary that is particularly relevant to the majority of participants is the demand for certain kinds of gig work stemming from businesses in Calgary. Due to the relationship that the city has with the oil and gas industry, Calgary has numerous opportunities for gigs in private venues such as an event for a corporate oil and gas firm. Although these private gigs were not described as the primary revenue

for any participant, this provided a steady influx of opportunities for work that are unique to

Calgary.

Gigs are organized by how much they pay. There were a number of gig types that participants took on, and I list these gigs in descending magnitudes of pay. First, there are contract gigs, where musicians are hired for a specific amount of time, paid per hour, and a contract is signed by a musician and an employer. In these cases, musicians sign a contract to play as extra in the CPO, for a wedding, a hotel lounge, and other such venues. Another type of gig took place in more reputable bars, clubs, and coffee shops. For these gigs, the venue offers a guarantee (a promised amount to the musician for showing up and playing) and a percentage of the ticket revenue. Participants also had experiences where they signed a contract to play in reputable bars clubs, and coffee shops, but musicians did not always sign a contract in those venues. A third type of gig also took place in venues where popular music was played. Contrary to the gig where a guarantee is offered in addition to offering a percentage of the ticket revenue, these gigs only offered a percentage of the take (ticket sales), and contracts were rarely signed. Instead, participants relied on email communications that stated what would be offered as a documented promise.

Many gigs are not paid. These non-paid gigs are exposure gigs, donation gigs, and pro bono gigs. Exposure gigs are live performances where the venue does not promise a musician an amount for performing. Although these gigs are not paid, many participants chose to play such gigs because they wanted to build their reputation as musicians by performing in front of as many people as possible. In other words, they wanted to expose themselves. Donation gigs consist of busking and gigging for non-profit organizations. In the case of busking, musicians play in a particular spot and wait for people to donate money to them. For non-profit organization gigs,

venues do not promise pay for musicians, but they often result in some form of pay. For example,

Morgan plays for aboriginal communities in Calgary, and she receives tobacco donations, cash in envelopes, and gift certificates at the end of such gigs. Lastly, musicians play gigs for charity organizations, they volunteer to play for non-profit organizations, and they play gigs in order to help out their friends. Musicians do not get paid for these pro bono gigs; however, participants did not play these gigs too often.

Although I organized gigs in the order of how much they pay, there was variation within each respective gig type. For example, freelancers generally accepted $150 for the first hour and

$50 for each subsequent hour, and sometimes they took on contract gigs that were less paying.

Similarly, venues where a percentage of the ticket revenue is offered as pay to musicians did not systematically offer the same pay for each gig. In these cases, musicians depended on how much ticket revenue was generated in one night. Guarantees also changed depending on the gig, ranging anywhere from $50 to $200. Like bar gigs, busking was described as a gig that could vary dramatically in terms of pay. For example, during off-peak times participants made an amount close to minimum wage (around ten dollars an hour) while busking, and at other times they were able to make four to five times that amount in the same time span. Musicians who gigged in bars, clubs, pubs, and coffee shops, venues where the pay ranges from receiving a guarantee and a percentage of the take to not paying at all, often relied upon merchandise sales to boost their gig revenue. Merchandise sales consisted of items such as CDs and band T-shirts, and many musicians maintained merchandise booths at gigs in order to systematically raise their gig revenue. These merchandise sales also were especially important for exposure gigs, busking gigs, and donation gigs, as musicians could only rely on item sales to boost their revenue for that particular gig.

Musicians portrayed a fairly standard length for gigs. A musician who performs a gig usually plays a set. A set typically lasts from twenty minutes to forty-five minutes, and it involves musicians preparing music for the allocated amount of time. Although some gigs are longer, the majority of gigs were described to fit this expectation. Musicians frequently talked about sharing a set with other musicians in order to fill a longer timeslot by playing one after the other in order to satisfy the demand for longer shows. Participants called these combined music acts split bills, and described them as events that last anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours.

Gigs that do not fit this short time span are seasonal gigs, symphony work, studio work and busking gigs. Seasonal gigs are typically longer in length and more lucrative, such as Christmas gigs for which a musician signs a contract to play Christmas music from eight in the morning to noon in a mall. Symphony work for gig musicians involves practicing with the orchestra for two sets of forty-five minutes, having a union backed break in the middle, and one to two shows that last between one and two hours not including intermission. For studio gigs, musicians are hired by the hour, and participants said recording sessions last between one and two hours, and session artists are hired to record a number of songs in one gig. Although the majority of gigs involve having a set to play, in those cases the length is much longer. Overall, the majority of gig work was characterized by participants as a short performance lasting up to forty-five minutes, and this work was sought out and booked on an ongoing basis. Gig venues like bars and clubs organize music nights by piecing together three or four sets from different performing acts. This three to four band split bill was especially common in music venues where pop, folk, indi, metal, and rock genres of music are played.

Interestingly, busking gigs do not fit the common definition of a gig where a musician is hired by someone to play, as there is no employer. Not only that, but the time that musicians busk

for is entirely dependent on the busking individual. Buskers such as Diane and Wesley said that they have stayed up to eight hours in a spot busking when the money and the conditions were good.

Even though busking does not fit traditional notions of gigging, it is included in this study because of the importance that it has as a revenue generating activity for some musicians.

Participants only talked about one city sponsored gig opportunity. For buskers such as

Diane and Wesley, the city of Calgary has a board that distributes busking licenses. In order to get a license, musicians take part in an audition process in order to obtain a busking license. Buskers occasionally have to show their license to patrolling peace officers on the job in order to prove that they are licensed. Wesley mentioned that according to board members, the goal of this board is to sift through auditioners in order to have respectable musicians play in the city’s public spaces.

However, in Wesley’s experience “they will give a license to anyone” as long as a person does the audition and pays a fee for it. He explained that musical talent does not play a role in who receives a license. Although I argued earlier that creative city strategies can have a role in shaping the lives of urban musicians, the talk of participants did not significantly contribute to this discussion.

4.1.2. Music genres and gig work

Musicians referred to themselves with varying labels and these coincided with the types of work that they routinely drew upon. The main ones were band musician, singer/songwriter, busker, and freelancer. Although participants talked about being in more than one category at once, participants routinely talked about how the organization of gig work relates to each respective label. The band musician is someone who plays in a group (such as a duo in a bar, a string quartet, and a full orchestra), and involves a wide array of genres such as rock, jazz, and classical music. A singer/songwriter refers to a musician who accompanies their voice with an instrument

(predominantly acoustic guitar), while performing original material typically in country, indi, roots

and folk influenced genres. Singer/songwriters generally perform alone. Their music was described as more popular in quieter bars, coffee shops, and festivals. A busker is anyone who has a license to busk and plays in ideally highly populated outdoor areas such as Prince’s Island and

Eau Claire Market during the spring and summer periods, as well as the high pedestrian traffic +15 indoor walkways downtown and the high pedestrian traffic light rail train stations during the winter months. Buskers also perform alone. Buskers are attracted to high traffic areas where the sound is able to resound because of their reliance on voice and solo instruments. Lastly, a freelancer primarily obtains contractual forms of gig work and plays in settings such as corporate events, studios, weddings and hotels throughout the year. Freelancers primarily perform in big band, classical and jazz genres, with the exception of one freelancer who performs on various zither instruments.

Participants revealed interesting situations of how different types of music making fit into the gig market. In conjunction with music genres, the reward systems stemming from the cultural tastes of music consumers present instances of what Bourdieu (1993) terms the space of possibles around a particular individual’s position in the field. Participants playing in popular music venues talked about the difficulties of obtaining a decent revenue for playing in the bulk of pubs, clubs, and bars. The genres that are played in these venues are generally not classical, big band, or jazz, the types of music that participants described as well paying. Instead, these popular venues offered opportunities for performance work that were termed either low paying or not paying at all. Due to the differences in pay, gigs have consequences for the ways that musicians sustain themselves as performers. This will be discussed in more depth later in this chapter.

One example of an individual’s space of possibles is that of Brian, a saxophonist and one of two jazz musicians in this study. Contrary to the findings of Banks (2012) where jazz musicians

pin themselves solely as jazz players and uniquely rely upon on the low paying jazz work opportunities for music work in London, Brian talked about pinning himself as a generalist in the saxophone gig market (he doesn’t just play jazz or one kind of saxophone). He does this in order to draw upon a variety of well-paying opportunities for work. As he said: “I have always striven to be as flexible as possible. I find if you pigeonhole yourself then you have to be very very careful.” He is hired to play for restaurants, big band casino nights, hotel lounges, private corporate venues, and as an extra for the local orchestra. His space of possibles, then, is dependent on the relationship that the genres that he plays, which include jazz and classical, have with the current gig market. Since he is able to demonstrate his ability to play these different genres, he is hired to play a variety of gigs in different sites.

The space of possibles of individual participants differs based on the genre of music that they work with. As part of the conditions of gig work, this genre-reward system “functions as a system of common reference which causes contemporary directors, even when they do not consciously refer to each other, to be objectively situated in relation to the others” (1988:176).

This system of reference has implications for what musicians play and where they play. Also, in this market classical music is rewarded in this manner, and rock music in that manner, and music performances are positioned through this reference system. Musicians in these market conditions have certain possibilities of opportunities for pay related the type of work that they have. The gigs that Brian plays are not the same as Adam, a bassist who is primarily hired out as a sideman. What further influences the possibilities that musicians have are the valuations attributed to different types of music. Musicians’ navigations are also related the amount of earnings that musicians draw from each performance. Put simply, they have different day to day habits and priorities, such as having health care insurance or not, if they earn more or less money from gigs.

The space of possibles is also affected by whether musicians are playing original music, cover music, or composition music. Participants talked about how playing these three different kinds of music shapes the amount of earnings they receive for a gig. For example, orchestral musicians will play music composed for orchestras and they receive the highest pay for playing music in Calgary, while singer/songwriters will typically play their own material in coffee shops, bars and pubs and their overall earnings are lower than that of orchestral musicians. Malcolm, who primarily plays his own instrumental music on tour and in local rock venues, explained that the earnings for playing cover music are higher than those for playing original music. As he says: “I've had friends in bands make about 1000 a night in a cover band.” This was not the amount that

Malcolm reported for playing a gig. For him, a good night is splitting $150 to $200 between the two members of his band. Cover music, a term that arose out of popular music recordings in the mid-twentieth century, is a new performance of a previously recorded popular music piece.

Although I did not explore with participants the reasons behind this disproportionate pay for cover and original music, I argue that because cover music involves playing songs that are well known, musicians are rewarded more for playing pieces that listeners know and get excited about.

Interestingly, even for the orchestra cover songs are more rewarded, as Neil mentioned that performances such as “Beatlemania” (where the symphony plays Beatle covers) sell more tickets than Dvorak’s “New World Symphony”, a composition written for orchestras.

The space of possibles then, reflects how a musician’s work is organized. From music genres to original/cover/composition music, the type of music that a musician plays has significant implications for the opportunities that they are able to draw upon in the gig market and their subsequent earnings. Each participant had their own space of possibilities, and through an

understanding of how music types are related to the gig market, we can begin to understand how the music field relates to each individual musician.

4.1.3. Getting a Gig

Musicians talked about a constant process of reaching out, managing expectations (such as when to play, for what, what the client wants, the pay) and booking gigs. As Wesley says about his general day: “I almost never stop working. I wake up, I do my booking, then I warm up, then I go busking, and then, either go teach or go home and do more booking, or just go home and practice.

I'm never not working on my art.” Booking for Wesley involves numerous tasks and these change depending on the gig at hand. He described what he does to book a festival gig:

I'll usually ask if they have a specific book e-mail to send all my information to. If they don't I’ll just contact them through a general inquiries method. I'll ask them who does the booking, can I get their contact information, then once I know exactly who to talk to [I will] send them an e-mail saying: please consider me for a performance, I have a small but loyal fan base in town. If you'd like I can organize a split bill with a bunch of other acts so we can really work at filling the venue. [I will then] send them my [portfolio] showing where I've played, links to my website so they can hear my music, then thank them for their time and tell them I look forward to talking to them.

Wesley’s process of putting himself out to venue organizers resonates strongly with Thomson’s

(2013) discussion of the modern musician, where musicians are increasingly shouldering more and more career-management duties, while simultaneously receiving lower rates of pay for such tasks.

With the exception of musicians such as Neil, a tenured orchestra player, Charlotte, a semi-retired cellist, and Fiona, a reputed niche music performer, musicians consistently described putting themselves out there to get gigs. These three particular musicians have people responsible for booking, such as orchestra manager or a booking agent, or they have people routinely contact them for hiring purposes.

Earlier I talked about a musician’s individual space of possibles and offered a framework for making sense these spaces: the organization of each musician’s work opportunities is related to the type of music that he or she plays. For participants, career-management strategies were also related to the type of work that they are able to perform. The type of gig set the expectations for how participants reached out to venues to get gigs. For example, some participants set up advertisements in local musician union websites and in buy, trade, and sell sites such as Kijiji and

Craigslist to obtain music students, studio work, and sideman work. However, Wesley and Brian were clear that this type of internet advertisement would not be as effective as throwing out professional emails (a term I use to refer to making email cold calls to venues) to local venue managers to obtain a gig.

Below are two composite stories I created drawing upon multiple accounts of getting a gig.

The first is an example of making cold calls to get a gig. Daniel the band guitarist knows that his band has open weekend spots in three weeks. Daniel then starts throwing emails out to local bars in which they have not recently performed. In these emails, he offers to play a thirty-minute or forty-five-minute set. Following a response from one bar and after a few back and forth emails where Daniel negotiates with an organizer, Daniel’s band will play and how much the band will be paid, Daniel and his band have a gig Saturday night at a local pub where they will play for thirty minutes as the first of three bands that night. Such stories were common, whether a musician offered to play in a hotel, a bar, a club, or a coffee shop.

This next story also draws upon multiple accounts of getting a gig, but instead of cold calls, it involves someone getting in touch with a musician, as opposed to a musician initiating the discussion. During her habitual email and social media message check, Anne receives a Facebook message from a fellow colleague who plays in a band with whom she has shared a set in the past.

Anne responds to her colleague and she learns that in five months there is an opening for a gig at a local pub, but the pub is only offering the spot if they can fill up two hours of time. Anne excitedly exchanges messages with her colleague and they set up a split bill with a third performer to last two hours at that pub. In this case, Anne is being contacted through her own professional network.

Participants gave many examples of how reputational networks and word-of-mouth referrals were the source of numerous gig opportunities. This type of booking was particularly frequent for private functions such as corporate events and weddings, and in venues that showcase split bills.

Just as with the above example, musicians had others contact them for work, and all participants were in agreement that the more they could rely on this form of booking (as it involves less time consuming work on their part), the better.

Participants tried to plan the majority of their performances five to six months in advance.

This was the agreed upon norm for gig work. However, during the interviews participants always gave exceptions to this rule. If musicians are not as booked as they would like to be and their schedule has a gaps it, then they try to fill it, as with the case of making cold calls to get a gig in three weeks. Other exceptions exist because of unexpected situations. For example, Morgan was asked in the last minute if she could fill in for a friend’s split bill. She explained: “I promised that

I would take over for one half jam because the lead singer was really sick and so I read the songs, showed up, and did the second half of the gig.” In general, gigs were planned long in advance through means such as cold calls, but they could also be scheduled as late as the morning of the gig through last minute phone calls.

4.1.4. Evaluating Gigs

When talking about gig work in Calgary, participants mentioned a variety of gig sites. These places differ in matters such as how much musicians are paid and what it’s like to gig there. In terms of

pay, the consensus of musicians is that orchestral gigs are at the top of the pay scale and playing in a bar for nothing is at the other end. Participants were constantly engaged in thinking about matters such as the pay of a gig, contracts and paperwork, and setting expectations for themselves as a performer and for the gig. This was all part of the work of evaluating and planning gigs. When asked about his process of planning a gig, Brian talked about part of his routine:

If it was people I didn't know, I would get some sort of contract together. Usually of my own design, […] I will have some sort of contract just to protect me. […] So yeah, just figure out all the logistics, and then the goal is just to try and make everything happen as seamlessly as possible […] So, try and figure out ways of having everything appear, happen and disappear without anybody having any friction about it.

When talking about the logistics of a gig, all participants shared this type of process. The goal for them is to earn a living, protect themselves as best as possible, and as Becker’s discussion of the integrated artists suggests, make a living in as smooth a manner as possible. As Brian says, you

“try and figure out ways of having everything happen and disappear without any friction about it.”

Participants talked at length about how venues were different, and reflected on different tactics of evaluation for different kinds of venues. Based on participant accounts, I created a compound characterization of two popular gig sites in Calgary. Vern’s Bar is a place where you can easily get a gig, but also a place where you will not be offered any money up front for playing.

At Vern’s, you always have a chance to show off your music in front of an encouraging crowd, but the rewards for doing so are meager. Contrary to that, the Ironwood is more discriminating towards who it selects for shows, often basing their criteria upon a portfolio, an artist’s local reputation and the promise of the musician to bring in an audience; however, the Ironwood has a reputation for not undercutting musicians and provides an opportunity to receive a promised rate for performing as well as revenue from ticket sales. In the hierarchy of gigs, both of these sites

have their own idiosyncrasies.

The characteristics of a gig site relates to how participants thought about and evaluated matters such as protecting themselves, the pay of the gig, and how the gig will unfold. How participants dealt with these venue characteristics was all part of their gigging career. In reference to the venue characteristics of a “gross bar” and a “better bar”, Carey said:

Little gross bars are awesome, like everybody has played at Vern’s. It’s [a] basement and […] the guy who runs it is awesome. But it’s […] a little disgusting bar. I’ll keep playing there but it would be cool if I could also play at Dicken’s. It holds more people [and] it looks a little nicer, […] the lights look good and the sound is really good and bigger bands tend to play there.

Even though these examples are of local pubs where the rewards for playing are typically lower, all participants had their own ways of thinking about and dealing with the idiosyncrasies of each gig site/role, whether it be as an extra in the symphony, as a solo wedding singer, playing as a punk drummer in a gross bar, or playing for a festival in a folk duet. As Carey emphasized, some things that she thinks about when evaluating gig sites are whether or not they are more exclusive, the attractiveness of the venue, the sound of the venue, and if talented and crowd drawing bands play there.

A few points were regularly raised by participants when talking about building expectations for a gig. They always thought of and brought up matters such as what to play, where to play, with whom, how much pay, and whether there was a contract involved. For example, if someone asked Elaine to play violin for their wedding, she would talk to those potential customers about what she can play, what they would like to hear, where the reception will take place and if

Elaine needs to hire extra musicians for the type of gig that customers want. As part of her routine of expectations, she will create and offer a contract for further negotiation after this initial discussion. All freelancers talked about being able to have contracts for the majority of their work.

