“Music moves Europe”: Music festivals, musicians, and transnational policy networks in the European Union

This dissertation examines the framework within which European Union institutions engage with the popular music industry in Europe, and in turn explores its effects on musicians within the industry who benefit from this engagement. It does so by examining two main components: the European Talent Exchange Program (ETEP), a networking platform headquartered in Groningen that works to connect up-and-coming European acts on their first international tour and/or supporting their first international recorded release with music festival organizers in locales outside of the act’s home nation; and the European Union’s two popular music prizes: the European Border Breakers Awards (EBBA), which ran from 2004-2018, and the Music Moves Europe Awards (MMEA) that replaced the EBBA in 2019. Examining these frameworks represents the two most direct ways that the EU’s Creative Europe agency interacts with the industry. This dissertation also explores the effect of these frameworks on the emergent European acts who have benefitted the most from the ETEP, EBBA, and MMEA relationships. Support for the artists discussed in this dissertation represent key strategies of the frameworks, such as promotion of institutions’ agenda; expansion of the tools used for continental circulation of people, goods, and services; enhanced visibility of common practices that exist beyond borders; and growth of economies. They also highlight the frameworks’ shortcomings, such as exposed cultural and historical biases; issues of race and identity in Europe; complexities of European national citizenship; and the challenges of cultivating a supranational European identity that did not exist a half-century before. The artists featured in this dissertation challenge popular understandings of national and European identity, supranational belonging, artistic circulation, performance logistics, language mobility, and general perceptions of the European popular music industry. The artists, festivals, agents, civil servants, and institutions central to ETEP offer an encapsulation of how many people within EU’s institutions and in European transnational businesses generally understand how the European Union works. This dissertation is primarily about these people, and their transnational visions of Europe. As an ethnomusicological study, this dissertation employs fieldwork based in unobtrusive observation, drawing from public conversations that individuals who operate within the ETEP, EBBA, and MMEA frameworks have had with each other, with the media, and with EU civil servants at music festivals and conferences to make each group’s case for a musically transnational Europe. This dissertation also uses content analysis to parse through EU treaties for cultural policy issues related to festivalization, ETEP promotional material that connects with EU policy, and existing artist interviews that show ETEP effect on their careers. It also engages with performance and circulation data to analyze the frameworks’ effectiveness. The dissertation ultimately argues that studying these frameworks are an efficient and convincing way to understand what the European Union hopes its project will achieve, particularly in the cultural policy arena.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Musicology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Henry, Lucas Aaron

Contributors dc:contributor

• Solis, Gabriel
• Buchanan, Donna
• Silvers, Michael
• Kourtikakis, Konstantinos

• Popular Music
• Music Festivals
• European Union
• Cultural Policy
• Scandinavia

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Lucas Henry

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117792

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F117792