Festival directors

CHIME CONFERENCE 25-28 May 2017 – Music, Festivals, Heritage

October 17, 2016October 17, 2016 Tony Whyton 1 Comment

CALL FOR PAPERS – CHIME Conference, Music, Festivals, Heritage

Siena Jazz Archive, Italy. 25-28 May 2017

Keynote Speaker: Professor Andy Bennett, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia

In a world where notions of culture are becoming increasingly fragmented, the contemporary festival has developed in response to processes of cultural pluralization, mobility and globalization, while also communicating something meaningful about identity, community, locality and belonging.—Andy Bennett et al, The Festivalization of Culture

From Woodstock to The Proms, from Burning Man to Montreux, music festivals have a transformative potential; they can help people connect with places and spaces in new ways and play a key role in identity formation. Festivals at their most utopian offer a fantastic space in which to dream and try another world into being. Equally, they offer opportunities for people to celebrate and engage with their cultural heritage and to re-connect with the past.

We invite submissions for Music, Festivals, Heritage, a four-day multi-disciplinary conference that brings together leading researchers across the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as festival directors, producers and programmers, to explore the relationship between music festivals and cultural heritage.

We welcome contributions that address the conference title from multiple perspectives, including heritage studies, festivals and event research, media and cultural studies, musicology, sociology, cultural theory, music analysis, history, and practice-based research. Music, Festivals, Heritage also aims to feature presentations from both researchers and industry professionals.

Conference topics include but are not restricted to:

Established and innovative uses of heritage sites and public spaces
Festival sites and cultural memory
Transformations of place: music festivals as utopian sites
Questions of music genre (e.g. jazz, opera, folk, rock, classical) and the construction of heritage at festival
Festival as dull culture: repetition, predictability, boredom
The tension between the conservation and the use of heritage sites
Festivals and cultural tourism
New models of engagement between festivals and cultural heritage
Festivals as sites that explore the relationship between tangible, intangible and digital heritage
Critical perspectives from festival programmers, producers, organisers
The mediation and representation of (heritage and) festival
Festival as exclusive community; festival as marginal space
From carnivalesque to festivalisation: theoretical approaches and questions of festival
The cultural politics of festival sites

Proposals are invited for:
• Individual contributions (20 minutes) – up to 250 words.
• Themed sessions or panel discussions – 250 words per contribution plus 250 words outlining the rationale for the session.
• 75 minute sessions in innovative formats – up to 750 words outlining the form and content of the session.

Please submit proposals (including a short biography and institutional or organisational affiliation) by email in a word document attachment to: w.vandeleur@uva.nl

The deadline for proposals is 1st December 2016; outcomes will be communicated to authors by 10 January 2017. All submissions will be considered by the conference committee:

Prof Walter van de Leur, Chair (University of Amsterdam/Conservatory of Amsterdam)
Prof Helene Brembeck (University of Gothenburg)
Prof Nicholas Gebhardt (Birmingham City University)
Dr Francesco Martinelli (Siena Jazz Archive)
Prof George McKay (University of East Anglia)
Professor Beth Perry (University of Sheffield)
Dr Loes Rusch (University of Amsterdam/BCU)
Prof Tony Whyton (Birmingham City University)
Dr Marline Lisette Wilders (University of Amsterdam/University of Groningen).

The conference forms part of the JPI Heritage Plus-funded CHIME project, a transnational research project that explores the relationship between European music festivals and cultural heritage sites. Visit www.chimeproject.eu for further information. Updates on the conference and information about travel and accommodation will be available on this site over the next few months.

CONFERENCE VENUE: SIENA JAZZ ARCHIVE

In 1988, the Siena Jazz Foundation founded the National Center for Jazz Studies “Arrigo Polillo” with its Library and Sound Archive. The Center is virtually the only specialized facility for jazz documentation and research in Italy; its serves as a reference point countrywide for students, musicians and scholars for their work. The facility is computer-based and the online catalogues are continuously updated. The Center holds the most important specialized collection in the country; the number of data included in the catalogues and the continous growth of the collections, which include more than 25.000 sound and video carriers, more than 2.000 books and thousands of magazine issues including the only complete collection of the Musica Jazz magazine put the Center on the par with the best Jazz Archives worldwide. The latest years saw important development with internal restructuration of the spaces, and with a general update of available equipment for digitization of audio and images.

From Glyndebourne to Glastonbury, festivals report now online

May 24, 2016May 24, 2016 George McKay Leave a comment

This new report about the impact of British music festivals, launched at CHIME partner Cheltenham Jazz Festival in April 2016, is now available online. We hope festival researchers and organisers will find it of use and interest. This is what some people are saying about it already:

“This report is an irrefutable qualification of the value and impact of our sector and an amazing resource for anyone involved in the organisation of a music festival.” Steve Mead, Artistic Director, Manchester Jazz Festival
“Within festivals we need and value the criticality of academic research. A report like this helps us shape, make sense, rethink what we are doing.” John Cumming OBE, Director, EFG London Jazz Festival
“This report is excellent—a pleasure to read, and I will be recommending it to my students and colleagues.” Professor Stephanie Pitts, Head of the Department of Music, University of Sheffield

The report was produced as part of The Impact of Festivals, a 12-month project funded under the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities Programme, working with research partner organisation the EFG London Jazz Festival. Professor George McKay is the Principal Investigator for the project, as well as AHRC Leadership Fellow for Connected Communities at the University of East Anglia. Dr Emma Webster is the Research Associate for the project, and co-founder and director of Live Music Exchange.

The findings are drawn from an extensive literature review of existing work in the field, from academic research to ‘grey’ policy literature, economic impact assessments to festival and industry publications. Not only that, but there is a 170-entry annotated bibliography of these outputs accessible here. We think that, taken together, the report and the annotated bibliography will be an important reference point for industry and academia alike in the future.

The report is is freely accessible here. If you would like a paper copy please contact Rachel Daniel, r.daniel@uea.ac.uk. Do let us know what you think of it!

CHIME at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival

April 30, 2016April 30, 2016 Tony Whyton 2 Comments

It’s International Jazz Day and UK members of CHIME are at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival.

Matt Brennan; Stephanie Pitts, Alison Eales and Nick Gebhardt talk about collaboration and live audiences. — Matt Brennan, Stephanie Pitts, Alison Eales & Nick Gebhardt talk about festival collaborations & audience research.

On Friday, George McKay hosted a day-long symposium on ‘Researching (Jazz) Festivals’ that included talks from leading scholars in festivals research and jazz festival directors from Cheltenham, London and Manchester festivals. Italian scholar and archivist Francesco Martinelli and CHIME’s Tony Whyton delivered keynote presentations on European jazz research and the day concluded with the launch of Emma Webster and George McKay’s ‘The Impact of Festivals’, an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded literature review that charts and critically examines existing writings on the impact of British festivals.

J-Hive

In addition to the symposium, Nick Gebhardt has been working with a team of media researchers from Birmingham City University to develop a digital heritage tool called J-Hive. J-Hive is being piloted in Cheltenham for the first time and runs from 28-30^th April. The project aims to document the experiences of different audiences at the Festival.

In putting the project together, a mobile application has been designed to allow different audiences (concert goers, musicians, promoters etc.) to send text and images to a web page where they regularly respond to, and reflect on, the music, the festival atmosphere, and the people they meet.

Through the interface, participants can follow their own posts as well as those of others participating in the project. Ultimately, J-Hive will create a collection of different festival encounters and memories that will offer insights into the festival experience, how festivals are navigated and understood, and the relationship of music to the places and spaces of the town.

Happy International Jazz Day!

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.