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Music Festivals, Ephemeral Places, and Scenes: Interdependence at Cornerstone Festival

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2020

ANDREW MALL
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Abstract

Cornerstone was an annual four-day-long Christian rock festival in Illinois that ran from 1984 until 2012, first in Chicago's northern suburbs and then on a former farm in the rural western part of the state. Most attendees camped on-site, and many arrived one or two days early when the campgrounds opened before official programming started. Like many contemporary multi-day festivals in relatively rural or remote locations, Cornerstone's festival grounds and campsites functioned as a temporary village. For many attendees, music festivals have supplanted local scenes as loci of face-to-face musical life. Outside Cornerstone, participants’ musical lives might be curbed by family, professional obligations, geographic separateness, or cultural stratification. Inside the festival's physical, social, and cultural spaces, however, a cohesive music scene manifested for a brief time every year. This article examines the production of space and place at Cornerstone. In doing so, it contributes a vital link between scene theory and the growing ethnomusicological literature on festivals.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 14 , Special Issue 1: Music Festivals , February 2020 , pp. 51 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2020

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Footnotes

This article expands upon a paper I presented at the annual Society for Ethnomusicology conference in 2015. I would like to thank my fellow panelists (Jayson Beaster-Jones, Maria Sonevytsky, and Aleysia Whitmore) and the audience for their valuable feedback. Additionally, the feedback from David Garcia and this journal's anonymous reviewers provided welcome guidance for improving this piece.

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