Vol.

45
2013
 2013 YEARBOOK
FOR
TRADITIONAL MUSIC
Volume 45

klisala harrison
Guest Editor

DON NILES
General Editor

SYDNEY HUTCHINSON
Book Reviews

MICHAEL SILVERS
Book Notes (Web)

BYRON DUECK
Audio Reviews

lisa urkevich
Film/Video Reviews

BARBARA ALGE
Website Reviews

Published by the
International Council for Traditional Music

under the auspices of the

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO)
 Music, Health, and Socio-economic Status:
A Perspective on Urban Poverty in Canada
by Klisala Harrison

In socio-economically depressed urban areas, many musical programmes

and projects are offered to the poor for free by community organizations, non-
governmental and governmental organizations, and arts businesses, with funding
from corporations, private foundations, churches, donations, governments,
and concert tickets.1 In poor urban areas in Canada and other nation states with
decaying systems of social welfare, or in non-welfare states, music making, music
classes, music therapy, and musical performances including theatre, dance, and
multimedia are activities within a larger series of services and goods offered by the
organizations and institutions, and directed towards the well-being and survival of
the poor.2 There are also musical rehearsals and performances that pay the poor.
Such music projects’ day-to-day functionings, which are still in the early stages
of being documented (Araújo 2008; Harrison 2008; Tan 2008), variously address
the social deprivations that have come to define poverty, such as lack of health,
livelihood sustainability, or social inclusion.
Many of the music projects develop the skills, education levels, incomes, or
occupational possibilities of participants living in material poverty, which in turn can
enhance their socio-economic status. This article investigates such music projects
in a Canadian urban-poverty context, with attention to their health implications.
The term “socio-economic status” is used in the medical sciences and social
sciences, among other disciplines, in order to identify types of social ranking within
socio-economic inequity. Social rank is one of the main social determinants of
human health and mortality, a position it shares with aspects of inter-social control
and autonomy, and social cohesion. More specifically, socio-economic status is
understood as a concept and composite measure of at least three interrelated but
not fully overlapping types of status experienced by people: status of income
(sometimes called economic status), status of education (often discussed in terms
of social status), and status of occupation (also called work status) (Dutton and
Levine 1989:30).3 Socio-economic status is not only measured quantitatively, but
it is based on qualitative human experiences of social rank, which make up much
1.  The proportion of involvement of the so-called third sector and of governments differs
according to national context.
2.  The offerings also include free food, free clothing, shelter and housing, free showers,
health and medical services, counseling services, legal services, employment, and education
possibilities, as well as different social and recreational activities. Formal programmes in
other arts are also offered.
3.  Definitions of socio-economic status in the United Kingdom have also included social-
class status in ways that reflected a national social-class system. However, in 2000, the
Office for National Statistics’ Socio-economic Classification changed to a new system that
stratifies occupations according to the degree of control that workers have in the workplace
(Office for National Statistics n.d.).
Yearbook for Traditional Music 45 (2013)
harrison music, health, and socio-economic status 59

scholarly literature on the topic and which will be discussed here in relation to
music.
The research material presented is drawn from musical programmes and
initiatives in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada. I focus on distributions
and understandings of socio-economic status that are involved in the programmes,
with attention to the poor who inhabit the neighbourhood and participate in the
music. The Downtown Eastside is a neighbourhood comprised of over 16,500
people, and is frequently represented in media and scholarship as “Canada’s poorest
postal code,” if inaccurately because different sub-areas of varying socio-economic
background make up the larger neighbourhood. The designation evokes public
recognition of the relative poverty of many people who inhabit the area—their
exclusion from a standard of living considered widely in Canadian society to be
reasonable and acceptable. Among residents of the three economically poorest sub-
areas4 (total population: approximately 6,500), 84%–85% lived below Canada’s
low-income cut-off dollar amounts in 2001 when I was beginning this research
(Statistics Canada 2011). The average household income was between CAD 12,486
and CAD 14,095 compared to the Vancouver household income average of CAD
57,916. Between 49.7% and 63.8% of Downtown Eastside household incomes
came from government transfer payments, indicating, for example, unemployment
or disability payouts (City of Vancouver 2005–6).5 Concerning health and mortality,
the life expectancy in the Downtown Eastside was sixty-six years for men, ten
years lower than the Vancouver average. Life expectancy for women was seventy-
eight, or five years lower than the city average (City of Vancouver 2005).6 Parallel
to Third World poor, the First World poor “are those whose greatest task is to try to
survive” (Immanuel Wallerstein, as quoted in Farmer 2005:6).
In the Downtown Eastside, organizations and institutions working with the
poor have offered various musical activities since the 1980s and especially the late
1990s: music therapy using popular music; music and theatre productions; music
jams in popular and folk music; lessons and workshops in musical performance
and associated arts, such as drama or dance; classes in the history of art music,
including at the university level; a range of ensemble opportunities, including choir
and jazz band; and occasional community projects of music recording. My research
has involved interviews and conversations with over two hundred participants
and organizers, and participant observation in local music-making, primarily as
a violinist, but also as a singer, drummer (Harrison 2009), and university lecturer

