Articles

An Approach to Medieval Music and the Study of Present-day Pop and Rock Festivals. The ‘Bangor project’ as a Source of Inspiration

Authors

  • Heleen Kommers

Abstract

In my PHD-research I tried to discover whether people attending secular pop or rock festivals could have experiences that might be called ‘religious’. Several authors had already studied relationships between popular music and new reli-gious expressions or experiences, phenomena they thought were related to the decline of institutionalized religion in our society. Starting from this idea, they sometimes also paid attention to festivals, extrapolating results from analyses of aspects of the music (such as lyrics) or interpreting observations they had made at festivals, taking them at face value, rather than studying festivals from the inside. This was one of the reasons why I decided to focus on methodological aspects and concluded that I needed to carry out fieldwork.

Published

2013-12-19

Issue

Section

Articles