Have you found what you’re looking for? Analysing tourist experiences of Wagner’s Bayreuth,ABBA’s Stockholm and U2’s Dublin

Abstract

Music tourism, the act of travelling to places associated with music, has become part of the tourism itinerary of many European cities. Although academic interest in this phenomenon is growing, little empirical research explores the experiences of music tourists – what are music tourists looking for? This study is based on participant observation and 15 in-depth interviews with tourists to Wagner’s Bayreuth, ABBA’s Stockholm and U2’s Dublin. It is argued that music tourism experiences involve a process of identity-work on a personal, cultural and embodied level. For most of the respondents, music plays an important role in their story of self, which is one of the main motives for travel and a source of performing self through music tourism practices. Once there, tourists relate personal music memories to music histories encountered in situ. Thus, music tourism effectively connects personal memories with shared identities and social spaces created by embodied practices.

Keywords

ABBA embodiment experience identity music nostalgia performance U2 Wagner

Introduction

Wow, I finally got here, I finally got to where this music is being made … they have been in there, they have been in those four walls … and made the music that I have heard and listened to all this time. (Tara, 43, English)

Tara is standing in front of the U2 studio at Windmill Lane in Dublin, Ireland. The studio walls are covered in graffiti left there by U2 fans. This location is one of several stops on an organized walking tour through the city, celebrating what the guide refers to as Ireland’s most famous rock band. Stops along the way include the Bonavox hearing aid store that lends lead singer Bono his name, a selection of former rock venues the band performed at, the hotel that is owned by Bono and lead guitarist The Edge and the current studio the band uses for recording sessions. Tara is not alone in wanting to visit this diverse set of U2-related locations: as increasing amounts of people – other fans, families on holiday, groups of foreign language students – join the tour, U2 is rapidly becoming part of the Dublin tourism itinerary.

Recognized as a growing niche in global tourism (Connell and Gibson, 2003: 221; Lashua et al., 2014: 8), music tourism can be defined broadly as ‘travel, at least in some part, because of a connection with music’ (Gibson and Connell, 2007: 161). Music tourism often involves live music events, and it has been argued that these events like festivals and concerts make music tourism economically viable (Roberts, 2014) and account for its special feel or appeal – music tourism in this sense is understood as ‘travel to hear music played’ (Lashua et al., 2014: 8). As live music is not always necessarily part of music-related travel, as, for example, in the U2 walking tour, in this article, music tourism is studied in its broader definition.

Taken in this broader sense, music tourism appears to be a persistent phenomenon, visible for example in the continued popularity of visits to places such as Elvis’ Graceland (over 600.00 visitors annually, www.graceland.com) and festivals like Glastonbury (177.500 unique visitors in 2007; Baker Associates, 2007). In addition to sustained numbers of tourists, music tourism is becoming increasingly institutionalized. An example of this is the existence of an industry lobby group in the United Kingdom. Based on this group’s research, the economic advantages of music tourism for the United Kingdom are around 2.2 billion pounds (UK Music, 2013) – according to UK Music at least, music tourism means business.

Academic interest in this subject is also on the rise. A number of inspiring studies have been carried out (Cohen, 2007; Connell and Gibson, 2003; Gibson and Connell, 2005) with scholarly attention focusing primarily on eye-catching, Anglo-Saxon examples like the Beatles’ Liverpool (Fremaux and Fremaux, 2013; Kruse, 2003, 2005a, 2005b) and pilgrimages to the aforementioned Graceland (Alderman, 2002; Drummond, 2011; King, 1994; Rodman, 1996). Other research focusing on popular music heritage includes AC/DC Lane (Frost, 2008) and Joy Division’s Manchester (Otter, 2013). People also travel to places to experience a particular music genre in its ‘authentic’ context, referring to places that have become known as sites of musical creativity where musicians come together or where the ‘magic’ of composition has taken or takes place (Gibson and Connell, 2007; Johansson and Bell, 2009; Rommen and Neely, 2014). Research including this genre-based tourism has focused on blues tourism (Fry, 2014), hip-hop tourism (Xie et al., 2007), Electronic Dance Music (EDM) tourism (Bennett, 2004; Saldanha, 2002; Sandvoss, 2014), ‘blackpacking’ (Podoshen, 2013) and Goth music tourism (Spracklen and Spracklen, 2014).

Within this growing field of music tourism research, the way tourists themselves give meaning to this activity remains surprisingly under-researched – referring to the U2 song that forms the title of this article: what are music tourists looking for?

