CITATION — REFERENCE ENTRY
Self-Involvement in Musical Performance: Stage Talk and Interpretive Control at a Bluegrass Festival — Ethnomusicology
- Key
- bealle1993-stage-talk
- Authors
- Bealle, John
- Issued
- 1993
- Type
- article-journal
- Container
- Ethnomusicology
- Volume
- 37
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 63-86
Raw CSL JSON
{
"URL": "https://www.jstor.org/stable/851895",
"page": "63-86",
"type": "article-journal",
"issue": "1",
"title": "Self-Involvement in Musical Performance: Stage Talk and Interpretive Control at a Bluegrass Festival",
"author": [
{
"given": "John",
"family": "Bealle"
}
],
"issued": {
"date-parts": [
[
1993
]
]
},
"volume": "37",
"container-title": "Ethnomusicology"
}
Claims
-
Since the mid-1960s, weekend outdoor festivals have played an important role in bluegrass. Bluegrass performances are notably conventionalized, and even on festival stages local and regional musicians aspire to reproduce songs from a canon of prior performances and recordings by professional bands. At festivals the formal stage show, a display event with a fixed band, is balanced by the less formal and more creative jam session, in which musicians move in and out according to rules of etiquette; Bealle, following Robert Cantwell, calls this participatory–display dichotomy fundamental to bluegrass.
"Since the mid-1960s, weekend outdoor festivals have played an important role in the tradition by accommodating fans' demand for diverse forms of involvement. ... Bluegrass musical performances are notably conventionalized, "with music following consistent patterns of rhythm and chord structure" (Rosenberg 1985:9). Furthermore, even on the festival stage, local and regional musicians routinely aspire to reproduce songs and tunes from a canon of prior and sometimes "brilliantly orchestrated" (Cantwell 1984:62) performances and recordings by professional bands. ... the stage set is noted for the formal presentation of music and is functionally balanced by the less formal and more creative jam session. ... In jam sessions, community is temporary and transcendent (Kisliuk 1988:154), with personnel moving interchangeably in and out of sessions according to rules of etiquette. ... In a dichotomy fundamental to bluegrass as a whole, the jam session articulates a participatory environment, the stage show a contrasting one of display (see Cantwell 1984:74-75)."
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