Musicians operate in a market that demands constant productivity and innovation. After her participation in two workshops at the OneBeat residency program, musicologist Monika Żyła calls for new modes of artistic production, based on sharing rather than competition.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shattered the world into pieces. We are slowly trying to gather them together to remake the puzzle we call our world. As our public spaces and personal freedoms radically shrunk, the structures we so meticulously built over decades were overturned. We now face the opportunity to redefine and reevaluate these structures, before we rebuild them from scratch. Perhaps there are ways of doing things better and we should learn from our mistakes. Perhaps new bridges, channels, and platforms must be created in place of the old structures, allowing the music community to reestablish our sense of values and significance that the pandemic made numb.

For me, music has always been a space of personal liberation because of the way it empowers and emancipates individuals, externalizing unique personal experiences and translating them into collective understanding, to expand our vocabulary of emotions, possibilities, ideas, and sensibilities. The ultimate goal of music is precisely this: to enlarge our worlds beyond our imagination, and to share.

How to Not Be Swallowed by the Market?

If the pandemic has any impact on the importance of music and creativity for society, then it should be to open up questions such as: how can we maneuver in this abundance of cultural products and own our practices that are so often extracted from us? How can we avoid being swallowed by capitalism’s expectations and an economic model that demands from us constant productivity and innovation? How can we dismantle the mechanisms that base the production of cultural capital on the extraction of resources? Will our search for new possibilities, new ways of caring and being fair, and new strategies of sustainability replace the economic system we built around selling experiences and monetizing our appetite for consuming extraordinary locations?

In a world where leading a creative life is increasingly precarious, community solidarity and playing fair could lead to building structures that override a system in which the hard work of many benefits a few.

The questions of how to better go back, if at all, keep returning to us as our conversations taking place in the One Beat residency program deepened. Unpacked with care during the workshops «Our Sonic Environment» and «Building Radio» which I attended, these questions made us reflect upon our shared collective challenges and responsibilities as artists.

Perhaps we as artists survived the pandemic because we predicted it some time ago. We stayed afloat on the surface of a system that constantly undermines what we do and renders it unsellable, and therefore irrelevant in the process of valorization. That is until an institution of higher authority recognizes it as a legitimate artistic practice. Therefore we desperately need civil spaces that will not only validate our practices but also provide us with an appropriate amount of space, comfort, and security to enable our creativity to unfold.

Competitive Isomorphism

Recent studies in the field of art sociology show how a lack of originality, fear of taking creative risks, deep concern about venturing into unknown territories, and ultimate homogenization of artistic practices is not a question of individual abilities but rather a consequence of larger systemic failure. In an art system in which many artists compete for fewer resources, there is a strong need to distinguish oneself from others. This means that musicians often follow each other’s work to know what other people are doing.

However, contrary to their initial ambition, they end up mirroring other artists’ work instead of departing from it. Belgian sociologist Pascal Gielen names this process «competitive isomorphism» and calls for wider societal, economic, and political recognition of the need for sustainable artistic labor, beyond the function of decorum. We are now gathering from the ground our shattered musical world in a post-COVID reality, trying to reclaim former spaces, institutions, and relations. The only hope now is in the alliances we establish and communities we create based on trust, sharing, and the willingness to collaborate.