Black Stars or Black Holes? Cities as Sites for Verticality in Popular Black Music Production

Harrington, Howard R.

doi:10.2148/benv.2005.31.3.208

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 33 publications

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“…The smaller number of geography studies undertaken by economic geographers on the economics and spatiality of the music industry include the work of Power on the Swedish and Jamaican music industries (Power and Hallencreutz 2002; Power and Jansson 2004); Scott (1999a), Harrington (2005), Power and Hallencreutz (2007) and Florida (Florida and Jackson 2008; Florida and Mellander 2008) on the US recorded music industry; Watson (2008) on the UK recorded music industry; and Sadler (1997) on the music industry as information industry. Andrew Leyshon has continued to be at the forefront of this literature, with studies on digital music formats and the ‘crisis’ of the record company (see Leyshon 2001, 2003; Leyshon et al.…”

Section: Music Place and Geographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Spaces and Networks of Musical Creativity in the City

2009

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Urban geography, both material and imagined, is a crucial mediating factor in the production and consumption of music. The city provides the concrete places which offer spaces for musical creativity. While certain spaces such as recording studios are specifically organised for this purpose, music is produced in many spaces, from the bedroom, garage or home studio, to community and youth centres, to street corners and clubs. Cities also sustain networks that foster and support musical creativity. These networks come together in locales of creativity and production to find fixity in the concrete spaces of the city. At the same time the networks are fluid, with musical knowledge moving within and between cities through the mobility of skilled creatives and new technologies. A growing body of geographical literature is attempting to foreground the spatial in music studies by focusing on local scenes, musical production, and the particularity of certain places. This article aims to provide an overview of current geographical research and debates on music, with an explicit focus on the role of urban space in musical creativity, and on the musically creative networks at work within and between cities. We argue that there is a need to situate creativity more squarely in its material and embodied contexts of production and to consider the ways in which creative individuals interact in complex ways with urban physical form, technology, and other actors in networks of creativity and production.

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