Lots of Planets Have a North: Remodeling Second-Tier Cities and their Music (original) (raw)
Related papers
Spaces and Networks of Musical Creativity in the City
Geography Compass, 2009
Urban geography, both material and imagined, is a crucial mediating factor in the production and consumption of music. The city provides the concrete places which offer spaces for musical creativity. While certain spaces such as recording studios are specifically organised for this purpose, music is produced in many spaces, from the bedroom, garage or home studio, to community and youth centres, to street corners and clubs. Cities also sustain networks that foster and support musical creativity. These networks come together in locales of creativity and production to find fixity in the concrete spaces of the city. At the same time the networks are fluid, with musical knowledge moving within and between cities through the mobility of skilled creatives and new technologies. A growing body of geographical literature is attempting to foreground the spatial in music studies by focusing on local scenes, musical production, and the particularity of certain places. This article aims to provide an overview of current geographical research and debates on music, with an explicit focus on the role of urban space in musical creativity, and on the musically creative networks at work within and between cities.
Live Music and Urban Landscape: Mapping the Beat in Liverpool
2012
This paper explores the nature and significance of live music as urban culture by focusing on a pilot project that involved creating digital, interactive maps featuring sites of music-making in Liverpool. The first of the paper's three main sections introduces the pilot project and the wider project that informed it. The second and longest section highlights three particular challenges encountered during the mapping process, and explains how addressing those challenges drew attention to the scope and distribution of live music in urban environments, and its embedding in urban space and time, and in urban experience. The final part of the paper reflects on the mapping process and argues that live music contributes in distinctive and dynamic ways to the commemoration and characterisation of cities, and that metaphors of landscape and circulation can be usefully combined to help conceptualise live music as urban culture.
Rock Landmark at Risk": Popular Music, Urban Regeneration, and the Built Urban Environment
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2007
At the end of 2005 two British newspaper articles caught my attention. In the first the Belgian city of Ostend was described as "a place that, like so many European cities, looks like pop music never quite happened," while the second was about plans to convert Parr Street recording studios in Liverpool into private residences. 1 Both articles prompted me to think about the relationship between music and the built environment. How is that environment is characterized through popular music culture, and in turn how is popular music culture affected by environmental change? In order to address these questions, this article uses Parr Street Studios as an illustrative case study and draws upon ethnographic research that I have conducted with others on aspects of popular music making in Liverpool. 2 The first part of the article considers in micro-sociological detail how music makers 3 at Parr Street engage with the built environment through routine, everyday social activities and events. The second part situates that process in the context of recent developments in the global political economy and the changes to the urban environment that they have provoked. Throughout the article the discussion highlights music's role and significance in the production and characterization of place. Popular music has often been promoted as a symbol of global culture. It is a fluid, traveling culture and that is digitally produced and disseminated through transnational networks. At the same time, however, it is also made within specific local and material settings and it is commonly connected or fixed to place. 4
Music Culture and Urban Life. Build and Inhabit the City from the Sound
UNESCO City of Music - Kirsheir International Music Symposium. Ed. Fenomen (Turkey), pp. 485-496, 2022
The experience of art always comes with a utopian tension. The source of this tension is the binary dimension of artistic work: while reflecting on the world, it also speaks to us about non-actualized possibilities. In the case of music, its degree of abstraction, multiple textualities, and the indefinite nature of sound itself, favor the construction of a thought based on what reality could be, and not so much about what it is. Listening to music allows us to open and access possible worlds in everyday life. From a critical perspective which begins with the assessment of existing societies in general as unsustainable community models, this text explores the functions and creative possibilities of music and acoustic signals in various contexts of the city. To do this, an interpretation of reality as a plurality of worlds and sound cultures is proposed. In this sense, listening emerges as an act of creation and, at the same time, of ethical-political, plural, and participatory commitment, which decisively influences how we build communities and inhabit our space-time reality. Thus, the ways of listening and inhabiting combine as transformative actions from which to reconfigure the sound as a commonplace and, with it, open new horizons in everyday life.
Context
Documenting cultural life in contemporary Australia seems a fraught and daunting task, if not for the one-sided narratives so consistently reinforced through early scholarship, then at least due to the geographical vastness and diverse population that makes generalisation so difficult. The arrival of Music City Melbourne: Urban Culture, History and Policy is thus welcomed for its resolute specificity and unique historical lens. The book narrates and delineates popular music in Melbourne from the 1950s until the mid-2000s, exploring how it has shaped, and been shaped by, cultural policy and migration. The text is a much-needed contribution to scholarship on both Australian cultural policy, which focuses predominantly on the fine arts, and Australian popular music that in general fails to account for the historical contributions made by marginalised groups. Indeed, the authors describe Music City Melbourne’s historical emphases and use of subtly critical language (most notably, their ...
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 2015
This special section of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies engages with the idea of activating a ‘sonic turn’ in urban cultural studies scholarship, in part through the evocation of the paradigm of critical and participatory citizenship, as well as through critical approaches to understanding how sound and music are implicated in the texture of a city. This work is therefore informed by theorizations of topdown and of bottom-up approaches to engagements with, and representation of, the city, through sonic and musical means. Drawing on a variety of disciplinary approaches, including urban ethnomusicology, urban sociology, cultural geography, acoustic ecology and soundscapes studies, this introductory article examines what is meant by ‘the sonic turn’ as it relates to sound and music studies and how and why this should matter to the study of cities and of the urban experiences of citizens in the broadest sense. This introduction also summarizes aspects of the five papers in this co...
Introduction (Musical Performance and the Changing City 2013)
When the Wall came down, the size of the city doubled overnight. There was a lot more space, and much of it was unregulated. There was a joy and excitement in the population that energized the music, and the music became so central to Berlin. It coalesced with the advent of an explicitly electronic music, a new music, a new culture of the present and future.