REVIEWS
”Many of us do indeed love music venues and summer music festivals, and in this book Holt does a terrific job of showing how even such beloved institutions are tied up with excessive commercialisation, dubious policy developments and property speculation. That shouldn’t stop people from enjoyment, but it might help us understand our pleasures better by forestalling naïve assumptions that contemporary musical experience is innocently separate from the nastier elements of our capitalist societies.”
— David Hesmondhalgh, University of Leeds, author of Why Music Matters
“This book is a highly original and quite brilliant approach to the study of musical performance institutions. I know of no other book that has such a broad perspective. Unique in its approach, ground-breaking in its objectives, Everyone Loves Live Music presents some fascinating information about both rock clubs and large rock festivals that make it a milestone and a point of reference for future studies.”
— Anthony Seeger, University of California at Los Angeles
“After half a century of writing about recorded popular music, an exhaustive analysis of the phenomenon of live music is finally available, thanks to this book by Fabian Holt! Everyone Loves Live Music provides original and relevant keys to understanding the extraordinary development of festivals, concerts, and live shows.”
— Gérôme Guibert, Sorbonne Nouvelle University
"Adopting a critical approach, Holt upends commonly-held ideas of live music and introduces a theory of performance institutions. The two central institutions of popular music—the club and the festival—are analyzed within the broader history of music and cultural life in modernity, shedding new light on organized cultural life in capitalism, urban media cultures, and the role of festive events in society. Everyone Loves Live Music argues that while live music provides exciting experiences for many people, it also promotes a new ideology of music in neoliberal capitalism."
— The New Books Network
"Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions presents an important contribution to the study of contemporary clubs and festivals, by way of critical and informative historical, political economy, and media analysis."
— Urban People
"Since the beginning of the 2000s and the record industry crisis, live music has triggered attention from various sectors (economic, technological, political, and intellectual), causing a severe inflation of discourses and narratives about its authenticity and new economy. Fabian Holt has been involved in this dynamic through several decisive academic contributions and professional activities related to festivals. In this book, he looks back at these numerous narratives, not without a (self-)critical eye. This is the first and greatest merit of the book, as it not only offers an overview of the many discourses on live music, but also questions the meaning of this renewed interest. The second great merit is that it proposes a real theorization of live music, and questions its nature in depth when many works are content with an industrial, depoliticized, superficial conception. . . . Holt’s work thus constitutes a great opportunity to reconsider our views on music as a public value."
— Popular Music
"While it is true that many scholars have previously identified the economic forces that operate behind the live music industries, Holt takes a broader perspective that allows him to describe a Global North phenomenon in which corporate power and anglophone pop music culture dominate the market... It is still difficult to determine what live music studies will look like in the future or what the main outcomes of this interdisciplinary field have been... In any case, Fabian Holt has made a very important contribution to its refinement."
— Ethnomusicology Review
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1. Introduction: The social study of musical performance institutions - Fabian Holt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226738680.003.0001
[live music;consumer interests;industry interests;performance culture;performance in modernity;performance institutions;seasonal domains;club;organized cultural life;festival]
This chapter introduces the idea of the book and provides a foundational framework for live music as a study object and an area of organized musical life. The idea is that a new mass culture of live music has emerged in the first two decades of the twenty-first century and that a critical interpretation of this culture is lacking in the literature. Also lacking is a more general understanding of musical performance in organized cultural life of modern societies. The book interprets the new pop culture of live music as the product of commercial exploitation and of broader changes in the conditions of culture and human life in capitalism. The introductory chapter progresses through five sections: (1) a presentation of the general argument, (2) an overview of the chapters, (3) a detailing of the critique of contemporary live music discourse, (4) a disciplinary grounding of the investigation in music studies and sociology, and (5) an outline of a conceptual framework of performance institutions and their place within seasonal domains. The framework will serve to organize the analyses in the subsequent chapters and it will be developed further in those chapters. (pages 1 - 40)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 2. Conceptualizing Musical Performance Culture - Fabian Holt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226738680.003.0002
[live music;musical performance culture;body in performance;cultural event;sociology of body;performance studies;event studies;media events]
This chapter develops the concept of musical performance culture as part of the book’s reconstruction of live music as an object of study. It argues that live music as a transformation of musical performance in modernity has ramifications for the concept of musical performance, too. The spaces of performance and the kinds of events in which performance takes place have evolved in modernity. The chapter provides a synthesis and rethinking of insights across a range of disciplines. It expands on the revisionist critiques of textualism in musicology during the 2010s by developing a broader concept of performance culture, drawing from sociology of the body, ethnomusicology, performance studies, and event studies. Musical performance is defined by an assemblage of ontologies, and this chapter focuses on the relationship between three central ontologies. The first section explores performing bodies through the literature on performativity and affect theory in music studies and the sociology of the body. The second explores the musical performance event, focusing on the relationship between architectural space and ritual. The third explores musical performance within a broader cultural event, such as a festival or a TV show. (pages 41 - 62)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 3. The Social Study of Music in Cities - Fabian Holt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226738680.003.0003