4.  The Census of Canada calls the three sub-areas Oppenheimer, Victory Square, and
Thornton Park, names otherwise infrequently used.
5. Education statistics are unavailable for the mostly adults who accessed the music
initiatives addressed in this article.
6.  Such statistics have improved since 2001, mostly reflecting in-migration of more
affluent populations, and a tendency of statistics to blend information from the more and
less affluent sub-areas of the neighbourhood—although the health and life expectancies of
the poor remain low. In 2012, the Downtown Eastside as a whole was 53.3% low income,
with the life expectancy of men being 73.8 years in contrast to a male life expectancy of 80
years in Vancouver, and the life expectancy of women being 84.5 years, slightly below the
Vancouver average of 85.1 (City of Vancouver 2012).
60 2013 yearbook for traditional music

involved in community centres, churches, theatre companies, and health centres. I

also conducted research in four music-therapy practices.7 Although the nature of the
different musical projects is diverse, all of them have been justified by organizers
and by the missions and mandates of organizations and programmes as enhancing
the well-being if not the health of participants.
After considering links between socio-economic status, health, and music, I
will analyse music programmes in the Downtown Eastside that worked to enhance
the incomes, levels of musical skill and education, and occupations of the poor—
in other words, their socio-economic situations. I also consider the following
questions. What are the social-structural and infrastructural distributions of socio-
economic status in most music projects that I studied and to which most such
projects aspire? In Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, how have people working
with music shifted socio-economic status, and expressed and circulated ideas about
socio-economic status through narratives? What are the implications for human
health and mortality? While definitive conclusions about the projects’ impacts for
human health are best reached perhaps in collaboration with medical researchers, I
can offer some general insights about their very probable health impacts based on
previous research findings.

Links between socio-economic status, health, and music

A scholarly treatment of socio-economic status in relation to social actions of

music currently requires a synthesis of research findings in the medical literature.
This is firstly because, in music research, socio-economic status has generally
been treated in relation to a quite specific set of social musical practices, without
referring to how social relationships of socio-economic status impact human health
and mortality—a topic that has been addressed prevalently in medical research
on socio-economic status already for decades. Socio-economic status is observed
most often in music education, but also in studies concerning music psychology
and music perception. It is considered a factor that may possibly influence grade-
school students’ recruitment and retention, and musical participation, achievement,
and attitudes, as well as teachers’ design of music programmes and curriculums,
and schools’ support for music programmes (see Albert 2006). Secondly, certain
studies in music psychology and medical ethnomusicology that address body-
chemical reactions to stress are highly relevant to socio-economic status, but do
not explain health relationships between socio-economic status, stress, and body
chemicals (e.g., Davidson and Bailey 2005:271–72) and, in most cases, neither
explicitly mention the term nor explain it as a social determinant of health (Koelsch
and Stegemann 2012; Kreutz, Murcia, and Bongard 2012; West and Ironson
2008:429–36). Medical findings can facilitate the making of that connection. A

