engleski

Musicians’ Economic Everyday Reality – Cruder Side of Sustainability Concept

Intended as a critique of UNESCO’s implementation of sustainability concepts, Titon in his articles in 2009 World of Music expresses a very utopian view of music’s sustainability being possible only through participatory practices, mutually and freely shared within a community, seeing professionalization as a negative effect which allows music to appear “in presentational forms (…), with the value-added mechanisms of commerce”, and encourages “thinking of music as a commodity” (Titon 2009b: 122). Successfully pointing out to some of the problems of Intangible Heritage Lists, Titon’s perception of music’s sustainability is however a very romanticist one, understanding researched communities as undifferentiated ones, ignoring the already-existing role of professional musicians and indirectly writing against the rights of musicians to be professionals in their area. If, as Titon claims, “sustaining music means sustaining people making music” (Titon 2009a: 6), should we not think about the real-life needs of people striving to sustain themselves as musicians? Deliberately going against the grain of the symposium’s definition of sustainability, this paper will attempt to pose questions on music as a form of labour and its economic sustainability. Some ethnomusicologists have already researched economic sustainability in traditional music, envisioning this discourse as an opposition to Titon’s (see O’Brien Bernini 2015, McKerrell 2018). The research this paper draws insights from is based on semi-professional and professional musicians of different generations and genres in North-western Croatia and their societal and market-based flexibility, survival or ephemerality.

music labour, music sustainability, music economy

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