Existing studies offer some suggestions. Connell and Gibson position music tourism as the consequence of a postmodern crisis of identity, linking music tourism to the need for nostalgia and a search for authenticity in Western society (Connell and Gibson, 2003: 222–277; Gibson and Connell, 2005: 263). The fluid, temporary and fragmented nature of postmodern identities as posited by Bauman (2005) and Appadurai (1990) is said to cause a continuous process of identity-work in which versions of identity are built, negotiated and reformed in order to achieve a sense of belonging (Morley, 2001). The ability of music to offer an effective way of stimulating a sense of identity and community (DeNora, 1999; Hesmondhalgh, 2013) has also been attributed to music tourism, especially through the role of live music experiences (Cohen, 2007).

However, the amount of empirical research that has been carried out exploring and supporting this role of identity-work in music tourism from the tourist’s perspective remains limited. Therefore, this article presents a comparative qualitative empirical perspective, exploring how, and in which ways, tourists involve this kind of identity-work in practice during their visits to music-related locations.

To answer this question, three music tourism cases from three different genres and relating to different timeframes were chosen, opening up research to the diversity of music tourism examples in practice. Participant observation was combined with interviews with tourists, tour guides and tourism officials involving Wagner tourism to Bayreuth (Germany), ABBA tourism to Stockholm (Sweden) and U2 tourism to Dublin (Ireland). Based on these empirical data, a process of musical identity-work is uncovered, exploring three levels on which tourist identities are negotiated and performed: the personal, cultural and embodied.

Music, tourism and identity

Before exploring how music tourism contributes to creating spaces of belonging, first it needs to be understood how touristic experience of place involves identity and in which ways music can become a part of this. Useful in this regard is understanding tourism through what has been called the ‘performative turn’ in tourism (Haldrup and Larsen, 2010). Tourism can be seen as a social process in which roles are performed and events and spaces are staged (MacCannell, 1976). This performance metaphor shows how tourists make sense of their own self through performing certain roles (Crouch et al., 2001) – backpacking means behaving differently than being a tourist on a guided tour.

However, the notion of performance is ambivalent: ‘the organization, materiality and aesthetic and sensual qualities of tourist space influence – but do not determine – the kinds of performances that tourists undertake’ (Edensor, 2001: 63). This ambivalence can be explained in relation to music tourism in two ways.

First, performance of self is influenced by the social context the tourist encounters. Being able to perform tourist roles implies knowing what these roles are and behaving in such a way. Tourism involves social frames and also enables and constrains tourism practices through the workings of the tourism industry. In music tourism, the music industry is an additional factor in the commodification of tourism.

A second dimension of ambivalence relevant to music tourism as performance is the extent to which tourism performance is reflexive. Edensor (2001) conceives of tourism practices as, on one hand, cognitively reflexive, a conscious set of activities and narrative reflections. On the other hand, tourism involves unreflexive, embodied activities: roles are not only chosen but also unintentionally enacted (p. 78).

This ambivalence helps to understand why tourist identity is not a stable unity, but a constant process of becoming, of identity-work. What it means to be a tourist is constituted both through reflexive narratives of self (Giddens, 1991) and unreflexive, embodied ways of doing (Larsen, 2005: 420).

The final step towards an understanding of the relation between tourism and identity which is relevant to music tourism lies in an extended notion of embodiment. The emphasis on embodiment puts focus on a multi-sensory conception of tourism. Embodiment refers to the active tourist body moving through place (Veijola and Jokinen, 1994), which opens the door for other senses to be included in tourism analysis, such as hearing and listening (Waitt and Duffy, 2009).

An element to add to these theories of performance is the connection between emotion, cognition and moving through place. Emotion and cognition are essentially embodied as well, which puts a thinking, emotional and active body at the centre of tourists’ experiences of place (Rakić and Chambers, 2012: 1629). Therefore, tourist experiences of place in this article are understood as embodied performances of identity that are at the same time cognitive, emotional and multi-sensory (Rakić and Chambers, 2012: 1629). As we will argue, this extended notion of embodiment is especially salient to an analysis of the ways in which music contributes to touristic experiences of place. In the next section, we turn to the role music can play in connecting these aspects of touristic experiences of place.

Music as a technology of self

Music, like tourism, involves cognitive, emotional and embodied social processes in which personal and cultural identity is negotiated and performed (DeNora, 1999; Hesmondhalgh, 2013). The theoretical point of departure for this article is the work of music sociologist Tia DeNora, who has written extensively on music as a technology of the self, a tool to construct personal identity and behave socially in the world. Through relating to music memories, people create the tale of who they have been, who they are and who they want to become: ‘Music can be used as a device for the reflexive process of remembering/constructing who one is, a technology for spinning the apparently “continuous” tale of who one “is”’ – a process DeNora calls introjection (DeNora, 1999: 45). According to DeNora, music can be used as a device for ‘being’ not only in a cognitive, narrative way, but it is also a tool to regulate emotions and bodily well-being – music influences how we feel, enhancing or changing emotions (DeNora, 1999: 45).

