What we did at the Classical:NEXT conference

The TUNE-IN Framework- A comprehensive Mental Health Initiative for Musicians

We were honored to do a panel discussion at the Classical:NEXT conference in Berlin from May 12-15.

Below is a shortened version of my talk:

L-R: Dr. Paul Roe, Angela Büche, Heather O’Donnell

Let’s begin with the bad news.

Not because I want to depress you—but because I think most of you will recognise some truth in it.

The concert music world is facing rising vulnerability. We’re navigating what some call BANI times—brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible. The world feels pretty BANI right now, doesn't it?

From pandemics to economic austerity measures to political upheavals … it’s a lot.

Our sector is a vulnerable one—on many levels.

At the individual level:

Professional music-making places immense demands on artists. It asks everything of the body, the mind, and the soul. It’s a very demanding profession!

Musicians face high rates of anxiety, depression, burnout, chronic pain, and physical injury, significantly higher than the general population.  We know this—and yet we barely speak of it.

Why? Because the risk of being seen as vulnerable can be too dangerous for artists who are conditioned to lead lives of precarity. In a precarious field, admiting weakness can mean losing work, losing work can mean for many artists losing identity.

Think of the great ballet dancer Misty Copeland, a principal dancer of the American Ballet Theater. At age 29, an almost geriatric age for a dancer, for a year, she danced on a leg that had the beginnings of 6 fractures on it. In that year, she was increasingly dancing on a broken leg. That was very painful.

She said:
“I knew that if I had gone to the artistic staff and said I'm in a lot of pain, they would have removed me from rehearsals. And I wouldn’t get another chance.”

This silence of artists’ suffering is understandable, it’s a professional survival mechanism.

But it must change.

Financial precarity is a constant drumbeat in the lives of many musicians. Even those who appear successful often live just one cancelled job—or one illness—away from serious hardship.

At the organisational and cultural level:

We operate in a culture that demands peak performance in every single performance.

Becoming a professional musician often means 20+ years of intense training—training that rarely really prepares us for many of the skills musicians actually need: communication, resilience,  the ability to set fitting boundaries, the ability to be a good colleague etc.

Music Institutions—often hierarchical, conservative, and risk-averse—are often sources of stress for the musicians working in them rather than support.

And then there’s the big question: Who watches the industry’s gatekeepers? What role does transparency and accountability play?

At the societal level:

We're being shaken by forces far beyond our control: war, climate emergency, displacement, economic squeeze. Meanwhile, the digital world keeps changing all the rules—fast. AI, streaming, collapsing revenue models. And there’s a growing sense that classical music may be increasingly irrelevant in this BANI world, I’ve heard so many beautiful responses to this issue here in the past days. It really gives me hope.

OK, so those are the challenges.  We’ve known about these challenges for decades.

We have lots of studies about musicians’ psychological, physiological, and professional vulnerabilities. We have the research.

What we don’t have is a coordinated, international response to the mental health needs of musicians—or of music institutions.

Compare that with the world of sport. Athletes have access to mental health supports that are institutionalised, professionalised, and often publicly funded. Their systems of support exist.

So where are ours?

The people here may be conditioned to perceive the difficult elements in the classical music sector. We are mental health practitioners, two coaches and a psychologist. We hear about a lot of suffering—from our individual clients, from music organisations reaching out in moments of crisis.

And yes—we’ve had our own experiencies within the music world too. Each of us worked as a professional musician for years. We've lived this.

In my experience, being a musician could be the best and the worst profession—often at the same time.

When I was living in Berlin, years ago, with an active career as a pianist, the city was a vibrant launching pad—culturally, artistically, even just on a human level. I felt tremendously enlived and inspired by it.

But behind the scenes, I was also dealing with the increasingly severe chronic injuries, with the increasingly severe chronic pain, with the increasingly severe burnout—and trying to manage all of that quietly, privately. Like so many others, I felt I had to keep it hidden.

Because that’s what the profession asks of us.

Introducing the TUNE-IN Framework

TUNE-IN began with a simple—but urgent—question:

How do we, as a cultural sector, genuinely care for the people who create our culture?

