From 9 to 12 June 2026, the European Music Council (EMC) is bringing together music professionals, artists, researchers, policymakers and organisations from across Europe in Timișoara for this year’s European Forum on Music, dedicated to the theme “Music, Health and Wellbeing”.

The Forum explores how music contributes to health, recovery, social connection and more resilient communities, while also addressing the real working conditions of those who sustain the sector.

The Forum officially opened yesterday with a keynote speech by Mila Georgieva – Vice Chair of the Board of the Bulgarian Music Association (BMA) and Chair of the Board of the European Music Council – who placed a strong focus on a topic that often remains at the margins of such discussions: the working conditions and wellbeing of music professionals themselves.

In her speech, she stressed that the conversation around music and health is neither a “comfortable” nor decorative topic, but an urgent one, rooted in structural challenges affecting the sector. She spoke about the growing pressure and instability experienced across the profession, often manifesting as chronic stress and burnout among musicians and cultural workers.

She also highlighted that labour in the music sector is too often taken for granted or stripped of its economic value — a reality that further deepens insecurity across the field.

In this context, she delivered a key message to the sector: that a sustainable and truly “healthy” music ecosystem cannot exist without fair remuneration and clear recognition of labour as one of its foundations, rather than as an afterthought.

Over the coming days, the Forum continues with discussions, workshops and project presentations exploring how music can contribute to healthier communities — and how the sector itself can become more sustainable for the people working within it.

The Forum is organised by the European Music Council in partnership with Asociația Scena Muzicală and the Centre for Projects of the Municipality of Timișoara.

Read the full speech here:

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Timisoara, and welcome to the 14th edition of the European Forum on Music.

It is fitting that we are here in this city a place that knows something about resilience. about culture as a form of resistance, and about the human need to create and connect even in the hardest of times.

The theme we have chosen for this Forum — Music, Health and Wellbeing — might at first sound like a comfortable topic. But I want to suggest it is one of the most urgent conversations we could be having right now.

The evidence keeps accumulating: music works. It reduces stress, supports cognitive development and emotional regulation, helps people recover from illness, navigate grief. and find connection when isolation threatens to overwhelm them. From singing programmes for elderly people living with dementia, to music in communities fractured by conflict, to music supporting maternal wellbeing – we will hear about all of this over the next two days. The science is increasingly clear. What we need now is policy to match it.

But there is a second dimension to this theme that we must not allow to be overshadowed.

Because while we rightly celebrate what music does for others – for patients, for communities, for society – we have been far too quiet about what is happening to the people who make it all possible.

Musicians. Composers. Educators. Cultural managers. Event organisers. The people across Europe for whom music is not a pastime but a profession – a vocation they have trained for, built their lives around.

This sector has a mental health crisis. It has a burnout crisis. A crisis of precarity that we dress up in polite language at conferences. Questions of work-life balance, of discrimination, of psychological safety, of physical health for performers – these are real and serious, and we will give them serious space here.

But if we are honest about the wellbeing of music professionals, we have to name the elephant in the room.

The most persistent, most corrosive threat to the mental health of people working in this sector is the experience of having your work treated as though it has no economic value. Of being asked, again and again, to contribute your expertise for free. Of being offered visibility in place of a fee. Of building a career of real depth and then still not being able to make a stable living from it.

This is not an abstract policy concern. It is a daily psychological reality for an enormous number of people in this room and beyond – particularly the freelancers who make up so much of our sector. Financial precarity is not a lifestyle inconvenience. It is a chronic stressor. And no wellbeing initiative, however well-designed, reaches far enough if the ground underneath people’s feet remain this unstable.

So here is a simple ask, and I direct it as much at myself as at anyone else in this room: the next time you reach out to an expert, a musician, a consultant -before assuming their involvement is a contribution – stop and ask whether it is budgeted. Let fair remuneration be part of how we define a healthy sector, not an afterthought to it. Start with the man in the mirror.

We have two rich days ahead. I am genuinely excited about the conversations to come. But I hope we carry this question with us throughout: not only what music can do for the world, but what kind of conditions we are creating for the people who give their lives to it.“