7.  My analysis is facilitated by my current fellowship at the University of Helsinki’s

Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, which in part entails exchanging knowledge on
the theme of mortality with an international body of scholars working in the humanities,
social sciences, and behavioural sciences, as well as law, theology, and education.
harrison music, health, and socio-economic status 61

third motivation, underlying the first two reasons, is that a treatment of socio-
economic status as a social determinant of health should ideally be informed by
some knowledge of how socio-economic status actually impacts human health.
Although precise correlations between better or worse health, and higher or
lower socio-economic status, respectively, are still being mapped, they follow
some general trends. Health-risk factors closely tied to both socio-economic status
and health outcomes are smoking, physical inactivity, poor diet, and substance
abuse. Psychological characteristics of depression and hostility have a consistent
relationship with socio-economic status and health outcomes. So does stress. Stress
is unevenly distributed in society, with people of greater socio-economic status
generally experiencing less stress, and people of lesser socio-economic status
experiencing more stress. Higher placement of individuals in socio-economic
hierarchies positively correlates with lower levels of stress, but also lower rates
of disease and mortality; lower placement correlates with higher levels of stress,
disease, and mortality (Adler et al. 1994). Stress has been characterized in two
ways and in terms of psychosocial stressors: as exposure to life events that require
adaptation (e.g., divorce, job loss), triggering perceptions of stress and negative
emotion, which is usually measured on individuals through surveys that are
checklists of major life events; or as a state, usually evaluated in terms of self-
reports of human subjective experience, which occurs when people perceive that
demands placed upon them exceed their ability to cope (ibid.:19).
One aspect of the relationship between socio-economic status and health is that
it is gradated. People of relatively greater socio-economic status have better health
and longevity, while people of relatively less socio-economic status have worse
health and longevity, people somewhere in the middle experience middling health
and longevity, and so on. This describes the health gradient, which renowned
epidemiologist Michael Marmot dubs “the status syndrome.” Marmot conjures an
imaginary parade of people of different ranks and status of income, education, and
occupation—people from the economically poorest to the richest, people with no
formal education to Oxford graduates, people from unskilled workers to doctors
and judges. In general, the higher up one is on the social “ladder,” the healthier
and longer-lived he or she will be; the less status he or she has, the greater risk
of disease and death (Marmot 2004).8 For instance, if one travels on the subway
from downtown Washington, DC, to Montgomery County, Maryland, for each mile
(1.6 km) travelled, life expectancy of residents rises by about 1.5 years. There
is a twenty-year gap in length-of-life between the poor blacks at one end of the
journey and rich whites at the other (ibid.:2). The status syndrome operates within
single societies, such as single-nation states, but not across societies (Kawachi and
Kennedy 2002). The understanding that where one stands in a social hierarchy
intimately relates to one’s chances of getting ill and one’s length of life is widely
accepted across the medical sciences.

8.  Marmot’s research investigates cases in which people have high status of income,
education, or occupation, but lack high status in one of the other categories, in order to
question the relative influence of the different status categories on health (Marmot 2004).
62 2013 yearbook for traditional music

Shifting the socio-economic status of an individual, such as through musical

activities in the Downtown Eastside, suggests also a shift in probable health
outcomes for individuals. Recent studies and activism by medical researchers,
including the World Health Organization’s Commission on the Social Determinants
of Health (WHO 2008), assert ever more firmly that gaining income and income
status over the course of one’s life positively affects health and life length; gaining
education and educational status positively affects health and life length; and gaining
occupational status does the same. Study after study has found that in general, such
social mobility determines health status and not vice versa (although of course
there are well documented, isolated examples of ill health causing downward social
mobility), and, in the main, social rank determines bodily processes associated
with disease and not vice versa (Marmot 2004:59, 119–20).
The human experience of low social rank including low socio-economic status
impacts the body as a psychosocial stressor that can generate physiological stress
reactions. Experiencing low socio-economic status precipitates the release into the
body of so-called stress hormones and initiates complex neuroendocrine responses
(West and Ironson 2008:432) that adversely affect the immune system. For instance,
the hormone cortisol, associated with psychological and physiological stress, is
generated by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis in the body, specifically
the adrenal cortex. Cortisol is the biochemical perhaps most frequently studied
in music scholarship. Based on twenty-one music studies, Stefan Koelsch and
Thomas Stegemann summarize that in general

it appears that a decrease in cortisol is found more frequently in response to relaxing

slow music, and in music therapy settings, whereas an increase of cortisol levels
seems to be observed … when individuals are physically active, when music is
perceived as vitalizing, or when individuals are under psychological stress. (Koelsch
and Stegemann 2012:447)

