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2006 30: 626Prog Hum GeogrRay Hudson

Regions and place: music, identity and place

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Progress in Human Geography 30, 5 (2006) pp. 626–634

© 2006 SAGE Publications 10.1177/0309132506070177

I IntroductionBoth historically and contemporarily thereare strong links between music and senses ofplace and identities, both of people andplaces. Via a variety of musical genres, fromthe evocative symbolism of Sibelius’ Finlandiato Springsteen’s gritty images of the deindus-trialized relicts of contemporary Youngstown,via numerous strands of folk and popularmusic such as Tommy Armstrong’s vividdescriptions in words and music of theDurham coalfield in the nineteenth century,there is ample evidence to support the propo-sition that music has the ability to conjure uppowerful images of place, feelings of deepattachment to place.

Given this, it is perhaps surprising thatmusic and its relation to place has been arather neglected topic in human geography.Not only has there been little consideration ofgeographies of music but such work as therewas tended to be descriptive and conceptu-ally limited (for example, see Carney, 1978;1994). As Nash (1996), not without a hint offrustration, lamented, ‘it is . . . a mystery tomany as to why cultural geographers havepaid so little attention to music because it

influences virtually all aspects of culture andmanifests itself in numerous spatial ways’.Although there had been some importantcontributions, such as Kong (1995), thatsought a more sophisticated engagementbetween geography and music, some fiveyears later Zelinsky (1999) still felt moved tocomment, with studied understatement, that‘our accomplishments in exploring the geo-graphic dimensions and implications of thatuniquely human, mysteriously indefinablephenomenon we call music have been ratherrudimentary’. Clearly here was a vacuumwaiting to be filled, and in recent years arange of human geographers have becomeincreasingly interested in issues of music,place and identity in a range of empirical set-tings, theoretical frameworks and policy con-texts. At the same time, other scholars ofmusic and social scientists have also recog-nized the importance of space and place inrelation to making music and issues of identity(Bennett, 2000; Whiteley et al., 2004).

The growing attention to the role of musicby human geographers in recent years chimesnicely with a number of broader shifts inemphasis and themes in human geography,

Progress reports

Regions and place: music, identity and place

Ray Hudson*Department of Geography and Wolfson Research Institute, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE, UK

*Email: [email protected]



which it has both reflected and helped pro-duce. Four in particular stand out. First, thereis the more general ‘cultural turn’ in much ofhuman geography. Second, there has been agrowing emphasis upon performance andpractice. Third, there has also been a growingsensitivity to the importance of senses otherthan sight. Fourth, one can point to a muchgreater acknowledgement of the importanceof affect and emotion in shaping behaviour.

However, it is also important to rememberthat the music industry remains an importantsite of commodity production in contempor-ary capitalism and that political economytherefore remains important in understandinggeographies of music.

II Making music, producing places‘Places’ can be thought of as complex entities,ensembles of material objects, people, and sys-tems of social relationships embodying distinctcultures and multiple meanings, identities andpractices. As such, places are contested andcontinually in the process of becoming, ratherthan essentialized and fixed, open and porousto a variety of flows in and out rather thanclosed and hermetically sealed (Hudson, 2001:Chapter 8). How then can music be thought ofin relation to the (un)making of place?

In one of the earlier contributions to the lit-erature on place and music, Cohen (1991)explores their relationship in the context of rockmusic in Liverpool and music-making by localamateur rock bands, caught between the com-mercial pressures of the music industry and adesire for creativity, poised between successand failure. She emphasizes the way in whichrock music is part of a rock culture, a way of lifewith its own beliefs, conventions, norms andrituals in Liverpool. In so doing, she challengespostmodernist assertions that the globalizationof music and indeed other forms of popular cul-ture results in a ‘loss of place’, a general condi-tion of both placelessness and timelessness. In alater contribution to the literature (Cohen,1995), centred on the biographical trajectory ofan 88-year-old Jewish immigrant in Liverpool,she argues that music can play a key role in

production of place in various ways, literally andmetaphorically: as a material setting comprisingthe physical and built environments; as a settingfor the quotidian social relations, practices andinteractions of everyday life; and as a conceptor symbol that is represented or interpreted. Asshe puts it (Cohen, 1991: 288), ‘[m]usic . . .plays a unique and often hidden role in the pro-duction of place’. However, the production ofplace through music – like the production ofplace in general – is seen to be a contestedprocess, while the dynamic interrelationshipbetween music and place suggests that musicplays a very particular and sensuous role inplace making.

