City Research Online City, University of London Institutional Repository Citation: Mackay, S. (2017). Musical culture and urban change in contemporary Marseille. (Unpublished Doctoral thesis, City, University of London) This is the accepted version of the paper. This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/21149/ Link to published version: Copyright: City Research Online aims to make research outputs of City, University of London available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to. Reuse: Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ [email protected] Musical Culture and Urban Change in Contemporary Marseille Sam Mackay Thesis submitted for examination towards the qualification of PhD in Music City, University of London Department of Music September 2017 2 Table of Contents Introduction .............................................................................................................. 6 1. Background: Imagining Marseille ........................................................................ 7 2. Literature review ............................................................................................... 21 3. Research methodology ..................................................................................... 31 Chapter One: Music, dissent and the capital of culture ...................................... 39 Chapter Two: North African musical heritage in the postcolonial city .............. 72 Chapter Three: Music, Occitanism and the contemporary city ........................ 102 Chapter Four: Live music and gentrification in la Plaine ................................. 135 Conclusions .......................................................................................................... 167 Bibliography ......................................................................................................... 172 3 City, University of London Northampton Square London EC1V 0HB United Kingdom T +44 (0)20 7040 5060 SOME IMAGES IN THIS THESIS HAVE BEEN REDACTED FOR COPYRIGHT REASONS: Images on pages 17, 20, 44, 78, 91, 104, 130, 137, 140 www.city.ac.uk Academic excellence for business and the professions Acknowledgements There are many individuals whose assistance, guidance and advice have been invaluable to me over the last four years. It would be impossible to recognise the full extent of this support here, but certain points are worth emphasising. I am grateful for the support of all those in Marseille who took the time to meet me, to share their experiences and perspectives, to offer their hospitality, to show me places and, in the process, to dissolve many of my myriad assumptions and expectations. I would also like to thank all those who have listened to and commented on my academic presentations, both at conferences and within the university department. In particular I would like to thank Dr. Laudan Nooshin for her feedback and, above all, for introducing me to many of the themes and concepts that first ignited my interest in studying for a PhD. The process has involved some major challenges, personally as well as intellectually. I must acknowledge the support provided to me, patiently and with humbling abundance, by my family and all those close to me. Finally I would like to thank Professor Stephen Cottrell, who as my supervisor has been tireless in stimulating ideas, offering encouragement and advice, and providing thoughtful and generative feedback at every stage of the process. 4 5 Introduction This thesis considers how musical culture shapes, and is shaped by, the contested redevelopment of contemporary Marseille. Drawing on ethnographic research and documentary analysis, it investigates debates about cultural representation, struggles over the regulation of nightlife, the production of grassroots scenes, and other practices in and through which music is made meaningful. The thesis focuses primarily on the period from 2013 to 2016, when the research was carried out. A secondary frame, extending back to the early 1990s, provides the immediate historical background, and where relevant I also discuss processes and events from earlier periods. Unlike some ethnomusicological studies, the focus is not on a single genre, idiom, form or other normative category of music. Nor does the study aspire to reflect the totality of musical culture in Marseille. Instead, the prism of urban change serves to centre the thesis on moments and processes through which music informs and performs the changing city. In addition to this interest in urban change, my decisions about which aspects and locations of musical culture to focus on were, of course, linked partly to my own subject position, and I address the implications of this in the methodology section. The thesis addresses three overarching research questions. To what extent has musical culture been restricted or marginalised in the context of urban redevelopment? How have musicians and audiences used music to narrate and negotiate the city in new ways? And finally, how are technological changes inflecting the ways in which musical culture inhabits the city? To address these questions I present four case studies. Chapter One investigates two controversies surrounding the musical programming of a major arts festival; Chapter Two examines a new initiative focused on the local circulation of post- war North African musical media; Chapter Three addresses Occitan-language music and its interface with the cosmopolitan city; and Chapter Four analyses the position of a neighbourhood’s DIY music scenes in relation to the advance of gentrification. Through these case studies, the thesis seeks to contribute to broader discussions about the relationship between music and the right to the city in late modernity. 1. Background: Imagining Marseille Why is Marseille a particularly significant place in which to examine the interrelationships between music and urban change, and why now? The second part of this question can be addressed first: following decades of industrial job losses, disinvestment and population shrinkage, the city has witnessed a dramatic wave of regeneration initiatives, underpinned most recently by its designation as a European Capital of Culture (ECOC) in 2013. Presented as a year-long programme of cultural events, the award was also linked, as in many previously designated cities, to new strategies for urban development and place branding. In Marseille, the image was advanced of a dynamic city steeped in centuries of diversity and exchange. But if Marseille is a testament to migratory flux, it has been a site of xenophobia and postcolonial tension as well as of tolerance and conviviality: in elections, an exceptionally high count is often recorded for the far-right Front National (FN) party.1 Meanwhile, investment in award-winning architecture and redevelopment accompanies the persistent deprivation of the city centre, where 42% of households are classified as being below the poverty line (INSEE 2017a). Contradictions such as these were highlighted and accentuated in discussions during and after the Capital of Culture year, in this way helping to define a period marked by important struggles surrounding the past, present and future of the city. To apprehend the significance of these contradictions, it is first important to introduce Marseille in more detail. It is worth emphasising at the outset that no single prism is adequate here: Marseille could be introduced as France’s “second city”, with a population of around 850,000. But this would say nothing of the many thousands more who journey from Algiers and Oran every week, to visit relatives or do business (Manry and Peraldi 2004). And it would be to obscure the question of spatial sprawl: Marseille’s central area is larger even than that of Paris,2 unfolding for two hundred square kilometres up the sides of a natural inlet in the Mediterranean coastline, and beyond as far as a ring of enclosing hills. In other words, and like any place, Marseille can and deserves to be approached in multiple ways. Doing so offers one means of avoiding an essentialised reading of the city, 1 Of the ten most populous cities in France, only Nice recorded a proportionally higher FN vote (25.3%) in the first round of the 2017 presidential elections than Marseille (23.6%) (Frémont 2017). The same pattern had materialised in the previous presidential elections in 2012. 2 The central area of Paris (the administrative space of the ‘commune’, governed by one municipal council) extends for 105km2 (INSEE 2017b) 7 its history reduced to a single, teleological narrative. At the same time, it helps us to conceptualise the city as something imagined as well as lived. In the period following the Capital of Culture, the sociologist Michel Peraldi (2015, 6) argued that the disembedded, imagined city was increasingly significant to Marseille’s future: “In this way, imaginary and symbolic issues or themes are at the heart of the urban economy, culture is now a productive force and