Since the beginning of the 2000s and the record industry crisis, live music has triggered attention from various sectors (economic, technological, political and intellectual), causing a severe inflation of discourses and narratives about its authenticity and new economy. Fabian Holt has been involved in this dynamic through several decisive academic contributions and professional activities related to festivals. In this book, he looks back at these numerous narratives, not without a (self-)critical eye. This is the first and greatest merit of the book, as it not only offers an overview of the many discourses on live music, but also questions the meaning of this renewed interest. The second great merit is that it proposes a real theorisation of live music, and questions its nature in depth when many works are content with an industrial, depoliticised, superficial conception. Therefore, the book's premise is to reintegrate concerts and festivals into a broader culture of performance, and to analyse the forms of institutionalisation that govern them in the European and American context.
This context is marked by a significant form of commercial institutionalisation, partly linked to the arrival of digital media and urban regeneration strategies through the creative economy. It reinforces a particular cultural hegemony of the urban white middle classes, characterised by pop/rock and electronic dance music (EDM) repertoires, and particular collective music listening practices or ‘rituals’ (for instance, in concert halls rather than in DIY venues, or in massive and Disneyland-like festivals rather than in community gatherings). In this sense, ‘live music’ embodies this commercial dynamic rather than a particular essence of public musical performance. For example, Holt focuses on two major figures in the commercial institutionalisation of musical performance: the rock club and the EDM/pop festival. In a nutshell, the rock club refers to the emergence of festive venues for the young middle classes in previously marginalised urban areas, which slowly erases the quasi-esoteric and communitarian nature of underground music gatherings and favours a more professional and disciplined experience of pop/rock music in gentrified concert halls. The festival is more dependent on seasonality and relates to the secularisation of culture in Western societies and the industrial evolution of live music on a global scale. Following in the footsteps of rural celebrations, pop festivals consist of bringing together many people under the auspices of themed, liminal and escapist sharing moments in the countryside. As very dense types of celebration, festivals also have the great advantage of concentrating many performing artists, allowing new forms of rationalisation of the line-ups, industry meetings and digital mediation.
Holt is also particularly interested in the role of cultural and urban policies in this process of commercial institutionalisation, especially in Europe. Building on the counter-cultural image of rock, state policies have progressively seized upon the rock club as a central object of interventionism, and even as a pretext for urban development. To illustrate this, Holt addresses the cases of three European venues that stem from such public policies: Vega (Copenhagen), Melkweg (Amsterdam) and Ancienne Belgique (Brussels). This kind of venue is characterised by its level of public subsidy (between 8 and 23%), average size (between 1500 and 2000), multifunctionality and multi-activity. In organisational terms, Holt describes the semi-bureaucracy that reigns there, making their functioning a relatively routine activity and leading to a certain standardisation of performances, notably through a system of renting out and distributing concerts captured by a few players. This system ultimately serves as a relatively consensual platform for the music industry to make its tours profitable, and for the local councils to improve the image of certain districts.
The book rightly describes one of the strong trends in the live music industry, a trend that is paradoxically very visible and has not been systematically studied. There is no denying Holt's observation, although it is sometimes lacking in nuance. Indeed, while the book deploys a great deal of historical knowledge about various musical performance cultures, most of the cases studied in depth illustrate the book's main hypothesis, without any real dialectic. This constitutes a methodological bias that sometimes oversimplifies the results. The author sometimes takes too many shortcuts when interpreting and omits to mention the internal contradictions of many venues, the initiatives that are taking place and that aim precisely at limiting economic concentration, or even the debates within the professional sector itself that deal with these issues (for example, within the European Live DMA network that brings together small and medium-sized venues). The case of French festivals, which local associations mainly run, also constitutes a much more nuanced version of the commercial institutionalisation process.
More generally, the central question is whether this process really hinders cultural diversity and artistic development, or whether it is simply another link in the value chain of the music sector. It is difficult to answer this question, although the author's view is that it is indeed a hindrance. Furthermore, from a Global South perspective, the book seems to omit some of the benefits of the process of professionalisation, notably in terms of the comfort, safety and quality of the shared musical experience. Regarding the role of public funding systems, there is no clear-cut separation between a cruel lack of funding in the South, and excessive neo-liberal policies in the Global North, but the book does leave us slightly wanting in terms of imagining a more sustainable model, one that is not merely the product of past ideological trends.
Despite these remarks, a certain lack of conclusions and unevenly developed sections, the book represents a crucial development in the research on live music. Its deconstruction of the very notion of ‘live music’, its profound historical and anthropological perspective, and its problematisation in terms of common good values, are in stark contrast to what might be perceived as the excesses of the critique. Moreover, the current global sanitary crisis reveals the limits of the mainstream discourse on live music that Holt addresses, as most societies engage in public discussions on the essential dimension of music events. Indeed, the pandemic deeply questions the right to celebrate with music, especially because (1) the cultural importance of the live music sector is largely subordinated to the economic factor, i.e. it has lost its symbolic value ‘in itself’, its ‘essential’ character (compared with the religious events of certain cultures) and (2) its economic weight is not sufficiently important to be considered as an essential sector. Holt's work thus constitutes a great opportunity to reconsider our views on music as a public value.
