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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781873150924 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 02/22/2005 |
| Series: | Aspects of Tourism , #19 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.15(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.65(d) |
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Music and Tourism
On the Road Again
By Chris Gibson, John Connell
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2005 Chris Gibson and John ConnellAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-873150-92-4
CHAPTER 1
Tourism and Music
In one of the more recent transformations of tourism, music – in different genres and guises – has rapidly become a new rationale for travel, and therefore a market for tourists in a rapidly expanding industry. It is a now familiar story that tourism experienced spectacular growth in the second half of the 20th century, initially in more affluent Western nations and more recently in the emerging countries of the developing world, notably in Asia (Hall, 1998; Williams, 1998). As tourist numbers increased, and tourism became a regular phenomenon, the quest for new sites, sights and experiences grew more complex, while travellers sought, at least on occasion, specific forms of tourism that met their personal needs. In part this was a response to, and rejection of, the mass tourism that had transformed areas like the western Mediterranean coast. Niche tourism became increasingly significant. This book seeks to discuss one such niche – music tourism, where people travel, at least in some part, because of music – and the significance of this for culture, economics and identity.
The rise of niche tourism has coincided with, and is part of, the growing significance of culture in the construction of tourism and recreation. The combination of the emerging 'heritage industry' alongside nostalgia, one nurturing the other, has resulted in the increased commodification of culture and attempts to preserve the historical fabric of city centres, archaeological sites and even old industries. Early forms of niche tourism were those that focused on history, whether of buildings or landscapes, and that enabled the survival of many stately homes in Britain or castles on the continent, alongside the expansion of national parks and wilderness areas on an almost global scale. Ecotourism is one niche that has achieved more than mere minority significance.
Over time, niches became less general and more focused. Literary tourism took visitors to places like the Lake District, where Beatrix Potter had produced the tales of Peter Rabbit and where Wordsworth had eulogised on daffodils (Squire, 1988, 1993), to the moors of Haworth in west Yorkshire made famous by the Brontë sisters (Drabble, 1979) or Marcel Proust's Cambray. Somewhat later a number of films and television series attracted tourists to such regions as north Yorkshire, where one part of the county became James Herriot country and another was Heartbeat country (Tooke & Baker, 1996; Mordue, 1999), and in North America where film locations, including The Bridges of Madison County, gained new visitors (Riley et al., 1998), or New Zealand where the filming of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings brought tourist development to several places. Other niches have followed, including art, crime, religion, sport (Priestley, 1995; Standeven & de Knop, 1999; Hinch & Higham, 2001), food and wine (Charters & Ali-Knight, 2002; Hall et al., 2000; Hjalager & Richards, 2002; Long, 2004; du Pont de Bie, 2004), battlefields (Lloyd, 1998), book towns (Seaton, 1999) and, at least for a handful of individuals, even more esoteric quests, such as Anthony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal (2001) or especially those that were spelled out graphically in Decca Aikenhead's book The Promised Land: Travels in Search of the Perfect E (2001) – a global quest for enlightenment through ecstasy. In different ways music has also become a new niche, or a series of niches, within cultural tourism.
Music tourists have often been individuals, from Bernard Levin taking himself on a Conducted Tour (1981) through a dozen classical music festivals, to Henry Shukman's Travels with my Trombone: A Caribbean Journey (1993) and the American guitarist Banning Eyre's In Griot Time (2000), recording his seven months of 'total immersion' in Malian music. Others too have taken their musical instruments on tour. Some have been deliberately journalistic as in Mick Brown's American Heartbeat (1993), subtitled Travels from Woodstock to San Jose by Song Title, which came with a cassette or a CD. Robert Craft (2000) travelled in search of any manifestation of Stravinsky, while Jason Webster (2002) placed himself within Spanish flamenco. Most have been nostalgic, like Randy McNutt's 'journey to the crossroads of rock 'n' roll' (2002), those small American recording centres that preceded the metropolitan studios of the conglomerates. The Scottish author Duncan McLean's book, subtitled On the Trail of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, evokes this spirit:
I'm three thousand miles from home ... I'm not from these parts. I've come a long way in search of real live western swing. I won't find real live Bob Wills that's for sure: he's been dead twenty years. But his spirit lives on; I know it, I feel it. It lives on ... somewhere. Not in the battered fiddle case in the museum upstairs [Memphis]. ... And now I am after something. I don't know exactly what it is, and I don't know exactly where I'm going to find it. But somewhere out there, further south and further west – out amongst the country dance halls, the ranch to market roads, the old musicians hunched over tin-tack pianos and tenor banjos – somewhere in the wide, sun-struck wilds of Texas, that's where I'm going to track down the spirit of Bob Wills. That's where I'm going. (McLean, 1997: 3)
Only a handful of such tours, and inevitably the most idiosyncratic, have been transformed into text. More frequently, music tourism has been somewhat prosaic.
