Anything goes? Recognising norms, leadership and moderating behaviours at folk clubs in England

Understanding the behavioural norms at folk clubs in England is complex because their rules of operation are rarely explicit. It is unclear how singers acquire the appropriate skills for successful engagement, and how rule management works within a musical community that prides itself on following egalitarian principles is unknown. Data from four fieldwork projects between 2008 and 2018 is combined with the authors' experience as long term participants to trace how folk clubs in England operate, with an emphasis on how normative patterns of musical behaviour are established and maintained. We found variations in how explicit folk clubs are about stating what music may be performed and how the performance context is structured. Concepts of accepted repertoire and membership show that appropriateness is incrementally learned, alongside generating a sense of belonging. This process of developing cumulative norms makes explicit rule making difficult, resulting in moderating behaviours that are correspondingly complex. As a result, opaque techniques such as humour, sarcasm or avoidance are applied. The projected images of openness and inclusiveness disguise the extent to which various forms of power operate in the range of musical experiences available within the same folk club tradition

'I realised it was the same song': Familiarisation, assimilation and making meaning with new folk music

In many settings, folk music continues to be a vibrant resource for contemporary audiences. Existing research in the folk music scene has largely been centred on participation, reflecting historical tensions surrounding the professionalisation of the genre. However, in this paper, we challenge the binary between participatory and presentational forms of music (Turino, 2008), positioning listening as a form of participation and highlighting the work done by audiences for presentational folk music. This paper presents the findings of a longitudinal, qualitative study of listening experience around the release of a new folk album by the first author: Fay Hield’s Old Adam (2016). Through a series of focus groups, eight participants gave increasingly personalised accounts of their relationship with the music, from first reactions to finding deep meaning in the songs. We draw on disparate strands of research including developments in music psychology and audience research, as well as theoretical literature on the value of storytelling, to consider how songs go from unknown entities to important emotional resource for listeners. We demonstrate that familiarisation with new music is impacted on by: live and recorded listening contexts, musical preference, existing knowledge of folk music repertory, and genre conventions. We show that while listeners may make their own meaning from music, they need to find resemblance between a song’s meaning and their own lived experience in order to connect with it deeply. While theoretical storytelling literature suggests narrative is important as a means of mentally rehearsing for future experiences, instead we found participants reject that notion, understanding rather that song stories act as a tool for reflection and in making meaning of previous experience. This depth of engagement shows that while these listeners may not be getting their fiddles out or leading a chorus song in a singaround, they are far from a passive audience

The obscure becomes vivid: Perspectives on the (re)mediation of fairy lore by folklorists, performers and audiences

Tales about fairies are often thought of as the province of children, popularised by moralising fairy tales and Disney films, yet the success of works such as The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and World of Warcraft demonstrate that other tropes that tap into the mythical past hold the power to enthral adult audiences. The Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies research project explored the porosity of this border by inviting thirteen musicians, writers and visual artists to respond to traditional tales about fairies and collaborate to make new works for contemporary audiences. We frame the artists’ interpretations of fairy lore as acts of (re)mediation. Audiences were involved through work-in-progress sharings and focus groups to capture their responses to the developing work. Here we present three distinct perspectives on the project: the folklore academic, the practice-as-research artist and the audience researcher. The thematic choices the artists made with the open-ended creative brief were at times unexpected, exposing the individual journeys artists made to create personal connections with the material. This resulted in work being produced that represented an individual artistic voice. Audience experience was similarly bound up in deeply personal understandings of fairy folklore, requiring modes of marketing presentation to be fully thought-through if this content is to be commercialised for new target markets. This project exposes the process of mediating folkloric material to make it relevant to contemporary concerns and anxieties. The narratives foreground vital themes of individual identity and self-determination; the vivid dramatisation of timeless and enduring truths about human existence still communicates powerfully with contemporary audiences. With attention to the staging of concepts and mediatised (re)presentation, this project has shown that the ancient, academic and obscure has the potential to become immediate, relevant and vivid

Accounting for convective effects in zero-Mach-number thermoacoustic models

This paper presents a methodology to account for some mean-flow effects on thermo-acoustic instabilities when using the zero-Mach-number assumption. It is shown that when a computational domain is represented under the M=0 assumption, a nonzero-Mach-number element can simply be taken into account by imposing a proper acoustic impedance at the boundaries so as to mimic the mean flow effects in the outer, not computed flow domain. A model that accounts for the coupling between acoustic and entropy waves is presented. It relies on a “delayed entropy coupled boundary condition” (DECBC) for the Helmholtz equation satisfied by the acoustic pressure. The model proves able to capture low-frequency entropic modes even without mean-flow terms in the fluctuating pressure equation

In defence of the familiar : understanding conservatism in concert selection amongst classical music audiences

Since the establishment of a classical music canon in the 19th century, classical music culture has historically been focused on a stable set of masterpieces by genius composers predominantly from the classical and romantic periods. A small number of composers continue to dominate programming to this day. Many classical music organisations are keen to programme music beyond this narrow repertoire and to showcase new or unfamiliar works. The need to sell tickets, however, is often an obstacle, with organisations far more confident in the ability of big hits to attract large crowds. This article explores the experiences and opinions of classical music concertgoers in relation to familiar and unfamiliar music, providing a number of reasons as to why audiences may choose to hear well-known pieces rather than new works. This paper reports on one strand of a qualitative study with 42 individuals who booked tickets for one of two concert series consisting of core and populist repertoire, respectively. Semi-structured interviews were carried out to explore the reasons for their choices and their experiences of attending live concerts. These interviews showed that most participants did indeed have a clear preference for hearing music that was familiar to them, and only frequent attenders relished the challenge of unknown music. Participants felt that listening to familiar music was usually a more enjoyable experience than hearing something new. They rarely spoke of becoming bored with over-familiar music, perhaps because the live concert experience brings a sense of freshness to even the most familiar work

Roots of the Revival: American and British Folk Music in the 1950s

Book review: Roots of the Revival: American and British Folk Music in the 1950s Ronald D. Cohen and Rachel Clare Donaldson

Making 'modern fairies': making fairies modern

An AHRC-funded project ‘Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies’ investigated what happened when a number of artists (musicians, writers, filmmakers) were asked to respond to and remediate a curated selection of traditional stories about fairies and loathly ladies. The artists came to the project with a spectrum of different views about fairies, ranging from belief in their existence to absolute scepticism about the supernatural. The works-in-progress they created were performed in a series of experimental shows at The Sage Gateshead theatre in 2019. The artists took up certain themes such as the otherworld, time slippage, fairies and children, but were not attracted by others. Fairy material was reconfigured to reflect contemporary concerns about the natural world and to explore ways in which magical human animal transformation spoke to women’s experience