Managing Insecurity and Work-Life Balance Among Artists: The Case of Baroque Musicians in Montreal

The city of Montreal has a “Creative city” reputation and its territory attracts many creative workers. Designers, musicians, visual artists, actors, multimedia or video game specialists... are all components of an extremely rich and diverse creative class, -to use the terminology of Richard Florida- feeding an ecosystem of interactions and innovations.

 

Among them, the baroque musicians (specialized in the interpretation on period instruments, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries European repertoire) are a special group. Indeed, Montreal is an important city for early music lovers. Over time, it became an important center for this particular musical style.

Several schools in prestigious universities (McGill, UdeM) offer specialized training that brought to Quebec musicians from across Canada, Europe, US, Latin America. Several ensembles (Arion, Studio de Musique Ancienne, Les Voix Humaines, Caprice ...) and festivals (Montreal Baroque, Bach Festival ...) enjoy an international reputation and provide professional opportunities for Montréal artists.

If the same artistic practice brings together this group of a hundred musicians, it nonetheless presents a great heterogeneity in terms of age (two generations coexist), origins, social status and career paths.

This paper aims to study two aspects of the careers of these artists.

First, the choice of a highly specialized repertoire necessarily causes a scarcity of professional opportunities. Indeed, even if the Montreal Baroque universe is rather dynamic, it nevertheless remains limited, notably in terms of audience. We must therefore ask whether the specialization leads to additional stress (compared to other musicians) in terms of precariousness or, on the contrary, if it allows for greater employability due to the scarcity of professional skills in this field. What are the strategies used by artists to address this vulnerability?

Then, it also seems interesting to focus on  the work-family balance issue among these artists. If, at first sight, artistic work can offer a certain flexibility in terms of agenda, it also imposes strong constraints (working evenings and weekends, touring, etc.): what are the consequences at the family level? Does the choice of career take precedence over the desire to start a family? What are the strategies implemented to address these constraints? What are the challenges for immigrant artists?