Music spaces, from conservatories to recording studios, have proven themselves unequal and exclusionary. To investigate how power relations condition present-day musical life, the research environment in musicology at Örebro university has been awarded funding for the three-year research program Music, Power, and Inequity (MPI).
The aim of this paper is two-fold. To contextualize our studies, we will initially give a brief presentation of the research program MPI. With the specific aim of discussing power relations in music society, we will secondly introduce two studies in their initial phase. Both studies investigate inequalities and hierarchies affecting the underprivileged in musical life, focusing on issues with regards to the music elite and freelance musicians' working lives.
The studies' methodologies build on a mixed-method approach. They map socio-economic characteristics of (i) freelance musicians, and (ii) people in power within central music organizations, conduct interviews focusing on musicians' life stories from a feminist intersectional perspective, and perform critical discourse analysis and multimodal analyses of home pages and official social media accounts.
Together, the projects contribute a crucial critical analysis of the constitution of the elite in musical life, clarifying the consequences of social distinctions as well as discussing what is required in terms of risk, support, and various forms of social, cultural, and economic background to lead a sustainable working life in music.
2024.
Gendering Music Matter. Power, Affects, and Infrastructures of Music Industries, the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, 13–15 March 2024.