Contracts were cited as necessary sources of protection due to past negative encounters. As Elaine said: “I try never to do it without a contract […]. Most of the time it's not a good experience when you don't use a contract […]. If there's no contract people don't take it seriously, that's what I find.”

In the case of freelancers like Brian and Elaine, as a general guideline they do not play a gig for less than $150 for the first hour, and charge $50 for every subsequent hour.

The activity of building expectations and negotiating in order to have a $150/hour wage is significantly different for musicians who primarily played in bars, pubs, clubs, and coffee shops.

In these gig sites, the pay is lower, and Malcolm explained that the scenario of signing paperwork to guarantee a musician’s wage was becoming increasingly unlikely in the gig sites where he performs. As he says: “the problem is that there's probably 8 out of 10 bands [who won’t play for a guarantee] […] to the point where, it can be faux-pas to ask for a guarantee.” The issue for

Malcolm is that the willingness of so many bands to play without a guarantee makes it difficult to get owners to provide musicians with a guarantee, as owners want to raise profits and can just refuse to hire bands that ask for guarantees. Just like Malcolm, Morgan has had experiences in these non-contractual venues. In reference to her negotiating routine for these venues, she says:

They won't do it, they won't bother signing anything. A lot is oral agreements and you have to really be careful with those. So I tend to e-mail back and forth just to have something in writing […] I will make sure that I e-mail so I that I have that as opposed to [just] an oral agreement […]. I do that a lot to cover my butt! - because I have been screwed in the past.

Just like Elaine, a freelancer who protects herself with a contract due to past negative encounters, musicians playing in non-contractual bars try to protect themselves. In Morgan’s case, she tries to have everything in clear written form prior to a gig. When playing in venues that don’t regularly promise a guarantee or a contract, participants not only talked about protecting themselves by having everything set out in clear written e-mails; they found other ways of obtaining revenue.

Musicians described tactics such as negotiating in order to obtain personal promises of pay from venue managers, negotiating for a share of the ticket revenue, and selling their own music merchandise. Problematically, these tactics do not amount to much money for a musician. As musicians such as Malcolm, Wesley, and Adam described, ticket splitting involves giving a cut to the door handlers, the sound technician, the venue and all the performing bands. In their experiences, even if a local generated $600 of ticket sales, it leaves an individual band with at most

$100 to split between the members. As Malcolm tells: “If you get 100 people in the door, and they all pay $5, [that’s] $500. Usually the sound guy will get 200, and whoever's working the door will get 100. So there's only 200 left for four bands to split.” The way that the income is split reveals how gig musicians are not well paid in popular music venues, and musicians hold marginal positions in the eyes of certain venue managers. Musicians in these venues get the leftovers of the ticket revenue as an afterthought, as the sound technician and the door worker are offered a promised amount of pay for their work. Despite this unfavourable situation, in venues of more repute where the clientele systematically generated music night revenue (i.e. the “better bars”), contracts were standardized by the venue and signed as a condition for playing, or the venues lived up to their promised pay consistently.

Musicians talked about one last aspect of the process of evaluating, negotiating and building expectations in popular music venues. Sometimes, during the frequent communications between participants and organizers, participants were told to bring in a certain amount of people to the show or to sell a minimum amount of tickets prior to the show. According to participants, certain venue organizers expect musicians to advertise themselves and deliver these particular results. For example, Mark is a band musician and a singer/songwriter who frequently gigs in quiet bars and coffee shops. In his experience, one overt way this expectation was broached is in the

question “how many people can you bring out?” Posed during email exchanges between Mark and a venue manager, this question demonstrates the expectations of such venue organizers when hiring musicians. An even more overt form of this expectation was also discussed by Mark. For example, during one of his exchanges with an organizer, he was told “you can’t play here unless you sell 20 tickets.” In Morgan’s case, she does not mind this type of expectation as she views self-advertisement as a core part of her livelihood. This view was shared by other participants.

However, what problematizes the expectation of managers are cases when musicians do not meet these demands. Mark described one such situation:

I said we could probably bring 10 people […] And he said try and make it 20, and we still played. I just laughed at that I thought it was a bit ridiculous. We only ended up bringing about five people at that show [he chuckles]. I don't think they minded too much, but I haven't gotten a call back from them.

Participants tried to play a gig in as smooth a manner as possible, and most musicians tried to play as many gigs as possible, but as Mark found, if the expectation to sell 20 tickets is not met, then you don’t get a call back. Gig work for musicians then, is also about taking on gigs when they may not be able to meet all of the expectations of the venue. Given that a significant portion of musicians who play in such venues do not always receive direct pay for their employment and are more likely to want to play for a chance to get exposure and earn money through other means, it leaves gig musicians in a position with little ability to challenge this type of expectation building between venues and musicians.

4.1.3. Summary

As opportunities for work, gigs are short-term in nature, continuously obtained, and vary in pay depending on the event. Musicians in Calgary each have their own space of possibles and these possibilities relate to how musicians refer to themselves and the type of music that they play.

Importantly, the space of possibles of a musician reflects how their work is organized, as musicians in this study experienced differences in pay, schedules, and gig types depending on the type of gig work that they drew upon. Musicians also had different tactics to deal with and evaluate gig venues, and these changed depending on the type of gig.

Up until now I have talked about the Calgary gig market by discussing the types of gig opportunities available, how the work of participants is organized by the type of work that they perform, and how gigs are routinely evaluated based on the venue characteristics. As one of the primary goals of this chapter is to make visible the forms of gig work available and the types of income generation that musicians draw upon, I will now go in-depth into the different forms of income that participants drew upon. As I will demonstrate, the work of a musician is also about supporting the music.

4.2. Supporting the Music

The musicians in this study were all unable to make an income solely through gig work. They relied on a number of other income generating activities and/or financial supports to supplement their gig revenue. Financial support came from a variety of sources, such as Adam’s parents who did not ask for rent, Gabrielle’s husband who worked for the city, Morgan’s mother who lived and shared rent with her, Charlotte’s government cheques for her old-age related disabilities, and

Mark’s student loans. Participants also revealed a plethora of work that helped them make ends meet. Based on participant accounts of their non-gig income generating activities, I categorized this other work as non-music work and music related work. As I will show, a dimension of gig musician life involves piecing together both gig work and other forms of work. In the next section,

I explore the interesting interplay between gig work and non-gig work in more depth. For now, I

will discuss what these two non-gigging forms of work are for the sixteen musicians in this study after a short word on the necessity of having other work.

I am confident that participants would not be working second jobs to support their music if conditions allowed it, with few exceptions. However, because of the financial strain that the gig market reproduces, participants had to juggle other sources of revenue to supplement their gig income. If this supporting work could be involved with music it was a bonus for participants. When it comes to other forms of income generation, Malcom said: “at least with a part-time […] job you know that you can rely on that income if you need to cover your rent.” This view was shared by many participants.

4.2.1. Non-music work

Non-music work is a category I created in order to contextualize musician income sources in relation to the gig market. As such, it involves any income generating activity that is not related to music. Based on the types of work that participants talked about, non-music work was comprised of construction work, oil and gas office work, construction management, public speaking, social work with youth, acting in local film productions, art craft sales, conducting aboriginal crafts workshops (such as workshops for making drums and dreamcatchers), stage building and takedown, and service industry work, which included bartending, cooking, courier work, warehouse nightshift work, dog grooming, and working as a store clerk. With the exception of

Gabrielle, Nicholas, and Mark, who held full-time positions in an oil and gas office firm, in construction management, and for the city as a night-shift road painter, respectively, all participants who held non-music jobs worked part-time in their positions. Musicians were drawn to these positions in order to make a predictable income on the side. Furthermore, during certain periods such as the summer, some musicians like Brian held numerous part-time jobs at once. As

workers, participants had a wide array of schedules. Carey talked about working up to six days a week at two part-time jobs as a dog groomer and as a store clerk during the mornings and afternoons, whereas Malcolm prefers to work three or four nights a week at his warehouse job for

Home Depot. On the other hand, Jack described the work he does with youth as a social worker as sporadic. For him, a social work contract may keep him busy for three months, but this work only comes along once or twice a year. Mark, who held a full-time position with the city at the time of the interview, worked as a night-shift road painter during the months with no snow.

4.2.2. Music related work

Just as I defined non-music work in relation to the gig market, I use the term music related work to encapsulate all of the work that participants had that was not a gig, yet related to the field of music. Not only did participants view this kind of work as a good way to make a predictable income, but they frequently mentioned how this work had the benefit of allowing them to use their skills and knowledge to earn wages that were typically higher than those from work not related to music. The types of work that I placed under this conceptual category were teaching music, conducting music workshops in schools (teaching on a large scale), owning and managing a music studio, music therapy, and music transcription.

Many of my participants described these jobs as activities where they spend relatively few hours for the amount of money that they need to earn monthly. Not only that, but musicians who held such jobs all found them stimulating due to their passion for music. Of all of the music related jobs disclosed, teaching music was the most prominent form, and it was done by Malcolm, Adam,

Neil, Wesley, Brian, Elaine, Charlotte, and Fiona. This work took place in homes, schools, and music studios, and teaching could be limited to one or two days a week. Fiona taught part-time at a private school in small intimate classroom settings and she also had a few individual students.

On the other hand, teaching music for Elaine meant juggling twenty-two individual students at one time. With the exception of Neil and Charlotte, music teachers generally tried to gather students when possible in order to gain steady sources of income while simultaneously being stimulated.

Some musicians, such as Malcolm, Brian, Elaine, and Fiona amassed a significant amount of students. Brian, who has a vast amount of experience teaching students individually and in workshops, shared this about teaching:

Teaching is like playing, you have to be engaged. Three hours is usually my cap […] because you are completely engaged the entire time. You are either listening or you are talking about what they are doing […]. More often than not you are listening to what they are doing because you want to show them how they can do it better, and then offer stuff, or a lot of the time I will play along with them, so that you are completely engaged. It depends on the situation, if I'm working with a group versus a single person obviously I'm going to be thinking about more ensemble stuff versus personal issues, but I am going to be focused on what I am doing.

Brian portrays teaching as a meaningful activity. He gets to play music, listen to music, and think about the intricacies of each situation. Elaine, who teaches a large number of students, also positioned teaching music in a favourable manner. As she said: “In some ways it improves you because you learn a lot from teaching, and you learn a lot from observing your students.” For

Elaine, teaching is an opportunity for musicians to hone their skills as performers because it allows teachers to watch and think about people playing music right in front of them.

For someone like Wesley, a musician who records songs, plays in bars, creates music videos, busks, works as a music therapist and as a music teacher, teaching at a studio provides him with the opportunity to earn a good hourly wage, and the benefit of not having to find students for himself. The studio provides students for him, and his role is to prepare lessons, show up, and teach. He said of his teaching work: “It pays quite well so it's totally worth going in for those six

hours a week.” Given the flexible nature of scheduling students, he is able to put all of his teaching onto two weekdays and reserve the rest of the week for other activities.

As there are few opportunities in the Calgary job market to earn a wage above that of

$15/hour for non-music and unspecialized work, teaching music was the primary of revenue for many in this study. Some musicians talked about teaching as a source of three quarters of their income depending on the season of the year. Teaching music does not take place throughout the year; instead, it coincides with the school system and thrives during the months of September to

June. Music teachers talked about teaching fees, ranging $25 an hour to $60 a half hour for more specialized classical lessons. Typically, students show up once a week and lessons last anywhere from half an hour to an hour. Because of the overlap between school and music lessons, most teachers put the majority of their students on weekday evenings. Participants mentioned having anywhere from one student to twenty-two students at a time.

Musicians considered one other advantage to teaching music, and it had to do with how the work came to them. When looking for work as a teacher in a studio, musicians demonstrate their credentials during the interview/audition and through achievements such as music degrees and

Royal Conservatory certificates. The teachers working in studios mentioned how they were easily able to demonstrate these credentials and subsequently obtain teaching positions. On the other hand, some music teachers wanted to avoid studio fees (the studio takes a cut of the lesson fees) and build up their own student cohorts, thereby making more revenue. For Brian, building up the amount of students and maintaining that number takes a significant amount of time and vigilance, as it requires reminders, follow ups and advertisement. However, when talking about being a self- employed music teacher, some participants commented on how their own networks of peers provided them with a steady influx of students. Elaine talked at length about how the community

of violin teachers in Calgary regularly recommends that students switch to different teachers depending on their needs, motivations, and skills. Although she loses students to her peers that way, she also gains students through her peers.

4.2.3. Merchandising

Of all of the non-gig work that musicians talked about, a particularly important type of work was selling merchandise. Merchandising is a form of non-gig work that is related to music in an interesting way. This activity involved creating and/or obtaining individual objects and selling these items at shows. According to merchandise vendors, what they do is set up a “merch booth” during concerts and sell items such as T-shirts with band logos and CDs. Some participants like

Malcolm and Jack put in a significant amount of time into creating unique items to sell. The most common objects for sale for merchandise sellers were T-shirts, hoodies, button pins, and CDs. For participants, “selling merch” had two important purposes. The first was to generate more income for playing a show, and the second was for promotional purposes. I will be discussing this form of promotion in more depth in the next chapter.

The musicians who talked about selling merchandise were Malcolm, Adam, Carey, Diane,

Jack, Wesley, Luke, Gabrielle, Fiona, and Mark. Interestingly, for the musicians here the work of selling merch mainly took place in popular music venues such as bars and coffee shops. With the exception of Diane, who mentioned making numerous sales online, at her busking spots, and in more intimate private venues, and Wesley, who also sold CDs while busking, merch sales were the domain of popular music gig musicians. Selling “merchware” was described as an endeavour that can systematically boost the revenue for playing a gig. Given that playing a gig in popular music venues does not frequently end up paying well for musicians, selling merchandise was sometimes the only form of revenue that participants could have for playing a gig.

Merchandise vendors talked at length about what they did in order to obtain items for sale.

Even the musicians who did not have much for sale at the time of the interview had concrete plans in motion in order to obtain more merchware. Although ways of obtaining items differ from item to item, such as dealing with a Calgary T-shirt printer for shirts, the basic pattern was described by participants to be done in this manner: contact a manufacturer, negotiate, purchase the items, provide the manufacturer with a few items such as T-shirt templates or song recordings, and wait for product in the mail. Participants often sold button pins for $2, T-shirts for $15, hoodies for $40, and CDs for $10 to $15. With the aid of the merch booth, participants talked about making extra amounts of $75 per gig by selling merch.

The ways of obtaining merchware were not limited to purchasing items from individual manufacturers. Malcolm and Jack portrayed the activities and time involved in the creation of merchandise. These two musicians were involved in a kind of art industry on the side. For them, one of the goals of creating these items is to maintain a stamp of uniqueness on their wares. For example, Malcolm orders album from a manufacturer in Toronto, has local artists contribute, and his girlfriend helps him create album sleeves to hold them. He talked about this elaborate process of putting together his albums:

The process of one of these [is] first we order the cardboard sleeves from Toronto […] and then we have an artist in town […] screen print the covers and the back. Then we have the storybook which [my girlfriend] wrote, and we have a local artist [...] do the illustrations. Each song gets a page of the story[book]. We tape and glue that in, and then we put book binding here, so that it's actually a gate fold11, and up to here we have top loading records, pink vinyl too. And then we have this funny little library card here so you can lend it out to your friends. So it does take a while. Like, when you’re doing a batch of 50, let's say the first 5 will take you 20 minutes each to hand assemble all of these, but then after a while you get the assembly going and start pumping them out.

11 A gate fold is a type of fold popularized by the “story books” of Pink Floyd vinyl record covers. 79

Malcolm showed me this sleeve during the interview. It is an elaborate and well put together album cover that gave me the impression of a fantasy story book with its calligraphy binding, pages and ordering. This sleeve was also the cover for a pink album, another touch which Malcolm said fans expressed delight at. As a merchandise maker, Jack is also heavily invested in the create of merchware for his shows, and his wife contributes significantly to the creation of items. Just like

Malcom, Jack said that fans liked his merchware because of the originality of the wares, and he frequently sold out of his merchandise during tours which would cause him to spend half the night after a gig to replenish the stock of items for the following day.

4.2.4. Grants and awards

Grants subsidize the activities of musicians. Certain governmental and non-profit organizations offer grants for explicit activities such as recording, marketing, publishing, and touring, activities which can easily cost up to $5,000. Two prominent grant organizations mentioned by participants are the Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) and the

Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent on Recordings (FACTOR). For very specific purposes, grants provide anywhere from $500 to five figure numbers, and for some musicians like Jack and

Adam, it provided a financial backbone for activities which would otherwise be unaffordable.

Other organizations mentioned were the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and regional radio stations. Many institutions also offer music competition awards by hosting events such as songwriting competitions. Awards for these competitions are prizes such as radio air time for the winning musician, and/or a lump sum of money.

Problematically, writing grants can be a counter-intuitive process for a musician. This was discussed by Jack, who often drew upon grant money to support his projects, and Adam, who helped newcomers learn how to write successful grant applications. Compared to the process of

writing, thinking about, and playing music, Jack said: “for the grants you have to know exactly what you are going to do.” However, knowing exactly what you are going to do beforehand for grants creates issues for people who are immersed in a field that does not encourage such task driven writing. While many musicians used a language of goals and targets, such as when communicating to a bar manager for a gig, the act of writing music, loving music, and performing music live is completely different from grant writing. Musicians are not used to it because they usually don’t need to think that way. However, without grants, some musicians here would not have recorded some of their albums, or decorated their music portfolio with awarded grants, or been able to tour across Canada, or publicize their performances with paid-for advertisement.

Without grants and competition awards, the funds necessary for tours, ads, and records have to come out of pocket, and these prohibitive costs are for the most part not within the reach of someone who plays music gigs in Calgary.

4.2.5. Summarizing non-gig work

Participants had numerous types of income-generating activities in order to support themselves.

Due to the limited revenue that they are able to earn playing gigs, all participants had some other form of support, whether it be from a spouse, a job, music grants, or an income-generating activity.

The non-music jobs reflected the need for participants to hold on to sources of income that they could count on, but this was not always limited to non-skilled labour jobs. For many participants, teaching was one of the main sources of revenue, as it was well-paid and did not tax them with too many responsibilities. Other musicians consistently tried to boost their gig revenue by selling merchandise in order to ensure that they could make some money from playing a gig.

I raise one last point about income related activities outside of gig work. Importantly, just as the music that a musician plays shapes the organization of a musician’s gig work, I argue that

other income generating activities shapes the space of possibles of participants. Take Brian’s account of the relationship between his music work and other jobs. As he says:

What makes it harder for me? Lack of time. I mean to be a performing musician, if I could be independently wealthy tomorrow I would instantly just start working on my own performance projects because I would be free […] to do it. […] The more time you spend making money to survive, say teaching, those things will take up the chunks of my time. […] If I had more time I could definitely do more stuff.

