Evidence points towards the key role that networks of both formal and informal relationships play in musicians’ careers. Alongside this, these careers have in recent decades become increasingly understood as engendering emotional stressors around mental health and wellbeing. However, what is the relationship between these two phenomena? In other words, what is the affective impact on musicians’ mental health of maintaining, understanding and negotiating the most proximate relationships in their lives? This paper seeks to answer this by employing the conceptual architecture of relational work, focusing in particular on the experiences of ‘mismatches’, to interpret insights from semi-structured interviews with twenty-eight musicians working in the United Kingdom. The findings suggest that the relational work of ‘matching’ relationships to appropriate understandings and methods of transactional exchange is enormously complex for musicians given that their economic relationships often are intimate personal relationships, and vice versa, leading to frequent ‘mismatches’ in musicians’ methods of relationship management which can be upsetting or emotionally destabilising. This is revealed by exploring the overlapping and interconnected forms of relational work employed by musicians amongst both their family and their musical colleagues. The findings contribute towards scholars adopting an affective frame of analysis towards practices of relational work, an emerging body of work primarily from Eastern Europe applying relational work analysis towards musicians, and more broadly researchers interested in understanding the psychosocial causes of mental ill-health amongst musicians.

证据表明正式和非正式关系网络在音乐家的职业生涯中发挥着关键作用。除此之外，近几十年来，这些职业越来越被理解为在心理健康和福祉方面产生情绪压力。然而，这两种现象之间有什么关系呢？换句话说，维持、理解和协商生活中最亲密的关系对音乐家心理健康的情感影响是什么？本文试图通过采用关系工作的概念架构来回答这个问题，特别关注“不匹配”的经历，以解释对在英国工作的 28 位音乐家的半结构化访谈的见解。是亲密的人际关系，反之亦然，这导致音乐家的关系管理方法经常出现“不匹配”，这可能会令人沮丧或情绪不稳定。这是通过探索音乐家在他们的家人和他们的音乐同事之间使用的相互重叠和相互关联的关系工作形式来揭示的。这些发现有助于学者们对关系工作实践采用情感分析框架，主要来自东欧的新兴工作机构将关系工作分析应用于音乐家，更广泛的研究人员有兴趣了解音乐家精神疾病的心理社会原因.