Places of Live Music: Eventful Geographies of the Roundhouse and the Troubadour

Michael Anton

Research output: ThesisDoctoral Thesis

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Abstract

Music venues are eventful places in which live musical performances happen. They are places of live music, spaces organised for live music, and buildings in which more than just music happens. The Roundhouse and the Troubadour are two examples of music venues, and this thesis is a consideration of what it means for these specific buildings to be, and to become, eventful places of live music.
Drawing on geographical theories of space, place and the built environment, philosophical notions of affect, becoming and the event, and musicological understandings of rhythm and sound, I focus on what happens when places of live music happen.
I move beyond a consideration of venues as mere containers for performance, and, whilst I concentrate on the roles that music and sound play in the making and remaking of these places, I also consider venues as multi-layered and multifaceted polyrhythms constructed from a multitude of overtly musical and seemingly unmusical processes, actions and materials.
Using ethnographic research methods, including participant sensing, informal interviews and rhythmanalysis, I represent and examine a series of multimedia vignettes gathered from these places in order to show how places of live music are characterised by, and impose limitations upon, the abundance of events that occur within them. I unpack a number moments from within live music events, demonstrating the dense bundles of processes unfolding overtly and covertly within them.
Music venues are defined by the activities that occur within them. This PhD attends to, examines, and explores the eventful geographies of places of live music, and it produces a geographical account of what goes on when live music happens in a place.
Original languageEnglish
QualificationPh.D.
Awarding Institution
  • Royal Holloway, University of London
Supervisors/Advisors
  • Cresswell, Timothy, Supervisor
Award date1 Jun 2015
Publication statusUnpublished - 2015

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