[music in cities;music and urban history;music and urban life;musical performance institutions;cultural institutions;urban cultural diversity]
This chapter takes stock of the intellectual history of music in cities to develop the conceptual foundations for studying musical performance institutions in the everyday urban domain. There is no discipline of urban music studies, but instead a diverse range of specialized literatures that cannot meaningfully be subsumed into a single theoretical or disciplinary framework. This chapter reconstructs the intellectual history of music in cities guided by the book’s interdisciplinary concept of the social study of music. The reconstruction is developed through a comparative exploration of knowledge interests among literatures that are often considered separately. It demonstrates how the concept of the social study of music in cities can help grow a field-sensitivity across these literatures. The chapter also provides insight into the cultural history of music in cities across the global north. The chapter examines conceptions of music in cities of the global north in the following six literatures: (1) cultural elites in European history, (2) popular leisure in the industrial-era metropolis, (3) The Great Migration, (4) genre cities and subcultural scenes, (5) diaspora, multiculturalism, and migration, (6) popular music in evolving urban economies. (pages 65 - 73)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 4. The Commercial Institutionalization of the Rock Club in New York - Fabian Holt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226738680.003.0004
[rock clubs;gentrification;urban sociology;CBGB;Death By Audio;Bowery Ballroom;Bowery Presents;Lower East Side;bohemianism;self, community, and the urban condition]
This chapter examines evolving models of the rock club within the wider process of gentrification in New York City. It argues that different models of the rock club have evolved in the city’s history, but that an overall shift can be identified from the small and informal clubson the Lower East Side in the 1970s and 1980s, which were institutions of neobohemian neighborhood scenes, to the neighborhood’s now-dominant model of the commercial indie concert theater governed by the corporate concert industry, larger media markets, and by a new condition of urban life. The era of scenes is gone. The analysis is organized into sections on the rock field’s history within neighborhood transformations. The chapter begins in the ethnographic present of the early 2010s with the Brooklyn warehouse scene. Promoter Todd Patrick is a focal point in this analysis. The second section analyzes the genealogy of the field and the club’s evolution in the Lower East Side scene of the 1970s, with promoter Hilly Kristal’s CBGB as a focal point. The subsequent sections analyze the corporatization of the rock club, focusing on the indie rock club concert theater developed by Michael Swier and the company the Bowery Presents. (pages 74 - 122)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 5. How Did the Rock Club Evolve in Europe? - Fabian Holt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226738680.003.0005
[rock clubs;cultural policy;nonprofit values;industrial organization of clubs;political economy of clubs;Melkweg;Ancienne Belgique;Vega;for profit values]
This chapter highlights the role of public policy as a local variable in the institutionalization of the rock club in Europe. It examines a particular policy development in northwest Continental Europe, focusing on the capital cities of Amsterdam, Brussels, and Copenhagen. These cities are peripheral to Berlin, Paris, and London and had somewhat small and insular national popular music industries until the 2000s. The chapter argument is that city governments helped establish the rock club as a central institution of popular music culture in a non-profit value system, but that city governments eventually stimulated the club’s transformation into the for-profit value system dominated by the corporate live music industry. The analysis is organized into a comparative case study of the three club organizations Melkweg, Ancienne Belgique, and Vega. The critiques evolving from the analysis provide arguments and suggestions, in the concluding section, for future approaches to the area. The general suggestion is the development of an institution with a stronger commitment to public values of music and performance culture, such as difference and social justice. This could be achieved by subsidizing more socially diverse organizations and by giving higher priority to resources for cultural labor. (pages 123 - 154)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 6. A Worldview History of Music Festivals - Fabian Holt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226738680.003.0006
[music festivals;cultural festivity;festivals and modernity;Festival of American Folklife;French Revolution;bourgeois festival tradition;festivity in totalitarianism;Lower Rhine Festival;World Festival of Youth and Students]
Chapter 6 lays some of the foundations for the book’s festival chapters. It begins by exploring the relevance of music festivals to cultural research and particularly to the social study of music, with the aim of stimulating reflexivity about knowledge interests in music and festival scholarship. The festival chapters analyze the transformation of the pop music festival since the 1980s, but they also advance a critical historical approach that sheds new light on the broader history of music festivals, organized life, and cultural festivity in modernity. This chapter develops the concept of the festival as an institution, focusing on its role in instituting and celebrating the worldviews of urban and media cultures in modernity. This conception is grounded in symbolic anthropology and sociology. The investigation into festival history is then initiated with an exploration of the worldviews that defined the music festival’s international history up to World War II, emphasizing humanist worldviews. The pioneering bourgeois music festival traditions in Europe evolved from the church into the secular sphere of civic associations and were influenced by Enlightenment ideas of authentic cultural citizenship. This idea of civic, social becoming through cultural festivity has remained a core mythical dimension of the institution. (pages 157 - 182)
This chapter is available at:
