February 2016

The (Re-)Use of Cultural Heritage Sites: the Concept of Memory in Visitors’ Experiences

February 17, 2016February 17, 2016 Marlieke Wilders Leave a comment

A position paper (no. 3) presented to the CHIME project team meeting, Amsterdam Conservatory, February 4 2016

Elsewhere, in a research project with the title From Working Space to Theatre Space: the user perspective, I am working on the question ‘How adaptive re-use of heritage sites can re-signifie the various values and meanings connected to these sites and the cultural events that take place there.’ With the help of audience research I aim at gaining insight in the relationship between the perception of (in this particular case industrial) architectural theatre spaces and the perception of theatrical events hosted there. It becomes clear that an important aspect in visitors’ experiences when it comes to cultural heritage sites, is cultural memory. My results from focus groups illustrate that memory can be present at different levels and take up different roles in audience experiences. The responses of audience members in the above mentioned audience research indicate that memory can become part of the experience for example by:

Having direct memories of the place;
Knowing the place as (an important) part of history;
Being reminded of similar situations;
The place symbolizing an era;
The place activating related memories;
The place activating the imagination;
The place provoking curiosity.

It seems that the relationship visitors have to the place or location is an important factor in determining the role that cultural memory can or will play, and this also goes for the attitude audiences have towards the art form concerned. So, when studying the intertwining relationship between jazz festivals and heritage locations, it becomes important to gain insight in questions like:

Are audiences familiar with the place and its history?
How familiar are audiences with the historical narratives attached to jazz?
What values do audiences attach to the location/landscape and to jazz music?

It is doubtful that a lot of festival organizations will have any data available concerning these questions, since even more plain audience statistics do not seems to be generally available. CHIME might have a task here, starting with the selected case studies.

It would also be interesting to confront these questions with festival organizations’ mission & vision towards the relationship between music and place and audiences and place (if any), to evaluate up to what extend festival organizations are aware of their potential and their actual impact concerning the (re)-use of heritage.

For example, what kind of audiences is targeted at?

(Yearly) returning audiences?
Incidental festival audiences?
Local audiences?
Tourism targeted audiences?
Pluriform audiences?

A place for jazz: Resounding the landscape at music festivals

February 15, 2016November 8, 2016 Loes Rusch Leave a comment

A position paper (no. 2) presented to the CHIME project team meeting, Amsterdam Conservatory, February 4 2016

In WP3, CHIME explores ways in which music and music festivals can provide new models for thinking about cultural heritage through an exploration of festival landscapes. It does so, among other things, by looking at three case studies, all of which are selected specifically for their engagement with different types of cultural heritage: North Sea Jazz Festival Curaçao, the SummerJazzCycleTour, and Jazz on the Waves. In this position statement I [Loes Rusch] propose a further exploration of music and music festivals as 1) practices of cultural heritage and 2) as a promotional tool for the protection and preservation of natural cultural heritage sites.

While the North Sea Jazz Festival Curaçao raises questions of the Netherlands’ colonial past and the ways in which different identities are negotiated through festivals, the SummerJazzCycleTour and Jazz on the Waves are particularly interesting because of its different approaches towards the re-use of typical Dutch landscapes and historical buildings.

The SummerJazzCycleTour, which celebrates its 30^th anniversary this year, takes place in the province of Groningen in the north-eastern part of the Netherlands and makes its audiences cycle through the Reitdiep, an agricultural area with canals dug as early as the first half of the thirteenth century. Jazz on the Waves takes places on the island of Texel in the Wadden Sea, an intertidal zone in the south-eastern part of the North Sea, which is one of the world’s seas whose coastline has been most modified by humans, via a system of dikes and causeways on the mainland and low-lying coastal islands. In 2009, this area became part of UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

Jazz and cultural heritage

The relationship between music or music festivals and cultural heritage is extensively studied, mostly in the area of popular music. The focus of these studies is mostly on the practice of music as cultural heritage, or as defined in a 2014 study by Amanda Brandellero and Susanne Janssen as “the preservation, exhibition, education and remembrance” of music, in many cases as supported and promoted by national and local public heritage institutions, often in connection with spatial planning and cultural tourism (Brandellero and Janssen 2014, 18).

Festival director Johan Gijsen on Le Guess Who?

February 13, 2016February 15, 2016 Loes Rusch Leave a comment

A presentation held by festival director Johan Gijsen (Le Guess Who?) during the CHIME launch event and reception, Amsterdam Conservatory, February 4 2016.

To kick-off the Dutch CHIME launch, we invited Felix Schlarmann (Jazzfest, Amsterdam) and Johan Gijsen (Le Guess Who?, Utrecht), two young and innovative festival directors who have recently enriched the Dutch festival landscape with two distinct music festivals. We asked them to engage with some of CHIME’s research questions and discuss how these play out in the day-to-day reality of their festival. In which ways, for example, does the place of event impact the festival’s program and music, and what does it take to start and develop a successful and sustainable festival?

