Boom Festival | Rehearsing the Future
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Boom festival | Rehearsing the Future Music and the Prefiguration of Change by Saul Roosendaal 5930057 Master’s thesis Musicology August 2016 supervised by dr. Barbara Titus University of Amsterdam Boom festival | Rehearsing the future Contents Foreword .................................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 4 1. A Transformational Festival ................................................................................................. 9 1.1 Psytrance and Celebration ........................................................................................... 9 1.2 Music and Culture ..................................................................................................... 12 1.3 Dance and Musical Embodiment .............................................................................. 15 1.4 Art, Aesthetics and Spirituality ................................................................................. 18 1.5 Summary ................................................................................................................... 21 2. Music and Power: Prefigurating Change ........................................................................... 23 2.1 Education: The Liminal Village as Forum ................................................................ 25 2.1.1 Drugs and Policies .......................................................................................... 28 2.2 Action: Sustainability and the Environment ............................................................. 31 2.3 Networking: Cooperation and Reverberation ........................................................... 33 2.4 Summary ................................................................................................................... 36 3. Being Together ................................................................................................................... 38 3.1 The Gathering of the Tribe ........................................................................................ 39 3.2 Reconnecting and Healing ........................................................................................ 42 3.3 Participation and Musicking ..................................................................................... 46 3.4 Summary ................................................................................................................... 51 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 52 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 55 Abstract .................................................................................................................................... 58 Cover picture: the Dance Temple of the 2012 edition at twilight. 2 Foreword In the summer of 2014, I planned to go to Boom, a psytrance festival I knew virtually nothing about. I went there with some friends, some of whom had already gone before and had spoken admiringly about its positive energy, its spectacular art and music, the sizzling weather, and the sustainability agenda embedded in the festival’s premises. My curiosity was awakened, and I decided to go. I still had to write my master’s thesis, and borne out the strong desire to combine the subjects of my academic studies with my personal quests, I thought why not combine them. This paper is the result of that research, one that, to stay in line with some of the vocabulary used, adds to the ensemble that makes up the various levels of the festival and its many intense experiences. The project has been a long and arduous journey, but a very personal one that brought great satisfaction and many valuable lessons. As I hope to make clear, the participatory nature of the festival requires active engagement, allowing for such personal development. Attentive readers will surely notice my unabashed appreciation of the festival, which I consciously include because of the fact that I am taking part by musicking, as any other visiting the festival, being first and foremost a participant. I dedicate this to all Boomers, and to all others who inherited the hippie ideals of love and peace; who believe in change, starting from within and growing from the small. It corresponds to the prefigurative mode in which Boom festival operates to contribute to creating awareness and change. And it all began with coming together and celebrating, which remains preserved at a core it has never lost. 3 Introduction BOOM FESTIVAL, Portugal, is one of the world’s leading psytrance (psychedelic trance) festivals, held biennially since 1997. At Boom, music is always everywhere, albeit in the background. It is a starting point from which other things happen, actions take place, and in fact the festival (and all it entails) was founded around it. There are various kinds of music at the festival, featuring different music stages and accompanying various activities, but psytrance forms the overwhelming centre of attention. The Dance Temple, Boom’s main stage featuring only psytrance, can be heard in most places at all times, save for a few afternoon hours of rest. It remains, literally and figuratively, at the centre of the festival, which has grown and expanded. Nowadays it is but one element of the festival, still binding other things together by its sheer omnipresence. With academic research of Electronic Dance Music Cultures (EDMCs) still in its infancy, this paper is a venture into the curious world of psytrance and its culture. The festival is full of activities, and far more than music and dance alone, Boom offers a full program of lectures, workshops and rituals of all kinds. In addition, it has an extensive environmental program that demonstrates and educates sustainability on different levels. Leisure studies scholar Erin Sharpe explains how leisure activities can create a context that may contribute to potential social change, as they ‘provide opportunities for individuals to resist and rewrite the dominant cultural narratives that shape their lives,’ where leisure is being seen as ‘a space for collective organizing to address social problems’ (Sharpe 2008: 218). Accordingly, following the objective of social sustainability, Boom explicitly states its aim to ‘develop a credible alternative to the models of mainstream culture’ (http://www.boomfestival.org/boom2014/environment/mission-awards/), thoroughly explored in Chapter 2. At the festival, all these cultural expressions are intimately linked. The festival experience is a whole experience, with all of its individual segments working together as an ensemble, as will be explored in more detail in the first chapter. All these things are continuously shared with mostly like-minded people who, having different objectives, still share similar experiences. Researchers have asserted that the festival experience can have a lasting positive impact and change people’s lives (Packer & Ballantyne 2011: 168-170), and in all, the festival provides a place that can ‘transform the everyday space of the familiar and mundane to one that is rather otherworldly and spiritually uplifting, even if the jollity and improvement are serious stuff’ (Waterman 1998: 58). This does not mean that the festival 4 spirit and everyday life are complete opposites, on the contrary. Transformational festivals (see Chapter 1) like Boom, especially, transcend such a distinction. As I will demonstrate, the festival is something that can transcend everyday life, and may ultimately have the power to transform it. When I first set out to write this thesis, I centred on psytrance music and its role at Boom festival. Gradually, the focus on the music alone did not give me the answers I was looking for. The close relationship of psytrance culture to its music makes it necessary to understand that culture, and culture in a more general sense, in order to understand the musical genre. Therefore, out of necessity my view broadened to include the cultural context of the psytrance scene, and Boom in particular. Indeed, if we consider the musical genre and its culture together, the connections between aesthetics, style and social elements become more obvious, and the ways in which they are linked are more intricate than expected or acknowledged until that point. Popular music scholar Georgina Born argues how music ‘in itself’ virtually doesn’t exist, as all music is produced, mediated and consumed in a social context that may be considered immanent to the music in itself. She argues for stronger academic interactions, understanding music through culture. ‘By “music as culture” in this broad sense,’ she says, ‘I refer to the ensemble or constellation of practices, beliefs, communications, social relations, institutions and technologies through which a particular music is experienced, and has meaning’ (Born 1990: 211). She further stresses the importance of ‘the multitextuality of music-as-culture; and the need to analyse its particular forms […] as an ensemble’ (Born 1990: 217). Nearly a decade later, musicologist Christopher Small takes a step further, deploring how for a long time music has been seen as a thing, and how the presumed autonomous ‘thingness’ of works of music, and of art in general,