At a time when the season for major music festivals is in full swing, the Presses de l’Université de Montréal are offering World music festivalsa collective work that dissects these great popular communions from the social, anthropological and musical angles, focusing on three events: the Festival of the Imaginary, in Paris, La Notte della Taranta, in the Salento region, in Italy, and the Arab World Festival in Montreal, which researchers cover under the umbrella of “world music” festivals, a cumbersome term whose use is debated both in society and in the academic world, confirms the co-director of the book, Professor Caroline Marcoux-Gendron.
In 2020, the Recording Academy opted for a symbolic change: the Best World Music Album category will become Best Global Music Album. “This change symbolizes a break with the connotations of colonialism, tradition and ‘un-American’ that the old term embodied, while adapting to current listening trends and the cultural evolution of the diverse communities that the term can represent,” argued the Academy.
Reservations shared by Caroline Marcoux-Gendron: “It’s a label that poses a lot of problems, firstly because it is in no way defined, from a musical point of view, and because it’s about a western construction. The use made of it in the title of the book precisely helps to deconstruct it by showing that it cannot be taken for granted. The reason why the label still mobilizes researchers is precisely to take a critical look at it and question what it represents and the multiplicity of phenomena it encompasses. »
One of the questions at the heart of the collective work therefore concerns what “world music” means. “If we can’t define world music festivals, can its audience help us do it? summarizes Caroline Marcoux-Gendron. The first chapter (“World music and its audiences”), written by Emmanuel Négrier, researcher and director of the Center for Political and Social Studies (CEPEL) at the University of Montpellier, sheds light on the socio-demographic characteristics of this audience. .
“What it teaches us above all is that world music is more a crossroads of taste than a musical style,” explains the researcher. It also evokes the notion of a universe of meaning. Afterwards, his studies of audiences show us that there are nevertheless traits specific to the arts and culture audience that reappear: it is a more feminine audience, in which the upper classes are more represented, they are audiences that are quite regional, where there is a strong renewal which is not necessarily demographic, that is to say that the characteristics of the new festival-goers are not different from the old ones. I like the idea that, from the point of view of their audiences, we can talk about festivals as a crossroads of tastes, instead of looking for a strictly musicological definition of them. »
We will focus on the Quebec case of the Festival du monde arabe (FMA, and its little brother, Orientalys), the research subject of Caroline Marcoux-Gendron and her colleagues Henda Ben Salahm, Leila Mahiout, Ghiwa Nakhlé and Michel Duchesneau, which presents in particular the approach of P²M (the Partnership on Music Audiences), an international research network on audiences.
The study of the case of the FMA drawn up by the researchers is all the more interesting since this festival has to deal with the perception of Quebecers of this “Arab world” – the researchers recall in particular that the festival was created the year preceding the attacks. September 11, 2001…
“Compared to the other festivals presented in the book, the FMA adopts a different method of staging and programming strategy, describes Caroline Marcoux-Gendron. The festival is not a showcase for music from the Arab world — another label that we could deconstruct and widely criticize — but a meeting place between, yes, these musical expressions of a territory that we call the Arab world, but also musical expressions from Quebec, Canada or what could be called the West. The objective of the FMA is to create encounters, for example by proposing creations in which there is a reappropriation of these cultural and musical references with the aim of arousing new perspectives” on the Arab world.
World music festivals. Comparative perspectives on three case studies in France, Italy and Quebec is also, and above all, a tribute to the other director of the publication, Flavia Gervasi, professor at the University of Montreal from 2013 to 2020 and co-director of the sociomusicology team of the Interdisciplinary Observatory for Creation and Research in music (OICRM), who died before the book was finished.
“She was my world music teacher,” says her friend and colleague Caroline Marcoux-Gendron, now general and scientific coordinator of the OICRM and associate professor in the Department of Music at the University of Quebec in Montreal. Flavia Gervasi, a specialist in the musical traditions of southern Italy, “instigated in Montreal these contemporary reflections on this phenomenon of world music and its festivalization”.
“Flavia has revived reflections around the subject, she has the merit of having brought people together around these questions, in Montreal, and of having created an international think tank, she continues. In addition, his works have had an important impact in Italy on the understanding of this festival”, La Notte della Taranta (The Night of the Tarantella), a festival dedicated to a dance (and its music) several centuries old, the pizzica. The big closing show of the festival, held at the end of the summer, attracts nearly 120,000 spectators.