More recently, Bennett (2002) hasanalysed how recently developed IT andinternet technologies are giving rise to newways of conceptualizing the relationshipbetween music and place. He deploys theconcept of ‘mythscapes’ (developed fromAppadurai’s work: for example, see 1996) tothe ‘Canterbury sound’, a term recentlyrevived and adapted by a web-based fan baseto describe a loosely defined back-catalogue ofalbums, songs and home-recorded musicalexperiments. As a result, Canterbury is beinginscribed into a series of urban myths relatingto its perceived role in the creation of a music-al style which fans claim to be locally specific.Bennett also considers the extent to which theCanterbury sound can be considered to be a‘virtual’ scene by virtue of its ‘construction’ incyberspace, as internet communicationreplaces more conventional forms of celebrat-ing collective musical tastes as these emergethrough the embodied sociality of club, con-cert hall and festival-based scenes.

III Music and identities and the well-being of people and placesOver the last decade or so, some importantedited collections have appeared, focused onthese issues of music, place and identities.Stokes (1994) assembled a collection of workthat examined the significance of music in theconstruction of identities and ethnicities andthe ways in which these issues related to those

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of place – though interestingly human geogra-phers were not identified as among the poten-tial readers of the book. A year later, Leyshonet al. (1995) brought together a set of papersby geographers dealing with issues of music,identity and place, followed by a further col-lection shortly afterwards (Leyshon et al.,1998) which explored the role of music in themaking and articulation of geographical imagi-nations at various spatial scales and the powerof music as a force in the definition of places.Then the complex links between places, pop-ular music and cultural identities at a range ofspatial scales – local, national and global – andin a variety of musical genres and styles – frombrass bands to buskers, from rap to rai, fromthe ‘Mersey’ and ‘Icelandic’ sounds to ‘worldmusic’ – and the diverse meanings of music ina range of regional contexts were explored byConnell and Gibson (2002).

While musical genres (like places) can beconsidered in terms of concepts of authentic-ity, they can, alternatively, be conceptualizedthrough the lens of hybridity and the ongoingmixing of different musical cultural traditionsin place. This routinely problematizes claimsas to authenticity, as Connell and Gibson(2004) emphasize in their discussion of therise of ‘world music’. They see this as a ‘com-mercial’ or ‘marketing’ category rather than agenre with definitive links to particular partsof the world. They stress that the rise of‘world music’, centred on fusion and hybrid-ity, renders impossible the tracing of authen-ticity in musical styles. Nonetheless, theseprocesses did create new identities that fusedlocal and global, traditional and modern,while at the same time deterritorializing cul-ture, though – paradoxically – only as a resultof the construction and contestation of discourses of otherness and place.

The construction of unique place-basedsocio-musical identity as a consequence ofthe arrival and negotiation of Balinese musicalculture on the neighbouring island of Lombokthrough processes of preservation, adapta-tion and innovation is examined by Harnish(2005). On Lombok, Balinese music and

culture collide, converge and mix with themusic and culture of the indigenous IslamicSasak majority. As the Hindu Balinese experi-enced successive dramatic shifts in status –from colonizer to colonized to minority in theIndonesian state – their music was adjustedand altered in consequence. Their musicalculture reveals three streams of influence thatdefine the Lombok Balinese, but these ‘tradi-tional’ strands are being actively reconsideredas musicians and societal leaders alike struggleto cope with reformist Islam, centralizedHindu organizations, and national andregional political developments.

The ways in which the character of musicevents can change in unintended rather thanintended ways is also explored by Waterman(1998) in the context of the annual Kfar Blumfestival at a kibbutz in northern Israel and avery different musical genre, chamber music.Soon after its inauguration, it became domin-ated by audiences of elite social groups, which made it a highly desirable social event.As a result of the enhanced demand for par-ticipation in the festival it became trans-formed from an artistic celebration to acultural commodity. This challenged the over-all purpose of the festival and resulted inchanges in artistic direction, as programmeswith a wider popular appeal were introducedin search of new audiences. Watermanargues that the Kfar Blum festival exemplifiesthe way in which social trends in Israel pro-duced new contested arenas, as place – in thiscase a quiet kibbutz in northern Israel –became a metaphor for these wider trends,emphasizing the ways in which music in placeis both affected by and constitutive of broadersocial processes. As Harnish noted, widernational and global influences can find express-ion in more local musical cultures, an issueexplored more fully by Connell and Gibson(2002), who emphasize the links betweenembodiment and mobility, fixity and fluidity inthe contemporary world.

