Musical Performance and the Changing City

Post-industrial Contexts in Europe and the United States

Fabian Holt, Carsten Wergin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415644860
• eBook ISBN: 9781136157820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

A contribution to the field of urban music studies, this book presents new interdisciplinary approaches to the study of music in urban social life. It takes musical performance as its key focus, exploring how and why different kinds of performance are evolving in contemporary cities in the interaction among social groups, commercial entrepreneurs, and institutions. From conventional concerts in rock clubs to new genres such as the flash mob, the forms and meanings of musical performance are deeply affected by urban social change and at the same time respond to the changing conditions. Music has taken on complex roles in the post-industrial city where culture and cultural consumption have an unprecedented power in defining publics, policies, and marketing strategies. Further, changes in real estate markets and the penetration of new media have challenged even fairly modern music cultures. At the same time, new music cultures have emerged, and music has become a driver for cultural events and festivals, channeling the dynamics of a society characterized by the social change, media intensity, and the neoliberal forces of post-industrial urban contexts. The volume brings together scholars from a broad range of disciplines to build a shared understanding of post-industrial contexts in Europe and the United States. Most directly grounded in contemporary developments in music studies and urban studies, its broad interdisciplinary range serves to strengthen the relevance of urban music studies to fields such as anthropology, sociology, urban geography, and beyond. Offering in-depth studies of changing music culture in concert venues, cultural events, and neighborhoods, contributors visit diverse locations such as Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York, and Austin.

Part I

Placemaking

1 “From the Big Dig to the Big Gig”

Live Music, Urban Regeneration, and Social Change in the European Capital of Culture 2008

Sara Cohen

Introduction

This chapter explores the relationship between live music and urban change. Focusing on rock music in the city of Liverpool (situated on the northwest coast of England), it considers how music performance, and the social dynamics involved, relates to various trends in urban regeneration. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to long-standing debates about the impact of urban change on social groups and cultural identities. While there is no space here to do justice to their subtleties and complexities, one set of debates concerns the emergence and growth of cities in the industrial era. Some scholars, for example, have argued that this urbanization, along with developments in media and communication technologies, prompted a decline or loss of community and the rise of individualism (Tönnies 1887 [1957]; Wirth 1938). Yet, this rather evolutionary perspective has been countered by scholars interested in the symbolic creation of community within urban contexts and how developments in media and communication technologies have enabled that process (Anderson 1983; Cohen 1985). For other scholars, the same developments have given rise to alienation, as illustrated by Benjamin’s distinction between the urban crowd and the street spectator or flâneur. These debates have been applied to music by scholars who argue that in a context of urbanization, popular music and the music industries have enabled the emergence of new alliances, communities, and collective identities that bring together even geographically dispersed urban audiences (Lipsitz, 1990; Cavicchi, 1998; Waxer 2002); or that they have instead given rise to alienated audiences, whether crowds of passive and ‘rhythmically obedient’ young jazz fans or the emotional, frustrated and manipulated Tin Pan Alley listener (Adorno, 1990).

A second set of debates concerns urban and social change in a postindustrial era. During the 1970s a crisis in the global capitalist economy based upon ‘Fordist’ methods of mass production led to widespread global economic recession, the collapse of traditional manufacturing industries and the depopulation of the cities in which they were based, and concerns about the future of such cities and their role within the global economy. In addressing such problems, civic authorities launched programs of economic restructuring governed by the politics and economics of neoliberalism.¹ This involved a turn to more flexible and decentralized ‘post-Fordist’ systems of production targeted at specialized, niche markets. It also involved the development of economies driven by new information technologies and knowledge-based industries and by consumption, including tourism, leisure, and retail.² Increasingly, attention was paid to the potential contribution of culture and the cultural or creative industries to that process, giving rise to regeneration initiatives led by culture, whereby culture became a tool or resource for the economic, social, and physical ‘regeneration’ of cities.