With regards to physiological reactions to stress also being precipitated by stress

reactions to low rank, social ranking is possible through many types of social
interactions including offering musical programmes and activities, teaching about
music, thinking and speaking about music, and interpreting social inequity through
musical performance.
Reactions in the body to psychosocial stress are complex and various, but include
a faster build-up of atherosclerotic plaque in coronary arteries (and thus increased
risk of heart attack), a tendency to suffer from central obesity, more damaging
levels of high-density blood fats, and an increased likelihood to be resistant to
insulin, among others (Wilkinson 2000:36). Chronic stress negatively impacts
the brain, thymus gland and other immune tissues, circulatory system, adrenal
glands, and reproductive organs. Types of asymmetrical power relationships that
discriminate according to social rank catalyse a hard-wired reaction in humans
(and some animals (Adler et al. 1994:20)) that can have devastating effects on
health and can end in death. In my study, I have not been measuring hormones
associated with stress; however, medical information about how health factors
harrison music, health, and socio-economic status 63

relate with socio-economic status are relevant when examining musical activities
in the Downtown Eastside in relation to experiences of social ranking. In light of
the medical literature, one can claim that if music can help to raise socio-economic
status, it also improves health.

Shifting socio-economic status through music in a Canadian urban-poverty

context: Health implications

Almost all of the musical activities on which I have conducted research in

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside have aimed to enhance participants’ skill or
education levels in musical performance or knowledge of musical performance.
Certain projects also have enhanced participants’ income levels and employment
possibilities, which some participants interpreted as socio-economic status
increases, suggesting a reduction in stress levels related to status.
Popular-music jams at organizations such as community centres funded by the
City of Vancouver and the governments of British Columbia and Canada were
hubs of informal learning for urban poor who taught each other, or self-taught,
instrumental performance skills mostly on acoustic, electric, and bass guitar, as
well as, in some cases, music notation and chart reading. Several music-therapy
practices (mainly with government funders) similarly allowed for informal learning
of performance skills in popular music. Music therapy at a community centre funded
by a private foundation, for example, has included music lessons for individuals
on guitar preceding a group music-therapy class. A stage band and jazz band at
a local community centre left the first hour of a three-hour weekly rehearsal for
the bandmaster to teach instrumental playing techniques, and for the ensemble to
practise scales and improvisation skills. In the Downtown Eastside, the University
of British Columbia (henceforth, UBC) offered community-service learning
courses, in which university students provide free services in the community as
part of their learning.9 When I taught such courses in 2009 and 2010, my students
elected to offer a three-day Javanese gamelan workshop and to organize Aboriginal
Canadian singing workshops. The same university has offered free university-level
courses to Downtown Eastside residents through its Humanities 101 programme.
More than ten productions of musical theatre, cabarets, musical revues, and
popular-music operas (funded by concert tickets plus an array of corporations,
including large and small businesses, governments, foundations, and private
individuals, but produced by performing-arts companies and community
centres) have emerged in the Downtown Eastside since 2002 and have cultivated
performance skills, enhancing capabilities in performing arts, and catalysing
income and occupational shifts for a proportionally small number of participants.
Not only show rehearsals, but also workshops preceding each show, have aimed
at developing relevant skill sets and stimulating community interest. In 2003, the
Downtown Eastside community play In the Heart of a City involved pre-production

9.  For a discussion of community-service learning in relation to ethnomusicology training,

see Harrison (2012:517).
64 2013 yearbook for traditional music

workshops in puppet making, choreography, acting, popular theatre, theatre sports,

