In a world where about 7,5 million blog posts are published every day, an explanation is in order as to why add one more to that pile. If for no other reason than to justify the carbon footprint of the servers that will store it. I have my reasons and will explain them below.
I decided to start a blog in the spring of 2021, but – suffering from somewhat toxic perfectionism – never wrote a sentence. Until now. Struggling to juggle my time between many projects, including working on a PhD thesis, which all require quite a lot of writing, I uncharacteristically made a set of New Year’s resolutions for 2024. These include making more quality space – in my calendar, in my head and in my daily habits – for thinking, reading and writing. This blog is part of that agenda.
So, welcome to my blog “The Sound of Policy Making”. Thank you for choosing to read it out of the 7,5 million others published today.
Here’s some professional biographical context: I’m from Estonia, but since 2020, I’ve been living in Brussels with my family. I was a professional musician from about 2003 to 2016 and a passionate music educator, teaching, and developing learning materials, courses and curricula. In 2014 I was invited to build up and run Estonia’s music export organisation Music Estonia. This turned out to be quite a challenge and was the most intense learning curve in my life so far.
Music Estonia operates in the intersection of the music sector (in its full complexity) and policymaking (of no less complexity). I was struck by how difficult it was to make sense of the workings of music life in ways that would effectively inform policymaking. Also, how persistent are the different, sometimes competing narratives that postulate taken-for-granted truths and values about who and what matters in music (policy) making and how – and according to whose views – it should be done. Searching for explanations led me to study public administration and governance in TalTech, where I finally graduated with an MA degree in early 2023.
In 2020 I left Music Estonia and moved to Brussels, partly to pursue exchange studies at KU Leuven, partly to work as a freelance researcher and consultant closer to the European cultural networks, think tanks and institutions of European policymaking, and partly because we just needed a change. I’m currently the research coordinator of the European Music Exporters Exchange network, a PhD student at Erasmus University Rotterdam, work in numerous other initiatives and hold a junior lecturer position at Viljandi Cultural Academy (Tartu University).
I have three main reasons for writing.
First of all, I want to learn to think more deeply and clearly. Writing helps. According to some, writing IS thinking. Therefore, I intend to write about themes that challenge and engage me, that I struggle to make sense of and thus seek to articulate – terms, concepts, lines of argument, framings and discourses – in ways that are clear and can inform my, and perhaps others’ thinking. This, then, will not be a “how-to” blog of any sort. Instead, it will be an openly exploratory attempt to make sense of problems, concepts and questions new to me. The articles, therefore, will not be polished end results, meticulously researched, referenced and elegantly formulated. They will be messy travelers’ notes.
Second, I write to overcome my struggle with writing and, especially, my anxiety about publishing. Given my current work which to an important degree includes writing in different forms, this might appear strange. Yet, I believe this to be quite common. And obviously, this is a drag and I want to improve. Getting better takes practice over many iterations and requires a low barrier to entry. Hence the exploratory, unpolished and slightly personal style over an article proper. Perhaps I will find an ease of method (if such a thing is even possible), a voice and a style that works to convey clearly what I am discovering.
Third, I write to perhaps come across readers who might find the questions I puzzle over interesting, important and worthy of engagement. Over time this might lead to a community of inquiry of sorts. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves…
The blog is called “The Sound of Policy Making”, which was also the title of my master thesis – my first attempt to wade into the weeds of the role of ideas and discourses in music policy making. As I mentioned above, my overarching interest in this theme is how to describe an area of human activity – music, first and foremost in my case – in ways that can effectively inform policymaking, while not succumbing to radical simplifications and reductionism nor particular lines of motivated reasoning from specific interest groups in the sector.
The issues pertinent to this are, among others, how is music as a phenomenon and area of practice explained to policymakers and the society at large from the various perspectives of an art form, creative or business practice, commodity, social good, expression of cultural identity, and so on? Why are some legacy narratives of what constitutes cultural value in music so persistent and grant some forms of music making the privileges of cultural policy attention and resources and others not? Furthermore, when making sense of music, why are we so invested in primitive binaries, like “art” vs “entertainment”, “public” vs “commercial”, “classical” vs “popular”, etc., when the reality is so evidently more nuanced? I’m also intrigued by the ways that political representation in the music sector is constructed, whether as (sub)sectors of certain industries (i.e. the recorded music industry), as socially valuable professions or types of work (think of the status-of-artist discussion now again making rounds in European institutions), or as certain music scenes with unique cultural and business value propositions to the society. Also the conceptual tools for explaining the dynamics of a sector, whether through a more classical value chain approach or a more trending ecosystem one. And why do we still have so bad cultural statistics, in the digital age of big data and looming AI?!
Finally, simply to cap the list somewhere, I’m not interested in policies only as artefacts, ready-made written texts ratified politically and implemented technically, but rather as dynamic practices of real people in specific positions within a complex institutional reality, making decisions in real-time and particular circumstances. These people, often referred to broadly as policymakers, also have their more or less articulate views of what is music or more broadly culture, and why should there be any policies for it; and they act on them.
As the above reveals, it’s all a bit of a mess. That’s why I’m starting a blog about it all. If I had already figured it out, having then probably worked on it for a decade, I’d write a proper book.
George Orwell, who incidentally has also written an essay called “Why I write”, suggests four reasons why anyone would write: (i) Sheer egoism; (ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm; (iii) Historical impulse; and (iv) Political purpose. He uses the word “political” in the widest possible sense, referring to the “desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after”.
There is an underlying rationale to this blog. I believe that by articulating concepts more clearly, challenging conventional wisdom and legacy rationales, describing practices with a sensitivity to context and nuance, analysing insights sincerely, and practising critical self-reflection to note one’s own biases, it is possible to contribute useful knowledge about the dynamic processes of our social life.
I guess that, in the Orwellian sense, I’m political that way too. So be it…