For Brian, having to work to survive eats up his time, and because of that he has less time to put into what he would ideally want to do with his time. The idea that the more time a musician spends to survive means that they can gig less is also visible in the accounts of full-time workers such as

Gabrielle and Mark. For them, working to survive means having 40 or more hours a week of non- gig work. In Gabrielle’s case, because of her office work and her two kids, she can only gig on weekends when she finds childcare. Mark gigs as often as possible before his night shift, but he often sleeps less during busy periods and has to find evening gigs that do not overlap with his full- time work. As we see in the case of Brian, Gabrielle, and Mark, each individual’s possibilities within the field are not only related to the type of gig work that they do, but also to the type of non-gig work that they draw upon. Gig musicians then, are shaped by the gig work that they do, but also by the other incomes that they rely on, and this has important implications for what they do in order to be gig musicians.

4.3. The Seasonal Market of Gig Musicians

Now that I have been able to introduce the various work opportunities musicians drew upon, I can bring out an integral element to the work of gig musicians. For the most part, the jobs that musicians worked were not available throughout the entire year; these jobs came in spurts. This element is crucial because it plays an important role in terms of how participants were able to get

and schedule gigs. Importantly, musicians spoke of their work as having a cyclical and seasonal element to it, as different gigs and non-gig jobs were available during select times of the year. For example, festivals gigs, deemed well-paying and good for publicity by musicians, are rarely available during the long winter months. Christmas gigs on the other hand, another good source of revenue for some participants, are for the most part only available in December. In conjunction with this, non-gig work often had a cyclical element to it, such as construction jobs that were primarily available during the summer months. As such, in order to continuously get gigs, musicians were involved in a constant juggle of income sources by filling in time gaps in their weekly and seasonal schedules.

Throughout this chapter, I have woven Bourdieu’s notion of the space of possibles into the presentation of the data and I have argued that conceptualizing an individual musician’s space of possibles requires a sensitization to the types of work that they draw upon, whether it be gig work or other supplementary forms of income. As I have shown through the accounts of participants, the work of musicians affects their field positioning and the options they have at their disposal.

However, to bring more nuance into this claim, I will show how the seasonality of all of the various work types that participants draw upon make a musician’s space a shifting space of possibles depending on the time of the year. In other words, the seasonal element of their work plays an integral role in how their possibilities are shaped.

Brian described his work as “periods of feast and famine,” and I use this term to exemplify how some gig seasons are more lucrative then others. Although no two periods of feast and famine were exactly the same for the musicians here, there were seasons of work that were shared by participants. During the spring and summer months musicians spoke of working a lot of wedding and festival gigs, as well as busking outdoors and in train stations. In the fall and winter,

participants spoke of recording, Christmas, and award seasons, which involved making and recording songs, playing Christmas gigs, and applying for scholarships and awards. Scholarship and award season was mentioned by a few participants. These musicians were able to periodically tap into funding circuits provided by various organizations by taking the time to fill out applications for grants. For the musicians who toured, touring season primarily took place in the spring, summer, and fall due to the difficulties that the weather presents for winter tours. Although touring did take place in the winter for Malcom and Jack, the large distances between Canadian cities and the cold winters recurringly created transportation and attendance issues for winter tours.

Other income generating activities also seasonally peaked and declined. Participants found that there are more service and labour jobs and very few teaching opportunities in the summer.

During the rest of the year, there are many teaching opportunities, some service jobs, and fewer opportunities for labour work. Most of the winter labour work was limited to indoor construction, renovation work, and indoor stage setups. Non-gig work such as teaching, acting, labour and social work was characterized as short and contractual forms of work by participants. Just as the musicians here juggled different forms of gig work over time, they were constantly balancing non- gig income sources along with their gig work, and all of these work types have their own ebbs and flows. As Jack said about his past three years as a solo singer/songwriter: “When work is there you gotta work, and otherwise, it can be pretty quiet. It’s totally different all the time.”

Even though musicians all talked about experiencing seasonal ebbs and flows, there are a variety of ways that musicians portrayed the changing nature of gig work. For example, Diane talked about herself in a transitional period of career, and she contrasted this to a more typical routine from before:

Now I am in a transitional period in my career. I have gone from full-time busking, nearly 7 days a week, on average - I [did] about 6-7 hours a day, [I was also] recording in studios, collaborating with other musicians, recording compilations with other artists from afar, and doing compositions for a theatre […] here in Calgary, and also doing soundtrack compositions and scores here and there for documentaries, online. […] Now, […] I'm going through a transition where it's been a long time since I've produced a full length album, I've been doing a lot of compilations since 2009, so now I have projects on the go, so up to seven full length albums and maybe a few EPs12 in there, […] and in the meantime I'll still perform regularly, weekly at various cafes like Cafe Koi, Kava Espresso bar and various places like Weeds Cafe and whoever happens to circulate my name.

Diane has gone from being a musician who constantly busks and collaborates with various artists to being a musician who gigs less often, but is in the process of recording a large amount of her own works. This is but one example of a shift in the working life of a participant. Her previous work organization was dependent on other artists for work as well as the various opportunities to frequently busk. Now, she depends less on other musicians and gigs weekly in various cafes for her work.

One important element of the gig market was emphasized by veteran participants such as

Brian and Charlotte. For them, working effectively with the seasons is necessary. Without doing so, there would be no performing. Gig work is by its very nature seasonal, and Charlotte talked about orienting herself to such conditions. She said: “Because the work comes in spurts […] then you better be willing to say for the downtimes, because there are going to be downtimes, I don’t mind that.” Brian strongly mirrored this statement in his interview. To him, it was not just about piecing together enough opportunities to make a living, but also about buffering the downtimes by never relying on one or two forms of gig and non-gig work. Although he frequently conducts music workshops in high schools during the school year, teaches students regularly, and gigs often in

12 An EP, known as an extended player, is a music recording that ranges between a single and an album in length. 85

different bands, he expressed a desire to ensure that his income sources do not dry up by never relying solely on one or two sources of income in case one of those sources were to disappear.

More specifically, he may currently be engaged with specific gigs and teaching opportunities, but he is ready to move on to a new form of work should the need arise. In his words, some of the work he picks up is “needs based,” and so he periodically finds himself new forms of income when others dwindle.

The theme of seasonal adaptation was prominent in the accounts of veteran participants: due to the continuously shifting nature of the different types of gigs, musicians have to adapt and orient themselves to the downtimes by fitting in other forms of income, which have their own ebbs and flows. Although younger participants talked about the ebbs and flows of their various income sources, experienced participants framed this element of gig work in ways that highlighted the strategies that they used when confronted with shifts in gig work and non-gig work. For example, when teaching stops during the summer months, Brian talked about hustling wedding gigs for that period in order to buffer the effect of the drop in teaching revenue. For musicians, different seasons require different jobs, and so the organization of their work changed along with the changes in revenue of the shifting seasons. All musicians had their own form of seasonal adaptations, like

Brian’s desire to get some wedding gigs during the summer, or Fiona’s case of spending more time recording during the winter in order to have CDs for sale for her upcoming summer festivals, or

Wesley’s choice to busk in December in dense train stations. Of all of the themes that arose during the interviews, this one strongly reflects the ebbs and flows of the short-term (non)contract musician who has to find ways to continuously generate some form of income. This orientation towards gig work is a continuous activity that all participants did in order to endure the seasonal

nature of every respective form of work that they drew upon. A musician’s space of possibles then, is a seasonal space of possibles.

4.4. Managing Poverty

With the exception of Neil, none of the participants had steady music jobs. Instead, they drew upon many precarious gig work opportunities. As precarious work, these opportunities were short-term and temporary. Work precarity by itself is not inevitably linked to low paying work, but it is characterized by seasonal and non-permanent placements, which causes workers to juggle numerous work opportunities over time in order to piece together an income. What characterizes the work of musicians here is that it is not only precarious, but low paying for the majority of participants.

4.4.1. Strategies for making ends meet

Participants reflected on numerous ways of adapting to minimal funds. Brian shows how some actions have a degree of nuance. For example, Brian plays gigs ranging from hotel lounge duets to being an extra in the local orchestra. He described how he obtains the clothes he needs for his work:

So right now my general uniform of choice, I have a $1200 suit that I got for 300 bucks at a consignment store back in 2004 […] and I am at a point now where I'm going to have to replace that suit because it's just beat up, it's missing buttons and the length is all shiny from me rubbing my [saxophone] on it. […] So when I finally get a new suit, it’s probably going to be in between 3 and 500, plus shoes. I've got a good pair of shoes that I've been keeping alive for a long time as well, […] [for this stuff] it's a couple hundred bucks a year probably, ties as well. […] [I]f I'm doing something a little bit more casual, I will wear nice jeans and a shirt, […] except now these [jeans] have got a hole in them. […] I probably should buy a new pair of jeans. […] I think these were about 200 bucks for new jeans and I probably go through about a pair year. So yeah, a couple hundred dollars a year I suppose overall if you spread out the big purchases across.

Brian also discloses another method of saving money on clothes:

R: What you do is you try to make it work as best as you can. If you're playing with the Symphony they will require you to wear a tux. Am I going to buy a tux just to play for a hundred dollars […] with the Symphony? No, but what I will do is wear black suit with the tux shirt underneath it and a bowtie and so for all intents and purposes if you're looking at me and I am on stage with a bunch of people in tuxes you are not going to notice that I don't have straight down my leg or on the lapel. So you can kind of fudge the system that way, especially if you're playing a big band. Generally, they will expect you to wear a tux, and again no one wears a tux […] [so] why don't you just buy a good black suit and then switch shirts and ties. So you can kind of fudge it and take it a little bit there. […] You know when someone hires you for something usually if they don't tell you straight up, one of the big questions is what do you want me to wear, and so […] everybody has the standard stuff that they can throw together.

From buying second hand clothing to disguising himself in less expensive clothing in a large band, getting his work attire ready without breaking the bank is a part of Brian’s routine. Other musicians also had tactics to minimize costs. Malcolm talked about sleeping in Walmart13 parking lots at night while on tour to avoid paying for a hotel, and he also gave examples of tours where he finds a couch to crash on for the same reason. Reciprocally, he also offers musicians on tour the chance to save money and sleep on his couch. Using tactics such as these, musicians are able to reduce the costs of doing their work.

Some participants save money by forgoing things like health and dental care, cars, and cellphones. Most musicians spoke of not having any health and dental care outside of the basic care provided the Albertan government. The only ones who had access to more than basic care were Neil, Gabrielle and Mark, who received benefits through their full-time work. Diane spoke about how forgoing crucial programs like health and dental care, something done out of necessity, created a long term strain for her. She spoke about a time when she really needed dental work:

I: So what did you do when you had some very expensive tooth work needed?

13 Touring participants told me that Walmart stores across North America explicitly state that they will not have security agents dissuade people from sleeping in their parking lots at night. 88

R: So what I did was, the year before I was already considering Blue Cross and stuff, you know when you work for such minimum wage, and your budget has to be so tightly monitored, you don't have a lot of room to think about health and dental and, stability in that sense so… […] and then it hits me. Ok, I have to take care of this […], I said ok I'm already so good at communicating about my music, how about I communicate about my pain [she smiles and I laugh lightly], so, on social media, on my website and through talking with people I said I need help, what can I do, could I get college students who are in medicine, maybe that was a resource. But, they're like […] they just do this and it's very basic care that they can provide you, what you need is quite intensive, it involves surgery, it involves extraction of a tooth […] and a filling and crowns, [and] they don't do that. And then, I called around - many - dental offices and none of them took my plight seriously, so I couldn't find any pro bono dentist who would help, nobody knew anybody who would do [it], and you know everybody has a family dentist or a friend who's a dentist but I couldn't get to them, and, finally I looked up Alberta Health and they surely enough they have at […] 4th St. and 12th Ave SW, they have a hospital there and upstairs [there] is a public dental, low income dental provider, so you sign up to be eligible and you get check-ups, and so I had emergency care with them, and that was very helpful. I mean in the hundreds of dollars instead of in the tens of thousands of dollars of procedures. I was [also] able to take care of minor tooth issues and I'm no longer with them because I don't need that anymore, so now I'm looking into Blue Cross. I: And how long did it take you from the point where the pain was there to when you were in the chair? R: Weeks, it was weeks so I was not in pain for too long. I: Were you able to perform? R: I was able to perform, yes I performed, with the sort of discomfort I guess, it wasn't so painful it was just a discomfort, and a fear that something worse would happen […] so, performing with the discomfort wasn't too bad.

Even though Diane makes light of it, a period of weeks in need of dental work is a significant hurdle. Given that this process took weeks, the consequences of forgoing health care due to financial necessities are real once something goes wrong. Not only that, but due to the contractual forms of work that musicians have, if they do not work, they do not get paid. This, added to all of the things needed to obtain affordable care when they need it without having insurance, emphasizes an ongoing stress that musicians face. Not only do they dread getting sick because that means they can’t work, but if they are sick they do not have the immediate resources available to quickly recuperate and get back to work.

In order to reduce monthly costs, a few participants did not have car or a cellphone.

Problematically, living in Calgary throughout the winter months can be demanding for musicians, as they have to carry around their gear on the transit system, wait times for buses are long, and instruments can be damaged from prolonged exposure to the cold. Not only that, but since buses and trains cover a limited amount of the city, an extensive amount of walking is necessary in order to arrive at gigs. Not having things like a car or a cellphone has consequences for how a musician is able to do their work, as Fiona said: “It's hard to live [in Calgary] without a car, because everything is designed for cars.”

4.4.2. Reframing systemic poverty

Participants made light of the systemic poverty in which they live. This was shown in the ways musicians talked about their desire to continue performing and in the entrepreneurial discourses of certain participants. This attitude is quickly summarized by Elaine. I asked her if she feels any pressure to stop gigging, and she said: “No, no. I will gig for the rest of my life” and she followed this with laughter. Most participants shared similar statements. For participants, the answer to this question is obvious, and most of the musicians in this study mentioned that even though they feel pressure to find a more lucrative way of making a living, they will continue to play music.

Participants experienced serious financial pressures, supported their music through various income sources, worked odd schedules, and routinely put together gigs. Despite these conditions, musicians framed their experiences as musicians very positively. They wanted to keep being gig musicians. Adam was the only musician who considered to stop gigging as an option for his life.

However, he said that for him to do so it would require him to experience some very specific pressures, such as getting his girlfriend pregnant. The investment in their music careers and the satisfaction that musicians felt from their careers was woven throughout the accounts of musicians, as this type of talk stemmed from the pleasures of performing, composing, and engaging in music-

related activities like teaching a good student or creating storybook vinyl album sleeves.

Participants did not only reframe their lives in a positive manner by keeping their outlook positive. For many musicians, making sense of their work meant framing it in business and entrepreneurial language. Malcom recalled his time of learning to be a professional musician as learning about the business. Coulson (2012) argues that this type of creative-work talk stems from neo-liberal discourse which frames professions as activities that must demonstrate an economic agenda, regardless of what they are. Not only that, but because of the pressure to compete among the numerous artists and scarce earning opportunities, Coulson argues, artists have increasingly become pressured to transform their lives through business language and techniques, and justify their positions in terms of their individual abilities and actions.

When talking about entrepreneurialism and music in general, participants showed different degrees to which they borrowed from business language and thought of themselves as entrepreneurs. Interestingly, musicians who regularly perform in popular music venues used business-like language and framed themselves as solely responsible for their own wellbeing. This is likely because musician unions and other protective organizations rarely play a role in the lives of musicians who draw on popular venue gigs. Although this language was used by all participants, it was used the most by participants who depended on the lowest paying venues. Entrepreneurial talk for musicians occurred when musicians communicated to a bar manager that they would bring thirty people to a show, or that they would play for exactly thirty minutes. This talk is entrepreneurial in the sense that musicians routinely try to create opportunities for themselves, talk about scenarios in concrete and measurable language, and systematically market themselves to venue organizers. One interesting interpretation for this business-like musician talk is discussed by Caves (2000), as he argues that artists may engage in targeted and goal-driven efforts in order

to be noticed by consumers, who include audiences and venue organizers, so that they can make more money.

As gig musicians, participants are keenly aware that in order to make ends meet in this field, a musician can’t only be a musician, and they draw upon readily available narratives of business success and personal responsibilities to persevere. Even the youngest participants talked about how they became quickly aware of this dimension of gig life. It’s not only about taking the time to practice, to write and to perform music; there’s bookings, there’s recordings to organize, there’s merchandise design. Musicians also present themselves to their professional networks and networks of peers, make use of social media, and foster new networks in goal driven ways, topics which I will discuss in the next chapter. On top of that, musicians need a second job in order to support their music. As such, drawing on the language of economics, participants reframed their work in order to fit in with the pervasive economic discourse.

4.5. Summarizing What Musicians Do

By setting up interviews using Becker’s notion of art world conventions and using Bourdieu’s notion of an individual’s space of possibles as a framework for analyzing the practices of the

Calgary music field, I have shown that musicians in Calgary are able to draw upon a limited stream of income-generating opportunities that shift throughout the year, and because of those limitations they piece together numerous income sources. Musicians also demonstrated numerous orientations towards these conditions. As the framing environment of their lives, the conditions of Calgary encourage musician to gig, hold other jobs, and forgo things such as owning many pieces of work attire, a car, a cellphone, and healthcare benefits in order to trim costs. Musicians, whether playing

in a bar or as an extra in an orchestra, are in positions where piecing together numerous activities is the work that they do, and how they do it, becomes an art in itself.

As I will show in the next chapter, the wide variety of experiences that musicians talked about throughout this study offer a rich account of what it’s like being a musician in Calgary, as these experiences show what musicians do in order to maintain their ability to be gig musicians.

In the following chapter, I delve into very specific navigations of musicians. Having first offered an account of the overarching conditions that musicians are immersed in, I will now explore in depth how parts are located in the community of musicians, and the individual practices of participants. Specifically, I will explore the practices musicians have for finding work, their orientation towards gig pay, the styles of interaction between musicians and others, in addition to the idiosyncrasies of Calgary as a place for professionally performing music gigs.

Chapter 5: The Community of Musicians

In the previous chapter I spoke of a space of possibles for each individual musician. As I have shown, these possibilities are organized by the various types of work that musicians draw upon in order to make ends meet. The work types involve gig work, as well as the various supporting income-generating activities that musicians draw upon. Since these income generating activities change over time, part of the work that musicians have to do is seasonally adapt to their changing financial circumstances. Not only do they find needs based work, but because of the low wages earned from gigs musicians find various ways to adapt to these conditions, such as forgoing a car.

In this chapter, I will show individual cases of what these possibilities look like for participants. My purpose in doing so is to provide an account of the individual actions of the musicians in this study by placing them within the framework of Calgary. As I will demonstrate, the work that musicians do is more than continuously piecing together numerous income generating activities over time and cutting expenses. Musicians are imbedded in a community of musicians as well as the community that they rely on for work. The point of this chapter is to explore in-depth accounts of musicians by weaving them into the framework of the previous chapter, and explore the intricacies of the community of musicians in Calgary. By doing so, I will show that musicians have particular orientations towards the multitude of tasks that they do.