TUNE-IN is a transnational, systemic, artist-led initiative. It’s grounded in one clear belief:
Musicians’ mental health is not a merely an individual issue. It’s a shared, sector-wide responsibility.
The idea took shape at a 2023 summit hosted by my centre, The Green Room, in partnership with the European Network of Cultural Centres. We brought together artists, psychologists, coaches, educators, and institutional leaders from across Europe.

And together, we began co-creating a new approach—a framework to support artists’ mental health and professional sustainability.

TUNE-IN isn’t a quick fix or a “one-size-fits-all” solution. It’s a long-term, multi-layered effort.

It doesn’t just respond to symptoms—it goes deeper, addressing many root causes of distress in our field.

And most importantly: it’s being built with artists, for artists.

What Does TUNE-IN Do?

TUNE-IN is a platform that offers:

• Comprehensive Psychosocial Support: Coaching, therapy, individual and group sessions — all led by pioneering mental health practitioners who are also artists. People who have lived-experience as artists.

• Network Building: We connect mental health providers, institutions, and cultural managers — because this isn’t merely an individual problem. It’s systemic.

• Investment in Research, Policy, and Education: We advocate for psychologically informed training, and push for mental health policies that are embedded across the sector — not tacked on as an afterthought.

And maybe most importantly — we aim to shift narratives.

From: “You just need to be tougher.”
To: “You are fricken tough AND You have the right to be supported.”
(Just like professional athletes.)

From: “Pain and illness are the price of excellence.”
To: “Well-being is the foundation of sustainable artistry.”

Let me be clear:
This isn’t about lowering standards.
It isn’t about turning musicians into therapy clients-for-life.
And it’s certainly not about indulging some stereotype of the hypersensitive ‘snowflake’.

It’s about reminding a sector that too often prizes the product over people that it is, in fact, made up of humans.

In the stories we tell about artists, we often indulge in a troublesome binary:
We perpetuate the idea that artists are either superhuman geniuses or spoiled, irresponsible children.

We reject that.
We insist on treating artists as human adults.
And every human adult needs care — not as a luxury, but as a right.

We draw inspiration from the world of professional sports — from the structures that acknowledge the psychological and physical toll of high performance.

If professional athletes have access to world-class coaches, sports psychologists, and rehabilitation specialists to support the longevity of their careers —

then why shouldn’t musicians?

The Four Pillars of TUNE-IN

The TUNE-IN Framework rests on four core principles:

1. Health as a Fundamental Right:
Not just crisis intervention — but prevention, access, and dignity.

2. The Human Over the Product:
Music is made by people. People come first. Healthy, resilient people make better art.

3. A Systemic, Client-Led Approach:
This isn’t a one-size-fits-all method. There are many validated, creative, and effective ways to support mental health and well-being.

4.Artistic Expression as a Protected Human Right:
Thriving artists are not a luxury. They are essential to a thriving democracy.

Here’s what we believe — and these aren’t just beliefs. They’re backed by science on peak performance and artistic process:

• When musicians feel safe, they take creative risks.

• When artists are supported, the art becomes more daring, more honest, more alive.

• When we invest in well-being, we don’t weaken the artistic ecosystem — we strengthen its core.

So I invite you all — as fellow musicians, educators, funders, policy-makers, gatekeepers, and bridge-builders — to tune in.

Tune in to what’s changing.
Tune in to what’s needed.
Tune in to each other.

So that we don’t just produce great music —
but build a vibrant culture in which music, and the people who make it, can truly thrive.

“Whatever your personal beliefs and experiences, I invite you to consider that we need a new worldview to navigate this chaotic time. We cannot hope to make sense using our old maps. It won’t help to dust them off or reprint them in bold colors. The more we rely on them, the more disoriented we become. They cause us to focus on the wrong things and blind us to what’s significant. Using them, we will journey only to greater chaos.”
— Margaret Wheatley

Where is TUNE-IN now?

As a platform, we are still in a seed stage.
We applied for a Creative Europe grant in 2024 and got very close — but not close enough to secure the funding needed to launch at scale.
So, we are actively seeking partners to help bring this vision to life. Below is the full project description.

In the meantime, the core initiators of the platform are carrying the principles into our own organisations and practices.
We meet regularly — to support each other, to share learning, and to keep weaving the network that will sustain this change-initiative over the long term.

The TUNE-IN framework was developed for a Creative Europe call in 2024. The full project description can be found here: