Stay Music Alternate Weblog
In our newest weblog publish, 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 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 subject was to be the historical past of rock festivals. Within the occasion the research day, just like the pageant, was referred to as off.
On Could 13, the Guardian reported: “The British unbiased pageant sector is susceptible to collapsing, with many cancelled occasions falling by way of the cracks of presidency assist measures for companies struggling because of the coronavirus disaster.” The story was primarily based on an Affiliation of Unbiased Festivals (AIF) survey of its members: 92% mentioned that they confronted prices that would destroy 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 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 all the yr, and that’s all been worn out.”
The misplaced summer season of festivals will undoubtedly have a huge effect on the reside music sector usually. Agent Matt Bates informed the Guardian that touring musicians would lose as much as two-thirds of their reside earnings 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 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 perhaps that it means now we have to focus our music making way more domestically, in a neighborhood approach. Fortunately that’s one thing I like anyway: I’ve my very own pageant, the West Wycombe Chamber Music Competition, and that’s our ethos. It’s small and put collectively at very quick discover, however now we have a tremendous viewers, and incredible associates 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 case would possibly drive us to assume. I’m certain that inside a mile radius of the place all of us reside, every of us might begin a lovely live performance sequence. Possibly a by-product of that is that now we have to interact shut by. If I’ve to remain in a single place, I’d 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 special query: not how will we to return to enterprise as ordinary however will we wish to.
In making ready my historic discuss for the Ruisrock occasion I used to be struck by how broadly its enterprise mannequin is now taken with no consideration. 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 educational consideration throughout extra disciplines than every other widespread music subject. In an try to convey order to this mass of fabric I categorized it below 4 headings.
- Economics (together with work on advertising, tourism, leisure research, occasion administration and native financial growth). 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, legislation, 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 at the moment assumed to be the best way festivals must be is, within the lengthy view, merely a second within the historical past of festivals, a second that would 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 a particularly 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 offer professional proof in a courtroom case, a contract dispute involving an annual pageant. 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 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 unhealthy climate and poor ticket gross sales. Our ‘professional’ judgement (we have been anticipated to provide a determine, nevertheless tentatively) was that the pageant in query might have fairly been anticipated to final, in its present type, 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 pageant 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, however, anticipate festivals yearly to return as occasions which can be 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 grew to become so deeply embedded within the cultural calendar that earlier than the coronavirus struck nobody appeared to doubt that they’d proceed endlessly, though, as we additionally doc, they’ve in truth all confronted severe 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 huge occasions from the post-war state subsidised mannequin of the humanities pageant, by way of the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties growth of jazz, folks and free festivals into 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 reveals and seaside vacation leisure, others (equivalent to Lawrence Energy’s West Wycombe chamber music pageant) organised by performers or by fans for explicit sorts of music. It’s as if there’s a fixed stream of festivals in Britain from which generally, with the fitting confluence of financial and cultural circumstances, one form 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 angle 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 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 technique 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 components of neighborhood, celebration and small-scale commerce within the context of digital know-how, mass advertising and the company pursuit of revenue.[iii] However additionally it is 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] Would it not matter if the Glastonbury Competition have been by no means staged once more? Do we wish Ruisrock to have a good time its one hundredth anniversary?
What the present disaster has made me realise is {that a} pageant is a remarkably versatile approach of parading neighborhood ties and cultural expectations and, in its carnival components, loosening and poking enjoyable at them. Festivals have performed this social position for a lot of centuries. Societies change; festivals mirror the adjustments. Fairly 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 occurring 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] This can be a theme in the perfect educational 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/