Importantly, musicianship requires energy, time, and a lot of effort.

5.1. The Strategic Selection of Activities

In the previous chapter I argued that putting together numerous opportunities over time is the work that musicians do. With this in mind, I will first speak a bit about participants’ explanations for how they chose particular forms of music and non-music work. This juggling is done routinely

throughout their lives; thus, the work of choosing work offers an interesting insight into musicians’ lives. Finding the right job was important for participants: in order to be able to gig on weekday and weekend evenings, the time for the majority of gig work, all participants made choices about taking on certain gigs and non-gig work. When asked whether non-gig work may get in the way of gigs, participants declared a relative lack of conflict between the two forms of work. This lack of conflict was unexpected because I initially thought that musicians had little control over the non-standard and shifting schedules of their supporting work, and as such they musicians would experience scheduling conflicts. This was not the case. As Luke said casually, “Work does not generally get in the way, and I do try to not let it as well.” The reasons for this relative lack of conflict were because musicians prioritized scheduling gig work over other supporting income generating activities. Carey, a younger participant who works two part-time jobs, has a clear strategy:

I: So how do you decide now, what to take and when [as far as other jobs]? R: What to take... just whatever I can get that’s flexible around my music. I need to be able to book time off for shows and things like that, so I don’t really want a full time job unless the hours really made sense for music.

Carey is attracted to non-gig work that allows her to book time off consistently and easily should the need arise. The hours of non-gig work have to make “sense for music,” which means she needs her non-music work to have weekend and weekday evenings free for gig work.

Participants all talked about how they avoided scheduling conflicts. However, some musicians did not avoid clashes like Carey, but rather found workplaces that were both flexible and well-paying, or drew upon the help of their family to make it to gigs. Like Carey, Gabrielle primarily gigs on weekends, but tends to not gig on weekdays. Among the participants here, she

was one of those who gigged the least because of her responsibilities as a full-time office worker and mother. For her, keeping her schedule gig-friendly necessitates a few different aspects:

I wanted something fun that paid better and was more challenging. I wanted to think, I wanted to problem solve, and […] I didn't want to work weekends. I had worked weekends my entire life and I wanted a job where I wasn't working weekends. [My husband] never worked weekends, so my family was always here on the weekend and I never was and I hate that. [I also wanted] more flexibility for music, and this job offers lots of holidays, I get flex days. I don't work weekends so it makes it a lot easier to do shows, so [I] have exactly what I need.

Gabrielle mirrors Carey in her desire to have “more flexibility for music.” However, her situation is different because her work allows her to have free weekends. Flexibility for Gabrielle comes from having free weekends as she gigs only on weekends.

Most participants did not have a steady and predictable schedule like Gabrielle. Due to the responsibilities of gigs, private lessons, workshops, music practice, childcare and his wife’s work,

Brian’s plans consistently shifted with the ebbs and flows of gig and teaching work:

I always joke, if you look at what an average week looks like, [it’s] a cacophony. […] What I will do, I will get hired for stuff and then once a week I will sit down and say okay, where are the holes? Because the problem is when you're running your own business you need to find the time to organize things like websites and things like that you need to find time to practice, you need to find time to book rehearsals if there is going to be rehearsals but you have to book [time]. So when we were planning this [upcoming festival gig], I looked ahead and thought okay there's a window open on Monday morning, I am not doing anything before my clinic, perfect. To [practice and] do this, I drive down to Beaverbrook [and] I can hang out there and practice for an hour before I come home. Then my wife works and I’m watching the boy at night. And then of course there’s other considerations, instead of hiring a babysitter if I come home, now I don't have to pay a babysitter and I am saving money instead of spending.

For Brian, every week has a different schedule. He ensures that every week he finds time to do certain activities such as practicing, maintaining websites, and booking rehearsals. Brian’s musician life involves him constantly fitting in activities both paid and unpaid where the “holes” are.

Many participants had similar ways of putting together their weekly schedules, but

Charlotte offered up a very different reasoning behind her scheduling style. As a semi-retired cellist whose body is unable to maintain an intense gig schedule, she primarily gigs when she is up for it. When she is not up to the task, she takes extended breaks from performing. For example, at the time of the interview, Charlotte told me that she had taken all of September off and a chunk of October as well. For her, problems arise from joint pain, improper warm ups, back posture, and staying in the same position for extended periods of time.

While Charlotte loves to perform music, the physical demands of performing outweigh the benefits of performing frequently over time. She is also in a position of financial stability and therefore does not feel the pressure to take on any “needs based” work. Therefore, when Charlotte is up to it, she takes on gigs and she is not afraid to say no to a gig. Interestingly, Charlotte did not appear to worry that her gig opportunities will dry up. The fear that gig work would fade away for musicians in if they took long breaks would be a legitimate worry for the majority of participants in this study. However, Charlotte frequently receives requests to play as a soloist or for her string quartet even when she is taking a break, and as such she doesn’t accept a gig until she feels ready to.

Like Charlotte, Nicholas loves to gig but he also has a physical limitation which prevents him from taking on too many gigs. He has severe back pain from a previous injury. As a drummer who works in an office position at a construction firm, he does not feel the pressure to take on any

“needs based” work, and gigs as often as his injury allows him to with his punk band. He is also often in a position where he refuses to take on certain gigs. Just like Charlotte, his gig schedule revolves around his physical ability to play. The situations of Charlotte and Nicholas bring into question whether being older, long-time musicians with solid reputations and networks make it

possible for these particular musicians to maintain this kind of intermittent schedule. Based on the cases of these two musicians, it would appear that holding such reputable and well-known position does allow musicians to be able to refuse work and take breaks from gigging.

5.2. Orientations Towards Gig Pay

The definition I have used for a gig frames it a paid activity, but that is not always the case. Some gigs taken on by participants were not paid. These unpaid gigs were referred to in the previous chapter as exposure gigs, pro bono gigs, and donation gigs. Exposure gigs were a particularly contentious subject for participants. Playing for exposure creates a challenge for musicians because they are not able to make a predictable income for playing a gig, yet they spend the time preparing for it and performing for it. Not only that, but exposure gigs were the gigs that younger musicians most often played. Throughout interviews musicians discussed their reasons for playing exposure gigs or not.

Some participants described themselves as willing to play for exposure. According to musicians, playing for exposure has three general benefits. By playing an exposure gig, musicians get to sharpen and hone their skills as a live music player, they can expose their music to someone which may lead to a subsequent gig, and lastly they have the opportunity to sell merchandise. For someone like Mark, a musician who often plays for exposure, the issue is simple. He said: “I would rather play as many shows as possible rather than only playing the ones where we are making money.” Musicians said that venues where musicians are not paid for a gig are primarily popular music venues. Because of the desire to build their reputation in the music scene, younger and less experienced participants like Mark strongly considered the benefits of playing for exposure. For these musicians, it was extremely difficult to fill their schedules with only paid gigs, as the bars,

pubs, and clubs where they played did not always give a guarantee, and the gig venues which don’t offer a guarantee are the ones open to newer musicians with less reputation. As musicians spoke of paid gigs in this context, I had the sense that playing mainly paid gigs is a luxury that they cannot have, and to play only paid gigs at the point in which they are in their career would only harm them. If less reputed musicians opted out of playing exposure gigs, they would rarely have the chance to been seen performing and their opportunities to gig would dry up. The general sense

I had was that the way they saw it, it would be nice to primarily play for pay, but it wasn’t going to happen.

In stark contrast, Fiona, a seasoned performer who has been playing gigs for over a decade, took a strong stand against playing for exposure:

Exposure is no good if you're just getting exposure to get more gigs that don't pay! It's a trap! [she laughs a bit hysterically]

Some musicians explain that if they expose their music to the right person this could lead to a subsequent gig (paid or unpaid), but for Fiona, the issue is not that playing for exposure is inevitably problematic, but in her experience musicians playing for exposure only leads to more exposure gigs, and not to any paid gigs. Because of this, musicians are forced into positions of uniquely drawing on exposure gigs where their meager revenue is primarily derived from merchandise sales.

Diane also strongly stands against playing for exposure, but she offers a different reason behind her dislike of it. Diane has played gigs for over two decades in a wide array of venues ranging from small coffee shops to large televised productions such as TED talks. In her experience the Calgary discourse of the artist is the problem. She described the take it or leave it attitude that people who hire musicians have:

I'm not firm on my request for a fee but I'd like to be treated […] with respect and with humanity. And so I often get the same old same old in Calgary and in Alberta, you know this is all we can offer, you can come in and sell your CDs and have the exposure and I basically say to them, “Thank you for your time [but] exposure kills me. I've been doing this for over 20 years, you know this is my going market rate, I'm willing to […] work with you”, but, you don't need to give me the generic […] sort of humiliating experiences. I don't need this. You are a well-established or an up and coming established event, and you want to make a mark in Calgary by humiliating an artist that you sought out? I don't think that's a very good move, I just don't think that that's [going to] last.

One last orientation was found among the more seasoned participants, and it was adroitly discussed by musicians who primarily played outside of popular music venues, such as classical and jazz players. Musicians who regularly play for money face different choices. These musicians were able to orient themselves towards how much pay is appropriate for a gig, when to do charity work, and when to play for the social and musical pleasure of the performance. Freelancers Brian and Elaine gave examples of how they made money for most of their gigs, and so they were both content to be in a few situations where they were paid at a decreased rate, or not at all, such as when playing for a charity event (which asked them to play pro bono beforehand) or for a close friend. Brian described what he considers when taking on gigs:

I: And do you charge a fixed amount for you to show up? R: I wouldn't say I have a fixed amount, I used to, I tend to go by union guidelines. I don't even know what they are right now, [but] I generally don't come out for less than 150 bucks, but it's very dependent on what's going on. There's a saying someone brought up to me a while ago which I really like. Wherever [you are] offered a gig you should look at three considerations: there's the bread, there's the artistic enjoyment, and there's the hang. Now if you get a gig that has all three, awesome! But, usually you can get by with two. So, if it's a real artistic enjoyable experience, and there's a lot of really cool people to hang out with, right? [I: Ah the hang.] Then maybe the money doesn't have to be quite as much and it's okay. Whereas, if it's a really lousy gig, […] artistically you're not going to enjoy yourself at all, but you're doing it with friends and it pays a lot of money, well then that's okay. But […] then of course there's the caveat, if you're playing with people that you don't like, and you're playing music that you hate [he laughs as he says this part], then you are missing two of those things, but if it pays a really lot of money, then well you should say yes as well.

Brian shows how the pay for performing, the enjoyment of playing the music, and the people

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musicians gig with can bring out a variety of considerations for taking a gig or not. Vicky, who has been playing for 10 years in Calgary as a violinist and has managed to achieve a position where most of her gigs are paid, said:

Preferred gigs? Let's see... I really like, [this] one is not paid, Classical Revolution. It's a once a month chamber series that I sometimes help host and program […], but I try to make it whenever I can. It's a café night, and people are just sitting and drinking and enjoying the music, and I will get together with some buddies and we will practice some stuff to play. That's not paid but it's a lot of fun, and sometimes we will play our own stuff.

Borrowing from Brian’s language, Vicky loves “the hang” and “the artistic enjoyment” of playing these classical café nights, and doesn’t push the issue of pay because of this. She is not only able to hang out with buddies and play her own music on occasion, but she has a lot of fun doing this.

In general, younger participants and those who drew upon gig opportunities in popular music venues wanted as many opportunities as possible to perform. They talked about playing for exposure as a necessary action, and framed it as the lesser of two evils. Simply put, they can’t afford to say no to a show, no matter the pay. Other participants such as Fiona and Diane, having played for exposure numerous times in their lives, had the experience to reflect on these gigs in a certain way, and oriented themselves against exposure gigs because they do not provide musicians with any significant benefits. On the other hand, some participants were paid for most of their gigs, and they showed how they considered various elements for how much pay is right for a gig. Each musician had their own orientation towards gig pay and these orientations helped musicians maneuver the various possibilities at their disposal as a frame for making sense of the gig market.

5.3. Musicians in a Social World

Besides things like practicing by themselves, little else was done without involving others.

Musicians had a deep social involvement with their communities. So far I have treated participants

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as individual actors who work in a gig market, and argued that musicians are constantly engaged in putting together numerous income sources to make ends meet, and they find various ways to adapt to the conditions of low pay. Not only that, but I have shown that musicians orient themselves towards gigs in particular ways, as not every gig is paid. However, using Becker’s theoretical approach offers a framework for understanding the actions of artists as inherently social, and analyzing this social dimension helps us contextualize the position of artists within their respective field. Therefore, I will now explore some of the routinized activities that participants talked about which involve the community around them. These activities include collaborating with other people, networking with other musicians and non-musicians, talking to others, playing for others, emailing others, and maintaining Facebook pages.

The reason for emphasizing the social nature of a musician’s actions is that I want to show how participants are particularly dependent on their communities and how collaboration is an integral part of a musician’s world. Recording and publishing an album will involve others, playing for an audience requires an audience, even learning about a new venue from a friend involves another, and importantly, a lot of a musician’s work comes from friendship and reputational networks. As my focus is on the various types of work that musicians do in order to keep on being musicians, part of the work that they do is communicate, collaborate, and talk to others.

Furthermore, in order to continuously fill their schedules with new work, musicians need to do these social actions effectively.

The musicians here show how Becker’s (1963; 2008) argument that musicians gather a portion of their work through others is still valid. Even though some gigs are obtained by engaging directly with venue organizers, especially in the case of popular music venues, for many participants gigs that comes from peer referrals and from strangers looking to hire a musician make

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up a significant portion of their work. Not only that, but communities which musicians rely on are also a source of knowledge, support, labour and advertisement, and not just a source of work. For example, participants would network by going to shows and talking to musicians and managers.

At these shows, they discussed topics such as audiences, songs, room acoustics, and venue spaces with musicians, and how to get a gig at a particular venue. This was all part of the regular revision and building of their knowledge of the field, and the constant need for more gig work required this to be repeatedly done by musicians.

Musicians described situations where peer and professional networks can benefit them.

Participants sometimes had particular goals in mind when networking such as advertising themselves, learning about new venues, and learning about specific tasks such as merchandise creation. As a younger entrant into the field, Mark describes how getting to meet a more experienced band turned into a gig:

That happened from just going to them, asking questions about their band, telling them about my band. Initially when I first saw them play I talked to them, after I got all their autographs because they are amazing […]. I got introduced to them again through another friend and you know when you keep on seeing a person […] you eventually [start to] know each other, and consider each other not just acquaintances. And then they asked us to play a show with them, that was a really big deal.

Just as Mark shows, musicians interact with others, and others play a role in musicians getting gigs. Because they are genuinely interested in getting to know other musicians, learning more about their field, and getting gigs, participants frequently made use of their networks or expanded their networks to the best of their ability in order to potentially improve their position. In the next section I explore how participants fostered, created, interacted with, and used their social ties.

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5.3.1. Collaborating in the community and interacting with others

Musicians know a lot of other musicians. They hang out with musicians, they talk shop with other musicians, they work for other musicians. Young participants showed that they quickly learned that being a musician is not just about playing music: they worked on many different skills like booking, merchandising, creating contacts, maintaining contacts, and building a reputation, skills which involve interacting with others.

Amongst the habituated actions of musicians, one is to be offered work by another musician, and another is to offer work to other musicians. Musicians come to be in a position where they can offer/refer work to other musicians when they have a solid reputation and possess a widespread professional network. For example, a wedding party wants Elaine to bring in a violin and cello for a string duet, and so Elaine needs to find a cellist to play that gig. Peer networks were often used in order to decide who to refer work to fill an empty gig role. As Brian mentions, for some this involves a mutual expectation of reciprocity. He talked about a colleague: “I threw her some work and I think she felt she needed to throw me some work.” Connections amongst musicians are used to determine who to ask to play a split bill, or who to refer for a gig. As a freelancer, Brian is sometimes in the position where he feels that what he plays will not satisfy the needs of prospective clients, and so he refers these clients to other musicians:

I got called once, they wanted me to play as a birthday present for somebody's father. They wanted to have a birthday dinner and have me playing [saxophone] in the corner of the living room which would be very weird14, which I explained to them and referred them to a couple guitar players who are friends of mine, who actually would be very appropriate.

14 Saxophones are very loud, and having a saxophone player in an intimate living room would be uncomfortable for those trying to have dinner. 104

Freelancers like Elaine and Charlotte also gave accounts of this type of practice. For these musicians, part of the work that they have to do is keep customers happy. In order to do this, it sometimes involves referring a prospective client to someone more appropriate, and musicians make use of their connections to make the decision of who to refer work to and keep music hirers happy.

An informal economy of favours is imbedded within this system of referrals, as Brian shows when he says that a colleague felt she needed to return the favour. This informal economy also involves more than work referrals, as a couple of participants talked about bands who always brought expensive equipment to gigs and made sure they let other musicians know they could share it during a split bill. Unfortunately, during interviews I did not push the conversation towards this particular topic, as I was relatively unaware of it. However, I was able to pick up some aspects of this topic from what we did talk about. I discuss this in more depth later in this chapter.

Having musician friends “higher up on the ladder,” who have more intricate peer networks and play more gigs, is beneficial to musicians because these people have had the time and experience to foster successful ways of doing musician work. If these experienced musicians like younger musicians, then this results in gig opportunities for younger musicians. Younger musicians such as Luke, Carey, Mark and Malcolm all had experiences where they were referred for a gig by a more veteran friend. As Malcolm said:

Sometimes you'll have friends that are higher up on the ladder, and, if they're doing a tour they might invite you on [it], or maybe they're planning a show and their band can't play, so they offer it to you guys.

Over time, referrals from friends higher up on the ladder amount to a good chunk of the gigs that musicians play. To create relationships such as these, young musicians repeatedly told me that they always chat with musicians at shows. Not only that, but digital mediums such as email,

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Facebook and text messaging were frequently used as chat mediums once these younger musicians had met these senior musicians. For example, an older musician might text a younger musician:

“Hey, do you want to split a bill on the 27th of March at the Ironwood?” Importantly, by being asked to play gigs such as split bills, young musicians get more gigs and sometimes they are able to play gigs in more prestigious venues where they would otherwise be unable play without the backing of a more reputable musician.

While peer referrals were a common way to get a gig, some musicians were able to obtain a significant portion of their gigs through their reputational networks. Due to her reputation in numerous niche communities of science fiction fans and medieval re-enactment groups, Fiona gets most of her work from strangers contacting her via Facebook. She gives a brief description of what this is like for her:

I get almost every gig that I get through Facebook, people going: I remember I saw you at such and such, or hey I told so and so that I was having this kind of event and they said you would be perfect for it. It's all through that kind of word-of-mouth facilitated by the social media.

