Dwell Music Change Weblog
In our newest weblog put up, Dwell Music Change co-founder Professor Simon Frith OBE displays on the historical past of festivals, together with how they’ve been studied, and considers the implications of Covid-19 for his or her future.
This yr’s Ruisrock Competition, held yearly in Turku in Finland, was scheduled for July 3-5. It was first staged in 1970 and to have a good time its fiftieth anniversary, Kari Kallionemi from the College of Turku organised a research day at which I used to be invited to talk. My matter was to be the historical past of rock festivals. Within the occasion the research day, just like the competition, was referred to as off.
On Might 13, the Guardian reported: “The British impartial competition sector is prone to collapsing, with many cancelled occasions falling via the cracks of presidency help measures for companies struggling because of the coronavirus disaster.” The story was primarily based on an Affiliation of Impartial Festivals (AIF) survey of its members: 92% stated that they confronted prices that might damage their companies because of cancelled occasions, with nearly all (98.5%) not coated by insurance coverage for cancellation associated to Covid-19. The sector was going through redundancies of 59% on common and was on monitor to lose greater than half of its workforce between September 2020 and February 2021. As AIF identified, “the overwhelming majority of our members are targeted on the supply of 1 single giant occasion throughout your complete yr, and that’s all been worn out.”
The misplaced summer time of festivals will undoubtedly have a big impact on the reside music sector typically. Agent Matt Bates advised the Guardian that touring musicians would lose as much as two-thirds of their reside earnings from competition cancellations. For many who aren’t among the many superstars who play arenas, “having no festivals to play this summer time has completely destroyed their earnings and their livelihoods”.[i]
Quickly after studying this I got here throughout a weblog by viola celebrity Lawrence Energy, reflecting on how his life had abruptly modified.
I can’t get my head round how we’re going to return to travelling around the world as freely as earlier than. A optimistic end result is likely to be that it means we have now to focus our music making rather more regionally, in a group approach. Fortunately that’s one thing I really like anyway: I’ve my very own competition, the West Wycombe Chamber Music Competition, and that’s our ethos. It’s small and put collectively at very brief discover, however we have now an incredible viewers, and implausible associates and colleagues do it on that foundation.
I really feel embarrassed that I don’t do extra regionally, as a result of I’m at all times going away to make music. This case would possibly drive us to suppose. I’m certain that inside a mile radius of the place all of us reside, every of us may begin a wonderful live performance collection. Possibly a by-product of that is that we have now to have interaction shut by. If I’ve to remain in a single place, I might be joyful to embrace that.[ii]
For AIF the difficulty is how its members can survive whereas ready for his or her websites to reopen. Lawrence Energy asks a special query: not how can we to return to enterprise as typical however can we need to.
In getting ready my historic discuss for the Ruisrock occasion I used to be struck by how extensively its enterprise mannequin is now taken as a right. Within the final 25 years rock festivals, loosely outlined and understood, have come to play the lead position not solely within the worldwide economics of reside music but additionally, as a consequence, in worldwide reside music scholarship. Festivals appear to draw extra tutorial consideration throughout extra disciplines than some other common music matter. In an try to deliver order to this mass of fabric I labeled it underneath 4 headings.
- Economics (together with work on advertising and marketing, tourism, leisure research, occasion administration and native financial growth). That is to method the competition as a commodity.
- Sociology (together with cultural research, youth and ageing research and ethnography). That is to method the competition as a ceremony.
- Politics (together with work on regulation, regulation, coverage and beliefs). That is to method the competition as a setting for disputes and causes.
- Psychology (together with work on id and wellbeing). That is to method the competition as an expertise.
Lacking from a lot of this work is a way of historical past and, particularly, an appreciation of two primary historical past classes. First, issues change: there weren’t rock festivals in Finland earlier than 1970 and there’s no necessity for there to be rock festivals in Finland after 2020. Second, issues don’t change. Music festivals existed lengthy earlier than rock and can exist lengthy after it. What’s presently assumed to be the way in which festivals must be is, within the lengthy view, merely a second within the historical past of festivals, a second that might now be coming to an finish.
To have a look at rock festivals traditionally is to disclose the contradictory dynamics of their evolution. On the one hand, staging festivals is an especially dangerous enterprise, with failure at all times potential: most rock festivals don’t survive for 50 years; then again, only a few of those festivals have been conceived as one-off occasions. They have been deliberate to occupy an annual date within the calendar for the foreseeable future.