Hesmondhalgh (2013) stresses that music’s role is not isolated, as music is always part of modern society. People are bound to negotiate between a sense of self and varied senses of collective cultural identity, like gender and ethnicity (Hesmondhalgh, 2013: 38). Comparable to the ambivalence discussed in relation to tourism, the role of music in identity formation is characterized by the ambivalence between individual agency and social constraint. To put it differently, what music means to people is always to some extent dependent on social context. This helps to understand how tourism offers frames that influence, limit or shape the role of music in the experience of place for music tourists. A case in point is the analysis of Goa dance floors by Saldanha (2002), the raves creating spaces of inclusion and exclusion for tourists and locals alike.

What makes music special, according to Hesmondhalgh, is the sense of connection it offers between an emotional, private experience of self-identity and already existing cultural discourses. This role of music is first present in remembering, as music-related practices enable people to map personal music stories with strong emotional content onto stories of other individuals or cultural narratives (Van Dijck, 2006). In this article, we will show that this process involves social practices that are performed during music tourism, such as going on a music-themed walking tour.

A second way in which music establishes this connection is through music’s pronounced physical and emotional dimensions. Especially prevalent while being a member of a concert audience, music offers a connection between the private, emotional meanings of the music and a sense of being connected to the rest of the audience through this experience (Hesmondhalgh, 2013). Malbon (1999) refers to this as the ‘oceanic feeling’ music offers, in which personal identity is temporarily suspended. In her work on Beatles tourism, Sara Cohen (2007) describes how hearing music during Beatles week forms an immersive space for tourists by creating a sense of direct, unmediated, non-cognitive experience in which music seems to create its own time, space and motion through music’s texture and tactile sound, its physical presence.

Forming affective ties to music and place

Fan scholar Cornel Sandvoss (2014) has expanded on this research in a study of Ibiza fans. According to Sandvoss, concert attendance as analysed by Saldanha, Hesmondhalgh and Cohen only forms part of the ways in which tourists emotionally engage with place and music. The unique ‘vibe’ of Ibiza cannot be explained solely through clubbing. The experience on the dance floor is short-lived and is not experienced by all, which indicates that this experience alone cannot be the source of a continued sense of belonging felt towards the island of Ibiza.

Therefore, attention should shift from a focus solely on the sensory aspects of music to the narrative ways in which affective ties to music and place are established. Sandvoss subsequently focuses on the role of online Ibiza fan communities. A love of place should be found, according to Sandvoss, in the virtual connection towards Ibiza, kept alive and grown through online fan engagement.

In this article, the focus is on the varied ways in which music is involved in creating topophilia (Tuan, 1974), an attachment to place. Starting from the broader concept of embodiment as mentioned earlier, we analyse the immersive music-related practices that cause a cognitive, emotional and multi-sensory sense of being there, a musical topophilia. Through interviews with music tourists, we argue that immersion, in the case of music tourism, should be understood more broadly than only pertaining to experiencing live music, ranging from the passive oceanic experience of absorption at concerts to active ways in which tourists integrate music, identity and place.

In short, this research expands on Cohen’s and Sandvoss’ work by exploring how travelling matters to the ways tourists consume and form connections between music, identity and place, elucidated through an analysis of Wagner-, ABBA- and U2-related tourism. Before looking at the specific practices involved, we will first outline the methodological aspects of this study.

Methods

Participant observation and interviews were conducted in Bayreuth (Germany), Dublin (Ireland) and Stockholm (Sweden) in the second half of 2013, with tourists who visited ABBA-, U2- and Wagner-related locations. We compared tourism involving different music genres (pop, rock and opera), as existing music tourism research focuses primarily on single-case examples involving popular music (Lashua et al., 2014). The aim of this study is not to extrapolate the experiences of the interviewees into a general theory of music tourism experience, but to offer a nuanced understanding of their situated experiences.

The specific examples were chosen because they involve highly successful music careers spanning different decades: ABBA released and performed their music in the 1970s, U2 shot to fame in the early 1980s and are still releasing new albums, while Wagner triumphed in Bayreuth at the end of the nineteenth century.