theatre games, singing, (Aboriginal Canadian) Métis dancing, hand drumming,
flag making, banner creation, and mural making. Professionals provided guidance
during rehearsals in the disciplines of set building, theatre lighting, costume and
prop creation, singing, performance in a music ensemble, acting techniques, stage
managing, choreography, and shadow puppetry. Participants in productions besides
this one were paid modest honorariums for their rehearsal and performance time
(e.g., for a series of musical one-act plays called Through the People’s Voice,
CAD 25 on a daily basis). A select number of performers continuously built
performance capabilities over the course of multiple productions, which led to
their taking new occupations as paid and, in some cases, professional performing
artists. After performing in a cabaret called I ♥ the DTES (Downtown Eastside),
as well as multiple other theatre productions, Grant Chancey, formerly employed
at odd jobs, sung and acted in the professional musical-theatre production of
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment at Vancouver’s PuSh International
Performing Arts Festival. Corinthian Clark, who worked as a security guard at a
Downtown Eastside hotel, sang in the same cabaret. She became an accomplished
jazz singer, performing at the 2006 World Peace Forum and various festivals in
Vancouver.
Cultivating musical skills, and generating income and new occupational
possibilities from them, has not only been confined to the theatrical projects. For
example, a music therapist at the privately funded community centre developed
a busking programme in which therapy clients performed in public spaces and
solicited donations. Repertoire primarily consisted of Billboard Top 40 radio hits
from the 1950s–1980s and songs that had become popular through other means (like
school or family sing-alongs) when the performers were youths. The music-therapy
clients, largely guitarists, took home any money earned. For the unemployed, the
music-therapy programme that involved their busking on the street for pay—but
also the theatre and music rehearsals and performances that gave honorariums or a
salary—meant (at least some) income. The positive health effects of having some
income versus having no income are well documented. A study of the 1971 British
census, for example, demonstrated that people who became unemployed had 20%
higher mortality than people who remained employed at the same level of social
class. A higher mortality rate for the unemployed does not die down as people die
off (Moser, Fox, and Jones 1984).
In addition to encouraging income, the music therapist, who also was a drug
and alcohol counsellor, would only busk with the therapy clients if they were
“clean and sober.” She hoped that performing with addicts would facilitate positive
therapist-client relationships through which goals of lifestyle change could later
be formulated. Downtown Eastside music programmes that shift socio-economic
status also normally aim towards an array of other social impacts, some of which
can be important for survival (Harrison 2008).
In many but not all cases, musical actions in the Downtown Eastside are part
of developing and marketing a “creative city” based on flourishing “creative
industries.” The creative city has become an attractive idea to urban policymakers
harrison music, health, and socio-economic status 65

and programme funders due to the expectation that a concentration of artistically

creative workers and growth in artistic industries will facilitate urban economic
development and regeneration. The idea has been roundly critiqued by urban
theorists, for instance, because it promotes a polarization between, on the one hand,
flexible employees with “privileged status” (e.g., high-powered workers in the
entertainment branch, such as theatre-company directors and producers, or other
music-project facilitators employed continuously) who may enjoy “individual self-
determination” in their professional lives, and on the other, flexible employees (e.g.,
semi-professional or freelance music performers) in very precarious employment
situations. The latter tend to have multiple jobs with low wages and long working
hours—short-term contracts that tend to lack social safeguards and benefits (Krätke
2012:144).
Music projects in the Downtown Eastside that develop creative industries
promote socio-economic inequity more specifically in that such industries in Canada
currently involve an income hierarchy that differently stratifies musicians—whose
skills are nurtured by the projects—as compared to event facilitators. In Canada,
income levels of performing musicians are towards the bottom of a national
hierarchy in general, as well as for employment specifically in music and in the
arts. A company specializing in social-science research of the Canadian arts sector,
Hill Strategies Research Inc., notes that in 2001, musicians and singers in Canada
had average earnings of CAD 16,090. The Canadian low-income cut-off for a
single person living in a community of 500,000 or more, like Vancouver, was CAD
18,400. Conductors, composers, and music arrangers reported an average income
of CAD 27,381, and producers, directors, and related occupational workers (in
music and other arts), an income of CAD 43,111. Working as a musician was found
to be the second-worst paying job in the arts in Canada, the worst being dancing
(Hill Strategies Research 2001). Hill Strategies Research also found that, “In five
arts occupations, median earnings are about $10,000. This means that a typical
artisan, craftsperson, dancer, musician, singer, other performer, painter, sculptor
or other visual artist earns only about $10,000” (ibid. 2004). The income situation
for musicians in Canada in general has remained dismal (ibid. 2009). Musicians
and other performers, within the current situation of Canada’s creative industries,
benefit among the least of the different types of arts practitioners in terms of (status
of) income and, very possibly, income status–related health impacts.
Currently, most of the Downtown Eastside music projects also unfold through
interpersonal relations of socio-economic inequity. In situations of urban poverty in
Canada and beyond, the socio-economic status of participants tends to be markedly
lower in terms of occupation and income compared to employees or (the more rare)
volunteers of organizations who facilitate the projects—even when the projects
work to enhance socio-economic status among the disadvantaged. Different health
outcomes for participants and facilitators in music projects are also suggested by
this type of infrastructure. Low socio-economic status of the participants compared
to the employees suggests worse health outcomes for participants and better health
outcomes for facilitators.
66 2013 yearbook for traditional music