The social and cultural impacts of these developments and initiatives have been fiercely debated. Some scholars, for example, have called for new ways of conceiving music collectivities that take account of the increasingly fluid, cosmopolitan character of postindustrial tastes and consumption patterns. This is evident in the contested deployment of concepts such as ‘scenes’ and ‘tribes’ (or ‘neotribes’) by scholars seeking to move beyond more fixed and rooted concepts of youth ‘subcultures’ and ‘communities’ (Straw 1991; Bennett 1999; Hesmondhalgh 2005). However, this chapter is concerned with urban regeneration and debates about its impact on local groups and cultures—in this case those connected to live music. In Liverpool, the city’s status as European Capital of Culture intensified public debates about culture and urban regeneration, and about the rapid and dramatic transformation of the cityscape through initiatives targeted at physical regeneration. This provides a context for the music performances discussed in the chapter, all of which relate to one small area of Liverpool’s city center immediately surrounding the historic St George’s Hall, and one eight-month period during 2007–2008. They include public and high-profile performances as well as those that were more private and intimate. Each is described, following Cowan’s approach to dance (1990, 4–5 and 18), as an ‘event’: a temporally, spatially, and conceptually bounded or ‘framed’ sphere of interaction set apart from the activities of everyday life. The chapter situates these events along the journeys of musicians and audiences through time and across urban space. It considers how these events and journeys unfolded, the social encounters that emerged, and how through this process the performances became attached to particular groups, relationships, practices, experiences, and identities.

Each of the chapter’s three main sections focuses on one particular performance event and relates it to a specific trend in urban regeneration. The first section focuses on the branding and ‘festivalization’ of cities and how live music has been mobilized as an official resource for that process. The second focuses on the production of cultural heritage and performances that commemorate the local musical past. The third focuses on the organization and reorganization of urban space through zoning and gentrification initiatives and how this has implicated and affected live music. Whilst each section draws on extensive research involving participant observation and interviews conducted by myself and a research associate³, given the scope of the chapter it can provide only a snapshot rather than an in-depth ethnographic account. Taken together, however, the three sections show how urban regeneration creates social and cultural divisions and hierarchies and communities born out of social exclusion. At the same time they reveal the tensions and contradictions of urban regeneration and its often fragmented, haphazard and messy nature. City planners execute plans about how cities should be, which create anomalies and gaps—places and people that don’t fit the plan (De Certeau 1988, 94), and live music can provide sonic representations of those gaps. Yet whilst live music reflects social divisions and exclusions and cultural hierarchies that are produced or intensified by the regeneration process, within such circumstances and constraints it nevertheless acts as an agent of social transformation by enabling routes to both social convergence and divergence.

The Musical Branding and Festivalization of Cities

The awarding to Liverpool of the title ‘European Capital of Culture 2008’ prompted a lengthy period of intense planning and preparation leading to a series of events designed to celebrate the city’s Capital of Culture status.⁴ The Capital of Culture competition is judged by a selection committee established by the European Commission, and each winning city must, “organize a programme of cultural events highlighting its own culture and cultural heritage as well as its place in the common cultural heritage, and involving people concerned with cultural activities from other European countries with a view to establishing lasting cooperation.”⁵ Liverpool’s Capital of Culture year was marked by events overseen by the Liverpool Culture Company, a public/private sector partnership established by Liverpool City Council to deliver the city’s Capital of Culture program. The company put the total number of events at 7,000, but there were also unofficial events overseen by other groups and organizations.⁶ This first section of the chapter focuses on the ‘People’s Opening’, an event staged by the Culture Company to launch the city’s Capital of Culture year. It situates that event within a context of urban regeneration before moving on to consider the social dynamics involved.

The People’s Opening: Live Music as Public Spectacle

The People’s Opening provides one example of how city planners and policy makers have embraced culture as an official resource for regenerating postindustrial cities by staging large-scale, high-profile performance events in public spaces and arenas. These kinds of events have taken various forms (such as biennials, expos, and festivals) influenced by similar events from the historical past (Delanty, Sassatelli, and Georgi 2011), and policy makers have tended to justify them by arguing that they generate a sense of pride and self-esteem among city residents (Quinn 2005, 931). This particular event took place on a cold January evening at St George’s plateau, which lies in between the majestic St George’s Hall and Liverpool Central Station and has long been used for the staging of grand public and civic events. Large crowds of people filled the streets in front of the hall, and the event took place against a backdrop of intense physical change and regeneration, with buildings in the city center in the process of being torn down and demolished, built and rebuilt. In view of this, the event had been designed to celebrate and symbolize Liverpool’s rebirth and regeneration—its transformation, as put by our compère that night, from the ‘Big Dig’, the massive reconstruction of the city center, to the ‘Big Gig’, the city’s year in the spotlight as European Capital of Culture. According to the Culture Company, it involved 800 performers and 50,000 people attended, with an estimated 300 million worldwide viewers.⁷

