News – CHIME

Welcome to our Music, Festivals, Heritage conference, Siena

May 23, 2017May 27, 2017 George McKay Leave a comment

This week the major international gathering of the CHIME project takes place, in Siena, Italy. We welcome everyone attending and contributing. Our conference, titled Music, Festivals, Heritage, seeks to explore a number of key themes, questions or problems for the field, including:

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.

Our location is the Siena Jazz Archive, which holds the most important specialised collection in Italy; it includes more than 25,000 sound and video items, over 2,000 books, and thousands of magazine issues including the only complete collection of the Musica Jazz magazine. Here is a feature in the Italian press about the conference.

On behalf of the CHIME project and the organising commitee, conference convenor Prof Walter van de Leur says:

We are hugely excited about the international conference here in historic and beautiful Siena this week, in collaboration with the Siena Jazz Archive. The conference is a major part of our EU Heritage Plus programme CHIME project. We are delighted to be hosting around 70 speakers coming from 23 countries across Europe, Canada and the US, South Africa, Colombia, and Australia. We look forward to stimulating, enjoyable and productive discussions around music, festival and heritage from the perspectives of academic research, the festival and music industries, and cultural policy.

Further information, including the daily schedule of papers and presentations, exhibition, lectures, plenary, reception, and screenings is available here, where you can also find travel information for international delegates coming via Florence and Pisa airports, for instance.

CHIME at Jazzahead!

April 23, 2016April 23, 2016 Tony Whyton Leave a comment

I’m currently in Bremen for Jazzahead!, the Trade Fair and Showcase Festival, which, over the last 11 years, has grown to become the largest international gathering of jazz organisations, promoters and artists. When I last attended the event in 2011, the trade fair was punctuated by a handful of daytime performances and an evening concert programme that showcased jazz of a particular country.

Erika Stucky with Bubbles & Bangs at the opening of jazzahead! in Bremen (c) Ingo Wagner/Messe Bremen — Erika Stucky with Bubbles & Bangs at jazzahead! (c) Ingo Wagner/Messe Bremen

This year, the partner countries remain (the opening night was Swiss jazz night) and take centre stage, however, the showcases have been expanded and the event has been ‘festivalised’ (to coin George McKay’s term) to the extent where jazz occupies venues across the city for four intensive days, with other events programmed in the weeks leading up to the event. Whilst festival events staged within the convention centre and surrounding hotels could be described as placeless in nature – as an audience member you could be in any world city – the adjoining Kulturzentrum Schlachthof offers the most interest in relation to CHIME’s objectives.

The former slaughterhouse was built in 1892 and prevented from demolition in the late 1970s. Since its transformation in the 1990s, it has become the largest cultural centre in Bremen, an impressive post-industrial venue with bars, a cafe, and an amazing performance space that is ideal for jazz and improvised music. In addition to its industrial heritage, the building is also associated with Europe’s troubled history.

In 1943, the slaughterhouse grounds were used by the Nazis in their deportation of Roma communities from Bremen to Auschwitz, where most were murdered.

A plaque was erected outside the Schlachthof in 1995 to commemorate these atrocities.

As a cultural centre, the Schlachthof engages with Bremen’s cultural heritage head on and, in this context, jazz provides the perfect vehicle both to engage with the heritage of the building literally and symbolically, to re-use the site and to energise the space. In many ways, the music works as a form of cultural palimpsest where traces of history remain but the sounds created in the venue confront the building; encouraging audiences to think about the problematic past, to reflect on the resilience of humanity and the processes of healing and renewal, and to experience the power of music in bringing people together.

How does CHIME chime? Producing an impact map

January 15, 2016February 8, 2016 George McKay Leave a comment

We want to capture in different forms ways in which the project is having impact — this can be through its collaboration between academics researchers and our parter organisations, including festival, music and sustainability / heritage groups.

For one of these we thought it would be a good idea to have a map of impact — of collaborations, relations — and to revisit this mapping exercise periodically through the project (e.g. on an annual basis) in order to visually capture its scope and spread. Click here to see the higher resolution version of our map of impact at the very start of the project.

This map is made from information gathered from project partners at our inception day event at EFG London Jazz Festival in the Royal Festival Hall in November 2015. We asked all academic partners present to identify up to three key activities, events, other projects, organisations, they were involved with in relation to the project, and to tell the rest of the room a little about each. We noted these down and subsequently produced an infographic-style version of them.

We aim to revisit and (this is our assumption…) add to this map in 2016 and again in 2017, producing a more complex version as work and collaboration takes place. Yes, more dots and curvy lines (we hope)! We anticipate that such an exercise will also illustrate the development of a project.

[Thanks to Rachel Daniel, administrator at University of East Anglia for George McKay and the Connected Communities Programme, including the Impact of Festivals project, for her work on this.]

CHIME at the European Jazz Conference

September 18, 2015November 24, 2015 Tony Whyton Leave a comment

Europe Jazz Network’s (EJN) European Jazz Conference kicks off in Budapest on 24 September. The event brings together festivals, venues, promoters and national agencies from across Europe to share good practices and to develop new initiatives and collaborations. The event will encourage debate around pan-European issues that have an impact on the arts and cultural sector and will include sessions on sustainability, professional development and education, as well as networking for seasonal festivals. There will also be a strong research focus, as the EJN builds on the work of its Strength in Numbers study and launches new initiatives around audience development and a history of European jazz.