Project Details
Projekt
"From dance band to cover band" The ball as popular rural site of amusement and musical socialisation
Applicant
Professor Dr. Andreas Fickers
Subject Area
Modern and Contemporary History
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 285228642
The sub-project "From Dance Band to Cover Band" aims to make an empirical contribution to the study of rural areas as "in-between spaces" and to show the special dynamics of border regions as spaces of political, cultural and economic negotiation processes. The micro-historical approach of the research project (i.e. concrete research into the history of local music practices in selected villages in the Saar-Lor-Lux region and the Euregio) will enable a perspective on everyday history that explores the life-world contexts of both musicians and local audiences.This local historical focus of the research project makes it possible to break down the artificial separation between high and popular culture, traditional forms of music making and village festival and dance culture with mass media-influenced appropriations of musical products and their collective consumption. Inspired by research in cultural anthropology and cultural studies, which emphasizes the sensory and body-historical dimension of popular cultural practices, the sub-project aims at a sensory-historical extension of the previous research design of "Popkult60". The production and appropriation of new musical styles in the long 1960s transcends the purely musical dimension. Rather, we are dealing with a change in the perception of tones, sounds, and images that was strongly influenced by new technologies (electrical music devices and amplifiers), with novel "vibes" or "vibrations" that touched and moved people in novel ways. In this sense, balls must not only be understood as places of sound, but must be interpreted in their entire function as arenas of performative rites: in other words, as social laboratories in which social roles and orders are rehearsed or transgressed, physical and emotional spaces of experience and horizons of expectation sounded out, and generational fractures but also intergenerational cohesion (for example, in the organization of a ball by a club) can come to light. In the form of the ball, music, dance and drinking culture enter into a sensory and life-world symbiosis whose significance for the formation of specific identities and popular culture as an ontological "Gesamtkunstwerk" has hardly been historically investigated.
DFG Programme
Research Units
International Connection
Luxembourg
Partner Organisation
Fonds National de la Recherche