An important dimension of the contempor-ary phase of globalization is the enhancedflows of people between places. In a way that

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resonates with other work on mobility andknowledge transfer (Hudson, 2005: Chapters3 and 4) Connell and Gibson point to the linksbetween migration and new musical prac-tices and the recent rise of music tourism,alluding to the relationships between musicand economic development strategies. Therelationships between tourism, place andmusic are explored in a rather different wayby Dunbar-Hall (2003), via an analysis of theperformances staged for tourists at a promi-nent site, Puri Saen Agung (the Ubud Palace)in the Balinese village of Ubud. These per-formances are representative of the ways inwhich traditional Balinese culture is trans-formed when it is packaged specifically fortourist consumption. Through a number ofreadings of the palace, the potential meaningsof music are shown to be dependent upon thepast and present identities of this site. This isheightened by a view of changes in thepalace’s status and uses as a metaphor forongoing developments in Balinese music anddance, and thus of the ways in which tourismhas been, and continues to be, a force inBalinese cultural production.

Building on earlier work by Gibson (2002),Gibson and Connell (2003) examine the rela-tionships between backpacker tourism, alongwith counter-urban migration (of a diversemix of ex-urban professionals, retirees andthe unemployed), music and the productionof place. A distinctive cultural economy hasdeveloped in Byron Bay on the Far NorthCoast of New South Wales, building on theconnections between tourism and the pro-duction and marketing of music. The perman-ent and temporary inward migratorymovements of people have contributed totransformations of regional identity as the FarNorth Coast is increasingly perceived as an‘alternative’ or ‘lifestyle’ region, and to trans-forming the former whaling town of ByronBay into a unique site of backpacker subcul-ture. A crucial element in this is the touristconsumption of popular music, specificallyproduced for youth markets, informed and influenced by the attitudes and style of

backpacker culture. These themes and globaland local influences coalesce in the marketingof ‘world music’ and its artifacts to ‘neotribal’subcultures. Baumann (2001) also discussesthe way in which, in the contemporary era ofenhanced mobility of both people (asmigrants, as tourists) and information,regional traditions interrelate with musicaldiversity and intercultural music-making andimprovisation. He emphasizes that, while incertain respects technological advances intransport and communications technologiesare shrinking the world, the conceptualizationof culture and region is expressed throughmusic in highly differentiated ways. Crucially,the region in which music is made can be dif-ferentiated from the (trans)region, which isrepresented symbolically through music.

The ways in which globalization has com-plicated modern ways of configuring identity,and intensified struggles over the category of‘identity’, are explored by Stokes (2004),using the specific example of Cartel, aGerman-Turkish hip-hop group. He arguesthat identity construction and ‘difference pro-ducing’ still need to be understood as centralcultural processes in modern urban life(indeed, modern life more generally) but thatthese need to be located and grounded in theeveryday life of communities, corporationsand cities (and indeed in the myriad otherspaces of contemporary quotidian life). Seenin this way, cultural identities are a product ofcontested processes, always in the process ofbecoming and unbecoming. Musical activity,the meanings of which are often particularlydifficult to fix, provides a useful vantage pointfrom which to explore this perspective. Usingthe example of Cartel, Stokes argues that itsself-conscious and highly contested identitypolitics must be understood in the intersectingcontexts of migration in post-1989 Europe,world music in the recording industry, TurkishIslamism and the ‘global’ refashioning ofIstanbul. In similar fashion, but in a very dif-ferent place, Roberson (2001) explores theways in which the cultural politics of imagesof Okinawa, Japan, are constructed within

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Uchina Pop music, an innovative hybrid syn-thesis of traditional Okinawa folk music with‘western’ musical styles. He argues that themusically constructed images of Okinawanhybridity and difference that this encom-passes must be understood within the context of national and international political-economic dynamics and their local effects.The emphasis is again on the ways in whichdiverse cultural currents flowing through aspecific place help shape images of placewithin music.

