Introduction Musical Performance and the Changing City

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289531470 Musical Performance and the Changing City Book · January 2013 CITATIONS READS 3 651 1 author: Fabian Holt Roskilde University 20 PUBLICATIONS 318 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE All content following this page was uploaded by Fabian Holt on 08 January 2016. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Introduction Musical Performance and the Changing City Fabian Holt with Carsten Wergin When the Wall came down, the size of the city doubled overnight. There was a lot more space, and much of it was unregulated. There was a joy and excitement in the population that energized the music, and the music became so central to Berlin. It coalesced with the advent of an explicitly electronic music, a new music, a new culture of the present and future. —Thomas Fehlmann of the Orb1 This volume is a collective effort at analyzing key issues in urban musical life within broader processes of social change. The starting point is our recognition of the complex role of culture in the city that evolved in the aftermath of deindustrialization in the 1960s and 1970s. The changes commonly identified by terms such as urban renewal, city marketing, creative industries, and event tourism have deep and ongoing implications for musical life and discourses on music in urban public spheres. In particular, mainstream forms of popular music have become one of the vehicles for the growing number of cultural events in official urban places. Music is also a medium through which new urban populations differentiate themselves within processes of neighborhood change and globalization. This volume focuses on the role of popular music in dominant processes and agendas, while also investigating a broader and more complex social reality among participants and communities. The volume shows that music cultures are deeply affected by urban social change and that music’s role as an instru- ment of power has evolved in the urban order. The volume also shows that music has the potential to create unique human values and forms of social interaction that would not exist without music, but that this potential is often unrecognized and in conflict with dominant economic and political agendas. The eye of the casual observer of musical life in contemporary cities might at first be struck by major trends of growth and decline. Small neighborhood clubs with space for social and artis- tic experimentation are being priced out by real estate development and are losing ground to larger and more commerce-driven clubs for live music consumption among new middle-class residents and tourists. In the process, DIY “microscenes” emerge in repurposed postindustrial spaces in the peripheries. Another trend is the trajectory of popular music styles from subter- ranean performance spaces into festivals with new mass publics and forms of urbanism.2 Moreover, the live concert and entertainment industry has become corporatized and profits from the trend of subsidized arena building, as illustrated by the O2 arenas around Europe.3 A new urban performance culture has surfaced with the proliferation of fl ash mobs in complex dynamics of amateur media culture and viral marketing. Registering and evaluating trends can be a starting point for updating the topics on the scholarly agenda, but research objectives should not be limited to this. The study of music and urban social change requires analytical narratives for examining the dynamics of change. While this may sound obvious, studies of music in cities have not always been clear about how social dynamics are con- ceived, as we shall see. The basic premise of this volume is that changes in urban music cultures can only be understood if they are examined as within broader social processes. Popu- lar music is produced and experienced within particular social, economic, and technological arrangements between individuals and organizations in the city. Its meanings change within emergent social groupings and neighborhood dynamics. More specifically, we contend that to analyze popular music in contemporary cities separately from evolving postindustrial issues of regeneration, gentrification, city marketing, and festivalization would be obsolete. Engaging with such issues is necessary for understanding the city as more than a representation or local setting. To understand the dynamics better, an analytical distinction between music and the city can be made at a conceptual and disciplinary level. The study of music has long evolved in the distinct field of musicology and later a more flexible notion of music studies, while the city is beyond the area of expertise of this field. The city has been a core concept in sociology since the formative stages of the discipline (Sampson 2012) and in the field of urban anthropology that emerged in the 1970s (Hannerz 1980). We shall argue that studies of urban music cultures can do more to recognize the expertise on urbanism, the conditions of urban life, and neighborhood effects within these social science traditions. Our research can be read as a contribution to a broader field of cultural and social research because it high- lights the significance of music and particularly popular music in recent urban history. The analytical distinction between music and the city implies a critical perspective on popular narratives. Music is often seen as a reflection of the urban environment, informed by origin myths of creativity and phantom crowds in the streets. Such imaginaries are commonly em- bodied in the phrase ‘sound of the city’ that was used in the title of a pioneer book on an urban history of popular music styles in the United States (Gillett 1970/1983) and is still used in music marketing and journalism, including the title of New York’s Village Voice blog. The phrase ‘sound of the city’ has its own raison d’étre in musical culture, but it was not coined for analytical purposes. It originates in an era when urban cultures were connected to local dis- tinctiveness by music and media industries. Moreover, attempts at offering a holistic view of music cultures in a city easily led to a false sense of totality. The diverse avenues of musical experience in the city are reflected in scholarly specialization, and the literature also reflects urban change in the wider contextualization of art world-derived conceptions of music scenes in relation to policy making (e.g., Chevigny 1991; Homan 2003) and urban renewal (e.g., Cohen 2007), for instance. One of the avenues of urban experience that is relatively distinct from the live performances investigated in this volume is media consumption of music in eve- ryday situations at home, at work, and in retail spaces (e.g., DeNora 2000; Bull 2007). The contributions to this volume examine music in contemporary cities with a quite specific focus. The volume engages with issues arising from the changing terrain of musical performance in music scenes and in the wider public sphere in which music is often a component of cultural events that are not primarily about music. Performance is central to understanding changes in cultural scenes, music consumption and production, and in urban social agendas. Some of the broader changes will be introduced further here and in detail in later chapters, but our fundamental analytical approach to performance should be clear from the outset. By focusing on particular social situations and moments of musical performance, we pay attention to the aesthetic and situational perspectives in the areas of expertise of music and performance studies. However, to help overcome some of the relative local isolation that exists because of limited collaboration between scholars working on different cities, the volume does not privilege the situational discourse of performance studies. Instead, we seek to com- plement the situational perspective on musical performance with social science approaches to the study of cities and particularly the urban condition as defined by broader contextual dynamics and macro-level structural change.4 To illustrate how the conventional focus on local uniqueness in urban music studies can be complemented by social science approaches, let us consider the opening quotation above. Fehlmann’s statement draws attention to the uniqueness of a particular situation in Berlin af- ter the Wall came down. However, the social processes that transformed the electronic dance music scene are not unique to this scene or to Berlin. Gentrification and tourism have transformed clubs and festivals for the electronic music. The music has entered mainstream media and city marketing in the context of easyjetset tourism and mass events in national historic places such as the Love Parade (Rapp 2009). Other forms of popular music have followed a similar path, as reflected in the Popkomm Festival and the Berlin Festival that both have been held in the city center, with a typical orientation toward neo-bohemian, gentrified neighbor- hoods. The same processes have unfolded in the music and cultural scenes of many cities, well known examples including Chicago’s Wicker Park and New York’s Williamsburg (Lloyd 2006; Zukin 2010; Holt, this volume). The term postindustrial is adopted in this volume as a historical perspective for situating contemporary conditions in relation to the fundamental changes that followed from deindustrialization in Western Europe and the United States in the 1960s. In this sense, the postindustrial perspective is a starting point and not an epochal concept. Our theorizations lie elsewhere. The exhaustion from debates about postmodernism has generated skepticism toward epochal categories. Social formations are still being historicized but more in the form of narratives of particular dynamics. Postindustrial dynamics and conditions have been subject to ex- haustive sociological research that helps situate the more specific contexts investigated in this volume.

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