At the same time, participants may benefit from musical initiatives that enhance
their socio-economic status and other influences on their well-being, and increase
education levels, incomes, and educational possibilities. Gaining education can
catalyse changes to status of income and occupation.
In scholarship on socio-economic status, however, the documentation of shifts
in socio-economic situation and involved contexts of rank is not enough to show
the status experience that influences health. One also needs to show how rank
is experienced or understood. I will do that by describing narratives of socio-
economic status in the Downtown Eastside music projects, as articulated by
participants, organizers, and onlookers. One example is Dalannah Gail Bowen’s
self-authored and performed, one-woman musical The Returning Journey, which
describes her “life journey [as an African Canadian] from abusive childhood
through depression and addiction to living with and in spirit; a celebration of life
and the story of overcoming the seen and unseen obstacles we encounter every
day,” according to the show programme. The musical describes how before her
involvement in the Downtown Eastside community play, Bowen was homeless
and suffered from depression after being diagnosed with a potentially terminal
illness. Singing and acting in the play inspired her to revive her previous career as
a professional blues singer. Today, Bowen enjoys a busy performance schedule and
new recording projects (see http://www.dalannahgailbowen.com). She also founded
the Downtown Eastside Centre for the Arts, a not-for-profit organization that has
offered music workshops, dance workshops, music performances, exhibitions of
visual art, and drop-in arts-and-crafts evenings. The Returning Journey tells about
Bowen’s new possibilities for a musical career, which can be interpreted in terms of
status of occupation and income. Her musical was a way of having her new social
roles publicly recognized, as well as enhancing her career through authoring and
performing a musical that was produced at a professional venue.
For a second example, the formerly novice actor-singer Elwin Xie emailed me
about how his involvement in the community play, In the Heart of a City, opened
up for him paid opportunities as a live performer in historical settings.

My involvement with In the Heart of a City gave me the experience and self-
confidence to audition for  Storyeum, a multimedia re-enactment of British
Columbia’s history. There, I was working side-by-side with performers who work
in professional theatres across Canada.
I have subsequently been able to parlay that experience into a new job as a
costumed museum interpreter at the Burnaby Village Museum. It all started by
me taking a chance in life and somebody taking a chance on me.

The above two examples come from music and theatre projects, which to a great
extent aim towards developing creative industries in that they cultivate performers’
skill sets that are used in the Downtown Eastside and that constitute (frequently paid)
performances in a Heart of the City Festival and other celebrations, performances,
and events, which increasingly and successfully market local talent to the general
public. Yet narratives of career success via music occupations also prevailed in
programmes with fewer commercial aims of artistic performance. Local popular
harrison music, health, and socio-economic status 67

songwriter-musicians such as May Kossoff10 and David Roy Parsons talked about
using popular-music jams, but also band and choir ensembles, in not-for-profit
community centres to develop performance skills for musical careers (Kossoff,
interview, 8 March 2005; Parsons, interview, 15 October 2004). A career in popular
music was so attractive to some of the most socio-economically marginalized
participants in music therapy that they sometimes fictionalized music careers for
themselves. In an interview that I conducted before writing the liner notes to a local
CD recorded as part of music therapy, an amateur musician claimed to have served
twenty-two years in prison for homicide, on the one hand, and on the other, falsely,
to be a well-known weightlifter, yet to have toured extensively with a blues band in

Montreal, New York, Charlotte, Carolina. I played in Miami. I played in Phoenix,

Arizona. I played in Tijuana, Mexico City. I played in Galveston, Texas. I played
in Houston, Texas. I played in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and
Seattle and many small towns in between. (Name withheld,11 interview, 3 March
2005)

In regards to the health implications of experiencing occupation-related

opportunities, again, an individual’s health and mortality rate generally improves
when his or her experienced status within a given occupational context increases.
Important early landmark studies that made this point were conducted on British
civil servants, starting in 1967. The two Whitehall studies, as they are known,
investigated the health relevance of the occupational status of workers in the highly
stratified British civil service. The first Whitehall study found that of 17,530 male
workers, office-support workers at the bottom of an office hierarchy had four times
the risk of death at the ages of forty to sixty-four as compared to administrators at
the top of the hierarchy. At the oldest ages studied, ages seventy to eighty-nine,
the low-ranking group (the office-support workers) had twice the mortality rate
of the high-ranking group (the administrators) (Marmot et al. 1978). The second
Whitehall study considered both male and female workers, and concluded that
the status syndrome applies to both genders (Martikainen et al. 2003). Similar
results have been produced through numerous studies, including those focussed on
occupations related to the arts. For instance, a study of seventy-two years of records
from the Academy Awards showed that (male) actors, who won Oscars, lived on
average four years longer than actors who had received Oscar nominations, but did
not win (Redelmeier and Singh 2001).
Downtown Eastside narratives of shifts of status involving skill building or
education, occupation, and income also circulate in published form in performance
programmes, in final reports to granting agencies, in documentary writings or film
projects on arts and the plight of the poor, and in news reports or promotional talks
about the music initiatives. In website and news publicity for UBC’s Humanities
101 course, which is offered for free but not for university credit to Downtown

