Abstract
Festivals have an important - if undervalued - position in Europe's cultural ecology, with their dynamic and synergetic relationship to spaces and cultural sites. Drawing on the findings of the JPI project ‘Cultural Heritage and Improvised Music in European Festivals’ (CHIME), this chapter identifies how cultural heritage themes play out in different European festivals today. We identify how the three themes of ‘improvising’, ‘marketizing’ and ‘sounding’ resonate through national contexts and case studies, and offer prospects for future research and practice. Finally, we develop a framework for locating jazz festivals, and festivals more broadly, in relation to wider debates about cultural heritage and sustainable development, and set out key proposals around festivals as integrated sites for understanding tangible-intangible entanglements.
Highlights
Festivals have an important – if undervalued – position in Europe’s cultural ecology, with their dynamic and synergetic relationship to spaces and cultural sites
CHIME explored how music plays a key role in the sonic refiguring of the urban and rural landscapes, and feeds directly into issues linked to conservation and use, cultural tourism, sustainability, urban regeneration and community engagement
We produced a typology of festivals and cultural heritage sites and identified how cultural heritage themes play out in different European festivals today (McKay 2018a, 2018b; Whyton 2018)
Summary
Festivals have an important – if undervalued – position in Europe’s cultural ecology, with their dynamic and synergetic relationship to spaces and cultural sites. As part of their study, the CHIME team interviewed audiences, organizers and volunteers in order to get a sense of the relationship between music and place, of the feeling of belonging among returning fans, and to develop insights into the tensions at play between the festival experience and the rural heritage location. A diverse blend of traditional qualitative research methods and creative interventions has provided a rich data set for transnational reflection which reveals fresh insights into the landscape of jazz festivals, thematic lenses through which we can interrogate jazz festivals in their specific spatial context and wider questions over the value of festivals in relation to cultural heritage and sustainable urban development
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