Musicians repeatedly characterized social media as a facilitator of interactions. All participants who wanted to be reached set up the means to do so, whether in the form of a personal/band website, a local musicians’ union webpage, or by disclosing contact information on advertisements.

5.3.2. Networking as positioning

When talking about the creation and maintenance of networks, participants revealed the importance of positioning themselves strongly in distinct gig markets. Brian gave a vivid account of how positioning in his gig market can be done well, and how being positioned in other ways

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can undermine a musician’s ability to obtain gigs. In the freelancer field, Brian stressed a few elements:

I feel like you have to be able to sell yourself, you have to be able to hang out with people. I went to [graduate] school with a trumpet player who now is the first call guy to play trumpet with [a famous group] who is just in town […], he's been playing with Prince. I think he did something with Jay-Z a little while ago, huge names! Right? And, my best friend and I were talking about him because we both know him […] and, how does he get these gigs? Because he is not God's gift to trumpet players by any means, he’s a good trumpet player, but there's tons of people who are way better trumpet players, so how the hell is he getting all these gigs? And my friend, he started saying well think about it, when you talk to him, he talks, he is interactive, he is really nice, but he doesn't talk too much. [He] doesn't really talk about himself too much, [he] doesn't really talk about himself unless you ask, and then he talks just enough that he answers a question, and then he shuts up about himself and lets you talk. You know he is always put together, he will drink but he never gets drunk, […] he's positioned himself to be that guy, as just like the perfect guy to hire, completely outside of the skill, just as a person he is selling himself now. And then when he started getting those gigs, I think he played with Prince first, I mean once you have played with Prince you got that on your resume, now the promoters that deal with the upper echelon of people, next time that someone is looking, […] we have to put this horn section together I need a trumpet player, and they are talking to each other, who did you use? Oh this guy he's awesome you should use him. And he's going to show up on time, he's going to look good, he's going to be nice, he's not going to piss anybody off, [and] he's going to be very easy to work with.

As a freelancer, good positioning involves being punctual, professional in dress and conduct, not overbearing, and staying sober at gigs. On the other hand, bad positioning would be showing up to gigs drunk, making people aggravated, dressing unprofessionally, and hogging attention. As

Brian said, a well-positioned freelancer has “positioned himself to be that guy.” Positioning themselves as ideal musicians for hire is then a crucial element for musicians’ networks and subsequently for the livelihood of musicians. As such, networking involves positioning.

Brian also gave an example of how certain types of positioning can be detrimental to a musician’s ability to get gigs in his field:

There's another guy I knew when I was in [graduate] school, a gifted gifted saxophonist – [but] he couldn't sight read to save his life […], he was a real ear player, which isn't the end of the world but if you can’t sight read you can't play with other people. You know

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you go out and you have limited rehearsal time and […] because [he could not] get all [his] stuff together he wouldn't get hired. As students […] we would sometimes get hired by the professors to put these little groups together and go and play in communities […], and he would not get called, they would call [other] graduate students to come in and cover that position, because [the professors] knew if they had to drop this guy he wouldn't be able to hack it.

In this case, not being able to sight read means that a musician is positioned by others to be able to play only certain kinds of gigs.

Musicians rely on the numerous networks that involve them, and so they position themselves favourably within a gig market as much as they can. This positioning is not only done to maintain the position that they have achieved within a field, but also to improve it. For participants, this process was necessary, ongoing, and it took a significant amount of energy for participants to keep up. Only Charlotte, who was semi-retired, said she was not doing “good” networking when refusing to play gigs for months at a time.

5.3.3. Networking as an ongoing activity

Ties between musicians are particularly important because they are frequently used in order to decide who to share work with and who to refer work to. Relations for musicians are also important to build and maintain with non-musicians. Networking requires communication between people, and for participants it involves musicians, current audiences, potential audiences, venue managers, manufacturers – anyone related to the activities that musicians rely upon.

Networking involves positioning, as participants were heavily invested in being understood as good gig musicians in their respective gig markets. However, all participants showed that the activity of networking had a particular element to it: for them, it was done continuously. Instead of networking at select times such as their own gig, it was a constant activity. Importantly, networking is not just an instrumental activity that they do in order to foster relationships. For

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example, Carey talked about how having a good time at a show is not a separate activity from networking:

Usually I'm playing pretty early in the night, […] and I like to stay back and watch the other bands and then let them know if I’m into their music […], things like that, and it kind of starts a conversation. I don't like to do things with ulterior motives. I actually do really like listening to the music, but a lot of the time is does end up with them saying, oh I also like your music do you want to open for us again, or do you want to open [for that show], or do you want to play at this show, things like that. So it just works out really well, networking wise, […] plus I get to discover a lot of new music.

Mark also talked about networking at shows in this manner. For musicians, going to a show always means networking, but since they love to play music, listen to music, and talk about music, going to shows also means having a good time.

Networking is done outside of musicians’ own gigs. Some musicians fostered new relationships as often as they could to build their networks and help their careers. Carey explained:

I go to a lot of local shows even though I'm not playing at them. I have a lot of bands that I really like, and I'll go to their shows just to see them play, and then I'll see other bands, [it] just works out really well for everything.

For participants, networking was not committed with a sole instrumental purpose. Instead, this act of building and fostering relationships was routinely done in and out of gigs in order to ensure that musicians not only built their connections and improved their position within the gig market, but also because networking is not separate from having a good time.

Mark, however, described how his non-gig work sometimes limited his ability to engage in the work of making connections:

I wanted to stay and watch them because they are incredible bands and talk to them and make connections, but I had to go to work. If I didn't work that night I would have stayed out with them all night, and you know talk music and make better connections with them. I really wish I could have, but instead I had to go to work and make money.

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As one of the least experienced musicians in this study, Mark clearly understands how networking means making connections and having a good time. He tends to play the first set of an evening

(i.e. opening bands), and he is always looking for the chance to talk to other musicians, especially those who are more experienced. Unfortunately, this type of mingling is not always within his reach because of his non-gig work, which he needs to pay for his rent, his food, and his schooling.

One point about networking was particularly important for younger musicians. For them, older bands who showcase the evening (the last band of a set) have a tremendous amount of experience to share, they know what to do, what not to do, and frequently share their connections and know-how with younger musicians. For all musicians here, and especially the less experienced musicians, building networks can offer a vast source of knowledge that they use to build and reassess their understanding of the gig market. When talking about communicating with those higher up on the ladder, participants showed how senior members were pivotal to their know-how, as seniors would aid them with crucial bits of knowledge. Some examples mentioned were help with scholarship applications, screening for a CD manufacturer, recommending someone to make

T-shirts, or finding a voice coach. Importantly, even for experienced musicians like Brian, going to a show means mingling with others, and he uses what he learns to make future decisions.

Participants were expertly fluent and knowledgeable about what it means to network as a musician. With the exception of Charlotte, all participants talked about relationship building as a desired, beneficial, enjoyable, and sought after activity. Even though newer entrants were particularly invested in seeking out as many opportunities to network as possible, all participants networked frequently. This networking takes up a significant amount of time for musicians. For example, it is done in person before shows, during shows, after shows, at shows they don’t attend, and it was also done through a number of websites, with email, and over the phone. However, as

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part of the survival kit of musicians, networking was not an activity which guaranteed a return.

Even though it usually works, the effects are not completely in the control of musicians as it is dependent on the others around them. For a musician to be referred for a gig, someone needs to refer them.

5.3.4. Networks, hustling, and DIY self-promotion

Musicians communicate with others through a variety of mediums, which include talking face to face, posters, phones, text messaging, and internet banners15. Four main audiences were discussed by participants when communicating: other musicians, venue organizers, new audiences, and repeat audiences. Because of its ease and inexpensiveness, musicians use the internet extensively in order to communicate with others, encourage audience attendance, highlight their experiences to fans, and improve their chances of getting a gig. Similar to Thomson’s (2013) discussion of the modern musicians, the majority of musicians in this study are in positions where the work of promoting themselves lies solely within their hands, and this work takes on a particularly important place in their livelihood. With the exception of players like Charlotte who rely less on this type of promotion for gigs, self-promotion was an activity that was done repeatedly as a means of survival.

Even for bands where the load of the promotional work is shared, the work is the same.

They have to reach out to people as quickly and as efficiently as possible in order to boost gig revenue. With the exception of Charlotte, who drew upon a booking agent for referral work, and

Wesley, who was beginning to collaborate with a local publicist, participants were their own publicists and did not have anyone helping them.

15 A banner is a small visual strip put in place for viewing on a website which contains images and textual material. A common example of an internet banner was “Facebook banners.” The purpose of a banner is the same as a paper poster, only it is “posted” on a website as opposed to a board or a wall. 111

Getting new work and more audience attendance involves advertising, and this type of reaching out took many forms. Just as with any form of work relevant to musicians, the activities that participants did to advertise and promote themselves are dependent on the type of work that they do within their community. For example, Luke, a rock band guitarist playing in bars and pubs, creates bulletin board posters and Facebook banners and spreads these ads wherever he can. On the other hand, Brian, a saxophonist who plays in hotels, orchestras, restaurants and weddings, has his profile listed on a local jazz association website, and maintains a personal website in order to highlight his performances and his proficiencies. He relies less on posters and banners. However, getting new work for musicians, whether it be getting new music students or a gig, is not simple.

It requires what Brian calls “hustling,” an activity that is inherently self-promotional.

Brian described his get-up-and-go approach to hustling as “putting in the effort”:

I: You said hustling the student. Brian: Okay, so, if you're hustling, where you can hustle gigs you can hustle students, you are basically hustling work. I: Like you are really really trying to get it? Brian: Yeah. Let's look at students, if I was going to hustle more students, I would not go to a clinic out of school without my pocket full of cards and I would be giving my cards to teachers. I would be putting posters up on everybody's walls. I would be really making sure that my ad online on Kijiji was always on the top, [always] very present. I remember a couple years ago, I drove around and I put up posters in every single high school and [talked] to every single high school band teacher. At the beginning of the year I will call every student that I have had in the last two years whether they have quit or not […], if that wrestles me up another couple call backs then perfect! I had a woman talking to me the other day asking about lessons I said please feel free to give me a call […] and I still haven't heard from her, so on my mental list of things to do today is to e-mail her back, and I also know she was referred by a friend of mine so I will probably call my friend and make sure she got my e-mail, you know just putting in the effort. […] So, hustling! Hustling takes time, sometimes it pays off sometimes it doesn't.

As teaching is one of the primary forms of revenue for many participants, hustling students is important to them and the act of trying to get more of this music-related work demands patience, tremendous effort, and luck.

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According to participants, hustling students is similar to hustling more gig work. Musicians put a significant amount of effort and time into building their positions within their community as people who are good fits for their gig market. This requires a multitude of tasks, like talking shop with musician peers at venues and presenting themselves in a certain way at gigs. As an activity that is tied to networking, hustling gig work is time consuming. In regards to restaurant gigs, Brian explained:

I’m thinking about hustling up some more work at restaurants with this duo but that means I have to go boost the pavement - go and meet people and walk around and check places out. I mean I could take a month doing that, every night, except now who is watching my kid. And what happens if no one bites? [he chuckles] Which is the other thing, there's cost- benefit analysis. Let's say I do do that for a month, let's say I end up with a gig every week out of that, well realistically that's still only an extra hundred 150 bucks a week in my pocket. Is that worth it for a month worth of evenings work? [He shrugs]

Because of the time requirements of finding gig work, student work, or any other form of work that musicians draw upon, hustling work is not always feasible. As Brian says, there are two issues with the demanding way that musicians find work: first, “what happens if no one bites?” and second, “is that worth it?” Finding work for musicians is a vital task that needs to be repeatedly done throughout the year due to the short-term nature of gig work. Even other forms of revenue such as teaching are seasonal, and require a certain amount of effort to maintain. Students come and go over time, and so musicians have to replenish their stock of students if they rely on that revenue. For the most participants, work only comes when they put in the effort: when they network, when others know about them, when they reach out to venues. This hustling is especially important for musicians who are less able to rely on referrals as a steady source of gig work.

So far I have talked about hustling teaching work and gig work, but participants did not only refer to those two activities when talking about putting in the effort. Of particular importance to musicians who draw upon popular music gig revenue is hustling more audiences, ticket sales

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and merchandise sales. Musicians spend a significant amount of time promoting themselves in order to reach out to new audiences and communicate with their current fan base. It is in the interest of a musician to have people come to a gig: with more attendance, musicians receive more ticket revenue, more repute, and generally more merchandise sales. Furthermore, some venues require bands to bring a certain amount of people to a gig, and having higher attendance can lead to future work if musicians meet the demands of the venues.

For these particular forms of hustling, musicians used bulletin board posters and popular websites such as Kijiji, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, ReverbNation and Bandcamp. These are physical and virtual sites are used in a variety of ways to communicate to others. Examples that participants used for posters and banners were “Live Friday Night Music at Dickenson’s” and

“Prime Time Big Band Brunch.” Websites in particular were also used to share musician highlights to a general audience, such pictures of a particular gig, and song recordings.

When it comes to reaching out to new audiences, participants talked about key goals. They want to display on the internet items such as live performances, recordings, their upcoming performances and their general musician lifestyle (e.g. displaying pictures of a recent tour on their

Facebook page). This form of advertisement was particularly important to musicians who rely on popular music venues. As Jack noted, in the age of Web 2.0 you have to disclose a certain type of information in order to successfully reach out to audiences:

I: So when you update [one of your websites], what are you putting on the web? Jack: It depends, a lot of people want to know about [our] career development, what’s the latest news with us. We want people to feel engaged so we try and take a kind of very personal approach because we, […] we’re not really trying to be famous or anything, we just want to do music and connect with people and that's it. We update with photos, little blog posts, tour posts, career highlights, updates. We just did a media tour [update], had some posts about that. [So] we have our shows updated, [and] we have an online store which we try and keep updated.

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Jack’s talk exemplifies Sargent’s (2009a) discussion of how musicians are mobilizing their social capital when they make use of digital mediums and social networking sites to show images and music to current audiences and broader audiences. All participants who performed in popular music venues spent numerous hours every week doing this form of promotional work. This promotional work was also part of freelancers’ routines, as Elaine and Brian both maintained personal websites which displayed information on upcoming and past performances.

Just as Jack wants fans and prospective audiences to feel engaged, Malcolm also shared this purpose when he put in the time to create unique storybook vinyl albums for sale. In his experience, fans frequently tell him that they like the stamp of originality his merchandise has, and he makes goes out of his way to build relations with his fans by using this sort of originality.

However, this tremendous effort put into audience relation building through the internet and through the maintenance of originality does not always pay off. Many musicians made comments regarding the difficulty of getting people to repeatedly come to shows and getting newcomers to come to shows.

Despite this difficulty, musicians engage in a routine process of reaching out to potential venues and potential/current audiences. Musicians talked about how they do a certain kind of hustling in order to get more gigs, increase ticket sales, and increase merchandise sales. This hustling required transportation, a computer, and chunks of time. When presenting themselves directly to new venue organizers, some musicians use a form of musician resume called an electronic press kit (EPK). For example, in Wesley’s experience if he is emailing the manager of a popular downtown bar with the intention of gigging there, one of the best ways to convince the establishment of his legitimacy is to send them a short music portfolio by email. This EPK includes but is not limited to a list of recent performances, upcoming performances, discography, reputable

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venues where they have played, press quotes and select song recordings. As Wesley said, the electronic press kit is “basically as much information about your act [that] you can fit into two or three pages.” Musicians explained that the use of an EPK is becoming increasingly popular among venue organizers, as hirers are able to make quick and easy decisions about whom to hire with the goal of maximizing the amount of attendance in their venues. Since this requires musicians to present themselves to employers in an economically meaningful way, it reduces the amount of time that employers spend judging whom to use and when.

Another form of self-promotional hustling is done by musicians who want to increase attendance at venues in order to have as many people as possible attend a show and satisfy the demands of venues. Simply put, they need audiences to attend shows in order to continually gig, and no one is going to do the work for them. Presented to anonymous audiences and intended to draw crowds to events, this kind of advertisement is commonly seen on bulletin boards on university campuses, bars, and coffee shops, as well as social networking sites. As a type of DIY advertisement, this attendance oriented advertisement was especially important to participants who played in popular music venues because it was one of the only ways to reach as many new and repeating audiences as possible. The costs of printing hard copies to post on boards is not high, and so musicians printed copies and distributed them around town. The use of free mediums such as Twitter and Facebook is especially popular because these sites do not burden musicians with any cost to advertise. As Morgan said in reference to why she uses websites to advertise, “if it’s free you can’t argue with free.”

With the use of the web, this visual promotion can be distributed quickly over a number of sites; therefore, most participants used these digital mediums for promotional purposes, whether it be uploading an upcoming gig poster on Facebook or showing tour highlights. The two most cited

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websites were Facebook and Twitter, which were portrayed as social network sites with the ability to reach a vast amount of people. Other specialized sites for sharing music that were particularly popular with participants were Bandcamp and ReverbNation. For most musicians here, the use of these sites is the primary strategy at their disposal for promoting themselves on a large scale.

When distributing physical prints of posters, the amount of time spent doing this activity can be significant. According to Morgan, Diane, and Luke, three experienced poster makers/distributers, they first produce and tailor a poster to a particular venue, and then they post copies around town in various locations. For poster distributers, ideal locations include university campuses, bar poster boards, music store boards, public poster boards, and various streets with concrete walls around town. The idea is to target a dense area or any place that musicians think that people interested in their music will walk by and see. These spots were sometimes called hotspots.

Speaking about her distribution routines, Morgan explained that it can take anywhere from three to five hours to “blanket the city” with posters. Given the climate and traffic conditions of

Calgary, the duration can be extended by another one to two hours. She described her approach to blanketing the city with gig posters:

Usually I will start spiraling, so I will blanket the Northeast, then I will come back and blanket the Northwest, blanket the Southwest, come back and go down MacLeod because there are five different stores down MacLeod, and then I will take 42nd to come back home. I am pretty central so it makes it super easy.

With the use of her van, Morgan knows exactly where she is going, and her route is one that she has done numerous times.

For Luke, blanketing the city’s poster hotspots is another story. As a musician without a car at his immediate disposal, he relies on public transit. What further problematizes his poster

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distribution routine is that poster pinners are in competition with one another for a limited amount of physical space. For him, his routine can take up to five hours, and it may be done in vain. He talked about his band’s poster routine:

We'll go out one day and get as many posters up as we can and, next day we'll go back out and see how many got covered up see how many have been taken down, [then] […] readjust [to] that. When it comes to actually getting posters out, it's a very consistent thing. You can't just go throw up your posters and go throw up all hundred posters and be like “okay were done! People are going to know about the show!” because there are people [whose] job [is] to go on their bike and throw up as many posters as humanly possible. It's their job [and] they get paid to do it so they are going to do it well. We don't get paid to do it - so we have to kind of tack up all of their stuff [over and over again].