Transcript of the presentation by Johan Gijsen:

Why another festival?

It was 2007, when childhood friend and co-founder Bob van Heur and I felt that the most interesting developments taking place were in the periphery of pop music; where artists that don’t bother to play by the fixed rules and grids of pop music determinedly go their own direction. In the Dutch media and on national radio and TV was little or no room for precisely these interesting movements in pop music. Here we grumbled about among ourselves and figured that it was better to take the initiative here. We shared the enthusiasm and passion of the scene in Montreal at that time; Arcade Fire and Patrick Watson experimented with new sounds; there was an interesting almost incestuous scene surrounding Wolf Parade with its many side projects; impressive horn player Colin Stetson just moved there and the dark, experimental Constellation Records released Godspeed You Black Emperor’s beautiful albums with sounds that we had never heard.

At the end of November 2007 first edition of Le Guess Who? took place on two consecutive evenings in Tivoli, Utrecht. On the poster were 11 acts, which all came from Canada. Since then Le Guess Who? has developed into a four-day international festival for independent and innovative quality music in the city of Utrecht. Besides authentic or urgent pop music, the festival also presents non-western music, avant-garde, folk, jazz, ambient, psychedelica and contemporary music. Le Guess Who? interlinks these non-popular genres, and presents them in an easily accessible way: in the setting of an adventurous but approachable pop festival. It thus takes them out of the niche to serve a much larger universal audience.

Why Jazz (and not, say, Rock or Folk) Music for Thinking about Festival and Cultural Heritage?

February 8, 2016November 6, 2019 George McKay Leave a comment

A position paper (no. 1) presented to the CHIME project team meeting, Amsterdam Conservatory, February 4 2016

Here are the opening sentences of the EU Heritage+ joint call grant application that the project team wrote in 2014, and which formed the basis of CHIME’s successful submission.

‘What an amazing experience, the clash of seeing Miles Davis in the Roman amphitheatre during the Nice Jazz Festival. The ancient stones and arches are re-sounded, the music somehow more resonant, old and modern at the same time. I’ll never forget that.’ This first-hand experience of a European festival-goer provided the initial inspiration for CHIME.

I (George McKay) want to interrogate the cultural space we have chosen a little further, which I hope will throw further light on my question, why look at jazz (and not, say, rock or folk) festivals?

There was a nice line tweeted on the CHIME Twitter feed recently, a quotation from Chris Goddard’s book Jazz Away From Home that sought to describe the experience of jazz in southern Europe, as a music ‘cut[ting] through the warm, humid Mediterranean night like a chainsaw through cheese’ (1979). Is jazz more cheese wire than chainsaw, do you think, though? If we want chainsaw music we need really to go to something more industrial—or agricultural—starting with the excessive, aggressive culture of rock music. Rock does after all sometimes feature a chainsaw: see southern US rock band Jackyl, who still finish each live set with their signature song ‘The lumberjack’ (the video is great and indeed a little Pythonesque, do have a watch) in which the lead singer does a chainsaw solo (though not through cheese). (Here is a pressing question for the New Jazz Studies: has a jazz band featured a chainsaw solo, ever?)

So, for questions of the clash or disjunction between heritage, festival site and popular music, the jarring re-sounding when both our ears double-take in stereo, rock music would be very good to think about. Though its history as a popular music has been shorter than folk or jazz (50-60 years as opposed to 100-120, very approximately)—does that mean its heritage is reduced?—rock music can supply a very powerful shock of the new, not least through its characteristic of being superloud, via a practice of extreme volume and a competitive rather than functional culture of amplification. (Even to the extent of rock deafening its bands and fans: McKay 2013, chapter 4.) And its use of chainsaws.

In order to pursue the comparison with Miles in the amphitheatre in Nice, consider an archetypal rock festival-style concert / documentary film, Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (concert 1971, film 1972). (See film extract at end of blog below.)

Filmed with the band playing live, over 4 days in October
Used their full and extensive tour amplification
Performances were filmed in front of no audience, an empty auditorium (rationale: in part a reaction against festival films like Woodstock, which had contained so many shots of festival-goers, the crowd)
It’s a slow, spacey music the band plays, with some slow and lengthy camera focuses in/out and pans (2-3 minutes)
Located in the ancient Roman amphitheatre and with a backdrop of Vesuvius
Some key resonances: volcano/volume; block architecture of amphitheatre/PA/amp stacks
Grandeur of the location fits with the grandeur (or pretentiousness) of Pink Floyd’s musical vision and its filming. (To return to the comedic end of rock, we could think here instead of Spinal Tap and their Stonehenge stage.)

Or consider Glastonbury Festival, originating at much the same time as the Pink Floyd concert (legendary Glastonbury Fayre was held in 1971, also filmed). Near Glastonbury, in the deep green English countryside, there is the invention of tradition and what I’m calling the instant ancient: mist and myth, a stage in the shape of the Great Pyramid of Giza, set on a ley line, with a crystal on top, a Neolithic stone circle—built around 1990. Read More