On 1 July 1992 over 100,000 people assembled in various locations across Canada to see their favourite bands play live at the Great Canadian Party. Broadcast on television and radio, this Canada Day spectacle celebrated the country's 125th birthday, but rather than being organised by the state or a non-profit making citizen's movement, it was facilitated by more than $100,000 of corporate sponsorship. Drawing on fieldwork in Vancouver, I will argue that external funding initially helped Canadian musicians but soon allowed outside sponsors to control the live music industry. These sponsors could then co-opt anxieties about national unity in a selective celebration designed purely for their own ends. By addressing the Great Canadian Party's emergence and historic moment the following discussion will explore what it meant for Canada to be represented through a giant commercial, a commercial drawing on shared national identity in order to sell the products of a global industry. The Party revealed how judiciously agents of commerce could use popular culture to negotiate between geographic scales. Despite that success, however, the resistance of participating bands suggests that the Party could not secure full hegemony for its sponsor's project.

Music's ‘malleability’ (Taylor 1997) has always facilitated its export and import from one location to another. Indeed, such processes are central to the creation and dissemination of new musical forms. Yet in our contemporary globalised world, such processes occur ever more extensively and rapidly giving rise to new forms of appropriation and syncretism. Record companies from the developed world find new audiences in the developing world (Laing 1986). Musicians from the West appropriate non-Western music, sometimes collaboratively (Feld 1994; Taylor 1997). Non-Western musicians and musicians from subaltern groups within the West create new syncretic forms drawing on both Western and non-Western music (Mitchell 1996; Lipsitz 1994, Slobin 1993). The resulting ‘global ecumene’ produces considerable ‘cultural disorder’ (Featherstone 1990, p. 6) whose results cannot easily be summarised.

In a tiny inner city pub

The amps were getting stacked

Leads were getting wound up

It was full of pissed Anzacs

‘Got no more gigs for Tuesday nights’ said the barman to the star,

‘We're putting pokies in the lounge and strippers in the bar’

The star, he raised his fingers and said ‘fuck this fucking hole’

But to his roadie said ‘it's the death of rock and roll’

‘There ain't no single place left to play amplified guitar

Every place is servin' long blacks if they're not already tapas bars

(TISM (This Is Serious Mum), ‘The Last Australian Guitar Hero’, 1998)

Introduction: local music-making

A number of recent studies have focused upon the places and spaces of popular music performance. In particular, analyses of British live music contexts have examined the role of urban landscapes in facilitating production/consumption environments. Building upon Simon Frith's (1983) initial exploration of the synthesis of leisure/work ideologies and popular music, Ruth Finnegan's detailed examination of amateur music practices in Milton Keynes (1989) and Sara Cohen's account of the Liverpool scene (1991) reveal the benefits of engaging in detailed micro-studies of the local. Paul Chevigny's history of the governance of New York City jazz venues (1991) similarly provides a rich insight into performance contexts and the importance of hitherto unnoticed city ordinances in influencing the production of live music.

It's funny how the difference in each nation organised a different rhythm almost. The beat, the beat is different, it's much faster here than in the States. Mainly in bush music it's like that, if you call it bush music. You know this, this lagerphone? Well this lagerphone beat is usually much faster than you would hear in America, that's the way we felt it when we first arrived. Now it's fine, it fits, you know! But for some reason, it didn't quite [fit], it was just a bit too fast for what I was used to from the States. (Glasco 1998)

Frederique Glasco, a participant at the 1998 Top Half Folk Festival held in Mt Isa, Queensland, talks here about the unsettled experience she had upon hearing what she described as an ‘Australian rhythm’: it felt different, it was too fast, it did not ‘fit’ to her own sense of rhythm. Yet, her initial perception changed after living for a time in Australia and this new rhythmic pulse did feel appropriate to her in her new surroundings. Two questions arise from this: first, how does a musical coding of space help create a sense of place? Second, how does engagement with this aural symbol create an identity through connections to place? In this paper I am interested in examining this relationship between music and place by focusing on participation in the community music festival, specifically participation in the 1998 Top Half Folk Festival, which was held in northern Queensland.

Say somethin' positive, well positive ain't where I live

I live around the corner from West Hell

Two blocks from South Shit and once in a jail cell

The sun never shined on my side of the street, see?

(Naughty By Nature, ‘Ghetto Bastard (Everything's Gonna Be Alright)’, 1991, Isba/Tommy Boy Records)

If you're from Compton you know it's the 'hood where it's good

(Compton's Most Wanted, ‘Raised in Compton’, 1991, Epic/Sony)

Introduction

Hip hop's capacity to circumvent the constraints and limiting social conditions of young Afro-American and Latino youths has been examined and celebrated by cultural critics and scholars in various contexts since its inception in the mid-1970s. For instance, the 8 February 1999 issue of US magazine Time featured a cover photo of ex-Fugees and five-time Grammy award winner Lauryn Hill with the accompanying headline ‘Hip-Hop Nation: After 20 Years – how it's changed America’. Over the years, however, there has been little attention granted to the implications of hip hop's spatial logics. Time's coverage is relatively standard in perceiving the hip hop nation as a historical construct rather than a geo-cultural amalgamation of personages and practices that are spatially dispersed.

Introduction

In 1996 a small independent record company, Oh Boy Records, set up a ‘chat page’ on its web site where fans of its major artist, John Prine, could exchange typed messages in close to real time. The page became a place where fans could ‘virtually’ meet to get information or exchange experiences and opinions relating to Prine. Through the chat page a fan community was established, in that the chat page became a meeting place that could not exist within real-world boundaries. John Prine has had some recent commercial and critical success, but Prine fans are still a minority in most geographic communities, and are, to some extent, isolated by the lifestyle of their 35-plus age group. It could be said that the one and only place where Prine fans could regularly gather was online through the chat page provided by the record company. The Oh Boy Record's homepage became a symbolic anchor – a recognition of shared experience and a sign of community. While music communities are usually associated with ‘local’ places, ‘the notion of “communities” or localities as bounded geographic entities increasingly has been seen as problematic to the study of music in urban settings’ (Gay 1995, p. 123). Communities exist through dialogue; through an exchange of past social history and current social interaction. Developments in communication technology have contributed to a ‘deterritorialization of space within a global cultural economy’ (Fenster 1995, p. 85), to a point where ‘local’ is no longer disconnected from ‘global’ and the identity of a specific place is located both in ‘demarcated physical space’ and in ‘clusters of interaction’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, p. 8). In the absence of a communal physical space, the Oh Boy home page became the site of a ‘local’ Prine community.

Introduction

There are no traces of the mid-Finnish village ‘Perikylä’ on existing maps. It features only in the ‘old folks’ memories', says the retired bus-driver, Matti Tulijoki, who wrote a melancholic waltz in memory of his native five-farm village, ‘in a weak moment’. He called the waltz ‘Memories of Perikylä’, and I have chosen it for analysis from the repertoire of the amateur musical group Virtain pelimannit, in which Mr Tulijoki is an accordion player and a pelimanni. Pelimanni is a term that has been used in Finland for centuries to denote a musician who plays a folk instrument. It is also used for the players who, from the start of the Finnish folk music movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, joined the groups that were being formed all over the country, carrying the name of each municipality. This paper uses the case study, Music and Identity at Grassroots Level (Järviluoma 1997), in which I analysed the ways in which one such amateur music ensemble creates and maintains different sides of its identity. The group comes from Virrat, a country town of 9,000 people in central Finland. One of the central themes of the case study was place, and I will draw upon the study here to examine how ‘place’ is present in both the players' music and their speech about music.