Without a car the time that each blanketing run requires is significant. However, along with online mediums, these are the only ways that musicians can advertise themselves on a large scale without drawing on substantial personal funds, and musicians like Luke do it again and again because they need audiences to attend shows.

Communicating with physical posters and banners is important to musicians, and it is part of the activity of positioning themselves in the greater community. What musicians communicate is therefore particularly important to them. However, just as Brian mentioned when talking about two musicians who are differently positioned in the freelance field, musicians do not do the same things when advertising themselves. Morgan argues that ineffective communication on advertisements is detrimental to succeeding in her gig market:

With our Facebook events I always make banners and make it dynamic and really fun. I always have precise clean edits and clean information, so it's not this garble. There's nothing worse than garble. [She laughs] Especially with bands, [on their banners] they will have all this other useless information. This is your time, this is your date, this is your venue, [and] this is what is available, that's all you need. Not, this is my website, we know these people, and do this, and you [ask yourself] why [put that up]? If they need the information they will ask, don't just throw it all on there.

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With her long experience in the music field, Morgan has found out through experience what types of positioning work effectively in her gig field.

Creating and distributing flyers is another part of the kit of promotional activities that musicians talked about. However, the distribution of flyers is different than that of posters, and relies on a number of intermediaries. Just as with Facebook banners where others “share” the information on their Facebook pages, flyers were primarily given to friends and trusted community members in order to be handed out to prospective audiences. As Morgan talked about the various relationships that she has with staff in bars, music stores, and non-profit music associations, she revealed how these social ties help musicians. As people in the music scene become closer to her, she often delegates a handful of flyers to them and asks them to distribute the ads as they see fit.

Importantly, this third party distribution is done by people who see a regular influx of live music consumers in their workplaces and have their own intricate networks in the gig market.

DIY promotion takes thought and skill as well as time. More experienced gig musicians described how they were able to improve their promotional methods over time. For example,

Morgan has hustled gigs and done her own promotion for many years:

I: So by now this is all fairly routine? Morgan: Yeah, yeah this is stuff that I have been doing for years [...] Because I have done so much special event coordination and poster making, and networking and things like that, it's second nature for me. So what might take - you know my drummer 2 1/2 hours to do it takes me 20 minutes.

Despite it only taking twenty minutes at one time for her, the total time of all the activities that involve hustling work and self-promotion is reflected in her following statement about her weekly tasks:

I: And if you had an estimate, how much time are you spending a week e-mailing, doing these updates, making posters?

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Morgan: Oh god, probably at least six hours if not more, usually it's an hour or two a day, sometimes more, sometimes less. I am constantly doing posters and little logos and things like that for [the] different gigs that we are doing.

Almost all participants offered statements similar to Morgan’s in regards to the amount of time that they spend doing the necessary tasks for getting gigs and promoting themselves. Email was the most common medium of communication for participants, followed by Facebook and text messaging. Musicians gigging in popular music venues spent the most time advertising themselves and updating their online websites, as they were by default the sole advertiser for a gig. Newcomers into this field are likely to spend even more time than six hours a week communicating, creating ads, and distributing them, as they are still getting a feel for how to do these tasks efficiently.

Musicians who gigged outside of popular music venues also spent a few hours every week communicating by email and updating personal websites, with the exception of Charlotte who mainly communicated by phone; however, the amount of time it took for them to do these tasks was not as high for them compared to musicians who drew upon popular music venue gigs. This was due to freelancers being in positions where the gigs that they play are often advertised by venues, and in positions where a chunk of the gigs they get come from reputational networks and referrals.

Musicians hustle gig work, they diligently update websites to stay fresh in the minds of audiences, they keep on distributing posters around town and regularly distribute online banners on the web. For most participants, it is necessary to do this form of promotion, and musicians rely on the various networks that they can tap into in order to promote themselves. With the exception of Charlotte and Neil, musicians in this study all hustled to get work, whether it be following up on a festival gig application, talking to managers around town, or asking fellow musicians if there

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is opening for a split bill. This hustling was even applied to getting supplementary forms of revenue such as teaching.

Musicians want to grab attention and keep attention on them in a particular way, as that is part of their trade. Over time, attention can transfer into gigs and increased attendance which results in more ticket and merchandise sales. Attention building also helps musicians build their reputation and their position within the gig market, which helps them attain more referral gigs. By putting effort into building relations with other musicians, venue organizers, new audiences, and repeating audiences in their community, musicians do the work that is necessary for them to be able to continually play music.

5.3.5. Networks and merchandising

In the previous chapter I described how musicians who perform in popular music venues obtain and sell items such as band T-shirts and CDs as a way to boost their gig revenue. Selling unique merchandise is also particularly important to musicians like Malcolm and Jack because they are able to connect with their fan base with the elaborate items that they offer. Musicians learn how to get these items through trial and error, but that is not always the case. The ways in which participants talked about getting merchware and learned about how to these it showed how important networks were for musicians as a source of merchandising knowledge and opportunities.

Adam, an electric bass player with twenty years of gigging experience, spoke about his role as a mentor for younger musicians: he helped them with grant applications, gave tips for finding work, and shared some of his merchandise contacts. Following up on this interview, I asked participants how they learned to get merchandise and what they did to get it. Luke, a younger player, gave this account of the role of a helpful mentor:

Well I personally have been the one to design our bands T-shirts on both occasions that

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they were done. This also harkens to the guy in Edmonton who for all intents and purposes we call our booking agent. The first time it happened he actually just said that he had an order T-shirts that he was making, and he was doing it for a whole bunch of bands that he manages. So, he said send us a design and we will get it made up for you. From thereon, he's more or less just been, if you guys have any kind of artwork that you want to put on a thing, just send it up to me!

The advantage for Luke is that he didn’t have to screen and sort through manufacturers, and the cost of his personal order was reduced because of the bulk of his mentor’s order. All he had to do for T-shirts was come up with a design and send it to his mentor in Edmonton.

Luke was not only musician able to tap into pre-existing networks to obtain merchandise.

Luke also talked to his mentor in Edmonton about screening manufacturers for CDs, as well as what to look for in a recording studio. These are some the many useful bits of knowledge that participants learned from talking with their peers. Like Luke, Mark is a newer entrant to the field who has learned about merchandising with the help of others. Two of Mark’s mentors, both experienced musicians whom he met after introducing himself to them at one of his gigs, provided him with the connections and tools and knowledge necessary to make T-shirts and record an album.

As it turned out, these two experienced musicians had the tools and know-how to create merchware themselves. One of them had his own recording studio set up, and the other had his own T-shirt press, and they both offered Mark a good rate for using their facilities. When recording his CD,

Mark was even able to learn about the intricacies of the studio process. Through his own nurtured network of musicians, Mark, like Luke, was able to use a pre-existing set of merchandising infrastructure to easily and inexpensively obtain merchware and learn more about the music field.

In the case of those without mentors who have everything set up or those without close contacts who can do specific merchandising work for them at a discounted rate, participants talked at length about the process of getting merchware. This process involves screening manufacturers,

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building a rapport with manufacturers and if everything goes well placing an order with them. It may also involve a musician doing some of the work themselves, such as when musicians invest in a T-shirt press to press shirts for themselves. Most often participants learned through trial and error about who to use, or asked questions to friends and colleagues. For example, Malcolm has asked a friend, “Hey – who did you use to make your T-shirts? What did you think of them?”

Merchandising musicians vary in the amount of time and effort they place into obtaining merchandise. On one end, there are people like Luke and Malcolm who make elaborative and decorative pieces with the help of their wife or girlfriend. On the other end, there are people like

Luke who are able to use pre-existing networks, and for him getting T-shirts involves sending a design to his mentor. All participant accounts of obtaining merchandises showed a set of connections that musicians make use of, as well as the ways in which they learn about merchandising through their own trials or from their peers. As selling merchandise is one of the primary ways of bolstering gig revenue for popular music gig players, it is no surprise that these musicians find a variety of ways to have merchandise ready for sale.

5.3.6. Networks of labour

Part of the work of musicians is managing their lives with little disposable income, and participants had a number of ways of getting many of the commodities of everyday life without having to financially overextend themselves. As discussed in the last chapter, one of these ways is to use cost cutting measures such as buying second hand suits and foregoing a car. Musicians do a variety of actions to replace something they would otherwise have to buy for themselves, as well as reduce the cost for these expenditures. With little or no money to pay for the labour of others or to buy certain things for themselves, musicians substitute this money with their own time and labour, and they offer their own time and labour to other musicians.

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In order to substitute the pay needed to hire a company to press T-shirts, some musicians opt to buy a press for themselves and press the shirts themselves. Musicians frequently mentioned that there are a few independent pressers sprinkled around town who do this. Because they have the facilities, these musicians also subsequently offer to press T-shirts for other musicians at a discounted rate, as was the case for Mark when one of his mentors made shirts for him. This type of money saving practice was not only limited to clothing presses, but also to small-scale studio equipment. After the interview, some participants showed me their personal recording studios.

Gabrielle has a fully equipped studio in her basement where her band has recorded, mixed, and mastered numerous albums for themselves. Diane and Fiona also showed me their recording setups in their homes where they did the same tasks for themselves and for others. These two talked about the need to acquire the skills and equipment needed for recording because of the necessity to reduce costs in the long run, and some musicians enroll in post-secondary institutions for these skills.

Fiona has an audio engineering certificate from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology

(SAIT) for that very reason. Luke, one of the younger musicians in this study, also talked about the need to save costs for his band and because of that he is enrolled in a two-year recording program at SAIT.

As part of this money saving culture, musicians participate in an economy of favours with other musicians and artists. As mentioned in the last chapter, comments like “she felt she had to throw me some work” show how musicians participate in a system of exchanges amongst themselves. As a participant in this economy of favours, Mark was unable to pay for the services of the eleven musicians on his latest album, but he was able to have these musicians play for him.

He talked about how he was able to do that:

For the recording it's mostly just my friends. I don't think they mind too much; they know

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that I am not some rich musician […]. We recorded two singles this summer […] and then for this album [my friend] played just on one song, so he came in for about an hour or two. I don't think I can afford to pay him; I wish I could - I will definitely give him an album for free. He's definitely a part of this group now that he has been on the album and everything but I didn't really tell him “Hey if you come in we will pay you this amount.” It's more of a “Do you want to play on this album?” and usually your friends will be more than happy to.

Many other musicians also had help with large ventures like recording albums. For example, Fiona had a friend who help her design one of her album covers in the past, and she repaid the favour by doing some song mixing and mastering for that friend. Because of the variety of tasks at hand for musician work, some musicians specialize into their own labour-substituting niche and offer these specialized services to their peers at a discounted rate or in exchange for other specialized services.

In this community, these specialists contribute to their community by providing services which would otherwise be unaffordable to the majority of musicians.

Given that the pay for playing gigs is neither substantial nor predictable, all participants mentioned that musicians help each other out, in a variety of ways. This could involve filling in a role on a particular bill, playing on a friend’s album, or sharing information about where and when to play certain types of music. Morgan gave an example of a gig where she accepted last minute to take over the role of main host for her friend’s live music night at a local pub, as her friend was very sick. One person, however, positioned the notion of artists helping each other out in a larger and more problematic context. Reflecting on the conditions of the performance of music for gig musicians, Fiona, who is very aware of the role that her musician peers play in her life, mentioned that “musicians bleed each other dry.” When asked to elaborate on this, she said:

We will help each other out a lot with session work, or related services like my [musician] friend who is a graphic designer, I have done audio for him, I have produced his work in exchange for his graphic design, and that is quite a symbiotic thing, the exchange of services like that. [However] the more toxic thing, and it's nobody's fault it's just the culture. The thing that is more toxic is, ‘oh hey, will you perform on my album?’ and it's assumed

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that there is no pay involved, because we are all friends. But we are all friends, because it's implied because we are in the same industry, and no one ever gets paid, and of course the venues don't want to pay us because we need the exposure.

For Fiona, helping other musicians pro bono contributes to the reproduction of the conditions where musicians are not rewarded financially for the work that they do. Not only do certain venues reproduce these conditions with take-it-or-leave-it attitudes, which involve little or no pay for playing a gig in some cases, but musicians are also reinforcing the idea that a musician’s time and effort is not to be rewarded with pay. As Fiona said: “It’s just assumed that there is no pay involved.” This leaves musicians in a problematic situation. On the one hand musicians rely on the free services of their peers, and on the other the kind and helpful gestures of peers who help out for free reproduce the impoverished circumstances of making a living from music.

5.4. Gearing into the Calgary Gig Market

In the previous chapter, I showed how the gig opportunities for musicians in Calgary revolve around local coffee shops, bars, clubs, pub, orchestras, private venues, studios, and seasonal venues such as festivals, weddings, and Christmas gigs. Some gigs also take place out of town in the case of musicians who go on tour or are play out of town venues such as festivals and weddings.

As a place in which musician work, Calgary was given mixed reviews by participants. Although there are many opportunities for private venue work due to the oil and gas industry, it is also a city where participants feel they are devalued as cultural workers.

5.4.1. What’s it like being a musician in Calgary?

Freelancers in particular talked about Calgary pragmatically. One reason for this is that freelancers are able to negotiate for higher wages for their performances. As Brian mentioned, part of being a musician in Calgary is looking for work that is funded through oil companies:

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I: What's it like being a musician here in Calgary? Brian: I like it a lot. […] Calgary has got a lot of money because of the oil. And so there is a lot of opportunity if you keep your ear to the ground and look for it, because people will go out and spend money.

For Brian, keeping his ear to the ground for work involves hustling for corporate and private gigs.

These events pay well and often last between one and three hours. At his current rate, Brian is able to get $250 for a three-hour function as a solo performer. Like Brian, Charlotte frequently plays gigs funded by the oil industry and has made a living of it for decades. But for her, keeping her attitude non-confrontational towards her employers is part of her recipe for making a living through corporate gigs. She elaborated on this:

I: What's it like being a musician in Calgary then? Charlotte: Calgary has been really good to me. Part of it is of course, you cannot have an opinion about oil companies and the environment. So, last night [at a gig] we hear the speeches all about them getting the oil out of the ground up there and all the labour problems they refer to. Sometimes they will talk about the protesters and they talk about them in the most demeaning ways, and you know, you just keep your mouth shut. If you are willing to do that there is so much money in Calgary, it's just obscene, and I have been very lucky.

Charging similar rates to Brian as a solo performer or in a string quartet, Charlotte recognizes the conditions in which she is able to perform. For some of her work “you just keep your mouth shut.”

However, as she opts to not vocally challenge this dominant industry during gigs she continues to store away these experiences and keeps working these gigs.

Elaine has also played many gigs for the wealthy elite of Calgary. For her, one issue is that certain types of music stagnate because of the prevalent dispositions and tastes of those who are able to hire musicians at the freelance rate:

I: So, what's it like being a musician in Calgary? Elaine: It’s not as forward thinking as other cities […] and it is money based so that also has its pitfalls. People aren't as into new music, or into more experimental stuff. So the sponsorships that companies give, you have to match the ideals and the politics. Your cultural institution would have to match that oil and gas company, like the CPO, one of the

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big sponsors is Nexen. [The] CPO plays a lot of covers like rock 'n roll stuff [...] and classic series, there isn't that much new music. And they play a lot of popular classical music, really romantic stuff.

Having to “match the ideals and politics” of those who sponsor music frustrates Elaine, who advocates for contemporary classical music to be performed in Calgary. Even large classical institutions like the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra are affected by the tastes of those who provide the funding for music.

In the hierarchy of funding which poses barriers for musicians, musicians who perform original music have a difficult time making a steady income by performing. Because of this, freelancers will only occasionally play their own material, and the bulk of their work comes from covers and composition music. On the other hand, many popular music venue players mainly perform original music. Malcolm talked about the difficulty of being motivated to perform covers and the discouraging rewards for playing original music in his gig scene:

Malcolm: I've had friends in bands make about 1000 to 3000 a night in a cover band, or performing weddings, that's pretty good. It's just whether or not you feel inspired to do that sort of thing. I have a friend who does that kind of stuff, and he loves it. I: In a cover band? Malcolm: Yeah in a cover band and performing at weddings and all that. For me I just haven't really felt the motivation to do that as much, just because I like make music my creative outlet more so, and then make money through it, in a way.

Malcolm has the passion and motivation to write and perform his own music, but he is faced with the disproportionate wages that musicians receive for playing different kinds of material. Just as the city’s philharmonic orchestra is constrained by having to play “The pops,” gig musicians are not free to play whatever they wish without financial consequences. Despite the poor pay derived from playing non-conforming types of music in Calgary, many participants here still decide to perform original material.

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5.4.2. Musician pathways in Calgary

Musicians portrayed Calgary as a good departing point for a musician’s career, and also as a stable location for the work of musicians. As someone who has been progressing in the music scene for a number of years, Carey talked about her experience in Calgary:

I'm kind of like a small to medium fish in a small pond right now. […] I think the Calgary scene is pretty easy to break into but I've been in it for a long time […]. It's not huge and if people like what you're doing its easy for people to hear about you. […] There's not a lot going on so it's kind of easier to get into it I think, rather than a place where there's a million huge venues where only established artists can play, there's a lot of entry level places that you can play [in].

In contrast to larger cultural hubs, Calgary does not have a large number of famous venues. Instead,

Carey frames it as a city where musicians can start making a name for themselves, as there are not many institutional barriers in the way. For musicians who draw on corporate gigs, the sentiment is generally in line with Charlotte’s comment that “Calgary has been really good to me.” For these musicians, Calgary is a place where they can get reliable sources of income by “keep[ing] your ear to the ground” and “keep[ing] your mouth shut.” Despite these conditions, because of the fact that they can make a reliable income by performing music these musicians are happy to be in Calgary.

Interestingly, the pathways of musicians in Calgary were not always the same. Among musicians who rely on popular music venues, some participants seem to find a cap in their career in this city. As Malcom noted: “It’s easy to kind of get on top in Calgary, but it doesn't really get you far in the long run. You really need to tour, and get your music our there physically.” For musicians like Carey and Malcolm who rely on popular music venues, the results of career stagnation in Calgary were revealed when they talked about having reduced show attendance over time, venues opting to choose other bands for a performance, and having a fan base that stops that stops growing. Malcolm finds that in order to counteract the stagnation of his music in Calgary,

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he has to get his music out to other cities physically by going on tour. By doing so he is able to position himself within these other cities for future gigs but he is then subsequently positioned more favourably by local venues after returning. In this sense, going on tour for him is a kind of musician CV building activity. Participants also mentioned that playing festivals was another way of counteracting the effects of career stagnation.

Contrary to the stories of popular venue players, I did not hear freelancers talk about stagnation. Their career trajectories appeared to be more stable, and this may be due to the prestige and status placed upon the instruments played by freelancers, such as the violin, the saxophone, trumpet, and the cello, as well as the genres that they frequently play, such as classical, big band and jazz. Corporate and private employers rarely call for a rock band, and opt for a zither performer, a string quartet, or a jazz duet. Because of this, freelancers, who are able to receive higher wages for performing, do not experience stagnation in the way that popular venue musicians did.

