Reside Music Trade Weblog
In our newest weblog publish, Reside Music Trade 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 Pageant, 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 subject was to be the historical past of rock festivals. Within the occasion the examine day, just like the pageant, was known as off.
On Might 13, the Guardian reported: “The British unbiased pageant sector is susceptible to collapsing, with many cancelled occasions falling by means of the cracks of presidency assist measures for companies struggling because of the coronavirus disaster.” The story was based mostly on an Affiliation of Unbiased Festivals (AIF) survey of its members: 92% stated that they confronted prices that might smash their companies because of cancelled occasions, with virtually all (98.5%) not lined by insurance coverage for cancellation associated to Covid-19. The sector was dealing with redundancies of 59% on common and was on observe 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 massive occasion throughout all the 12 months, and that’s all been worn out.”
The misplaced summer season of festivals will undoubtedly have a huge effect on the dwell music sector typically. Agent Matt Bates instructed the Guardian that touring musicians would lose as much as two-thirds of their dwell revenue from pageant cancellations. For individuals who aren’t among the many superstars who play arenas, “having no festivals to play this summer season has completely destroyed their revenue 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 instantly 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 final result may be that it means we have now to focus our music making rather more domestically, in a group approach. Fortunately that’s one thing I really like anyway: I’ve my very own pageant, the West Wycombe Chamber Music Pageant, and that’s our ethos. It’s small and put collectively at very brief discover, however we have now an incredible viewers, and implausible mates and colleagues do it on that foundation.
I really feel embarrassed that I don’t do extra domestically, as a result of I’m all the time going away to make music. This example would possibly drive us to assume. I’m positive that inside a mile radius of the place all of us dwell, every of us may begin a ravishing live performance sequence. Perhaps a by-product of that is that we have now to interact shut by. If I’ve to remain in a single place, I might be pleased 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 unique query: not how will we to return to enterprise as common however will we wish to.
In getting ready my historic speak for the Ruisrock occasion I used to be struck by how broadly its enterprise mannequin is now taken without any consideration. Within the final 25 years rock festivals, loosely outlined and understood, have come to play the lead function not solely within the worldwide economics of dwell music but additionally, as a consequence, in worldwide dwell music scholarship. Festivals appear to draw extra educational consideration throughout extra disciplines than every other fashionable music subject. In an try to carry order to this mass of fabric I categorized it below 4 headings.
- Economics (together with work on advertising and marketing, tourism, leisure research, occasion administration and native financial improvement). That is to method the pageant as a commodity.
- Sociology (together with cultural research, youth and ageing research and ethnography). That is to method the pageant as a ceremony.
- Politics (together with work on regulation, regulation, coverage and beliefs). That is to method the pageant as a setting for disputes and causes.
- Psychology (together with work on identification and wellbeing). That is to method the pageant as an expertise.
Lacking from a lot of this work is a way of historical past and, particularly, an appreciation of two fundamental 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 best way festivals should 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 all the time potential: 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 skilled proof in a court docket case, a contract dispute involving an annual pageant. The dispute was ultimately 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 doubtless life expectancy of a longtime rock pageant? 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 ‘skilled’ judgement (we have been anticipated to supply a determine, nonetheless tentatively) was that the pageant in query may have fairly been anticipated to final, in its present kind, 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 pageant organisers’ danger registers. Extra importantly we understood that festivals are a part of the dwell music ecology; over time they should adapt to all types of developments within the dwell music financial system.
Individuals do, however, count on festivals yearly to return as occasions which might be acquainted. In our dwell 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 Pageant. These occasions grew to become so deeply embedded within the cultural calendar that earlier than the coronavirus struck nobody appeared to doubt that they’d proceed perpetually, though, as we additionally doc, they’ve the truth is all confronted critical threats to their survival and to outlive have needed to settle for new methods of doing issues.
There may be an underlying historic narrative right here, an evolution of massive occasions from the post-war state subsidised mannequin of the humanities pageant, by means of the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties improvement of jazz, folks and free festivals into Nineteen Seventies and Eighties consolidation of the rock pageant, to the flip of the century emergence of giant worldwide dance occasions like Creamfields and Tomorrowland. However there has additionally all the time been an enormous number of small occasions, some rooted within the lengthy custom of harvest festivals, village exhibits and seaside vacation leisure, others (resembling Lawrence Energy’s West Wycombe chamber music pageant) organised by performers or by lovers for specific kinds of music. It’s as if there’s a fixed movement of festivals in Britain from which generally, with the best 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 changing 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 individuals, 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 have a look at the historical past of what grew to become often known as rock festivals, then, is to look at how they’ve retained the required parts of group, celebration and small-scale commerce within the context of digital know-how, mass advertising and marketing and the company pursuit of revenue.[iii] However it’s also to understand that Covid-19 now threatens a pageant mannequin that was, maybe, already reaching its safe-to-use-by date, as environmentalists have been suggesting for a while.[iv] Wouldn’t it matter if the Glastonbury Pageant have been by no means staged once more? Do we would like Ruisrock to rejoice its one centesimal anniversary?
What the present disaster has made me realise is {that a} pageant 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 function for a lot of centuries. Societies change; festivals mirror the modifications. Somewhat than despairing that our favorite festivals could by no means occur once more within the ways in which we’ve acquired used to, we needs to be trying ahead to new festivals occurring in new methods, in ways in which we presently can’t think about.
[i] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/could/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] This can be 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/