Some years in the past LMX was requested to supply knowledgeable proof in a courtroom case, a contract dispute involving an annual competition. The dispute was finally settled out of courtroom however not earlier than we had ready our assertion. The query we have been requested was easy: what was the probably life expectancy of a longtime rock competition? Emma Webster and Adam Behr approached this by making a complete survey of why rock festivals fail. They discovered many causes, such because the Icelandic ash cloud in 2010 and the London Olympics in 2012, however the commonest have been unhealthy climate and poor ticket gross sales. Our ‘knowledgeable’ judgement (we have been anticipated to provide a determine, nonetheless tentatively) was that the competition in query may have fairly been anticipated to final, in its present kind, for one more 25 years. We didn’t anticipate Covid-19 however we have been conscious that the specter of an epidemic was one thing to incorporate in competition organisers’ threat registers. Extra importantly we understood that festivals are a part of the reside music ecology; over time they must adapt to all kinds of developments within the reside music economic system.
Individuals do, nonetheless, anticipate festivals yearly to return as occasions which are acquainted. In our reside music historical past we cowl the launch of the Edinburgh Worldwide and Aldeburgh Festivals, the Sidmouth and Cambridge Festivals, the Glastonbury and Studying Festivals, WOMAD and the Brecon Jazz Competition. These occasions turned so deeply embedded within the cultural calendar that earlier than the coronavirus struck nobody appeared to doubt that they might proceed eternally, though, as we additionally doc, they’ve in actual fact all confronted critical threats to their survival and to outlive have needed to settle for new methods of doing issues.
There’s an underlying historic narrative right here, an evolution of huge occasions from the post-war state subsidised mannequin of the humanities competition, via the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties growth of jazz, people and free festivals into Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties consolidation of the rock competition, to the flip of the century emergence of giant worldwide dance occasions like Creamfields and Tomorrowland. However there has additionally at all times been an unlimited number of small occasions, some rooted within the lengthy custom of harvest festivals, village exhibits and seaside vacation leisure, others (akin to Lawrence Energy’s West Wycombe chamber music competition) organised by performers or by fanatics for specific kinds of music. It’s as if there’s a fixed circulate of festivals in Britain from which generally, with the proper confluence of financial and cultural circumstances, one sort of occasion – Glastonbury, say – bubbles as much as the floor and attracts industrial funding, mass media protection and tutorial consideration earlier than turning into a taken-for-granted routine or sinking again down among the many myriad of gatherings out of the general public eye.
From this angle the important qualities of all festivals are these.
- They supply a way of group, nonetheless that’s outlined and skilled.
- They’re celebrations, whether or not of holidays, coming of age, or just as a gathering of like-minded folks, and carnivals, occasions outwith on a regular basis social norms and conventions.
- They’re settings for native commerce and commerce (and plenty of festivals routinely contain musical competitions and prizes).
A technique to have a look at the historical past of what turned generally known as rock festivals, then, is to look at how they’ve retained the mandatory parts of group, celebration and small-scale commerce within the context of digital expertise, mass advertising and marketing and the company pursuit of revenue.[iii] However it is usually to understand that Covid-19 now threatens a competition mannequin that was, maybe, already reaching its safe-to-use-by date, as environmentalists have been suggesting for a while.[iv] Would it not matter if the Glastonbury Competition have been by no means staged once more? Do we would like Ruisrock to have a good time its one centesimal anniversary?
What the present disaster has made me realise is {that a} competition is a remarkably versatile approach of parading group ties and cultural expectations and, in its carnival parts, loosening and poking enjoyable at them. Festivals have performed this social position for a lot of centuries. Societies change; festivals mirror the modifications. Slightly than despairing that our favorite festivals might by no means occur once more within the ways in which we’ve obtained used to, we needs to be trying ahead to new festivals taking place in new methods, in ways in which we presently can’t think about.
[i] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/might/13/uk-live-music-festivals-sector-at-risk-coronavirus
[ii] https://www.thestrad.com/playing-and-teaching/lawrence-power-life-lessons-from-lockdown/10640.article
[iii] It is a theme in the most effective tutorial research of rock festivals in Britain, Chris Anderton’s 2018 Music Festivals within the UK. Past the Carnivalesque.
[iv] See for instance Abigail Dunn’s LMX weblog: http://livemusicexchange.org/weblog/looking-for-silver-linings-abigail-dunn/