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Chapter 7. The Evolution of Anglophone Global Culture - Fabian Holt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226738680.003.0007
[popular music festivals;cultural festivity;happening;hippie festival movement;cultural globalization;Roskilde Festival;Sónar Festival;Lollapalooza Berlin;festivals on YouTube;postwar metropolitan scenes]
Chapter 7 examines the evolution of worldviews in the large popular music festival in the context of postwar cultural developments in the metropolitan centers of the United States and the United Kingdom and the wider media flows from these countries into Europe. The pop festival crystallized in the hippie movement in the mid-1960s, drawing inspiration from the culture of the happening in metropolitan arts scenes. The hippie festival movement declined in the early 1970s, and the festival did not become institutionalized as an annual event in a stable organizational field until the 1980s. The chapter analyzes how the worldviews of European festivals changed in this process. In Europe, the large pop festival became an institution of Anglophone global culture and a vehicle of a hegemonic form of globalization in the Global North. The chapter introduces a distinction between two variations, the broad pop festival and the niche festival, and illustrates how they have adapted differently to cultural worldviews promoted by transnational cultural industries and internet corporations. The examples include the first hippie festivals and “love rallies,” the Watts Summer Festival, and the Roskilde, Sziget, Nashestvie, Sónar, Iceland Airwaves, and Lollapalooza Berlin festivals. (pages 183 - 219)
This chapter is available at:
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Chapter 8. Three Industry Evolutions That Changed Festival Culture - Fabian Holt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226738680.003.0008
[festivals and commodity markets;commercial exploitation;history of EDM;EDM pop festivals;concert industry;festivals and cities;festivals and social media;Richard Peterson;Coachella;Tomorrowland]
This chapter provides substance to the book’s argument that the festival industry has played a major role in transforming festival culture over the past few decades. The profiles and trajectories of festivals have increasingly been shaped by the hegemonic logics and structures of international corporations and markets. The chapter analyzes core systemic changes in the fields of large popular music festivals in the United States and Europe and expands the discussion into electronic dance music festivals. It begins by introducing theory of industry-driven popularization of cultural forms before outlining three distinct evolutions in the festival industry’s conception of the festival: The festival has evolved into (1) a platform for the concert industry, (2) a generic event for mainstream society, and (3) a social media event. These institutional evolutions—involving a new relation to city governments and general commodity markets, such as fashion and advertising—have changed the functions of festivals in the cultural industries but also in musical culture and society more broadly. Popular music festivals have reached wider audiences, but also become further removed from their origins in urban scenes and from the civic values of the festival institution in modernity. (pages 220 - 238)
This chapter is available at:
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Chapter 9. Festival Video and Social Media - Fabian Holt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226738680.003.0009
[festival video;festival cinematography;festivals and social media;media events;festival marketing and consumption;EDM pop festivals;Tomorrowland]
Chapter 9 introduces a conceptual approach to the study of festival media culture and examines the impact of social media marketing on festival culture in the 2010s. The chapter focuses on Tomorrowland, which is one of the largest EDM pop festivals in the world and originates in developments in Belgium since the early 1990s. The argument is that the EDM festival industry created a new type of festival cinematography, specifically marketing videos for social media consumption, which transformed the image of EDM pop festivals and the outlook and functions of the festivals themselves. By developing the production and distribution of video into marketing practices, the festival industry commercialized the social media culture of festivals and developed video practices into more professional forms for the purpose of growing consumption and increasing sponsorship revenues. The festival videos created eroticized and glamorous images of EDM pop festivals in a generational worldview of summer festivity. The videos, moreover, were incorporated into the annual cycle of festival consumption, with a ritual function in relation to the festival event. The industry developed a focus on creating consumer desire before the event, boosting excitement during the event, and stimulating interest in further consumption after the event. (pages 239 - 261)
This chapter is available at:
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Chapter 10. Conclusion - Fabian Holt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226738680.003.0010
[corporate capitalism;sociology of science;Jürgen Habermas;Helga Nowotny;Beyoncé Knowles;Martha Nussbaum;Coachella 2018]
The concluding chapter summarizes and reflects on the book’s main insights and methodology. It begins by summarizing the interpretative steps in the theoretical framework and how the investigations of individual institutions led to insights into the seasonal domains. After the discussion of the book’s main objectives, the chapter evaluates the structural changes in the conditions of popular music performance in the global north since the 1960s, with an emphasis on the live music industry boom in the 2000s. Have central popular music performance institutions become better places for this musical culture and for human experience? The larger picture emerging from the investigations motivates a discussion of political agency in the field and of alternatives to corporate capitalism. Beyoncé’s historic show at Coachella in 2018 is discussed in terms of political agency and developments in performance culture. This is followed by a discussion of the potential in moral philosophy of human growth and the good life for thinking beyond corporate capitalism. The final section reflects on the changing conditions of humanistic scholarship, interpreting this book as a product and critique of hegemonic conditions in European universities. Key intellectual figures in this chapter include Jürgen Habermas, Helga Nowotny, and Martha Nussbaum. (pages 262 - 284)
This chapter is available at:
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