Marta Sofia Honer

September 1, 2026

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Versatility on Stage, Activism Behind the Scenes

On her Instagram page, violinist and violist Marta Sofia Honer of Local 47 (Los Angeles, CA) cheekily describes herself as “one-half experimental artist” and “one-half string for hire session rat.” It’s a neat summary of her career, heavily overlain these days with a healthy dose of union activism and advocacy work on behalf of her fellow LA studio musicians.

Indeed, during this interview, Honer is prepping to travel to New York City for the Sound Recording Labor Agreement (SRLA) negotiations between the AFM and major record labels. The SRLA covers fair compensation for instrumental musicians, arrangers, orchestrators, and copyists for recorded music intended for commercial sale or distribution. It also encompasses on-camera work in the creation of music videos.

Honer says these negotiations are likely to be interesting for one very important reason: This is the first time this agreement is attempting to grapple with AI’s role in music, and fair use of AFM musicians’ contributions to what AI platforms produce.

The ultimate goal, says Honer, is to figure out how to write new provisions that provide legitimate protections for musicians. “As expected, the major record labels are already pushing back against fair use,” she says. Shocking nobody, they have also been reluctant to share any information on their plans or practices regarding artificial intelligence.

Deviating from the Typical Track

Honer’s path to working toward solidifying musician rights seems like the next natural progression in her self-forged dual career as performer and studio musician, where she deals with contract issues as part of the job. But long before that, there was the road to becoming a musician.

“I was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin,” she says. “My mom runs a Suzuki violin school, so I grew up studying the Suzuki method and being involved in music from a very young age in her program.”

High school at Interlochen Arts Academy followed after a switch from violin to viola. “I was starting to add chamber music to my musical education and forming my first string quartets. We needed a violist, and no one else wanted to do it,” she recalls with a chuckle. “I said, ‘I’ll try it.’”

Next up was a bachelor’s degree in performance on viola at DePaul University in Chicago. “A music career was definitely a natural flow for me, being surrounded by a musical family and friends with parents who were educators and musicians in the local symphony orchestra,” says Honer. One of her brothers is also a professional violinist, currently acting assistant concertmaster for Detroit Opera.

While Honer chose to pursue viola as her dominant instrument, she still plays a lot of violin. “But I am definitely more inclined to the middle voice of the viola,” she says. Of course, there is also the very real challenge of the physical differences between the two instruments. “The viola is heavier and the spacing is larger, so your left hand has to be a lot more flexible.” She laughs as she remembers the words of a former teacher: “He used to say that playing the cello is the most natural thing in the world; playing a violin is like playing a toy; and playing a viola is like playing a coffee table.”

Versatility by Design

In the professional world, splitting her time between both instruments has paid dividends, even though her current career is may not be what she initially envisioned, citing her departure from the typical path of an orchestrally trained string player who winds up either in an orchestra or a chamber group.

“But that was actually a conscious choice,” she clarifies. “I’ve always been interested in lots of different genres of music. Growing up, my dad got really into Celtic music, so I started learning traditional Irish music and going to sessions with him. Then, I was in a post-rock band in high school and played in folk bands in college. I was always into the broader arena.”

These days, she also spends a significant amount of time in the experimental music field (an interest first sparked in her Chicago days), recording and performing original sounds with her husband playing the modular synthesizer.

“Collaboration like this really speaks to me because it builds on my fascination with music’s different possibilities,” she says. “It also expands opportunities for self-expression in performance.”

With Honer’s move from Chicago to Los Angeles, the multi-genre potential of a freelance career really took shape for her. “There’s just a vast variety of work happening here, and so many artists and musicians trying to make different things happen,” she enthuses. Also, she thrives on that variety. “I think every gig I’ve done this week has been completely different.”

A brief glance at her website bears this out: Honer’s versatility in different musical settings has earned her studio credits alongside noted artists across the spectrum, including Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar. She has picked up nine Grammy nominations, and three wins, including a win for album of the year. On stage in live performance, she has collaborated with artists ranging from Ariana Grande and Mariah Carey to Lauryn Hill and the Pacific Jazz Orchestra.

Breaking into the Session World

Studio work obviously figures highly in Honer’s career. She says breaking into that was also an interesting example of how LA works. “When I moved here, I think I knew a single person who I had met at a chamber music festival. So, I was trying to get work started with meeting one person, doing one Craigslist gig, figuring out who the contractors were, and piecing it all together.”

