1st Edition
Remaking Culture and Music Spaces Affects, Infrastructures, Futures
This collection analyses the remaking of culture and music spaces during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Its central focus is how cultural producers negotiated radically disrupted and uncertain conditions by creating, designing, and curating new objects and events, and through making alternative combinations of practices and spaces.
By examining contexts and practices of remaking culture and music, it goes beyond being a chronicle of how the pandemic disrupted cultural life and livelihoods. The book also raises crucial questions about the forms and dynamics of post-pandemic spaces of culture and music. Main themes include the affective and embodied dimensions that shape the experience, organisation, and representation of cultural and musical activity; the restructuring of industries and practices of work and cultural production; the transformation of spaces of cultural expression and community; and the uncertainty and resilience of future culture and music.
This collection will be instrumental for researchers, practitioners, and students studying the spatial, material, and affective dimensions of cultural production in the fields of cultural sociology, cultural and creative industries research, festival and event studies, and music studies. Its interdisciplinary nature makes it beneficial reading for anyone interested in what has happened to culture and music during the global pandemic and beyond.
Introduction: Making sense of culture and music space during and beyond the pandemic
Jo Haynes and Ian Woodward
Part I: Affects
1. Festival atmospheres: social, spatial, and material explorations of physically distanced festivals
Britt Swartjes and Femke Vandenberg
2. How live is live?: COVID-19, live music, and online performances
Ben Green, Andy Bennett, Paula Guerra, Frances Howard, Ana Olivera, Sofia Sousa, and Ernesta Sofija
3. ‘Like a winter without Christmas’: Interaction rituals and the disruption of the Roskilde Festival
Annette Michelsen la Cour, Mette Kousholt, and Emilie Kirstine Holse
Part II: Infrastructures
4. Curating listening: The cultural production of a (commercial) experience
Raphaël Nowak
5. Reconceiving spatiality and value in the live music industries in response to COVID-19
Iain Taylor, Sarah Raine, and Craig Hamilton
6. Out of office: The broader implications of changing spaces and places in arts-based work during the COVID-19 pandemic
Rachel Skaggs, Erin J. Hoppe, and Molly Jo Burke
7. The sounds of silence: Concerts, musicians, and the COVID-19 pandemic
Timothy J. Dowd, Yun Tai, and Dmitri Zaras
8. Self-organisation in musicians’ collective workspaces before, during, and after COVID-19: A model for moving forward?
Yosha Wijngaarden
Part III: Spaces
9. A sonic paradise in the countryside: Pop-rock festivals as drivers of creative tourism development in small cities and rural areas in the post-pandemic era
Paula Guerra and Ana Oliveira
10. Refiguring pathologised festival spaces: Governance, risk, and creativity
Ian Woodward, Jo Haynes, and Magda Mogilnicka
11. Experimenting with adulthood in the time of pandemic: The 18th edition of the Sacrum Profanum festival in Cracow
Karolina Golemo
12. The island of freedom on the Vltava
Pavla Jonssonová
13. The moral complexity of organising a civically engaged festival during the COVID-19 pandemic
Ivana Rapoš Božič
Part IV: Futures
14. Unknown futures: Towards a more resilient Dutch popular music sector
Frank Kimenai, Pauwke Berkers, Nyota Kanyemesha, and Joost Vervoort
15. At the juncture of the liminal and the neoliberal: Can the smaller, independent commercial music festival survive into the future?
Aileen Dillane
16. Regions in recovery?: The significance of festivals for regenerating and reimagining regional community life
Michelle Duffy and Judith Mair
17. Music missionaries: How Dutch music festivals utilised the pandemic to bounce forward
Martijn Mulder
Biography
Ian Woodward is Professor of Cultural Sociology at Syddansk Universitet, Denmark. He is an internationally recognised scholar in the sociology of consumption and material cultures, the sociology of cosmopolitanism, and aspects of cultural production and consumption in contemporary music economies. Most recently, he was co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Consumption, and his books include Labels: Making Independent Music, The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism, The Festivalization of Culture, and Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age.
Jo Haynes is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on the sociology of popular music, ethnicity/race, diversities, and cultural work, (digital) entrepreneurship; and the cultural industries. She has published a research monograph called Music, Difference and the Residue of Race and has published in leading journals including British Journal of Sociology, Cultural Sociology, and New Media & Society.
Pauwke Berkers is Professor of Sociology of Popular Music in the Department of Arts and Culture Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is an expert in the study of inequalities in arts and culture—particularly race/ethnicity and gender. He has published in leading journals in sociology and gender studies. Berkers has coordinated several national and international research projects.
Aileen Dillane is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Limerick. Her research interests include local/global Irish musical identities, protest music, and music festivals. Select publications include the co-edited volumes Songs of Social Protest: International Perspectives (2018), and Public and Political Discourses of Migration (2016).
Karolina Golemo is a sociologist of culture, and Assistant Professor at the Institute of Intercultural Studies, Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Her research interests focus on cultural diversity of Italy, Spain, and Portugal; cross-cultural identities and integration of immigrants’ descendants, migrants and artistic expression; music in intercultural relations; and postcolonial relations in cultural perspective.
"This book gives us a very timely and important contribution for understanding how the COVID 19 pandemic has affected culture and music spaces. It estab-lishes a very useful timeline into the pandemic’s affects, including how cultural events have adjusted into new pandemic friendly formats and describes the magical social, change-making, and ritual festival spaces we have missed out on. It takes us through both challenging and innovative change for infrastructures and spaces. Finally, the collection gives optimistic and brave suggestions for the future of the cultural industry in post-pandemic times. This is certainly a book that gives producers, commissioners, and academics in the cultural field a deep and nuanced insight into the history, dynamics and challenging futures that the field is facing at the moment."
Signe Brink Wehl, Head of Art and Activism, Roskilde Festival, Denmark
"This volume is a valuable contribution to the evolving conversation about an extraordinary moment in cultural history. It features insightful first-hand accounts of significant experiences and transformations across the cultural landscape and introduces useful analytical interventions."
Fabian Holt, author of Everyone Loves Live Music
"Remaking Culture and Music Spaces offers a fascinating and thought-provoking account of the transformation and remaking of cultural and musical activities during the Covid-19 global pandemic. This edited collection clearly underscores the added value of multidisciplinary, collaborative, in-depth empirical research that covers a variety of global and cultural contexts. The collected chapters present an exceptionally rich and lucid picture of the affective, infrastructural, and spatial dimensions that shape the material and symbolic production of culture and music as well as their significance for individuals, communities, and societies, not just in pandemic times but also more generally. The book also raises pertinent questions about the post-pandemic future of cultural and musical activity. For all these reasons, it is a must read for practitioners, policy makers, researchers, students, and anyone else who cares about culture and music."
Susanne Janssen, Professor of Sociology of Media and Culture, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Netherlands
"After Remaking Culture and Music Spaces we will never be able to view the pandemic in the same way again. This book takes the reader on a tour of cultural responses to the pandemic. It highlights the powerful forces that refigure combinations of spaces, objects and practices. A highly recommended read!"Prof. Martina Löw, Institut für Soziologie, Head of the Collaborative Research Centre Re-Figuration of Spaces, Technische University, Berlin, Germany
