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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.

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.

This chapter focuses on one of the most fundamental sociocultural determinants of creative activities: ideology. Drawing from ethnomusicological ethnographic research, it examines differing cultural belief systems, values, and attitudes that may restrict, inhibit, encourage, or liberate musical creativity. It presents six case studies that demonstrate widely varying beliefs and conventions concerning musical creativity. They are: Venda traditional music from South Africa; pre-1970s Suya ceremonial music from Mato Grosso, Brazil; Western Classical and Romantic art music as studied and performed in Western Europe and North America in the late 20th century; American post-revival folk music; Finnish contemporary folk music; and festival music of the Aymara-speaking indigenous people from Conima, Peru.

This chapter provides a fresh perspective on the musical world of Stalinist East Germany, and argues that the vibrant soundscape was marked by the hopes and desires of both composers and the audience as well as by directives from cultural officials. Beginning with a brief discussion of expectations for musical compositions under Socialist Realism, it explores the rich array of music festivals in the post-war period, from prominent events in Berlin to those organized in smaller towns and the countryside. Concluding with an examination of Estradenkonzerte, or stage revues, the chapter asserts that the soundscape of the GDR was a negotiated project that helped to create a new socialist identity.

Arnold Schoenberg once spoke famously of his invention of ‘the method of composition with twelve tones related only to one another’, as the discovery of ‘something which will assure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years’. How did the generally inclusive habits of composers in German-speaking countries in the eighteenth century, who did not hesitate to adopt diverse musical styles from other countries in Europe, turn into something called German music in the nineteenth century that was decidedly exclusive? And who were its inventors? This chapter argues that German music took its bearings from non-German countries in a spirit of assimilation or opposition — and vice versa. Public ritual and predictable cycles most memorably marked by German music began in Germany in the nineteenth century with the inauguration of the annual Lower Rhine Music Festivals founded in the late 1810s. The marked suitability of German music to do cultural work in the name of the past in order to stabilise uncertain life in the present is not without precedent in Britain too.

Music festivals mattered to the larger development of American live music along multiple fronts in the two decades following the founding of the Newport Jazz Festival. Most saliently, festivals helped to push the business of live music more and more toward large-scale production, laying the groundwork for the arena and stadium rock economy. Because they so often had an aura of idealism surrounding them, however, music festivals could never be reduced to strictly commercial ventures. The combination of scale and singularity gave festivals the aura they would come to possess and made them flash points for contests over cultural values that coursed through the musical styles put on stage. This chapter traces the development of US music festivals from the establishment of the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, to the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, and then into the era of the rock festival in the late 1960s. In jazz and folk alike—and in rock, where the influence of both would loom large—festivals came to stand for a host of tensions that characterized the social role of popular music in the post-war era.

This chapter traces key events in the history of radio broadcasting and new music festivals up to 1954, when John Cage first visited Germany and performed with pianist David Tudor at the Donaueschingen festival and in Cologne. It explains that within a few years after the war, West German radio broadcasting became free of political or commercial sponsorship and took control of all aspects of their music programming. It also describes how radio in West Germany encouraged the development of an autonomous contemporary music development during the post-war years.

This chapter and the next cover the period from 1968 to 2010, beginning with the massacre and Olympic Games in Mexico City. Framed by President Echeverría's (1970–1976) populist style of governance using folkloric nationalism, discussion centers on the role of the Dance of the Old Men as promoted through staged displays in European festival tours and Mexico City events, organized through FONADAN, Radio Educación, and The National Museum of Anthropology, by individuals including Josefina Lavalle, Mario Kuri-Aldana, and Marcelo Torreblanco. Discussing tourist initiatives in Michoacán, focus is on the development of The Old Men and Night of the Dead in Morelia and Lake Pátzcuaro, specifically dealing with the Festivals of Music and Dance on all the islands and in Tzintzuntzan; the experiential encounter on Janitzio; and the role of newspaper articles and photos, and TV crews.

This chapter makes a case study of the Warsaw Autumn’s founding and first season. It argues that the 1956 concerts, which coincided with the political upheaval of the Polish October Revolution, offered a first answer to the question of what it would mean for a music festival in socialist Poland to be “contemporary” as well as “international” during the Thaw. As they crafted the 1956 Warsaw Autumn, festival participants were constructing an institutional paradigm that still depended on interwar patterns of cultural contact and Stalinist-era practices of state investment in the arts, but also transformed the art world in which elite Polish composers worked. The moves the Warsaw Autumn’s first participants made not only reflected what was possible in mid-1950s Poland: these actions also created a framework for the future.

The link between alternative film production and rock culture continued in the subgenre of the music festival documentary, which came into being through the direct cinema documentary movement. The transition from the recording studio to the live stage was a defining one for rock culture at the end of the 1960s, and the aesthetics of presenting dynamic concert performances—communicated widely by audio and moving image representations of concerts—displayed ideals of rock authenticity. Exploring four feature documentary projects organized around the countercultural space of the rock festival, my third chapter demonstrates how emergent means of nonfiction film production shaped the onscreen spectacle of a rock musician performing live onstage. Through concert documentaries, a rock star no longer had to go to the studio lot to appear onscreen; instead, their stage labor could be preserved and extended through new camera and sound recording technologies. However, while the technologies (and filmmakers’ philosophies) that informed direct cinema seemed to offer a uniquely uncompromised means for representing rock culture onscreen, the production histories of concert documentaries also reveal how rock stars’ control over their own representation was not distributed equally, ranging from the option of refusing to be filmed to the power to determine whether a film project even saw the light of day. Produced in the absence of major film studios, arrangements of power between filmmakers, rock stars, and festival organizers existed on a case-by-case basis, and rock stars operated on a spectrum between observed subjects and controlling gatekeepers of moving image depictions of their performances.

