Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper will examine how professional musicians in Athens calibrate their employment strategies, creative outputs, and conceptualise their personhood within the context of the Greek financial and socio-political crisis.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper will focus on the ways in which the post-2010 economic 'crisis' in Greece affects local professional musicians. The chronicle of Greece's radical economic and political change in the past seven years has been covered extensively by domestic and international media. Following the global financial crisis that began in the United States in 2008, Greece faced a sovereign-debt crisis in 2009, which resulted in a succession of so-called 'bailouts', with each of them deepening the imposed austerity, the recession and the political alienation of Greek citizens. This paper will address how increased precariousness and unemployment due to the 'crisis' reshapes the strategies of working musicians, but also their self-conceptions and sense of personhood.

Since 'The Crisis', musicians have found steady work scarce and payment often not forthcoming. This paper will elaborate on the ways that professional musicians in recessional Athens practically adjust their work to the new crisis-scape, but also how they embody subjectivities of the precarious labourer. I will suggest that freelance musicians in Athens engage in two simultaneous processes: (1) they incarnate a new type of artistic labourer, what I call the 'Music Precariat': mobile and alienated from industry structures, but also an agent of grassroots solidarities at home and abroad. (2) They operate as 'aesthetic prophets' of a new kind of cultural production, based on ideas of small-scale performance, domesticity, independence, and free, unmediated circulation.