Music Festivals as Scenes: Producing Ephemeral Space Annually at Cornerstone Festival

Society for Ethnomusicology

SEM, Austin, Texas, December 6, 2015.

Material from this paper was published in Music Festivals, Ephemeral Places, and Scenes: Interdependence at Cornerstone Festival.

Abstract

For many attendees, music festivals have supplanted local scenes as the locus of face-to-face musical life. Cornerstone Festival, an annual Christian rock festival in rural western Illinois, was significant to attendees not just as a festival but as an imagined community made real. Outside the festival, participants’ musical lives might be curbed by family, professional obligations, geographic separatedness, or cultural stratification. Inside the festival’s physical, social, and cultural spaces, however, a cohesive music scene manifested for a brief time every year. While scene theory addresses the relationships between music communities and their geographic spaces, writers such as Will Straw (1991), Barry Shank (1994), and Holly Kruse (2003) do not adequately address scenes that are simultaneously ephemeral in their temporariness and permanent as an annual ritual. Given the recent popularity of and expanding market for music festivals, organizers have a vested interest in nurturing and promoting these scenes. They must balance the needs of their staff, stakeholders, performing artists, and attendees when designing and producing the festival space. At Cornerstone, however, organizers addressed a different challenge: faced with declining attendance, they had to make economic use of the space while respecting the festival’s history and traditions. Based on interviews with festival staff, historical research, and ethnographic fieldwork in 2009–2012—including time working on the festival’s setup, stagehand, and teardown crews—this paper examines the production of space and place at Cornerstone Festival. In doing so, it contributes a vital link between scene theory and the growing ethnomusicological literature on festivals.

Part of the organized panel Music Festivals as Temporary and Permanent. Panelists:

• Andrew Mall

• Maria Sonevytsky

• Aleysia Whitmore

• Jayson Beaster-Jones (chair)

Panel abstract

Music festivals provide rich insight into contemporary musical life, concentrated into limited temporal and geographic frames. Taking place over the same few days every year, festivals are ephemeral yet often an annual ritual for participants. They are simultaneously fleeting and permanent cultural and performance spaces whose organizers, performers, and audiences foster distinct cultures, legacies, and reputations. Whether they take place in self-contained “vacation villages” whose touristic space is fenced off from everyday life, or they spread throughout urban areas invading everyday spaces and soundscapes, festivals redefine music’s relationships to space, place, and nation. They promote cultural tourism, contribute to local economies, and foster public discourse around contested issues attract wanted and unwanted attention. Festival performances and audiences are both separate from the world that surrounds them and enmeshed within a region’s cultural history and identity. Festival spaces and their participants reinforce and redefine genre boundaries and hierarchies as they participate in and promote discourses about musical styles and aesthetic values. This panel addresses these issues through ethnographic research at contemporary Christian rock, jazz, pop, experimental art, and world music festivals. Privileging the experiences of performers and cultural intermediaries (such as festival organizers and promoters), panelists investigate the cultures, values, and spaces developed in music festivals. These papers build on existing scholarship on space, place, tourism, ritual, affect, and national belonging to suggest theoretical frameworks within which we might better understand how the fleeting yet ritual performance spaces at festivals make unique contributions to musical life.