Participant observation of tourist behaviour took place during ABBA, U2 and Wagner walking tours, in the ABBA museum in Stockholm, in several Wagner exhibitions in Bayreuth and at additional locations related to the music or musicians. Participant observation and on-site short interviews (32) were combined with off-site semi-structured in-depth interviews among tourists (15), tour guides (6) and tourist agency officers (3), conducted during autumn/winter 2013 and spring 2014.

Of the interviewees, seven tourists were female and eight male. Nationalities were varied, but all interviewees were living in Europe, the United Kingdom or the United States at the time of the interview. Ranging in age from 29 to 68 years old, occupations included professors, financial managers, a recording engineer, communications professional, an image editor and someone unemployed. The social profile of the interviewees differed markedly between the different locations.

The Wagner tourists visiting the festival conformed to a typical classical music audience (Peterson, 1992): senior, high income and highly educated (finished university education). The walking tour attracted a slightly younger audience, as the concerts require a 10-year waiting list, but the tour is open to anyone. Offered in the afternoon, it was also an alternative for tourists who had missed the early morning historical tour of the town. The ABBA tourists were younger than the Wagner tourists, and there was a remarkable prevalence of parent–child couples: a father or mother who was a fan of ABBA music when they were in their early adulthood, and their child who had got to know ABBA through the MAMMA MIA! musical and film. The city museum designed the ABBA tour to attract people in their 20s to their historical walking tours (Sara Claesson, 2013, personal communication), but the impression given by tour guides and the tourists seen indicated that the audience actually taking the tour at the time of research was both younger and older, the children being in their early teens, the parents were around 40 years old. The level of education of the ABBA tourists was average to high (having finished at least higher vocational education). For U2, the general educational level of the interviewees was average (starting at intermediate vocational education), ages ranging from 37 to 50 years old.

The interviews were conducted using a semi-structured interview guide (Kvale and Brinkmann, 2009) with four main topics: the level of involvement with the music, the reconstruction of the journey, the experience of the tourists and the overall meaning of the journey to the tourist. The interviews lasted between 15 minutes and 4.5 hours, averaging 81 minutes.

The data were analysed using a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006). First, the interviews were transcribed verbatim and consequently analysed using Atlas.ti. Codes were assigned freely in a phase of initial coding and then grouped together through a phase of axial coding. Subsequently, the transcripts were reread to saturate the codes.

In the next three sections, we will discuss how the interviewees involved music in the way they experienced the three cities. First, we consider the relation between the role of music in everyday life as a story of self and the way music tourism activities are included in this story. Then we explore how this personal story of self is culturally embedded, discussing the ways in which interviewees make connections between their personal biographies and cultural narratives on location. Finally, we show in which ways music aurally contributes to creating spaces for identity-work – both through concert attendance and beyond.

Analysis

Music tourism as a story of self

To stand there, and then you see … they have been removed by the way: ‘I see seven towers and I see only one’ … that you’re standing there and you can see the towers he writes about, you actually see it in front of you, and then you hear: ‘I see seven towers I see only one way out’ … that is an indescribable feeling. (Patrick, 50, Dutch)

Arriving at Dublin airport, Patrick recounts how a special sensation takes hold of him. Visible from the airport exit is a grey flat, a panorama the unsuspecting traveller passes by without taking notice. But as U2 fan Patrick describes, upon seeing the tower a song starts to play in his head: ‘I see seven towers / but I see only one way out …’ The song, Running to Stand Still, is about the Ballymun flats, seven flats that once stood in the neighbourhood U2’s lead singer Bono grew up in. Only one flat today remains, and for Patrick, arriving in Dublin and seeing the tower causes an experience all interviewees shared to some degree: the sense of ‘being there’.

Although this moment forms an emotional climax, it is part of an on-going process of emotional involvement with the music that all interviewees share. Music can play this role throughout everyday life (DeNora, 1999), but it is especially noticeable when involving important, formative moments in people’s lives (Van Dijck, 2006). During the interviews, this was confirmed by stories of how the tourists first came into contact with the music, for example, by secretly listening to Wagner music as son of Jewish Holocaust victims, or by listening to U2 during the first long period away from home. For the tourists who did not regard themselves as fans, the music was related to one or two of these special moments in childhood or adolescence. For tourists who did regard themselves as fans, the music was there at important moments throughout their lives:

Time and time, I have sort of associated certain albums with certain parts of my life, says did exams, starting college … when I hear a single I always associate it with a particular time, when one of my kids was born, or when I got married … the song itself won’t necessarily have any meaning to it, but I just associate it with that particular period of time of my life, so it’s like a wallpaper to my life. (Paul, 37, Irish)

