Stay Music Alternate Weblog
In our newest weblog put up, Stay Music Alternate 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 12 months’s Ruisrock Competition, held yearly in Turku in Finland, was scheduled for July 3-5. It was first staged in 1970 and to rejoice its fiftieth anniversary, Kari Kallionemi from the College of Turku organised a examine 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 examine day, just like the competition, was known as off.
On Might 13, the Guardian reported: “The British impartial competition sector is susceptible to collapsing, with many cancelled occasions falling by way of the cracks of presidency help measures for companies struggling on account of the coronavirus disaster.” The story was based mostly on an Affiliation of Unbiased Festivals (AIF) survey of its members: 92% mentioned that they confronted prices that might wreck their companies on account of cancelled occasions, with virtually all (98.5%) not lined 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 centered on the supply of 1 single giant occasion throughout the whole 12 months, and that’s all been worn out.”
The misplaced summer season of festivals will undoubtedly have a huge effect on the stay music sector typically. Agent Matt Bates advised the Guardian that touring musicians would lose as much as two-thirds of their stay earnings from competition cancellations. For many who aren’t among the many superstars who play arenas, “having no festivals to play this summer season 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 immediately 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 constructive consequence is likely to be that it means we have now to focus our music making far more regionally, in a neighborhood manner. Fortunately that’s one thing I 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 incredible 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 power us to suppose. I’m positive that inside a mile radius of the place all of us stay, every of us may begin a ravishing live performance sequence. Perhaps 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’d be blissful 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 distinct query: not how can we to return to enterprise as traditional however can we wish to.
In making ready my historic speak 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 stay music but in addition, as a consequence, in worldwide stay music scholarship. Festivals appear to draw extra educational consideration throughout extra disciplines than another well-liked music matter. In an try to convey order to this mass of fabric I categorised it beneath 4 headings.
- Economics (together with work on advertising and marketing, tourism, leisure research, occasion administration and native financial improvement). That is to strategy the competition as a commodity.
- Sociology (together with cultural research, youth and ageing research and ethnography). That is to strategy the competition as a ceremony.
- Politics (together with work on regulation, regulation, coverage and beliefs). That is to strategy the competition as a setting for disputes and causes.
- Psychology (together with work on identification and wellbeing). That is to strategy the competition as an expertise.
Lacking from a lot of this work is a way of historical past and, specifically, 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 need to 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 take 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 attainable: most rock festivals don’t survive for 50 years; alternatively, 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 professional proof in a court docket case, a contract dispute involving an annual competition. The dispute was finally settled out of court docket however not earlier than we had ready our assertion. The query we have been requested was easy: what was the possible 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 dangerous climate and poor ticket gross sales. Our ‘professional’ judgement (we have been anticipated to provide a determine, nevertheless tentatively) was that the competition in query may have fairly been anticipated to final, in its present type, for an additional 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 stay music ecology; over time they need to adapt to all kinds of developments within the stay music economic system.
Folks do, however, anticipate festivals yearly to return as occasions which are acquainted. In our stay 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 grew to become 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 severe 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 massive occasions from the post-war state subsidised mannequin of the humanities competition, by way of the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties improvement of jazz, folks and free festivals into Seventies and 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 enormous number of small occasions, some rooted within the lengthy custom of harvest festivals, village reveals and seaside vacation leisure, others (reminiscent of Lawrence Energy’s West Wycombe chamber music competition) organised by performers or by fans for specific forms of music. It’s as if there’s a fixed circulation of festivals in Britain from which generally, with the proper confluence of financial and cultural circumstances, one type of occasion – Glastonbury, say – bubbles as much as the floor and attracts business funding, mass media protection and educational 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 attitude the important qualities of all festivals are these.
- They supply a way of neighborhood, nevertheless 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 method to take a look at the historical past of what grew to become often called rock festivals, then, is to look at how they’ve retained the mandatory parts of neighborhood, celebration and small-scale commerce within the context of digital expertise, mass advertising and marketing and the company pursuit of revenue.[iii] However it’s also to grasp 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 rejoice its a centesimal anniversary?
What the present disaster has made me realise is {that a} competition is a remarkably versatile manner of parading neighborhood 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 replicate the modifications. Moderately than despairing that our favorite festivals might by no means occur once more within the ways in which we’ve received used to, we needs to be wanting 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 one of the best educational examine 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/