5.5. Concluding: How Do Musicians Keep Going?

In this chapter I have situated musicians within a variety of social elements in the Calgary gig market. As I have shown, the intricacies of music work encapsulate a variety of choices and orientations towards the tasks that musicians perform and the difficulties that they face. By providing more detail about how people make it possible to continue doing this work, I have shown how the organization of the gig market in Calgary shapes a field of music hierarchies, where the possibilities that musicians are able to draw upon are based on the types of work that they do. In their field, musicians do not rely solely on themselves. The decisions they make, their orientations

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towards the variety of tasks and decisions at hand, and their opportunities for work are profoundly influenced by others.

By focusing on musician work, I have shown the rules of the game of this particular field.

Musicians have a variety of tasks, decisions and activities that they must do in order to ensure that they can keep playing gigs. These people need to find work frequently, and they rely on a number of different income sources in order to make ends meet due to the precariousness and low wages of gig work. Musicians actively position themselves within their respective gig markets in order to get more gigs. Musicians also find ways of cutting costs by foregoing commodities and services, and by substituting their labour for things they would otherwise have to pay for. Not only that but they frequently participate in an economy of favours which may involve them offering their own labour to other at a discounted rate, or playing on a friend’s album for free. To keep gigging, musicians expertly build social relations with a variety of people, and through these relations they simultaneously piece together their knowledge of the field, and obtain a wide degree of opportunities which include playing more gigs, learning about venues, getting cheap labour, and learning about and recording a CD.

This chapter showed an account of individual possibilities of gig musicians in Calgary.

Finding gig work, finding other jobs, deciding what work to take, cutting costs, talking to people, and building relations with people is the work that musicians do. By glossing over the fact that musicians perform live music in order to focus on all of the other aspects of playing music for a living, I show that what ends up taking so much of a musician’s time is the work that is not playing music.

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Chapter 6: Concluding Musician Work

Conceptualizing everything that musicians do as work underpins the entirety of this study. In popular discourse we portray musicians as having muses for inspiration, and praise them for producing art works, but we do not focus on what happened for a musician to be able to produce that particular art piece – whether it be everything they did to produce an album, who was involved in their latest performance, or how much they struggled to make money from music. Instead, we focus on their individual qualities, their song meanings, and their song inspirations, and this ignores the diversity of efforts made by musicians who persevere as professionals. This particular individualistic focus is also found in academia. As Lena and Peterson (2008:713) say regarding music genre studies, “[m]uch writing on genre [...] focuses on the ingenuity and creativity of particular artists.” This study is not about that. It is about what is involved in preparing and performing music, in a very broad sense.

I have built my study around the accounts of sixteen musicians in Calgary who are experienced as gig players. These musicians represent a wide variety of music genres and instrument types, and they help uncover the importance of conceptualizing the work of musicians as a plethora of decisions and activities, and not solely as performing. This plethora is what I call musician work. In the opening chapter I outlined the framework of the context of these practices, their significance to sociological thinkers and the musicians themselves, and I outlined what I believed was the work necessary to reframe music work as a survival mechanism. Now that I have done so, in this final chapter I want to return to the significance of my empirical analysis to the lives of musicians who do musician work for a living, and highlight my study’s contribution to a more general sociological field of inquiry.

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My research emerges out of an ethnographic exploration of the actualities of gig work which merges theoretical and analytical insights from Howard S. Becker’s Art Worlds (2008) and

Pierre Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production (1993). My focus is on the work of musicians.

This brings into my analytical lens the market organization of gig opportunities, the field of hierarchies in which musicians exist, and the rules of the game, that is, everything musicians do in order to work within this field and the tensions found within this field. By focusing on the field of music opportunities in Calgary, I have shown how profoundly social the work of musicians is.

The work of musicians is not glorious in the way media often shows it, and musicians have their own valuations to the many tasks that they do. They are not primarily motivated to perform for money, but they need money to survive. Financial hardship, in this sense, is part of the package of being a musician. Although this inquiry could have focused on why musicians in Calgary chose to be professional musicians when it means that they experience years on economic hardship, I did not lead the focus in that direction. Musicians certainly treat their profession as a calling, and what

I do in this study is provide an account of musicians in Calgary who persevere as professionals and who navigate the tensions of low paid work.

The participants in this study varied in terms of their career stage. Some participants were older and more experienced as musicians. These experienced musicians consisted of freelancers and musicians who gigged in popular venues that had steady supporting incomes. These people knew from experience what to do in order to sustain themselves as musicians. Other participants were in the middle of their career. This particular group of musicians also consisted of freelancers and popular venue musicians; however, many of these musicians were trying to find a balance between playing paid gigs and finding the right supporting income sources. The musicians in the

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early stages of their career all performed in popular music venues, and this group of musicians included those who had the least number of paid gigs.

Musicians gear into the Calgary gig market in a variety of ways, and their location within this field shapes the possibilities that they have as gig musicians. All musicians were profoundly shaped by the need to have other supporting sources of money. More experienced musicians were able to consistently rely on gig work that was offered to them by others due to their solid reputation and networks, and these musicians knew how to position themselves in their respective gig markets. Older musicians also had a strong understanding of what kind of supporting income and

“needs based” work they could rely on if they needed it. For example, Brian knew exactly what kind on non-music jobs he could work during the summer, and he also knew how these different jobs would affect his gigging schedule. On the other hand, younger musicians invested a significant amount of effort in order to build their reputations and networks in the gig market. They did so by taking on as many gigs as possible, whether paid or unpaid, in order to be seen by various audiences.

Young musicians networked at every possible opportunity in order to improve their position. These musicians wanted to increase the proportion of paid gigs that they played, and also the amount of gigs that they play that come from “connections.” Part of the challenge for musicians in a middle career stage was also to improve their position in the field, but compared to newer entrants into the field they had a higher proportion of paid gigs. For some musicians, like Fiona, the struggle was to manage an income through music-related work and paid gigs alone, as she wanted to stay in a position where she does not take on any exposure gigs. On the other hand,

Elaine, who was also in the middle of her career, had the goal of performing more paid classical

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gigs. In order for this to happen, she applied to numerous orchestral grants and found a variety of ways to boost her gig revenue. For her, this included teaching a heavy load of students.

Music genres played an important role in how musicians fit into the gig market. In this field, genres act as a system of common reference, and this system shapes the lives of musicians due to the different rewards that are given to different kinds of music. Freelancers, who primarily played classical, big band, and jazz gigs, received the highest pay. Gigs that involved rock, pop, folk, indi, and punk music were typically the lowest-paying, and sometimes they were not paid.

Musicians who played in popular music venues could receive a decent wage for performing, but it was limited to rarer and more prestigious gigs such as festivals and reputable bars. As musicians receive different wages for the gigs that they play, this has a profound impact on the ways that musicians organize their lives and the activities that they do. Specifically, if a musician’s wages are higher or lower, then they have different day to day habits and priorities, such as having health insurance or not, selling merchandise or not, and opting for more or less income supporting work.

In this study I examined the multitude of activities that musicians do. I wanted to learn about the intricacies of being a musician in a contemporary Canadian city. I asked about musicians’ lives without referring to the popular type of inquiry which revolves around individual musicians and their songs. In this inquiry I claim that the work of musicians is never-ending and has a profoundly social element to it. I did not ask why, but instead I asked what and how. Under the assumption that musicians want to keep being musicians, I was not focused on learning about their personal drives and motivations, although they certainly came up during interviews. Instead, I wanted to learn about everything that musicians do in order to be musicians. I wanted to flesh out their lives with the substance that keeps them going, and not through any psychological focus.

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6.1. Becker, Bourdieu and the Sociology of Art

This study contributes to a body of literature that refuses to conceptualize cultural products as solely made by individuals, such as artists (Banks 2012; Becker 2008; Bourdieu 1988; Bourdieu

1993; Cluley 2009). Musicians are not merely individual agents who produce works of art, but they are imbedded in social systems which are integral to their ability to produce art, and these social systems have distinctive social activities and values (Banks 2012; Byrd 2014; Clawson

1999; Coulson 2012; Grazian 2004; Martin 2006; Sargent 2009a, Sargent 2009b; Schippers 2000;

Schmutz and Faupel 2010; Walser 1993).

Despite the differences in the perspectives of Howard S. Becker (2008) and Pierre

Bourdieu (1993), both scholars offered important theoretical insights into the music world/field.

By utilizing their theories as frameworks for the analysis of the actions of gig musicians, I proposed a convergence of the methodological insights drawn from each theorist. At the risk of standing against one of the most powerful figures in the sociology of art, I did merge Becker and Bourdieu, despite Becker’s misgivings16. With this merger, I engaged in a flexible interview around the various tasks and conditions that need to be met in order for art to be produced, and I was sensitized to the multitude of ways in which others are intertwined with musicians.

Despite taking a back-step during the analysis, Becker’s most profound influence was in generating my data. When it comes to music worlds, framing interview questions around what musicians do to “set up” being able to play music, who is involved at each step, and to what degree, provides an opportunity to generate a wealth of data around the experiences of musicians. During

16 See Becker’s dialogue with French sociologist Alain Pessin in the 2008 edition of Art Worlds, where Becker argues against the naïve efforts of graduate students who try to merge Becker and Bourdieu. 136

the interviews, some participants quickly became aware that my interview was not structured around traditional interview topics such as those seen in chapter one. Instead, participants saw that the flow of the talk was shaped around the nitty-gritty details of the various practices and activities that they do. I believe this breadth and depth of talk was profoundly influenced by Becker’s theoretical insights which shaped my methodology. Future scholarship can tap into a wealth of experiences by exploring the lives of musicians in this way.

When conducting the analysis, I became more sensitive to the numerous ways in which the music field of practice shapes the possibilities of musicians. In talking about an individual’s space of possibles, I have shown how the variation in the accounts of what musicians do in order to make ends meet is so profoundly tied to the gig and non-gig work that they do, but also to their respective positions in the gig market. Using Bourdieu’s space of possibles as a conceptual tool for analysis was insightful, as I was able to bring out in more nuance what musicians do, and what they may do in their different field positions. This lesson is important for future studies of fields of cultural production.

6.2. The Sociology of Music Work

This study contributes to a growing field of literature that sees the work that musicians do as a vast palette of activities that go beyond writing, practicing, and performing music (Banks 2012;

Coulson 2012; Sargent 2009a; Thomson 2013; Umney and Kretsos 2014; Unmney and Kretsos

2015). The musicians in this study are doing what Umney and Kretsos (2015) call managing precarity. They simultaneously put a lot of time into building their gig opportunities and networks, while maintaining other forms of income. Essentially, as long as they can find gigs, these musicians will keep going the way they are and this involves managing precarity. As one of the only existing

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studies on the lives of Canadian musicians, this thesis offers an account of musician work by not overly focusing on music work itself, but more importantly, in this study I offer an account of what it is like to work in a music career with a low income.

6.2.1. How musicians keep going

Through a close examination of the ways that musicians organize their work, prepare their work, and the way they orient themselves towards the multitude of tasks at hand, the work of musicians reveals itself to be far more than preparing and performing music. As cultural workers the lives of musicians are not lucrative, and as I showed throughout this study how this lack of money encourages musicians to find a variety of ways to boost their incomes and reduce expenses.

When asked about their difficulties, Brian offered words which encapsulates the lives of participants. He said:

Harder for me? […] Because the amount of time that I put into the entrepreneurial side of things like bookkeeping, you know going to the bank, picking up cheques and making sure that I have been paid by people […] The whole bookkeeping aspect of it, all that stuff just takes a lot of time. So I would say the hardest thing about […] being a performing musician is just finding the time to just work on projects and keep your stuff together, because the more time you spend making money to survive, say teaching, those things will take up the chunks of my time. […] I have to really budget in time to practice.

As Brian says, the more time musicians spend making money to survive the less time they have to do traditional musician tasks like practicing and playing.

In regards to the current conditions of professional musicians, Thomson (2013:522) discusses the relevance of her findings for the lives of musicians:

Most underscored that they are hustling more than ever, but what the hustle means varied a lot. Some talked about driving farther to pick up freelance gigs. Some described better merchandising techniques. Others found themselves applying for grants.

Brian’s talk about his difficulties resonates with Thomson’s argument. Making sure time is “put into the entrepreneurial side of things,” which for participants may include picking up more gigs,

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making unique merchandise, negotiating for pay, and applying for grants, is necessary for the survival of participants. Without these various activities, musicians would be unable to sustain themselves financially.

Broadly put, my research question is what keeps a musician going? I focused on the multitude of activities that keep them going. These activities support the music, boost their revenue, they help musicians get to know more people, get more gigs, and reduce costs. Musicians have shown in their accounts what is vital to them as cultural workers in Calgary. Although personal dispositions and motivations are certainly a part of their story, I have rarely included these in my account of their stories. That is because it strikes me that what is pivotal to understanding what musicians do to sustain themselves is their dedication towards the “doing” of the hundreds of tasks at hand.

Younger participants demonstrated how they quickly picked up the survival tools of their trade. Being a musician is not only about learning songs and being in front of crowds. There’s learning about how to book venues, learning to sift through venues to not be cheated, learning about how to find jobs that are flexibly supporting their music, and there’s also learning about how to routinely get gigs over the changing gig seasons. Even though this seemed obvious to participants, this study provides an account of how important this work is for musicians.

6.2.2. Musicians as entrepreneurs

Although musicians shared a language of entrepreneurship and business to different degrees, this study demonstrates that musicians are far from adopting “entrepreneurship as a work mode”

(Coulson 2012:247). Although participants frequently showed how they had systematic attitudes towards the plethora of tasks at hand, calling this efficiency a business-derived attribute does not do the work of musicians justice. Certainly, participants were very aware of entrepreneurial

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language, as numerous participants thought of themselves as people who run their own business.

However, running a business does not make a musician an entrepreneur. The goal for participants was not to make a vast amount of money, but rather make money while doing the work that they love so that they can keep doing the work that they love. Running the business for musicians then, is about drawing on certain business strategies and language in order to make a living in as smooth a manner as possible.

6.3. Music Genre Cultural Studies

By setting up the interviews in a way that did not limit the focus to any particular music genre, but in a way that set up genres as something related to a market, this study contributes to sociological studies of music genre by demonstrating the utility of doing explorative qualitative inquiries into local music scenes that include multiple genres. What strikes me as important is that the similarities and differences amongst musicians relate to the type of gig opportunities that they draw upon. I did not really think of participants as classical musicians, or pop musicians, instead I saw them as freelancers, orchestral musicians or popular venue musicians, while being wary of neatly tucking away participants under one conceptual category. As I found out, no participant was a perfect fit.

This type of market-oriented framing encouraged me to contextualize participants in relation to their work as opposed to framing their experiences in relation to a contentiously defined music genre. Genre studies over time can be a conceptual and analytical nightmare due to the tensions amongst insiders, academics, and laypeople in defining and using a genre label (Bourdieu

1993; Lena and Peterson 2008). Although there are certainly lessons to be drawn from studies related to music genre (Banks 2012; Dowd and Pinheiro 2013; Dunn and Farnsworth 2012;

Gronnerod 1993; Lena and Peterson 2008; Pinheiro and Dowd 2009; Regev 1997; Walser 1993;

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Zwaan et al. 2009), had I focused on a particular kind of music I would not have attained such a wide array of accounts about what musicians do to keep playing gigs.

Drawing on the works of Becker and Bourdieu, Lena and Petterson (2008:697) argue that using music genre as an analytical tool is useful when “it describes a manner of expression that governs artists’ work, their peer groups, and the audiences of their work.” In a broad sense, this is how I have used music genre. I used the term music genre as an analytical concept which is related to their gig market. Conceptualizing musicians in relation to the gig market, which encapsulates music work, their networks, who consumes their music, and where their music is consumed, was particularly useful in drawing out analytical lines of inquiry and teasing out how gig musicians make it happen. What was even more fruitful for me was conceptualizing musicians of a variety of genres, genders, and experiences in relation to the gig market. As such, this study shows the utility of not limiting musician studies to any one genre.

6.4. Research Reflections

The goal of this study was modest. I wanted to introduce through the accounts of musicians what it is like to be in the music gig profession in Calgary. Although the scale of this research is small, its explanatory power is significant. What I have argued throughout this study is that the necessities of gig musician life, which involve making it possible to gig on an ongoing basis, put musicians in situations where the bulk of their work does not involve traditional musician activities.

Numerous avenues for further research unfold from this research. Future research could delve more deeply into areas such as doing gender as a Calgary musician across the various aspects of musician work, explore in further depth the economy of favours that musicians are a part of, and observe how the lives of musicians shift throughout the year.

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In this study I was not able to find any clear gendered differences between the experiences of men and women. Despite coming across many examples of how gender plays a role in the lives of musicians on and off the stage (Clawson 1999; Groce and Cooper 1990; Hallam et al. 2008;

Sargent 2009b; Schippers 2000; Schmutz and Faupel 2010; Wald 1998; Walser 1993), I was not able to explore what doing gender was like for my participants. I had one condition in place for gendered talk to arise by having a fairly equal representation of men and women in my study, but

I was not able to tease out any nuanced accounts of gendered musician talk. This could be due to my focus on activities that sustain musicians, as the phrases and words that I used during the course on interviews focused on the seemingly gender-neutral practical elements of the profession, and not on bringing out any particular gendered talk. It could also be due to my conceptualization of gendered musician talk as conversations that involved women being objectified as players, and as devalued participants in the music community. I was looking for ways in which men did particular actions and said certain things (such as saying that a woman looks strange when playing the bass guitar), or ways in which women experienced being the target of words and actions (such as being the focus of a leering audience member). Future studies may be able to learn more about masculinities and femininities for musicians who play a variety of genres by asking questions in more nuanced ways.

Although musicians described aspects of the informal economy of favours in which they participate, this topic was not explored to my complete satisfaction. The majority of the insights that I had about this subject only came after the sixteen interviews were conducted, and so I did not have the chance to probe this issue in greater depth. One possibility for future research would be to explore more ways that musicians participate in this economy, explore in more depth how

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this economy of favours helps (or does not help, as Fiona suggests) musicians, and explore how this favour system is sustained by the gig market in which musicians collaborate.

Lastly, by engaging in a sociological study that relies solely on interviews, I run the risk of building an account that is not completely accurate. Despite my confidence that participants were accurate in their accounts, utilizing observational methods in order to build more nuanced accounts of gig life could prove invaluable. For example, even though participants told me that gigging in the winter is difficult because of transportation (e.g. cars stop running and carrying music gear in the snow is difficult) and attendance issues (e.g. people stay indoors instead of attending live music nights), I did not build a highly nuanced understanding of this situation by attending gigs during the other seasons of the year, and contrasting these to winter gigs. Future research could take on the task of hanging out with musicians and observing musicians when they do activities such as play gigs, arrive at gigs, leave gigs, record songs, and network throughout the year, in order to build more contextualized accounts of gig musician life.