10.  This is a stage name.

11.  I have permission to give the name of this consultant, but in the interests of my personal
safety, I refuse to do so.
68 2013 yearbook for traditional music

Eastside residents, university-staff members and journalists tout the educational

accomplishments of those students (see UBC 2007). A Reader’s Digest (Canada)
column describes how after taking humanities classes, which included lectures on
art music, three course alumni “now attend UBC, and many more are enrolled in
community and technical colleges. Others have become self-employed or taken up
volunteerism, community activism, acting careers; one even ran for mayor” (Pfeiff
2003). A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television special explains that two
Downtown Eastside residents, Andrew Sharpe and Melissa Eror, after learning
about opera in Humanities 101 and being involved in Downtown Eastside theatre
productions, were writing their own opera, Refraction of Light, which adapted the
allegory of the cave in Plato’s The Republic to the contemporary context of the
Downtown Eastside.
Another feature of the “success stories” of increases in socio-economic status
is that they also seem to be of high interest to organizers of music events directed
towards cultivating creative industries, and to local performers interested in
pursuing professional careers as performing artists. A theatre company, which
has staged music and theatre productions about the Downtown Eastside, recently
self-published a book that presents dozens of short articles, script excerpts,
photographs, and testimonials from participants that promote the social impacts
and contributions of the company’s productions, some of which involve education,
income, and occupation enhancement. In show programmes or news releases for the
theatre productions, singer and actor participants gaining professional experience
often choose to represent their successes in conventional ways for a performing
artist, such as listing the productions in which he or she was involved, especially
highlighting the most prestigious ones, along with any awards won.
The Downtown Eastside success stories that celebrate individuals’ new
education, income, or occupation promote and involve public recognition of
status change, similar to the public performances of Bowen’s musical. They
imply commonsensical thinking about more education and income, and a more
prestigious occupation, being “good things.” The narratives about increases of
socio-economic status also often originate and circulate from people who are
invested in or accepting of (the development of) creative industries (even as this
promotes certain socio-economic asymmetries) and constructs of social rank more
generally. Such people include the poor who are participants.
However, not all people involved in music initiatives in the Downtown Eastside
talk about status in an uplifting way. In interviews and the everyday talk of organizers
and facilitators of music events, shifts in socio-economic status are articulated
and motivated through disparaging comments about the poor. For instance, a
scholar who once organized the Humanities 101 course at UBC told me about
one participant who attended it while also sitting in on a third-year anthropology
course. He expressed strong surprise that the woman, whom he described as having
her glasses taped over and her hair in her face, submitted the best summary of
Louis Althusser’s article “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1971) in
the anthropology course. She was the best in the class. Without attention to her
educational background, the woman was described patronizingly as “kiddo” and as
harrison music, health, and socio-economic status 69