The event’s producers (who included those with long-standing involvement in local and alternative popular music performance and events management) thus made use of the cityscape as the stage for a strategic performance and promotion of Liverpool’s changing image, identity, and material landscape. Given the density of the crowd, it was easier for most of us to watch images of the performance projected on huge screens erected against the facades of St George’s Hall and neighboring buildings. Directly opposite the stage, members of the world press and media camped out in rooms belonging to a residential hall for university students. Behind the stage in the distance flowed the River Mersey, overlooked by Liverpool’s historic waterfront buildings and flanked by construction sites and shiny new iconic architecture, including a partially built new museum of Liverpool, a new Liverpool arena, new luxury high rise apartments and office blocks, and the Liverpool One retail center, a £1 billion initiative still under development and occupying 42 acres of land.

St George’s hall and surrounding historical buildings and monuments had been specially lit for the occasion, while additional spot-lights picked out guitarists and drummers performing on the top of nearby historical buildings and monuments dressed as construction workers in overalls and hard hats. Other landmark buildings provided a site for the launch of fire-work displays. At one point, a large metal shipping container labeled ‘Precious Cargo’ was lowered by crane onto the roof of St George’s hall, where it deposited a horde of local celebrities who waved at the audience as they walked across the stage. They included rock musicians well known for their commercial successes during the 1980s and 1990s as well as a hip-hop musician, the conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and others from the worlds of sports, screen, and stage. Meanwhile, acrobatic aerial dancers (also dressed as construction workers) slid down the cranes and screens on either side of the hall, while on the ground at St Georges’ plateau a series of performances and poetry readings took place involving a mix of orchestras and choirs, small children, comedians, actors, and poets. The event lasted 40 minutes and the intended highlights were two performances: the first by local rock band the Wombats, who had only recently begun their career as recording artists but had produced one UK hit single, and the second by Ringo Starr, who performed a sentimental song about Liverpool from his new solo album Liverpool 8.

The People’s Opening provided a spectacular platform for the branding of Liverpool as a European city with a distinctive cultural heritage, and as different not just from other cities but from the Liverpool of the past. Liverpool had once been Britain’s second city, hence the grandeur of many city center buildings. For various reasons, however, it had been generally perceived within the UK as a city with a long-standing image problem, and throughout the twentieth century negative images of the city were produced and reproduced in national newspaper articles, television programs, film documentaries, and so on (Belchem 2000, Chapter 1). Glasgow had likewise been subject to negative media reports, but the image of that city was generally believed to have been transformed through its status as European City of Culture 1991. Liverpool’s Capital of Culture award was thus an opportunity to stage the city’s transformation from a symbol of urban decline into one of revival. The city’s journey from the past into the future was represented by the staging of the People’s Opening in front of St George’s Hall, Liverpool’s oldest and grandest concert hall and meeting point, and, on the following night, the staging of a second high-profile music performance event at Liverpool’s newest concert hall—an iconic waterfront entertainment arena.

The People’s Opening also symbolized Liverpool’s transformation into a European Capital of Culture. Particularly prominent were the city’s historical, neoclassical architecture and central public spaces, both of which have been common resources drawn upon to promote cities as having a shared European heritage of high art and culture (Aiello and Thurlow 2006; Lähdesmäki 2009; Milner 2007, 183). In addition to this, the event illustrated the emphasis on cultural diversity and integration in European cultural policy and the Capital of Culture competition (Lähdesmäki 2009). These exchanges help to show not only how one performance can inspire contrasting and conflicting interpretations, but also how engaging with diverse audiences and participants, and with culture’s potential role in social cohesion and community change, was a central aim of Liverpool’s bid to become European Capital of Culture. The bid was promoted through the slogan ‘The World in One City’ and an accompanyi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction: Musical Performance and the Changing City
• Part I: Placemaking
• Part II: Scenes and Venues
• Part III: Nightlife
• Contributors
• Index