“Come and expose yourself to the fantastic music from around the world”

Abstract

Since the last century and even more for the last decades, the world has increasingly been connected, and people from the most distant places have become neighbors both virtually through the World Wide Web and physically through easier and faster ways of travelling. The worldwide interconnectedness has been termed “globalization”, or in a more differentiated form, several “-scapes” have been described. Appadurai distinguishes five of them, including “ethnoscapes”, “technoscapes”, “financescapes”, “mediascapes”, and “ideoscapes.” (1990: 297-300) Those parameters attempted to more adequately describe today’s complex global cultural economies, their f luidity and the plurality of possible perspectives to be taken. In similar ways, the production and consumption of cultural goods has become distributed over distant localities all over the world. Music production is one part of this and, in unique ways, has been changed by global interactions. Reaching far-off audiences, allowing global f lows of musical ideas and styles and providing an opportunity for musicians as well as audiences to “attend” distant places in the world, the distinction between the global and local dimension has been severely blurred. A remarkably interesting phenomenon in this regard is the music festival. Music festivals can be described as places offering “intense and concentrated interaction” (Chalcraft/ Magaudda 2005: 173) between people from different places sharing a local