Tourism is simultaneously a social, economic, cultural, environmental and political phenomenon. It transfers capital between people and places, influences the social organisation of destinations, enables the revitalisation, preservation and also the destruction of cultural phenomena, and creates new landscapes. It results in the intervention of local and national governments, and private individuals, in each of these contexts, not least in the promotion of particular destinations. Each of these themes, with the partial exception of environmental impact, are as crucial to music tourism as they are to other kinds of tourism, and all will be examined here. Indeed since no other book discusses music tourism, it is intended to be as comprehensive as possible.
This chapter provides a historical background to music tourism, with particular reference to the better-documented European context and to classical traditions. The following chapter looks at the manner in which music created virtual tourism, before recreational travel had become a common activity. Chapter 3 provides an overview of the diverse contexts of music tourism in a range of global locations, and sets the scene for the three following chapters which centre on the economics of this particular niche, the significance of music tourism for personal and place identities and the very different experiences of travel, from hedonism to pilgrimage. The penultimate chapter examines festivals, whose themes encompass all those discussed previously.
From the Grand Tour to Niches
Travel has always existed but tourism is relatively new. Annual mass movements of people from their homes is a recent phenomenon that got underway in the 19th century in relatively industrialised countries. It dramatically burgeoned in the second half of the next century with the simultaneous rise of affluence, the greater provision of leisure time (including paid holidays) and technological changes in transport. Until the Renaissance relatively few travelled for pleasure, despite trade fairs and pilgrimages, and not many travelled far, but in the 17th century the Grand Tour brought the start of tourism to Europe.
The gradual achievement of law and order in Western Europe, and the emergence of an elite group of statesmen, merchants and scholars 'began to legitimize the gallants' jaunts which thus imperceptibly merged into the educative and educational institution known as the Grand Tour' (Fairburn, 1951: 118). By the middle of the 18th century it had become fashionable for such elites, and especially those from Britain, to travel in continental Europe in the search for education and recreation. A few decades later the Tour increasingly focused on the pursuit of pleasure and many inveighed against its supposedly corrupting influence. This was the first of many phases of tourism, perhaps tourist cycles, where the high ideals of the earliest travellers were seen to have degenerated into mere hedonism. An intriguing element of the Grand Tour was its somewhat conventional and regular form – again a precedent for what was much later to follow – where time periods (preferably three years) and particular itineraries (which usually involved a long stay in Paris, almost a year in the major cities of Italy and a return by way of Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands) were prescribed. It was primarily intended to ensure the greatest exposure to the sites of antiquity and the cultural achievements of western continental Europe, which the rest of the world seemingly lacked.
The parallel development of spas, again principally in Western Europe, brought a new phase in tourism, focusing on the physical benefits to be gained from particular forms of escapism. By the end of the 18th century England alone had more than a hundred spas, a measure of the way that 'taking the waters' had attracted growing numbers of the middle classes. By the 19th century they were evident even in such remote colonies as the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia, while the emergence of hill stations virtually throughout the tropics further emphasised the apparent curative properties of tourism and recreation in appropriate places. The health benefits of tourism, first open to the elites, were eventually extended to the working classes, notably following the construction of railways in the 19th century, bringing the growth of seaside resorts throughout the western world. Seaside resorts and sea bathing gradually replaced the spas.
At the core of the Grand Tour had been the notion of high culture: the inculcation of knowledge, partly through self-education, in the centres of civilisation. While the Grand Tour emphasised the literary, archaeological, architectural and artistic culture of Europe, music often played a relatively small part, whether by attending concerts and recitals or the acquiring new musical skills. Instrumental music was not particularly popular, though opera, especially in Italy, was a key part of the Tour (Black, 1992: 252–260). Only in relatively rare cases, such as that of Vincent and Mary Novello, was music the central focus of travel; their journeys, from London to Salzburg in 1829, were very much a precursor of contemporary specialised tours. They left a detailed record in diary form of a series of concerts in theatres, churches and town squares for several parts of Western Europe (Hughes, 1955). Just 12 years after the Novellos' travels, the first Thomas Cook's tour took place, inaugurating a quite different form of tourist experience.