Honer recalls meeting two prominent contractors a few months after arriving in LA. “They put on kind of a side-by-side mock session play-along at Sony,” she recalls. It was a project to introduce a younger generation of players to session work. “I had to audition to participate, recording a few excerpts. I got accepted. I sat assistant principal to a violist who’s one of the main principal players in the session studio world and learned the ropes.”

From that point, she says, she started getting called and meeting more people. The key, Honer says, is flexibility, the one word she stresses when asked if she has any advice for younger players who may be exploring similar career options.

“Listening to lots of different music is crucial, because when you’re doing a variety of things, each requires a different performance feel and touch,” she says. “How you approach playing in an orchestra section, for example, is going to be very different than, let’s say, what I just did yesterday, which was a session with a modern gospel organist. It’s about being open to and cognizant of these different approaches. They’re going to be varied, so you’ve got to be able to play varied.”

That flexibility can be crucial in the moment, on the job. “Sometimes in a session you’ll get a request to play something an octave up, or down, or change the key. There’s no copyist on hand to make that edit or hand you a new part. You just have to be adaptable.”

From Self-Education to Member Advocacy

Honer’s natural curiosity to understand how nonstandard things work led quite naturally to interest in contracts. “Since I do a lot of recording work, I’ve been involved for quite a while with the SRLA,” she says, adding that the work comes to you in a nonstandard way because it is more artist based.

Calls for work, and contracts, she elaborates, don’t always come from a contractor. “When I get called for a recording date, oftentimes it might be from a music director, a friend who’s the arranger or composer, or even another colleague.

“I’ve even gotten a call from an assistant sound engineer out of the blue, someone looking for strings and saying that a mixer who just mixed something that I had played on liked what they heard and recommended me. So, you get the picture—it’s a little bit of a Wild West mixed bag in terms of where that call can come from.”

Why that matters, she says, is that those doing the hiring might not be as well-versed as a typical contractor regarding the contract terms. “That gave me the idea to start learning about contracts just for myself. And then, very quickly, it also became about educating my colleagues,” she says.

A few years ago, Honer’s desire for more in-depth knowledge took her to an admin for the Sound Recording Department at Local 47. “I had them walk me through how to fill out the contract on my own and clarify some of the finer details about it. Since then, I’ve assisted many friends.”

Fast forward to today, where Honer says it felt like a great time to learn more, and possibly even participate. “The entry of AI into sound recording means this is a historic time for recorded music,” she says.

She decided to educate herself about the SRLA negotiations at a Recording Musicians Association (RMA) general membership meeting at the beginning of this year. “I reached out to Allen Fogle, the current RMA president. I knew that they had already gotten the ball rolling with negotiating, so when I mentioned that I was interested in developing some sort of educational component to the contract and offered my services, Allen said, great, you’re on the team.”

Addressing Artificial Intelligence

Honer says the team will be in New York City for three days, and the presumption is that they will still have another round before everything is finalized. “The AFM and our lawyers are negotiating with the SRLA signatories,” she continues. “These are the major record labels that will ostensibly agree to and sign onto the contract. That’s Universal Music Group, Sony, and Warner Records, and also their subsidiaries.”

Honer hopes these labels will start sharing information on their plans or practices regarding AI, and how they will deal with all of the different AI music companies that are already out there.

“What’s really interesting,” she says, “is that most of them have been suing and either settling or licensing material with the top AI music apps independently. So, their side of the table is sort of splintering as they all choose their own models and business practices.” And that’s why, she adds, they have been slow to share any information—because they don’t want to share it with each other.

“At the last round of negotiations, we stated that these AI models had scraped (reused) materials throughout recording history, which includes a lot of our AFM-covered recordings, and used these materials to generate new material. As such, we believe that basically triggered a new use clause, as stated in the provisions. We told them that we should therefore get a percentage of the money they had received from these AI companies,” she explains.

Once again—zero surprise—the record labels declined. “So, we issued a lawsuit. And then we requested more information, which they still have not submitted to us. As a result, the AFM just filed an unfair labor practice suit on top of the lawsuit,” she says.

The seemingly bottomless morass of contention—between even the record labels themselves—has made one thing abundantly clear, according to Honer: “We know we absolutely need to write and agree on a provision about protecting our musicians against AI—and we need concrete information to do that. It’s hard to negotiate in good faith when we don’t know what we’re negotiating against.”

While all of this sounds murky, with the recording industry on the cusp of profound change, Honer remains steadfastly hopeful. “Success here will set up a framework for future contracts as well. The goal, as always, is benefiting our members in terms of compensation for their work.”

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