Introduction: Festivals and Musical Life
Journal of the Society for American Music
Vol. 14, no. 1: pp. 2–9 (2020)
Abstract
The articles in this special issue of JSAM originated as contributions to a seminar session at the 2017 SAM conference in Montréal. After meeting a growing number of music scholars who were researching festivals from a variety of disciplinary and methodological orientations over the prior five years, I wanted to provide a forum for festival research at SAM that went beyond a standard conference paper. First at the seminar in Montréal and now in this special issue of JSAM, my overarching goal has been to showcase the rich diversity of festival research, decentering popular music studies from it, and in doing so to demonstrate both that music scholars working in a variety of areas have much to contribute to contemporary popular and academic discourse on music festivals, and that festival studies has much to contribute to music scholarship beyond popular music studies. The articles collected here contribute to a broad interdisciplinary literature on music festivals. Each also illustrates the value of music festival research to the scholarship of music in the Americas. I asked the authors to consider, broadly, what festivals do—that is, what do they do for music, for musicians, for audiences, and for researchers? What might research into music festivals reveal about strategies for promoting musical cultures, repertoires, and aesthetic hierarchies? What do festivals contribute to music scenes, be they local, trans-local, or virtual? What roles do festivals play in shaping historical and contemporary cultural life more broadly? How do festival organizers, stakeholders, artists, and their fans navigate and negotiate broader socio-cultural tensions in festival spaces?
Contents
This special issue of JSAM includes the following articles:
Grant Park Music Festival and Music in Chicago's “Front Yard,” by Kate Brucher
Pitching Opera: Innovating New Music Theater at Banff and Stratford, 1970–1990, by Colleen Renihan
Music Festivals, Ephemeral Places, and Scenes: Interdependence at Cornerstone Festival, by Andrew Mall
Music, Politics, and the Liminality of the Havana Jazz Plaza Festival in the Obama Era, by Timothy Storhoff