FIMS Publications
Popular Musical Labor in North America
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2015
Journal
The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music
First Page
135
URL with Digital Object Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473910362.n8
Last Page
153
Abstract
In his 1962 career guide aimed at American high school students, Robert E. Curtis describes and assesses persisting features of the music performance occupations. ‘Come join me in the fascinating world of music', he writes in Your Future in Music, ‘but only if you are ambitious and studious, have a strong heart and stomach, and can take the bad with the good'. Music is a ‘glamorous but lopsided field’ in which you will encounter ‘celebrities and nonentities…as well as hosts of just ordinary people'. Contrasting the music maker's independence with postwar mass employment, Curtis observes that ‘[p]eople in music enjoy a freedom completely unknown to the organization man'. In fact, freedom from workaday convention is one of the selling points of the career in music: ‘[t]he nine-to-five day is almost wholly foreign to the life of a musician, and he usually can avoid getting caught up in rush-hour traffic either going to work or coming home, if not both ways'; yet this freedom also correlates to music-makers’ interstitial positions in the social world; ‘most musicians', he writes, ‘have to work when others are enjoying time off from their own labors, and this means nights, weekends, and holidays’ (1962, p. 9). Indeed, the job of many performers is to provide entertainment to enrich other working people's leisure. Curtis’ endorsement is ambivalent: ‘[f]ew other fields offer such a mixture of exciting, talented people, such freedom or such diversity of opportunity for making a living. Few other fields offer such chances for fame and fortune, and few other fields bring so many of their older members such bitter disillusionment’ (1962, p. 10).
Notes
In Andy Bennett & Steve Waksman (Eds.) (2015). The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music (pp. 135-153). Los Angeles: SAGE.