a surprisingly good student who, after attending the Humanities 101 class and then
a Vancouver Opera production of Puccini’s Tosca, “started cleaning [herself] up”
and acting more “prideful.” The student, a heroin addict, apparently began taking
methadone and continued taking university courses.
At rehearsals of the stage band, I also heard the leader often reinforce the need
for learning through putting down participants. When the band was about to play
one member’s arrangement of the Champ’s late-1950s instrumental hit “Tequila,”
the bandleader announced his approval with: “What do we have to lose? Our pride?
We don’t have any pride. Our minds? We don’t have minds.” Put-downs made
about and to the poor about what they personally lack, including education and
ability, are used in everyday speech—not to mention grant reports and appeals to
the media—by some workers, organizers, and facilitators when motivating and
justifying the music projects. Pejorative comments about participants of lower
socio-economic status by workers on Downtown Eastside music projects, who are
normally of higher socio-economic status, inflict low status on the participants.
In interviews not aimed at any publicity agenda, however, the poor in the
Downtown Eastside sometimes give status a more marginal role and do not think
about it in terms of income or occupational employment. Sue Blue talked about
how taking part in plays and a variety of events concerning music and arts and
crafts in the Downtown Eastside is part of her personal journey as an Aboriginal
Canadian woman. After experiencing abusive relationships with parents and legal
guardians when growing up, and with clergy and teachers at culturally assimilative
residential schools, Blue sees performing (musical) theatre, in which she often
takes Aboriginal character roles, as an opportunity to “learn who the hell I am” and
to break (including through artistic representation) cycles of violence, addiction,
and injustice that have been passed on between generations. Blue also says that
she enjoys group performance activities because she feels that she has found “new
friends and family. It’s something to get up for and look forward to.” Sue Blue
exclaimed that her social status had improved in community contexts, “I am a doll
at the Carnegie [Community Centre]! … People around here … think I’m one of
the leaders. I don’t call myself a leader. When they tell you you’re dumb, stupid and
all this, you never become a leader. But in my own ways I know that people here
see me and I’m higher than that” (see Hombrebueno, Cheung, and Lee 2009:5–
6). Several popular musicians and songwriters spoke to me in interviews about
their songwriting, performances, and artistic intentions without ever referencing
formal employment occupations. They were unemployed. While success stories
about shifting the education, income, or occupation of participants through music
projects are evidence of experiences concerning socio-economic status, they also
may be interpreted as ways of circulating normative ideas about status, and as
promoting the concepts of income status and occupational-employment status of
greatest potential health benefit to those of higher socio-economic status.
70 2013 yearbook for traditional music
Conclusion

Thinking about music in terms of socio-economic status means analysing felt

experiences of the types of rank that comprise such status: educational status,
occupational status, and status of income. According to previous research on health
and socio-economic status in societies of socio-economic inequity, increasing
experienced education levels, income, and prestige of occupation most probably
promotes health and longevity. Higher socio-economic status implies a decrease
in harmful reactions in the body from psychosocial stress that are triggered by
low socio-economic-status experiences, in turn negatively affecting health and
longevity. When the music programmes examined in this article did or did not
enhance socio-economic status, they may have had or may not have had positive
health implications, respectively.
However, when music is used to enhance individuals’ experiences and position
in relation to others’ regarding status of education, occupation, and income—which
frequently is attempted in “interventionist” music initiatives in Canadian urban-
poverty situations—this only changes how individuals participate in social-status
systems, potentially decreasing psychosocial stressors and enhancing health. It
does not do anything to change the systems themselves in which some people have
more status and others less.
In Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, understandings of social rank and socio-
economic status circulate in “success stories” about change of socio-economic status
through musical practice and performance. The success stories originate primarily
from facilitators and media observers promoting the Downtown Eastside music
projects, and also from participants working to achieve or enjoying higher status
through musical activities. Attempts to increase socio-economic status of the poor
occur through musical activities within projects and programmes that replicate and
develop institutional and interpersonal formations of inequity in socio-economic
status. The musical activities themselves may have benefits affecting the socio-
economic-status of the poor, enhancing their occupation-, income-, and education-
related situations, and socio-economic status—thereby resulting in possible health
benefits—and which can be meaningful to the participants if they previously were
unemployed and without income, or if they experienced lack of status. However,
the music projects are structured in such a way that the health of paid project
facilitators very possibly benefits more from their income positions compared to
unpaid or low-paid participants. Furthermore, occupation-, education-, and income-
related possibilities presented to the poor who participate in programmes aimed
at developing creative industries direct these participants towards the relatively
low-income positions of being a musician and performing artist in contemporary
Canadian society. The implied, low-income status of Canadian musicians in general
has negative implications for their health and longevity compared to generally
higher-paid arts professionals, like producers, directors, or related occupational
workers. Thus, musical initiatives in the Downtown Eastside have limited but
possible benefits related to socio-economic status and health for participants
currently living in material poverty—which the participants may pursue if they are
harrison music, health, and socio-economic status 71

not discouraged by organizer statements classifying them as being of low status.

Because socio-economic status impacts the lives and the health and mortality of
research subjects in substantive ways, it should be heeded more thoroughly in
scholarly analyses of musical practice and performance.

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