CHIME Conference – Music, Festivals, Heritage

Venue: Siena Jazz Archive

From Woodstock to The Proms, from Burning Man to Montreux, music festivals have a transformative potential; they can help people connect with places and spaces in new ways and play a key role in identity formation. Festivals at their most utopian offer a fantastic space in which to dream and try another world into being. Equally, they offer opportunities for people to celebrate and engage with their cultural heritage and to re-connect with the past.

CHIME Conference – Music, Festivals, Heritage is a four-day multi-disciplinary conference that brings together leading researchers across the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as festival directors, producers and programmers, to explore the relationship between music festivals and cultural heritage.

Conference topics include but are not restricted to:

• Established and innovative uses of heritage sites and public spaces
• Festival sites and cultural memory
• Transformations of place: music festivals as utopian sites
• Questions of music genre (e.g. jazz, opera, folk, rock, classical) and the construction of heritage at festival
• Festival as dull culture: repetition, predictability, boredom
• The tension between the conservation and the use of heritage sites
• Festivals and cultural tourism
• New models of engagement between festivals and cultural heritage
• Festivals as sites that explore the relationship between tangible, intangible and digital heritage
• Critical perspectives from festival programmers, producers, organisers
• The mediation and representation of (heritage and) festival
• Festival as exclusive community; festival as marginal space
• From carnivalesque to festivalisation: theoretical approaches and questions of festival
• The cultural politics of festival sites

The conference forms part of the JPI Heritage Plus-funded CHIME project, a transnational research project that explores the relationship between European music festivals and cultural heritage sites. Visit www.chimeproject.eu for further information.

Updates on the conference and information about travel and accommodation will be available on this site over the next few months.