While several scholars have explored themore positive aspects of the relationsbetween identity, music and place, othershave pointed to the darker side of these rela-tionships. As Cloonan and Johnson (2002)have observed, throughout history a consid-erable amount of popular music has beenintegral to exclusionary, divisive and oppress-ive identities and social relations. To take justone contemporary example, Baker (2005)focuses upon the rise to stardom of theCroatian folk/rock singer, Marko PerkovicThompson, whose repertoire is stronglyassociated with the military veterans’ lobbyand protests against the indictment ofCroatian soldiers following the Balkan wars ofthe 1990s. Thompson’s music and lyrics, bothduring his wartime career and in the post-Tudjman period, reproduce nationalist narra-tives of Croatian continuity, heroism andvictimhood, and draw on (and one might add,help reproduce) an established pool of folk-loric imagery, while articulating a myth ofwartime brotherhood with explicit politicalconnotations. The fact that the figure ofThompson has become a site at which narra-tives of Croatia’s history, present characterand future responsibilities are contested hasbeen further thrown into sharp relief duringrecent controversies concerning his apparentmusical rehabilitation of the fascist NDH, inwhich his popular cultural product is under-stood as a vehicle for the transmission of anundesirable interpretation of the past.

Music has also been linked to issues ofwell-being as well as those of identity. Wood

and Smith (2004) emphasize that emotionalexperiences and relationships are commonlymarginalized within human geography,despite their impact on all aspects of sociallife, and argue that this leads to a partial andimpoverished understanding of social life andhuman (inter)relations. They use the exampleof musical performance, a setting in which theemotional dimensions of social relations aredeliberately and routinely enhanced, toexplore how social scientists can access theintimate emotional content of human affairs.However, they then pose two questions:what is the relevance of emotional knowingand being? What might be done with suchemotional ways of knowing once they havebeen acquired? In answering these questions,they turn to the relatively neglected – butincreasingly popular – concept of social well-being and suggest some ways in which thismight be enhanced by ‘musicking’. Theseinclude: music as therapy; music as a way ofenhancing quality of life; and music as amedium of empowerment.

Based upon empirical research in Australia,Hays and Minichiello (2005) examine themeaning and importance of music in the livesof elderly people, paying particular attentionto the ways in which music contributes toself-identity and quality of life. Music providespeople with ways of understanding and devel-oping their self-identity, of connecting withother people, of maintaining well-being andexperiencing and expressing spirituality. Itprovides strong memories of and associationswith a person’s life. Music thereby promotesan enhanced quality of life by contributing topositive self-esteem, by helping people feelcompetent, and by lessening feelings of lone-liness and isolation. In a world of increasingnumbers of elderly people, these are poten-tially very positive therapeutic effects.

IV Music, cultural strategies andregional and urban developmentstrategiesBy way of introduction, consider two exam-ples from Sydney – one in New South Wales




in Australia, the other in Cape Breton inCanada. The latter is located in a regionwhich has suffered a profound deindustrial-ization, with its attendant socio-economicproblems. Recently a giant fiddle hasappeared on the quayside there, where visit-ing tour ships tie up. From its structure, thestrains of Celtic music emanate on a more-or-less continuous basis, drifting over the town.It is intended to register the significance ofCeltic music in Cape Breton (although this isnot the only sort of music made in CapeBreton: Earhart, 2002), especially to thenewly arrived tourists, and to promote thetourism potential of events such as CelticColours, a series of concerts held over a two-week period in October since 1997 (see CelticColours, 2005) as part of the cultural strandof a regional regeneration strategy. While itseconomic impacts are clearly limited, CelticColours has a broader cultural significance inregistering that Cape Breton has a culturethat both deserves valuing for itself as well asfor its regenerative potential.

Music is also central to regenerationstrategies in the very different context ofSydney, New South Wales. Gibson andHoman (2004) examine the use and promo-tion of popular music in inner-city spacesthere, which are currently experiencingprocesses of gentrification. While residentialdevelopers have played upon the reputation ofkey suburbs as sites of creativity, lifestyle and‘alternative subcultures’ around consumptionspaces on the main streets, the resultant risesin property prices and the lifestyle and musi-cal preferences and tastes of the newlyarrived gentrifying residents have threatenedto eliminate spaces of living, work and per-formance that are affordable to musicians andother cultural performers. Responding to thework of a Live Music Task Force establishedto examine musical performance opportuni-ties in the area, Marrickville City Council inSydney’s inner-west area made an imagina-tive policy response by funding a series of freelive music concerts in the open spaces that itmanages.

