Book/Printed Material Can music make you sick? : measuring the price of musical ambition

Title

• Can music make you sick? : measuring the price of musical ambition

Summary

• It is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detailed study of recording and performing artists in the British music industry, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave turn this view on its head. By listening to how musicians understand and experience their working lives, this book proposes that whilst making music is therapeutic, making a career from music can be traumatic. The authors show how careers based on an all-consuming passion have become more insecure and devalued. Artistic merit and intimate, often painful, self-disclosures are the subject of unremitting scrutiny and data metrics. Personal relationships and social support networks are increasingly bound up with calculative transactions. Drawing on original empirical research and a wide-ranging survey of scholarship from across the social sciences, their findings will be provocative for future research on mental health, wellbeing and working conditions in the music industries and across the creative economy. Going beyond self-help strategies, they challenge the industry to make transformative structural change. Until then, the book provides an invaluable guide for anyone currently making their career in music, as well as those tasked with training and educating the next generation.

Names

• Gross, Sally-Anne, author
• Musgrave, George, 1986- author

Created / Published

• London : University of Westminster Press, 2020.

Contents

• Introduction : special objects, special subjects -- Sanity, madness and music -- The status of work -- The status of value -- The status of relationships -- Conclusions : what do you believe in? -- Appendices.

Headings

• -  Music trade--Great Britain--Psychological aspects
• -  Musicians--Mental health--Great Britain

Notes

• -  Includes bibliographical references (pages 159-186).
• -  Description based on print version record; resource not viewed.

Medium

• 1 electronic resource (vii, 186 pages)

Call Number/Physical Location

• ML3795.G88

Digital Id

• https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gdc/gdcebookspublic.2020719133

Library of Congress Control Number

• 2020719133

Rights Advisory

• Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode External

Access Advisory

• Unrestricted online access

Online Format

• image
• pdf

LCCN Permalink

• https://lccn.loc.gov/2020719133

Additional Metadata Formats

• MARCXML Record
• MODS Record
• Dublin Core Record