ABSTRACT
Music festivals offer a valuable glimpse into the state of the current musical landscape. Through them we can follow the career trajectories of particular artists, spot genre trends and divergences, identify connections and differences, and make sense of emerging scenes. Equally, music festivals lay bare the continued inequalities that exist;inclusions and absences are starkly visible in festival line-ups, and marketing and communications provide inspiration for public debate and the fuel for change. For scholars, festivals offer a context through which to examine the complex politics of music, condensed into a specific time and place yet engaging with global trends and debates, with international artists and audiences, with the past and the future, all within the economic and social context of the music industries. From spring 2020, we could clearly plot through music festivals the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on live music as we have previously known it, the government-driven lockdowns and social distancing regulations bringing an abrupt halt to live performance and threatening the existence of many music festivals. This period of disruption extended also to the outreach, education, artist development, fundraising, partnership working, and overall strategies of festival teams, to include festival-driven and global attempts to address significant issues relating to access and diversity within the music industries. This article explores gender politics from the stage of UK jazz festivals and considers the momentum of gender-focused initiatives during a period of international crisis.
ABSTRACT
Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, live music spaces - and the practices which produce them as economically viable - have found themselves in crisis. In spite of a UK government announcement on the 25th of July 2020 which allocated £2.25 million to support 150 music venues across the country, the processes of allocation, the conditions under which this emergency funding is allocated, and capacity to secure medium-to-long-term sustainability of the live music industry in the UK, remains unclear. In this paper, we present a Lefebvrian analysis of live music, highlighting the complex ways in which space is produced and consumed within a live music environment. By extending this framing to consider Lefebvre's conceptualisation of dominated and appropriated space, we argue that the economic viability of live music stems from its spatiality, and that ongoing responses to the crisis require greater sensitivity to the spatial practices of music production and consumption. © 2021 International Association for the Study of Popular Music. All Rights Reserved.