These two examples drawn from the twovery different Sydneys illustrate the range ofways in which music is being enrolled intourban, rural and regional redevelopment andregeneration strategies in a variety of loca-tions around the world. Cities such asNashville, having turned away from theirmusical history and identity, have againsought to brand themselves as ‘Music Cities’.The growing interest in music in economicdevelopment policies can be traced back to amore general ‘turn’ to cultural industries as animportant element of urban and regionaldevelopment policies made in the early 1980s(for example, see Hudson, 1995; Leyshonet al., 1998; Brown et al., 2000; Gibson, 2002;Power and Hallencreutz, 2002; Gibson andConnell, 2003). In the remainder of this sec-tion, I will mainly focus on these issues in thecontext of the United Kingdom, with somereference to other European experiences.

Major northern English cities such asLiverpool, Manchester and Sheffield, seekingto cope with the debilitating effects of a pro-found deindustrialization, sought to developmusic and culture and specific ‘cultural quar-ters’ as part of new economic developmentand regeneration strategies (Brown et al.,2000). More recently Gateshead hasattempted to follow the same path with theopening of the Sage Centre. Often localauthorities in these cities have been unsurehow to define the music industry and delin-eate its boundaries. Many local authority eco-nomic development officers see music as a‘soft’ and ‘unreliable’ activity, as not a ‘proper’industry, with resultant tensions withinCouncils. Sheffield City Council was the firstof these to target cultural industries followingthe collapse of the city’s steel industry in theearly 1980s, establishing Sheffield’s CulturalIndustries Quarter (CIQ) as the pivotal placein this strategy with facilities for film produc-tion as well as making music, linked to initia-tives for training and job creation. TheQuarter includes Red Tape, set up in 1986 asthe first municipally owned recording studioin the UK. Liverpool City Council also sought

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to develop music as an element of its localeconomic development policies, to a degreebuilding upon its reputation as a major cen-tre of popular music. The designation ofMerseyside as England’s first ‘Objective 1’area within the framework of the EuropeanUnion’s Structural Funds programme resultedin a massive injection of funds into the area(£1.25bn between 1994 and 1999). The arts,culture and media industries were identifiedas one of five priority investment areas in thesearch for new sources of economic growthand employment. Liverpool too designated aspecific area, the ‘creative quarter’ in theDuke Street/Bold Street area, as a focal pointfor these developments. In 1998 LiverpoolCity Council helped establish the MerseysideMusic Development Agency as a further stepin its policy of encouraging music as part of itseconomic regeneration strategy. Finally,Manchester City Council sought to promotethe city as a centre for music and culture,centred on the Northern Quarter, as part ofits economic regeneration strategy. In thiscase, however, the designation of the Quarterwas more a recognition that the area was awell-established focus for music and othercultural businesses. However, by the end ofthe 1990s Manchester was evolving a moreovert policy of promoting music-based devel-opments with the creation of a CulturalIndustries Development Service and thelaunch of its Cultural Production Strategy,both in 1999.

In summary, each of these cities has soughtto encompass music and culture as importantstrands of postindustrial development strate-gies, and each has focused its efforts on particular sites, often alienating musical practitioners in other parts of these cities, manyof whom in any case were suspicious of anemphasis upon the economic rather than thecultural significance of music. However, therehave also been some important differences inboth the content and implementation of thesepolicies. For example, Sheffield City Councilhas taken a more proactive interventionistapproach while Manchester City Council has

been more prepared to allow market forces toshape the way in which the music industrydevelops there.