By the time that tourism had incorporated spas, the focus had shifted from education to recreation. Recreation and residence in the spas were often accompanied by music and the seaside resorts, modelled on the spas, were furnished with promenades and rotundas, and supported musical concerts and even lectures (Figure 1.1). The rise of seaside resorts, in England at least, was a result of the Napoleonic wars that had brought the Grand Tour to an end by discouraging overseas travel. Moreover the resultant presence of many military camps on the south coast directly provided music to the nearby resorts as, apparently, their 'brass bands captivated the ladies with stirring martial music' (Robinson, 1976: 11). The larger resorts developed more complex musical cultures. By the late 19th century in Brighton, the beach had become a noisy place:
There was the town band playing a little west of the Bedford Hotel; there was a French string band off Regency Square and there were other bands of nigger [sic] minstrels shouting their wish to be in Dixie. ... There is a squealing, squalling, screaming, shouting, singing, bawling, howling, whistling, tin-trumpeting, and every luxury of noise. Two or three bands work away; niggers clatter their bones; a conjuror throws his heels in the air; several harps strum merrily different strains. (Gilbert, 1954: 184–186)
No doubt Brighton also had organ grinders and their monkeys, as on the main streets of the largest cities. The heyday of music in the spas and 'watering places' was between 1880 and 1950, an era captured in one elegant attempt to record in literary form 'some of the echoes of the dead-and-gone music of the spas and seaside places before they finally fade into a harmonic empyrean beyond living memory' (Young, 1968: 12). Music accompanied recreation and tourism in a variety of guises, including the rise of brass bands, the diffusion of organs (and monkeys) and black minstrels, which pointed to the mobility of the performers, between countries and continents.
In continental Europe the situation was similar, as music accompanied tourism. Visitors to the great cities during the 19th century sampled theatres, ballets and concerts of various kinds, and military bands entertained passers-by in the gardens of cities such as Vienna. Many cities had opera houses and other venues. As with troubadours in the Middle Ages, travelling players provided the working class with more 'fringe' entertainment. Thus in Italy, bagpipe players from Romagna and the kingdom of Naples entered Rome in companies in the late 19th century, their hymns filling the city, especially at festival times. In Australia, Aboriginal gum-leaf orchestras (where tree leaves are the main instrument, blown across in the style of a flute reed) were formed on mission settlements, touring rural and coastal towns with their cheap, ever-present instruments (Dunbar-Hall & Gibson, 2004). In the cities of Japan, the travelling No dancers were exotic attractions. Throughout the 19th century such entertainments were primarily for the residents, and the musicians rather than the bulk of urban residents were the most mobile.
Only exceptionally was a distinctive form of tourism shaped by music. Thus in Bayreuth, in southern Germany, the birthplace and home of the composer Richard Wagner, performances of the Wagner Ring Cycle of operas, in the theatre built by King Ludwig of Bavaria, brought tourists from great distances. Indeed, since the sacred drama Parsifal could only be performed in Bayreuth, those who wished to hear it were forced to travel. A late 19th-century guide described the situation:
When the festival takes place, admirers of Wagner flock from all parts of Europe to hear it. The festival generally lasts for about a month. ... During the intervals [in Parsifal] the whole audience leaves the theatre ... those who wish to do so can take tea or dinner in the well-managed restaurants close at hand or walk up and down on the terrace in the woods that surround the theatre, watching the sunset glow on the sweet landscape of the Bavarian hills. Anything more unlike the ordinary surroundings of a theatre can hardly be imagined. The summons to return to the theatre is given by a group of trumpeters. (Loftie, 1890: 117–118)
A handful of other places, such as Vienna and Salzburg, similarly benefited from the fame of their composers, symphony orchestras and opera companies, but they were rare exceptions, primarily meeting the needs of a European elite.
Seaside resorts dominated the tourist landscapes of the Western world until the middle of the 20th century, when a series of changes transformed the structure and content of tourism. The post-war era, after the hiatus of the war itself and the Great Depression, brought longer holidays (often paid for by employers), increasing affluence, a rise in car ownership and, from the 1960s, the possibility of relatively cheap air transport. 'I'm leaving on a jet plane/Don't know when I'll be back again' were not merely the words of a song but the symbol of the emerging tourist industry, and of 'drifter' or backpacker tourism. These changes contributed to larger numbers of people becoming tourists, and tourists taking longer and longer holiday breaks, thus enabling travel to more distant places, and eventually the emergence of 'second holidays' within one year (that might take a different, more specialised form than the first). The rapid expansion of tourism also emphasised the shift from the residual high culture of the Grand Tour, though never entirely to disappear, to the more evident populist recreational forms established in the late 19th century. Meanwhile some popular 19th century destinations, such as the Isle of Man, had long since lost their importance, as tourists sought the greater excitement and warmer climate of more distant places. Before the end of the 20th century, tourism had become the world's largest international industry.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Music and Tourism by Chris Gibson, John Connell. Copyright © 2005 Chris Gibson and John Connell. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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