Stay Music Change Weblog
In our newest weblog publish, Stay 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 fun 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 unbiased competition sector is prone to collapsing, with many cancelled occasions falling by 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% stated that they confronted prices that might smash their companies on account of cancelled occasions, with nearly all (98.5%) not coated 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 your entire yr, and that’s all been worn out.”
The misplaced summer time of festivals will undoubtedly have a big impact on the dwell music sector typically. Agent Matt Bates advised the Guardian that touring musicians would lose as much as two-thirds of their dwell revenue 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 revenue and their livelihoods”.[i]
Quickly after studying this I got here throughout a weblog by viola famous person Lawrence Energy, reflecting on how his life had all of a sudden 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 is perhaps that it means we’ve got to focus our music making rather more domestically, in a group approach. 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 quick discover, however we’ve got a tremendous viewers, and unbelievable 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 may drive us to suppose. I’m positive that inside a mile radius of the place all of us dwell, every of us might begin a lovely live performance sequence. Perhaps a by-product of that is that we’ve got to have interaction shut by. If I’ve to remain in a single place, I’d be comfortable 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 need 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 function not solely within the worldwide economics of dwell music but in addition, as a consequence, in worldwide dwell music scholarship. Festivals appear to draw extra educational consideration throughout extra disciplines than some other widespread music matter. In an try to convey order to this mass of fabric I categorized it beneath 4 headings.
- Economics (together with work on advertising, tourism, leisure research, occasion administration and native financial growth). 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, legislation, 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 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 present assumed to be the way in which 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 a particularly dangerous enterprise, with failure all the time doable: 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 offer skilled 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 most typical have been unhealthy climate and poor ticket gross sales. Our ‘skilled’ judgement (we have been anticipated to provide a determine, nonetheless tentatively) was that the competition in query might have moderately 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 competition organisers’ danger registers. Extra importantly we understood that festivals are a part of the dwell music ecology; over time they should adapt to all kinds of developments within the dwell music financial system.
Folks do, nonetheless, anticipate 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 Competition. These occasions turned so deeply embedded within the cultural calendar that earlier than the coronavirus struck nobody appeared to doubt that they’d proceed without end, though, as we additionally doc, they’ve in reality 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 the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties growth of jazz, folks and free festivals into Seventies and Nineteen Eighties consolidation of the rock competition, to the flip of the century emergence of big 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 (akin to Lawrence Energy’s West Wycombe chamber music competition) organised by performers or by fanatics for specific varieties of music. It’s as if there’s a fixed stream of festivals in Britain from which generally, with the correct 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 attitude 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 lots of festivals routinely contain musical competitions and prizes).
A method to take a look at the historical past of what turned often called rock festivals, then, is to look at how they’ve retained the mandatory components of group, 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 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 have fun 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 components, loosening and poking enjoyable at them. Festivals have performed this social function for a lot of centuries. Societies change; festivals replicate the modifications. 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] 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/