The role of music in the story of self, especially for fans, leads up to the emotional climax of ‘finally’ being there, as the quote of Tara at the beginning of this article showed, and as Richard recounts:

It’s unbelievably exciting … for me it’s my first time, and it’s something I dreamt of doing ever since I was small … I’ve been in love with Wagner’s music since I was 9 years old … and coming to Bayreuth was always kind of a dream. (Richard, 50, American)

This aspect of the attraction of visiting place can be linked to the age of the interviewees. Ranging from 29 to 68 years of age, there often was a prolonged emotional involvement with the music, which influenced the experience of place. As emphasized by David:

Being in Bayreuth really made a difference … it’s not like people check things off a list like okay, I’ve been to Bayreuth … for me it’s a place I do want to go back to … almost need to because … now I’m 63, I hear Wagner one way, and I’m sure that when I’m 70 and have more experience of life, I’ll experience it in a different way. (David, 63, American)

Next to the role of age, this quote shows how the interviewees include their trips in their story of self – travelling to these places is not simply ticking a box on a to-do list of life experiences. In the case of David, it is a motor for recurrent travel, as the music takes on new meanings concurrent with accumulated life experiences.

Music-related travel in this sense is not only fun, it is also a way of communicating and creating identity (Therckelsen and Gram, 2008): taking part in an ABBA walking tour signals that you are a person who has some sort of connection with ABBA. Where Therckelsen and Gram have shown how travel choices solidify the bond between mature married couples, the ABBA fans showed how travelling is a way of sharing identities across generations. In the case of the young ABBA fans and their parents, taking part in the walking tour allowed them to share their identity as ABBA fans with each other.

Interestingly, it seems that the artists themselves hold special significance for tourists in constructing identity in music-related travel. The interviewees attached great significance to getting close to band members or the composer during their trip. This was especially important to U2 fans, as it is possible to run into the U2 members at their studio, and trips are actually planned according to their being in Dublin to maximize the chances of this happening:

You do check … when we go, we know from the internet they are working on a new album … and are in the studio … so yes, you can take a chance on it. (Gloria, 44, Dutch)

Although in the case of ABBA and Wagner meeting the artists is either improbable or impossible, proximity still is an important motivation for music tourism. ABBA tourists, for example, were disappointed that there was not much attention paid to the current situation of the ABBA members during the tour. When tourists asked the tour guide about this, she pointed out issues of walking distance and privacy.

In the case of Bayreuth, although Wagner himself is dead, people for example visit his grave, and tourists get excited about the idea of being led through Bayreuth by Wagner himself in the Walk with Wagner-app issued by the tourist agency. The next best thing is to meet the singers and musicians from the Festspielhaus production.

Comments on wanting to meet band members of U2 and ABBA or Wagner family and musicians return frequently during interviews. Reijnders (2011) has written on the apparent need people have in the current media-saturated society for proximity, understood as a need for moments of ‘unmediated’ reality. Being close to celebrities creates moments in which fans get the chance to experience their idol in an unmediated way, which supposedly takes their parasocial relation with the idol to a new level. Interestingly, the way fans describe their meet-and-greets reveals more about themselves than about their idol (Reijnders et al., 2014).

While Reijnders does not explore this idea further, the interviews in this study show that wanting to be close to the artist or the composer in music tourism says more about the tourist than about the artist – for example, in the words of Gloria, when describing the moment she meets Bono after getting him a birthday present during a music trip to Dublin:

… then he turned himself fully to me: ‘did you give me that cheese?’ At that moment I knew he had received it, because it had been all wrapped up before … so I asked – he instantly gave me two kisses – and I said: ‘do you even like cheese?’ and he said: ‘oh yeah. I love cheese, I am a cheese man. (Gloria, 44, Dutch)

Traditional Dutch Gouda cheese is a strong marker of national identity to Gloria. This example is interesting since it expands on what Roberts describes as the ‘contagious magic’ of a music tourism site (Roberts, 2014: 11): places associated with artists have an auratic quality. Podoshen (2013) argues that this ‘emotional contagion’ is essential to the experience of music tourism, as the tourist takes on qualities or emotions associated with the artist in some way. Music tourism in this sense contributes to a feeling of existential authenticity (Wang, 1999), the tourist being in touch with a true self, rather than the constructed, inauthentic self of everyday postmodern life.

However, in the example of Gloria and in other instances like it throughout the interviews, tourists did not refer to such a division between their sense of self at home and on holiday. Rather, in their descriptions of visiting music tourism sites, they stressed the continuity between the role of music in their everyday life and during their holiday. This finding suggests that a desire to escape in search of an authentic self is not really a motivation for travel in the case of the music tourists in this study.