Assessing the policy effects and effective-ness of local economic development andregeneration policies based on musical activi-ties is more problematic. Often they havefailed to have their intended effects. Forexample, in Sheffield the National Centre forPopular Music received substantial fundingfrom the National Heritage Lottery Fund(some £17 million) but for a variety of reasonsfailed. For several years the iconic buildingstood empty, abandoned and unused at theheart of the CIQ. Despite a grassroots cam-paign for it to become a public centre for cul-tural and creative activities, it was sold toSheffield Hallam University for less than atenth of its original cost and opened in 2005as its students’ union building. This change ofuse is seen by local activists as a severe threatto the redevelopment of the CIQ area and tothat of Sheffield city centre as a whole,revealing a lack of understanding of Sheffield’sindigenous cultural heritage and economy, alack of recognition for the fundamental role ofcreative individuals in that cultural economy,and the bankruptcy of ‘top down’ regenera-tion policies. Sheffield’s cultural ecology hasbeen built upon an understanding that creat-ing genuine opportunities for the communityto access facilities for cultural production, dis-tribution and consumption will lever thesocial, economic, cultural and environmentalregeneration of the entire city – not just for asmall minority sector (Anon, 2005). WhileManchester has probably been the most suc-cessful of the northern English cities in cap-turing the economic benefits of music-baseddevelopments and retaining them within thecity, in general there has been a flight of talentto London, while services are purchased inLondon, the dominant centre of the musicindustry in the UK. However, as Power andJansson (2004) argue, albeit using the experi-ence of another capital city, Stockholm inSweden, it is possible for a more integratedlocal music industry to evolve that stretches




beyond simply the production of albums andsongs. Stockholm has developed a more var-ied music services industry, encompassing theproduction of everything from remixes tomusic marketing strategies. At the heart ofthe emerging music industry cluster is a largenumber of firms seeking to combine musicand ICT in innovative ways (for example, inhigh-tech postproduction and mixing serv-ices). This at least points to the wider possibil-ities of the music industry as part of urbanand regional regeneration strategies.

In general, however, growth in economicactivity and employment in the music indus-try has been very modest in cities in the UKother than London. As Scott (2004: 480)puts it in assessing the effects of local eco-nomic development policies centred aroundmusic and cultural industries in Manchesterand Sheffield, ‘(n)either of these experi-ments can be said as yet to be much morethan provisionally and partially successful’.Similar conclusions emerge from studies inother and very different parts of the world.For example, as Gibson (2002) emphasizes,despite the growth of a cultural tourism inwhich music plays a central role, unemploy-ment rates in the Far North Coast of NewSouth Wales remain among the highest inAustralia while future employment is likelyto be transient and insecure. Moreover, itremains an open question as to whethersuch music-based urban and regional devel-opment policies can ever have more thanmarginal effects in depressed urban andregional settings – put another way, theimplication in Scott’s ‘as yet’ that thingsmight improve given time may well turn outto be overly optimistic.

While the majority of music-based strate-gies were cast as part of mainstream regener-ation strategies, seeking to locate placesadvantageously in relation to music in themainstream capitalist economy, Hudson(1995) documents the way in which a groupof local residents in the former steel town ofConsett in northeast England sought to usemusic as the substantive focus to demonstrate

that there were alternative models of regen-eration, based in this instance upon coopera-tive forms of organization, that could bepursued in depressed, deindustrialized areas.The significance of the ‘Making Music Work’project therefore lay in the conceptual andpolitical space that it sought to create in which alternative – even radical – local economic development models could beexplored, based on different social relations tothose of the mainstream capitalist economy.However, a variety of financial and politicalpressures led to the radical intent of the pro-ject becoming compromised, raising broaderquestions as to the possibilities for alterity inlocal development policies.

V ConclusionsThere is no doubt that music – in both its production and consumption – can be animportant influence in shaping the typicallyhybrid identities of people and places, of engen-dering a sense of place and deep attachmentto place. In this sense it can help contribute inimportant ways to the well-being of peopleand places and this is not without practicalsignificance. However, the extent to which itcan form the substantive basis of regenera-tion efforts in economically depressed placesremains much more questionable. There are,therefore, dangers in raising unrealistic expec-tations in relation to economic regeneration,not least in diverting attention from the otherways in which music can have positiveimpacts on peoples’ lives.

AcknowledgementsI am extremely grateful to CatherineAlexander of the Geography Department andJennifer Crockett of the Wolfson ResearchInstitute for their help in identifying and locat-ing many of the articles and books referred toin this review, often in places in which I wouldnever have thought of looking. It is fair to saythat without their assistance it would nothave been written. However, the responsibil-ity for what has been done with the materialis mine alone.

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