This chapter describes the story of Queenie Pie, Ellington's last theater work as told by the author of this book, who worked as an assistant to Ellington when it was a yet-to-be produced one-hour “opera comique” for National Educational Television. The production was abandoned after Ellington died but re-emerged ten years later as a full evening musical with a new libretto by George Wolfe, with the author directing the Ellington orchestra in the pit of the Music Theater Festival of Philadelphia. The chapter also offers insights into Ellington's working methods.

This chapter uses the British contralto Dame Clara Butt as a case study through which to critique notions of celebrity, as well as definitions of the prima donna. Drawing attention to venues in which opera was heard away from the opera house and other “stages” on which operatically trained female singers appeared—principally the concert, music festival, society salon, and drawing-room soirée—the chapter examines the claims that such women who performed outside the theater might have had to the status of prima donna. This chapter evokes the centrality of vocal performance in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, a culture in which the genres of ballad, cantata, and oratorio were prized as highly as opera, and female singers’ aspirations to public acclaim and a professional career on the lyric stage were fraught with ideological constraints.

This chapter explores how the governors of British Guiana during the 1950s had to navigate several significant international and domestic realities. They had to implement imperial policies related to decolonization and the “realpolitik” of the Cold War. India's political independence in 1947 signaled the end of the British Empire and the emergence of the Commonwealth; so for British Guiana, the question of independence was not if but when. Sir Charles Campbell Woolley, governor at the time, was engaged in preparing the colony for political independence, including the development of a more inclusive constitution. As a result of the state of organizing capacity in the colony's political and cultural realms, things moved quickly on all fronts. Music was associated with all of them, most evidently when the first national festival of music was held in July 1952—the British Guiana Festival of Music.

This chapter surveys American music's role during the initial period of occupation and reconstruction up to the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany and the official division of East and West Germany. It mentions American composers who contributed to the presence of American music on the European continent, paying particular attention to Henry Cowell who was the one of the most adventurous composers of his generation. It explains that while mainstream contemporary American music received little or no attention at new music festivals during the period, tentative awareness of something radical began to spread on the radio and at other music venues.

Chapter Seven deals with the period known as the Golden Age (1940 to 1968), contextualizing this with an overview of state policies regarding indigenismo, folklore and folklórico, and the role of government institutions such as INAH and INI. Two films, The Three Caballeros (Disney) and Maclovia, and the book A Treasury of Mexican Folkways are the focus of analysis in considering national and international dissemination. Discussion of the Lake Pátzcuaro region encompasses the burgeoning array of events using the Dance of the Old Men for local, private and political occasions; the initiation of hotel performances; the Festival of Music and Dance for Night of the Dead; and the role of the pedagogical institute CREFAL Finally, didactic and pedagogical regional dance publications and events, and the influence of the Ballet Folklórico de México are discussed.

The letters sent to American composer and pianist Eugene Hemmer allow Dring to speak in her own voice for the first time since the early diaries, documents that allow a glimpse into her musical as well as her personal life. There is a brief discussion of The Florida International Music Festival, which featured the US premiere of her most popular instrumental composition, the Trio for Flute, Oboe, and Piano, a work which provides a splendid example of her later musical style. Other works that are discussed include The Real Princess, a ballet written for Mari Bicknell’s Cambridge Ballet Workshop, and four song cycles: Dedications, Love and Time, Five Betjeman Songs, and Four Night Songs. Also documented are the first professional recordings of her compositions and the spiritual journey she undertook in her last years, the latter illustrated by talks that she gave at the Centre for Spiritual and Psychological Studies. Finally, her sudden death from a brain aneurysm is related through letters of Roger Lord and other documents, followed by her memorial service and concerts in her honor at the RCM.

As music festivals are a space apart from everyday lives, both musicians and audience members can feel freer to engage in political expression at them. After describing politically themed folk and rock festivals from the 1960s to the ’80s, the chapter discusses three antinuclear music festival series with different communication approaches—informational, where arguments are presented, or experiential, where an immersive environment opens one’s mind to different points of view. Initiated by Sakamoto Ryūichi, the No Nukes series takes an informational approach, using videos between acts, program notes, and NGO booths to make antinuclear arguments. The Atomic Café at Fuji Rock Festival is a separate, informational space within one of Japan’s largest music festivals. In contrast, the Project Fukushima Festival refrains from explicit antinuclear statements; festivalgoers experience Fukushima by participating in activities. Of the three festivals, Project Fukushima enjoyed the widest media coverage because it appeared to be supporting Fukushima rather than railing against nuclear power.

This chapter discusses Roy Hart, the Roy Hart Theater, and the roots of extended vocalism; widening of vocal range and inclusion of non-traditional vocal sounds and techniques; the American monologists; Meredith Monk, her techniques, vocal esthetic, and music-theater works; other well-known performers; and Quog Music Theater and the American Music Theater Festival.