Street Music

For centuries, street musicians, or buskers, have been plying their trade the world over. However, the study of street music and musicians is an emerging field of research. It is richly interdisciplinary and reaches into many fields, including anthropology, art history, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, human geography, law and legal studies, marketing, and musicology, as well as tourism and urban studies. The topics on which scholars write largely include noise and regulation, protest, aesthetics of space, and studies of street musicians in particular cities and countries on every continent. The genres of music include street cries and brass bands, along with studies of solo instruments such as the harp, violin, voice, and accordion. The literature on street music can be categorized into three overlapping areas: historical, ethnographical, and philosophical and social. Historical studies are concentrated on street cries and street singing. Ethnographical studies are evident in a range of historical studies but also in contemporary accounts of artists from New York to Moscow and Rio de Janeiro to Melbourne. Encounters with buskers provide not only insight into the reasons they perform, but also the repertory they play and the influence of audiences and technology on their performance. Where and how musicians perform also tell us about the precarious place street musicians occupy in the cultural economies of place, especially in relation to the use of digital culture and e-commerce as a means of making money and publicity. Philosophical and social inquiry asks questions about the nature of the space street music occupies; the ways in which it is and owned, shared, or a contested space; and the psychology of creativity in the moment of performance for both musician and audience. At the heart of much of the literature on street music is the way street sound and music has been captured over the centuries. Early modern studies rely on texts—and textual analyses—to speculate on the style or mode of singing that street criers and performers used to disseminate their messages or to perform. Studies from the late 18th century rely on artworks such as woodblocks, engravings, etchings, and oil paintings to depict the sound. In the 19th century, musical transcriptions begin to appear as a way to approximate the sound of the street (usually sounds created by solo performers), but today transcription is less of a requirement. Video-recording and other forms of digital imaging are capturing the sounds and music of street musicians and their sometimes international careers. Some studies adopt theoretical approaches drawing on the work of such writers as Michel de Certeau, Erving Goffman, Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Attali, and Richard Florida.

‘Vacant Geelong’ and its lingering industrial architecture

Once a prosperous manufacturing town, Geelong in Victoria, Australia is undergoing a process of deindustrialisation, and in turn, redefining its identity to better retain viability in a globalised world. For instance, the town bid to host a Guggenheim museum on its Eastern Beach shore at the turn of the millennium, and has recently become a UNESCO City of Design (2017). Like so many declining regional industrial towns, Geelong has been undercut by the new economic forces, and has sought a new identity in cultural economies. The ‘Vacant Geelong’ project, which began at Deakin University in 2015 and is ongoing, evolved as a response to vacant industrial architecture in Geelong. Major industries including Ford (vehicles), Alcoa (aluminium), timber sawmills, wool mills, Pilkington Glass, cement works, and the oil refinery once defined the town and its history as an industrial architectural landscape.1 Major industries transformed the architectural and cultural terrain. Despite these cycles of transformation and erasure, and counter to a progressive and chronological approach to change, the ‘Vacant Geelong’ project explored this vacancy of industrial operation, yet presence of industrial architecture. Through inscriptions – artworks, design projects, creative research, installations, texts – it addressed those material realities that did not leave, the industrial structures – silos, ducts, chimneys, warehouses – that give Geelong its continuing industrial architectural character.

Introduction: Creative labour in East Asia

In this introduction to this special issue on creative labour in East Asia, we explore how the creative industries discourse, and related debates around creative labour, continue to be haunted by a Eurocentric cum Anglocentric bias. The critical language of this discourse often directs all discussion of “inequality”, “precarity” and “self-exploitation” of creative labour towards a critique of “neoliberalism”, thus running the risk of overlooking different socio-political contexts. We point at the urgency to contextualize and globalize, if not decolonize, creative work studies, including the debates surrounding precarity. This special issue explores the nuanced situations of governance and labour experiences in the cultural economies of East Asia.