Music and Tourism

On the Road Again

By Chris Gibson, John Connell

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2005 Chris Gibson and John Connell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-873150-92-4

Contents

Preface,
1 Tourism and Music,
2 Virtual Tourism,
3 Musical Landscapes, Tourist Sites,
4 Music in the Market: Economy, Society and Tourism,
5 Music, Tourism and Culture: Authenticity and Identity,
6 On the Road Again: Nostalgia and Pleasure,
7 Festivals: Community and Capital,
8 Conclusion: Final Notes,
References,
Index,

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...