Framing performance and fusion: how music venues’ materiality and intermediaries shape music scenes

Abstract

How do performances contribute to meaning-making processes in cultural fields? This paper focuses on the spaces where performances happen and how music is framed and staged by intermediaries. I engage critically with cultural pragmatics from a Bourdieusian perspective to argue that performance contexts are central to the structure of music scenes, and that fusion may be understood as a moment when the “rules of the game” (Bourdieu 1993 ) of a cultural field are enacted, perpetuated, or contested. This article points to the role that cultural intermediaries play in shaping performances, interpreting systems of collective representation, and achieving fusion. I devise a framework to analyze how the Parisian music scene is organized and structured by a pure/impure binary linking specific music genres to performance contexts. I also examine how cultural intermediaries in Paris work within this frame, playing with performance “rules” to shape audiences’ understandings and experiences of music in particular venues. Drawing on ethnographic observations conducted in two major venues, I show how bookers attempt to transform the “rules of the game” and position their venues as part of the avant-garde by mixing “pure” and “impure” elements of performance during the events.

The metamorphoses of cultural capital in a neoliberal and multicultural era: Towards a comparative approach

“…Studies dedicated to the venues are required in order to understand how the consumers meet the cultural supply of live performances, and the role of cultural intermediaries in this process (on music venues, see Picaud, 2022). The social properties of these cultural intermediaries (i.e.…”

Environment-Friendly Vocal Music Ecological Education: Sustainable Development of Vocal Music Education from the Perspective of Building

“…This is because in life when using bamboo instruments and approaching the bamboo hut, we have already had the experience of hearing and hearing them together. In building, people do almost the same in visual and tactile spaces [ 35 ]. The rough and smooth materials in architectural expression may be associated with the alternation of male and female voices in vocal, the contrast between the high-pitched Qin opera and the poignant Yue Opera, or the combination of drum and flute sounds.…”