6.5. Returning to Gig Musicians

Being a musician who performs for pay involves doing a variety of activities which help musicians support themselves and find work. Problematically, the notion of gig, defined as a paid music performance, may not currently be the best term for capturing what most professional musicians do. The accounts of participants bring more nuance to the term gig by clarifying the different ways in which they have played a gig, and set up a gig. Playing a gig does not inevitably mean getting paid. As I discussed in chapters four and five, for various reasons, like playing for exposure, playing for a friend, or playing pro bono for a charity, musicians are not always playing gigs for pay. For younger musicians, earning money for playing a gig is seen as a type of luxury. Veteran

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participants showed how with more experience doing the many tasks of being a musician, such as making networks, finding gigs, positioning oneself, and finding suitable and flexible income supplements, the more successful they are at adapting to the conditions of their gig market. With more successful adaptations, they tend to get more paid gigs. For musicians then, part of the work that they do is try to achieve a state where they can have most gigs paid. Of course, having all gigs paid would be unreasonable, as Brian discussed in chapter five. Sometimes, musicians take on a gig for other reasons, such as the enjoyment of the music and who is performing with them.

As I discussed in chapters four and five, the Calgary gig market is organized in a particular way, and musicians experience this market differently depending on their respective positions in the field. This gig market is not a neat and tidy field. As I discussed in chapter four, the pay for gigs varies depending on the venue in which the gig takes place, and on the relation of a gig to a music genre. Some gigs are protected by contracts, while others are set up over the phone or email.

Gigs related to jazz and classical music paid the most, and these performances were almost always set up in a contractual manner. Gigs related to rock, pop, and other forms popular music were the least paid, and these took place in a multitude of small local venues such as bars and pubs where contracts were less formalized or inexistent.

In this field, gigs are not always paid. Unpaid gigs are comprised of donation gigs, pro bono gigs, and exposure gigs. Although all participants talked about taking on unpaid gigs, the bulk of gigs performed by younger musicians are exposure gigs. For these musicians, these gigs were described as a route to getting more paid gigs, repute, and merchandise sales. As the aim of the bulk participants is to get as many paid gigs as possible, many musicians opt to play these performances and as such these exposure gigs are an important part of the gig market. They are

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important because of the position that these gigs have as stepping stones for musicians to advance in the gig market.

Participants also varied in terms of how much they played. Some musicians took on as many gigs as possible, performing two to three times a week. Others opted for more casual gig schedules with three or four gigs a month. The different levels of participation of musicians in this study showed how gig musicians were able to find an array of methods in order to support their music. Typically, the more time a musician spent doing things that supported their music, the less time they had to perform. This tension was evident in the account of Brian, who positioned that as one of his principal challenges as a musician, and also in the way that Gabrielle scheduled her weekly routine. By holding a full-time office position, she was only able to gig on the weekends.

The work of gig musicians helps them piece together a multitude of precarious one-time

(un)paid opportunities. While most of what musicians do ideally leads to pay in the long run, many individual actions undertaken by musicians fall under the umbrella of what I call musician work, such as networking, and these activities are not paid. Furthermore, musicians who play exposure gigs in popular music venues are not paid, but they are investing in building a paid career. Despite being paid less often for playing a gig, they are still doing the work of musicians by networking, scheduling gigs, recording, and working other jobs. As such, a characteristic of the Calgary gig market is that musicians play gigs for no pay, and are not paid for most of what they do. In essence, participants were all people who regularly performed music and did a number of activities to support their music and put together gigs over time. Musician work is worthy of critical attention as it brings into the forefront how individual people manage to navigate through their precarious and low-wage musician careers and what different musician career stages look like.

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Thomson (2013) calls musicians who make an income from music “working musicians.”

By doing so, she probes into the various income sources that musicians have, the proportion of each source relative to their income, and roles of the working musician, such as composing music, writing music, performing live, managing a band, and teaching music. In this study I support

Thomson’s use of the term working musician, because of the utility of the concept in capturing the various aspects of musician work. I do so by conceptualizing everything that musicians do as work

(even if it is unpaid) in this study, and this helps capture what musicians do across the range positions in this field.

Musician work thus brings up a musicians’ efforts, their thoughts, their learning, and all of the diligence that they put into the task. Without their continuous efforts, most musicians would become forgotten and others would take their place on gig night. As cultural workers, their lives are complex. As Canadian musicians, their voices also contribute to the ongoing study of cultural producers by delivering accounts of what it is like to be in a low-income music career in a wealthy

Canadian city. As a researcher, what I did was steer the conversation towards the hidden dimensions of musician life. Musicians do so much in order to make ends meet and ensure that they can keep on playing gigs, much more than the popular style of interview with musicians shows. If readers are to take away one point from this study, that is it. Revealed as such, these people may stand acknowledged, worthy of our attention, thought, and time.

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Appendix A: Recruitment Poster

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Appendix B: The Musicians

Malcolm Reynolds recently turned twenty-seven. In his words, he is a progressive rock band musician who uses an 8 string electric guitar. Due to the difficulties of making an income by performing original music, he supports his music through a number of activities as the demands of home and studio rent, touring, and day-to-day necessities eat up his monthly income. Living with his girlfriend, Malcolm is a music studio owner and manager, a music teacher, a part-time night shift warehouse worker at Home Depot, and a proficient DIY merchandise maker. He has been residing in Calgary for most of his life with a short stint in a Los Angeles music school in

2009, has actively placed playing music gigs as his drive since his schooling five years ago, and has been frequently gigging since 2011.

Adam Gibson is a thirty-seven-year-old man who struggles to find a steady pace playing as a sideman in a number of projects as an electric bassist. Having been involved in the gig field for close to 20 years, he has found a number of ways to support his passion for playing music live.

During his time as a musician, he has completed a music performance degree at Vancouver

Community College, and gone from gigging occasionally to gigging non-stop. He has experienced a vast number of music career experiences such as obtaining grants, and touring with the Cirque

Du Soleil. Furthermore, he has mentored numerous newcomers into the community of musicians.

Currently, Adam is managing to hold a very spartan lifestyle, with a low monthly income and low monthly expenses. He does not own a car, nor a cell phone, nor does he pay rent. When he can find the opportunities, he works as a sideman for a number of music acts, a construction worker, a stage builder and labourer, a music transcriber, a bass guitar teacher, and an extra in western themed movies.

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Neil Baird is an outlier among all of the participants because of the nature of how he obtains his performances. Playing as a tenured member of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra as a trumpeter, Neil plays frequently with the CPO. Following his bachelor’s degree in Toronto and a subsequent semester of graduate school in Cleveland, Neil won an audition for the CPO in 2009 decided to pursue his music career in Calgary. As an avid classical music fan and player, Neil also teaches music to a few students and acts on a number of CPO committees, in addition to taking on a rare freelance gig. Although he differs from other participants in terms of how he obtains his performances and how is work is contractually negotiated and protected, Neil was included in this study because of the rich insight he offered in regards to one of the main institutions of music performance in Calgary.

Carey Daellenbach is one of the two youngest participants in this study at twenty-two years old. As a folk singer/songwriter who sings and plays acoustic guitar in a solo setting, Carey describes herself as a “small to medium fish in a small pond.” She has been gigging more and more seriously since her mid-teen years, and tries to maintain at least two to four gigs a month even during the slow seasons. She has played at the Lilac Festival, and frequents most of the venues that feature live music in Calgary as a performer and as a member of the crowd. Living with her parents, Carey is determined to support her music by working six days a week at two part-time jobs: one at a dog daycare and the other as a retail clerk in a pet supply store. She is currently continuing to amass funds to continue making recordings, gig as frequently as possible, and intends to release a new album in the near future.

Diane Nguyen is one of the veteran members of this sample of gig musicians. In her late thirties, she has gathered more than twenty years of experience in various music hubs, and has been performing for sixteen years on various zither style of instruments. During her career as a

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musician, she has performed numerous times on television and has been a part of TED Talks. Now, she embodies a particularly spartan lifestyle which enables her to be mobile as a performer. She is currently in a form of transition as she waits for the final phases of her immigration process to emigrate to the United States (where her husband resides). At the time of the interview, Diane busks frequently in Calgary, performs weekly at a select handful of casual music venues, produces her own music, is hired out to make exposition and cinematographic music, and jams as often as possible with those who complement her approach to being a part of a music community.

Jack London is another participant who excels at the craft of DIY merchandise. Touring as frequently as possible with his wife in various parts of North America, he also plays at festivals in addition to performing in various Calgary venues as a solo singer and guitarist. Jack spends most of his time working numerous part-time jobs, in addition to song writing, practicing, performing, and replenishing his stock of music merchandise. He is an at-risk youth social worker, a labourer of all sorts, an actor - he works as many music and non-music jobs as he can when they come. He has also successfully obtained numerous grants related to music production and touring.

Having completed a degree in social work nine years ago, Jack fell in love with music shortly afterwards and started to learn more about it through the encouragement of others. Although the times are lean, he is steadily persevering with his love of creating and performing music. He notes,

“we always have enough food, we always have enough money, we have enough gas in the gas tank.” As a musician who has been seriously pursuing this path for three years, Jack feels he has made some excellent headway.

Wesley Montgomery is an avid fan of busking in Calgary. As a busker, he practices, he perfects his art, he tests out new material, and this provides a stream of income which he noted is better than most part-time jobs. In addition to that, he uses his cheerful attitude towards music by

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working part-time as a music teacher in a studio and as a music therapist, and performs in a band in addition to playing solo gigs and doing busking work. Having moved from Ontario to Calgary for a job in 2012 after completing a music performance degree in Guelph and doing short stint in

Toronto, Wesley quickly began to pursue his love of performing by building up his repertoire and realized that he could discard any non-music related work by teaching, busking, and working as a music therapist. In his mid-late twenties, Wesley also competes in regional music competitions, and is working on a website and an EP release as a solo artist.

Luke Talbert is the other of the two youngest participants in this study. He plays in a rock- oriented band as a guitarist and singer. At around twenty-two years old, he has made gained much experience in the Calgary bar and pub scene over the past six years. Luke professes a strong love for the underground bar scene, where most of his gigs come from. Currently, his band is capped at three to four evening gigs a month during the high seasons due to the difficulties of finding gigs for his post-psychedelic band. In order to be able to sustain his activities, he also works part- or full-time as a labourer in the construction industry depending on the season. Currently, he is taking courses at SAIT in digital audio in order to do recording activities for his band. With his band starting to pick up more and more gigs, Luke also has started to gather his own band merchandise, and he is in the process of releasing his band’s first polished album.

Gabrielle Fournier is a musician in her mid-thirties who supports her music drive with full-time work in the oil and gas business. She has been performing for eighteen years in Calgary,

Medicine Hat, and Toronto. As a passionate performer of 80s synth style of pop and a mother of two daughters, Gabrielle tends to gig less frequently and reserves the weekends for gig work in

Calgary bars, pubs, and clubs. Having been a part of numerous bands over time, she has found a great balance between gigs, band member motivations, and full-time work with her current group.

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Both she and her husband are part of the same 80s synth pop, and together they juggle schedules in order to raise their children, hold full-time jobs, and gig two to four times a month. They have also put together a small recording studio in their basement, which is used to record and produce new music for their ventures.

Brian Colburn is a freelance saxophonist who has been very active in the gig world since graduating from the University of Calgary with a music performance degree in 2000. Since then, he has gigged in Calgary until 2005, obtained a Master’s degree in music performance from the

United States in 2007, lived in Jersey City, gigged in the New York city area, married, and had a child. Having moved back to Calgary in 2011, Brian maintains a heavy schedule of gigging, teaching, and conducting music performance workshops. Although he occasionally performs alone, he is part of numerous small and large groups, and finds venues to play his original music when he can. His gigs range from standing in as an extra horn for the Calgary Philharmonic to playing in a duet at a downtown hotel. As part of the lean lifestyle of the freelance musician, he embodies an adaptive lifestyle in order to buffer the periods of famine, and works diligently during the periods of feast in order to build up his reserves.

Elaine Shayipova is a freelancer who performs on the violin. In the past, she has busked, taught music, and performed in solo as well as group settings in Calgary and in Los Angeles.

Having obtained a Bachelor’s degree in 2008 and a Master’s in conducting in 2010, she resides in

Calgary and currently gigs for regional private venues such as weddings as a solo or group musician, and in a couple regional symphonies and orchestras. In addition to that, she is currently setting up her own orchestra group with which to perform classical music in Calgary. Elaine also has weekly teaching responsibilities for around twenty-two students, and creates her own visual art for craft markets. Being a frequent teacher and gig performer, she is currently pushing her own

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flagship orchestra to the forefront of the Calgary music scene, as she strongly desires Calgary to have a group that performs the many great classical pieces that the CPO does not place on their roster.

Charlotte Atkinson is a semi-retired, sixty-eight-year-old cellist who has been living in

Calgary as a performer for the better part her working career since 1968. Her gigs primarily come from her string quartet, but she also performs as a solo musician for private gigs and as a recording artist. Due to the bodily demands of playing the cello at a high level and the financially stable place that she is in, she is a seasonal break taker. When performing, she usually takes on two to four gigs a month during the busier times. However, this does not stop her from also occasionally teaching a student, playing as a dancing cellist for a local dance group, and practicing reiki. As a cellist,

Charlotte has been a part of the CPO, has gigged extensively in virtually every string instrument venue in the Alberta region, and has toured numerous times. Having reduced the amounts of gigs that she takes, she currently lives happily being able to pick and choose what she takes, and when she performs.

Morgan Reid is an aboriginal singer and drummer, a singer in two local bands, a workshop conductor, a political activist, and a single mother of two children. As a herald of aboriginal culture and rights, Morgan primarily gigs for donations, as she wants to maintain a celebratory aboriginal culture in Calgary. Currently in her thirties, she may be seen performing up to four times a week with her aboriginal drumming pair and in two local bands. She has been part of the music scene since early 2000, but six years ago her gig work started to take off when she moved to Calgary due to popular demand for aboriginal singing and drumming. In order to supplement her income, she also conducts craft workshops for items such as drums and dreamcatchers, speaks publicly for venues and schools about aboriginal culture and history, and occasionally acts in local venues. As

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part of her desire to create a healthy community through music, Morgan remains extremely cheerful and enthusiastic and she frequently participates in jam nights by hosting and participating in them.

Fiona Klassen is an established niche gig player who has been performing in Calgary. As a part of her musician philosophy, she insists that artists should be paid for their work, and that artists should pay others for their work. Currently, she primarily performs alone and hires out accompaniments when she needs. She frequently plays for festivals, and tries to avoid the Calgary bar scene due to the lack of harmony between her music and the crowds who frequent such establishments. Having been a part of a number of bands and performed a wide scope of music over time, she has played in most Calgary venues, and now she chooses to aim for a particular career direction by only taking on paid gigs. Having obtained a recording diploma from SAIT in the past, Fiona utilizes this knowledge to record and fine-tune many of her own works. Although she does not perform as often as some freelance musicians, she pieces together recordings, niched gigs (in medieval, sci-fi and pagan communities), DIY merchandise, and teaching sessions to keep on making ends meet. Living without a car in Calgary, the use of electronic devices has been very important in reducing the amount of monthly financial upkeep necessary for her. Due to many difficult decisions on her part, she is able to make an income from music related work, and does not rely on any non-music work to make ends meet.

Nicholas Wetherel is a semi-retired performer who has opted for full-time work in construction management due to an injury which prevents him from drumming like he used to.

Hailing from the hardcore punk scene of the 90s, he has carried on this tradition to his wife, his kids, his workplace and his current band. Gigging primarily on weeknights and weekends, he gigs two to three times a month if his back pain allows it. Over time, Nicholas has played many of the

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underground venues that constantly fluctuate. Although common tastes do not necessarily appreciate the type of music that he plays, he has made a niche for himself in such venues, and he never stops thinking about music, and what to play next.

Mark Gordon is young indi/folk musician in his mid-twenties who performs as a singer and guitarist in a band and occasionally alone. He performs in coffee shops, bars, pubs, and for fundraiser events due to his soft natured music. Mark leads a busy life being a full-time university student at the University of Calgary, a full-time city of Calgary night roads worker, the principal gig scheduler for his band, as well as a live music performer. He is particularly affected by the seasonality of gig work, night shift work, and school work as months like September and October are ones where all three activities are concurring. Despite that, Mark is determined to keep his music career moving forward, while simultaneously building backup opportunities by completing a degree during the slow performing seasons.

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Appendix C: Musician Interview Guide

1) Overview MQ: What do you do now as a gigging musician?

Do you perform alone? / Who do you play with currently?

Are you a part of different bands?

Current level of involvement? How long have you been doing this?

Instrument use?

Gigs a month?

2) Getting Into Music MQ: How did you come to be musician?

If certain aspects are not implicit or explicit: Age, ethnicity, family background, education, years of involvement, instruments played

Prior involvement, bands, family context,

Transition to present, point of decision, point to have it as an occupational choice

3) Current Work as Gigger MQ: Where do you perform?

Types of gigs?

Who sets up bookings, manages money, sets up equipment…

Follow ups: Could you step me through this process? How does getting a gig typically happen? What is it like at X site? Preferred gigs? What are the differences?

4) Other employment (if applicable) MQ: Do you have another job?

What type(s)? How often do you work there? Shift work?

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How did you come to it? How do you decide what to take and when?

How does it affect their gigging opportunities?

Changes in other forms of employment?

How does it work for you?

A Week in your life: Could you describe the work you do within the course of a typical week?

How do you fit it together?

Do you live with a partner (relation type?)? What is your income situation like? Are your incomes pooled? Do you have health care benefits?

5) Being a Musician in Calgary MQ: What’s it like being a musician in Calgary?

How did you come to perform in Calgary and not another city?

Do you have a many musician friends and acquaintances? What is it like? Do you need networks to find work? What resources are available to you?

Do you see yourself as an entrepreneur of your own music?

6) Supports and Barriers MQ: What are the things that you have found that make it harder to be a gig musician? And/or What are the things that you have found are supportive to being a gig musician?

Are these specific to Calgary? Tell me how so/why not.

If not mentioned: Are people an important part of these supports/obstacles?

How do your friends and family think about your decision to be a musician?

How did they react when they found out you are wanting to make a living off of music? How do they see you as a musician?

Do you feel pressure to stop or continue gigging?

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Follow up: When do you feel called upon to justify what you’re doing?

7) Future MQ: Where do you see your career going?

Is there something you need to happen to achieve this goal?

8) Closing off.

Thanks again for helping me know more about your work and taking the time to talk to me, but it seems our time is nearing an end. Before we close it off,

MQ: Is there something that we talked about today that you feel we did not go into enough detail?

What are your plans this ______(upcoming holiday period)?

Where are you performing next?

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