This is confirmed by findings in other research on niche tourism. This type of tourism is influenced by a desire to continue activities that are important at home, as part of the travellers’ embodied taste preferences, or habitus (Bourdieu, 1984). As concluded by Lee et al. (2014) in a study on slow food tourism, tourists may carry their interests as part of their habitus to wherever they go (p. 218). Instead of music tourism functioning as a way to anchor identity outside the unstable postmodern home, the interview data in this research suggest that music tourism is rather an extension of that home, not an escape.

In the next section, we will broaden the scope of the analysis by focusing on the interaction between this personal level of experience and the social-cultural context in which music tourism takes place.

Connecting to cultural identities

As shown in the previous section, music tourism has a strong personal emotional component. What makes music tourism as an activity special for tourists is the opportunity to actively connect these personal music memories to the ways music is presented as local history on site, for example, through taking part in walking tours, visiting museums and talking to locals. Music tourism thereby forms an example of a practice that involves the social role of music (Hesmondhalgh, 2013): the way it connects personal dimensions of experience with cultural identity.

These personal memories can fit into and overlap with the music histories presented at museums and during walking tours on location, offering an opportunity to look back at certain decades or moments in time. During the interviews, Robert for example describes the feeling of nostalgia he experienced during his ABBA trip to Stockholm, triggered by merchandise in the ABBA museum:

When you walked in there, and you saw this merchandise of ABBA stuff it brought back so many memories to me, of when I was a kid in Australia. There was definitely parts of the museum that was really nostalgic … when I walked into that shop I was like, oh my god, this really took me back to my childhood … quite funny. (Robert, 50, Australian)

In this example, Robert identifies with a particular time period that is personally meaningful to him through his childhood memories. This example shows how tourists engage with cultural narratives, through relating these stories to their personal biographies (Bagnall, 2003).

However, since personal memory plays such an important role in this process, idiosyncrasies are involved, such as the role the music still plays in a fan’s life or having a different memory or experience of what is presented. The experience of music tourism to the interviewees therefore holds a certain degree of ambivalence (Spracklen and Spracklen, 2014), relating to both issues of agency and ethics.

This becomes clear when comparing Robert’s reaction to the ABBA museum with hearing music during the ABBA walking tour. Robert experienced nostalgia upon seeing the merchandise, whereas the songs that are played during the nostalgically framed ABBA walking tour are not always experienced in that way by the interviewees, but actually remind them more about recent social situations in which they listen to and sing along to ABBA:

It reminded me of … I had an ABBA-party for my girlfriends at home you know … we were singing and dancing. So that maybe describes more about in which occasions I listen to ABBA songs and it has a lot to do with singing along. That is why I found it really nice, the opportunity to listen and sing along to these songs during the walk as well … so that is what it did to me mainly. (Elviira, 44, Finnish)

Sometimes the time period that tourists are reminded of through music does not correspond with that which is presented by a museum or during a walking tour. Music tourism has been conceptualized as a nostalgia industry (Fremaux and Fremaux, 2013; Gibson and Connell, 2007; Kruse, 2005b), nostalgia being understood as a longing for times past (Boym, 2001). Our analysis shows that a focus on nostalgia should not exclude or reduce the active role of the tourist. Although a nostalgic framing can offer a directed performance of tourism (Edensor, 2001), music comes to carry new meanings to the tourist in everyday life. As one Wagner tourist put it: ‘Wagner is contemporary’, meaning that Wagner music continues to have new meanings to him in the present even though it is a product of the past. This influences the way a musicscape is experienced.

However, while tourists do not passively absorb accounts of the past, these narratives do influence their experience of the places visited, and not always in a positive way. An example is the U2 walk. The U2 walk is organized by a fan, Paul, who engages with current images of the band that circulate in the media. Paul tries to reconfigure the perceived popular image of U2 as the band of the celanthropist Bono (Rojek, 2014). In offering a grassroots, vernacular memory (Burgoyne, 2013) of U2, Paul emphasizes the musical quality of the band during his tour by including mostly sites where U2 has performed or created its music. Hereby he reproduces an idea of authenticity, current in rock music discourse, as a history of live performance which is seen to contribute towards the credibility of a rock band (Auslander, 2008).

This example shows a moment of friction between personal and cultural identifications with music. This is especially prominent in Wagner tourism, as being a fan of Wagner music and going to Bayreuth raises moral questions. Both tourists and tour guides try to undo unwanted connections between the music and the difficult and tainted Nazi history of the Bayreuth festival. The solution for them seems to lie in making a strong distinction between the music and Wagner as a person.

