In our newest weblog put up, Reside 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 have a good time 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 referred to as off.
On Could 13, the Guardian reported: “The British impartial competition sector is liable 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% stated that they confronted prices that might destroy their companies on account of cancelled occasions, with nearly 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 your entire 12 months, and that’s all been worn out.”
The misplaced summer time of festivals will undoubtedly have a huge effect on the reside music sector typically. Agent Matt Bates informed the Guardian that touring musicians would lose as much as two-thirds of their reside 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 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 final result may be that it means now we have to focus our music making far more regionally, in a neighborhood means. 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 now we have an incredible viewers, and unbelievable 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 may drive us to suppose. I’m certain that inside a mile radius of the place all of us reside, every of us might begin a wonderful live performance collection. Perhaps a by-product of that is that now we have to have interaction shut by. If I’ve to remain in a single place, I might be completely satisfied to embrace that.[ii]
For AIF the problem 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 typical 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 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 some other common music matter. In an try to deliver 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 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 id 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, 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 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 at all times potential: most rock festivals don’t survive for 50 years; alternatively, only a few of those festivals had been conceived as one-off occasions. They had 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 competition. The dispute was ultimately settled out of courtroom however not earlier than we had ready our assertion. The query we had 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 had been dangerous climate and poor ticket gross sales. Our ‘professional’ judgement (we had been anticipated to supply a determine, nevertheless tentatively) was that the competition 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 had 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 reside music ecology; over time they must adapt to all kinds of developments within the reside music financial system.
Individuals do, nonetheless, count on festivals yearly to return as occasions which might 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 turned 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 in actual fact 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 competition, by way of the Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Sixties improvement of jazz, folks and free festivals into Nineteen Seventies and 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 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 (reminiscent of Lawrence Energy’s West Wycombe chamber music competition) organised by performers or by fanatics for specific forms of music. It’s as if there’s a fixed stream of festivals in Britain from which generally, with the precise 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 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 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 lots of festivals routinely contain musical competitions and prizes).
A technique to take a look at the historical past of what turned often known as 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 know-how, mass advertising and marketing and the company pursuit of revenue.[iii] However additionally it is 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] Wouldn’t it matter if the Glastonbury Competition had been by no means staged once more? Do we wish 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 means 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 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 ought to be trying ahead to new festivals occurring in new methods, in ways in which we presently can’t think about.
[iii] It is a theme in the perfect educational examine of rock festivals in Britain, Chris Anderton’s 2018 Music Festivals within the UK. Past the Carnivalesque.
