The Free-Lance Musician as A Type of Non-Person: An Extension of the Concept of Non-Personhood

Abstract

Free-lance musicians are professionally trained artists who lack permanent membership in any musical organization. Although trained to be creative artists, most frequently free-lancers play supporting music for operas, ballets and solo performers on stage, or provide background music for dinners or receptions. As a consequence, their technical skills are devalued by audiences; they often play music below their skill level; spontaneity in interpretation is extremely limited or impossible; they are anonymous to the audience and their playing generally receives an impersonal response; performances serve a functional rather than an aesthetic purpose; and players are interchangeable between groups. As a result of treatment as non-persons, free-lancers hold a sense of low prestige for themselves, and the occupation in many ways serves as a negative reference group for its members. Wide implications regarding non-personhood are drawn for an increasingly mechanized society. Contrary to Goffman's examples, non-personhood is not tied to occupations of limited skill, but rather, can occur in any occupational group under conditions in which individual interpretation, decision making, and power are nullified.