This distinction seemed a little odd to the field researcher at first, as usually in classical music the composer is an important source for meaning construction. However, the notion of habitus as mentioned in the previous section is useful to explain this apparent discrepancy in the stories of Wagner fans. Fans challenge or ignore textual references that do not match their own frames of reference, their habitus (Sandvoss, 2007). In the case of Wagner tourism, Wagner as a person is excluded from the meaning-making process, which in a way solves the problem of his contested past for his fans.

However, this meaning-making process takes place in Bayreuth, where the confrontation with history is literally present. Bayreuth is a ‘guilty landscape’ (Reijnders, 2011), for example through the presence of the Wagner family guesthouse where Hitler was a guest. The Wagner tourists who are fans do appropriate these elements to some extent, which results in Wagner music being, in David’s words, ‘a guilty pleasure’.

The physicality of the location therefore offers not only a reflection and extension of self, but also changes the relationship of the fan to the object of fandom. This special role of embodied experience has been ascribed to the power of attending concerts in previous studies. In the next section, we will discuss the role this plays along with other ways, in which music-related activities influence tourism identity-work.

Tuning in – embodied identity

The act of travelling is embodied. Music likewise has been studied for its physical, embodied qualities, which in music tourism research has led to a focus on live music events (Lashua et al., 2014). Especially being part of a concert audience is said to bring music’s ability to create special embodied spaces of experience to the fore (Cohen, 2007), described as the oceanic feeling of loss of identity (Malbon, 1999) or an experience of absorption. In the interviews, this was present for both popular and classical music:

One of my favourite live tracks is Bad from Unforgettable Fire from 1984, every time I hear that I get goose bumps … especially when it’s in Dublin, when I hear that it just knocks me senseless, if you talk to me during that song, you won’t even get a response … I get transported to a different planet, I get transported to planet Bono. (Tara, 43, British)

Bayreuth really is like stepping of the planet to a different planet for a very brief moment … you can sustain that mood, especially if you go to the Ring cycle, because you get four nights of it … yeah, being in Bayreuth really made a difference. (David, 63, American)

As is evident from what Tara says, absorption contributes to a sense of loss of personal identity. The interviewees describe the sense of connection which arises from being part of an audience:

What we’re hearing tonight is in a way a distillation of hundreds of thousands of performances of people living and dead, and we are part of that … we are part of a unique moment, but we are also part of a great river, that flows on and which we share with all those people who went before us … there is a great sense of connection. (Richard, 50, American)

However, during the interviews it became clear that music contributes to connecting personal experience and social aspects in more ways than in attending concerts on location. Other music-related practices such as singing along during a walking tour or imagining music also contribute to the embodied experience of place for music tourists. In line with Fry (2014: 71), active participation for tourists is crucial to music tourism.

Music offers specific ways in which this active participation takes place – for example, simply walking around at a music-related site and realizing that the language of the music was in fact spoken language, not a libretto:

Being surrounded in Bayreuth by the German … all the sudden it made the singing not memorized language but conversation, people talking to each other – which is of course how original audiences heard it. It wasn’t that they had studied the libretto, memorized it and came prepared, you know. (David, 63, American)

The importance of walking has also been remarked on in relation to literary walking tours (Plate, 2006). Where Plate credits the geographical knowledge gained by walking to illuminate the text, David’s quote shows how knowledge of the soundscape of a city can illuminate the music.

Moreover, during the ABBA walking tour, a social dimension was added to this experience. Music was played when walking from location to location, and the tourists were invited to sing along. This was experienced as creating a music tourist bubble:

I found it really funny during this ABBA walking tour … that the guide had the little tape recorder playing ABBA songs … there were so many people because of the Triathlon … I found it really nice, our group walking after her through the crowd and playing … and we were singing a little bit … I found that really, really nice. (Anna, 29, Russian)

The group navigated a busy square that was filled with people who had come to watch the Stockholm Triathlon. Singing along to the music demarcated the group members from the Triathlon audience, which made the group space more evident.

The ABBA walking tour was one of few examples in which music was actually played out loud to tourists. Likewise, the interviewees did not mention listening to recorded music individually during the tour or when visiting other places related to music, despite the current ease of listening to music on the spot with mobile devices. Apparently, none of the interviewees felt the urge to do this, because as they explained, the music was already playing in their heads:

‘I see seven towers and only one way out’ … when you arrive at Dublin airport and you see the tower in front of you … I already hear the song in my head, I don’t need to play it. (Martin, 41, Dutch)

This involuntary musical imagery (Williamson and Jilka, 2014) forms an embodied memory (Van Dijck, 2006), which creates a private personal space for the tourist as the tourist alone hears it. By walking around and engaging with the locations, the interviewees experience music both in this imaginative, individual way and in the social dimension that replayed or live music offers.

