Music Festivals, Ephemeral Places, and Scenes: Interdependence at Cornerstone Festival

Journal of the Society for American Music

Vol. 14, no. 1: pp. 51–69 (2020)

Abstract

Cornerstone was an annual four-day-long Christian rock festival in Illinois that ran from 1984 until 2012, first in Chicago’s northern suburbs and then on a former farm in the rural western part of the state. Most attendees camped on-site, and many arrived one or two days early when the campgrounds opened before official programming started. Like many contemporary multi-day festivals in relatively rural or remote locations, Cornerstone’s festival grounds and campsites functioned as a temporary village. For many attendees, music festivals have supplanted local scenes as loci of face-to-face musical life. Outside Cornerstone, participants’ musical lives might be curbed by family, professional obligations, geographic separateness, or cultural stratification. Inside the festival’s physical, social, and cultural spaces, however, a cohesive music scene manifested for a brief time every year. This article examines the production of space and place at Cornerstone. In doing so, it contributes a vital link between scene theory and the growing ethnomusicological literature on festivals.