Conclusion

This research aims to explore music tourism from the tourist’s perspective, focusing in particular on the way music tourism relates to processes of identity-work. As the results show, the music tourists in this study engage in identity-work in at least three ways. First, these tourists visit particular places because they are connected to music that plays a part in their story of self. Visiting the locations therefore is the culmination of an emotional involvement with the music. This involvement often has a long history, which is not surprising regarding the age of the interviewees.

This research shows that not only the music plays an important role. Being in close proximity to the musician is also a way to perform personal identity, especially in those cases where the musician has come to embody the music.

Second, the personal experience of music is connected to the stories tourists encounter while on location, offered by other fans or locals met while travelling, by museums or during walking tours. What this research shows is that central to music tourism is not so much the comparing of images with visual reality while on location (Podoshen, 2013), but relating personal and emotional music memories to the locations visited. These memories can fit into and overlap with the music histories presented at museums and during walking tours on location, offering an opportunity to look back at certain decades or moments in time. However, idiosyncrasies are involved as tourists’ personal memories and experiences can and often do diverge from the story that is presented.

The experience of music tourism to the tourist therefore holds a certain degree of ambivalence, relating to both issues of agency and ethics. The nostalgic story presented on location does not necessarily have to be the story that is experienced by the visitor. Moreover, tourists can be confronted with uncomfortable narratives surrounding the music or artist, as is the case in Wagner tourism. This shows how the role of music in identity-work is not always entirely positive, and visiting places because of a connection with music can confront tourists with negative associations attached to these locations.

Third, we have shown how the connection between personal life narratives and more general cultural narratives is stimulated by the bodily experience of ‘being there’. This turned out to be one of the central characteristics of music tourism. For the interviewees, music effectively mediates between personal spaces of the imagination and shared, social spaces through practices such as singing along or being part of an audience. Through these embodied practices, the experience of ‘being there’ for this diverse group of tourists can form the starting point (accidental tourist) or an anchor point (fan) in a continued emotional connection to the related place, a musical topophilia.

In contrast with previous research on music tourism, the interviews of this study suggest that a sense of escape is not central to the experience of music tourism to the interviewees. ‘Being there’ forms an extension to the identities constructed and performed in everyday life. The contribution thereby is first and foremost empirical, adding to the growing body of research on music tourism which is still small compared to other forms of media tourism, such as literary and film tourism.

In a broader scope, this research offers a contribution in light of the proliferation of articles emphasizing a multi-sensory approach to tourism studies (Chronis, 2015; Edensor and Falconer, 2011; Trandberg Jensen et al., 2015; Waitt and Duffy, 2009). Based on the dimensions of musical identity-work analysed, this research shows how music can mediate between reflexive symbolic aspects and unreflexive enacted aspects of tourism. By adopting an expanded notion of embodiment, this mediating role calls attention to the ambivalence inherent in tourism.

While this analysis has focused on similarities between three different examples of music tourism, the differences encountered point towards possible directions for future research. Research on the relation between music, place and identity suggests class, ethnicity and gender influence music tourism experience (Cohen, 2014). This research contributes to the limited body of work exploring the relation between music, identity and place empirically from the perspective of the Western urban tourist, but research is needed that includes, for example, non-urban and non-Western contexts.

Despite these considerations, the process of identity-work described here offers a framework to explore the questions raised by postmodern explanations of music tourism. Music tourism for the interviewees contributes to a sense of personal and cultural identity, suggesting that their activities to some extent fulfil a need for nostalgia, authenticity and belonging. Moreover, music-related practices play an active role as building materials of identity, contributing to varying degrees of feeling immersed and absorbed. In the eyes of the tourist, visiting music-related places offers a ‘lived and felt knowledge’ (Plate, 2006) which lifts the experience of music out of the ordinary, in a way which is not possible through listening to a CD at home.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the interviewees for generously sharing their experiences. Thanks go out to the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions on the previous version of this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research as part of the project ‘Locating Imagination. An interdisciplinary perspective on literary, film and music tourism’, grant number PR-11-77.

Author biographies

Leonieke Bolderman is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Arts and Culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on the role and meaning of music tourism in contemporary culture.

Stijn Reijnders is a Professor of Cultural Heritage, in particular in relation to tourism and popular culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research interests revolve around the role of media culture in everyday life.

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