“The Night and the City: Music and Policy”

Speaker's bio:

Will Straw is James McGill Professor of Urban Media Studies in the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University in Montreal .  He is the author of Cyanide and Sin : Visualizing Crime in 50s America  (Andrew Roth Gallery, 2006) and co-editor of several volumes of writing on cities, night, popular culture and music.  His most recent contributions include the Oxford Handbook to Canadian Cinema (co-edited with Janine Marchessault) and Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (co-edited with Eric Lewis and Georgina Born.)  He runs a blog theurbannight.com tracking developments in night culture around the world. 

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Abstracts:

In recent years, across much of the world, music has become the focus of new interest on the part of city governments.  Even as national music policies have found themselves challenged by digitization and changes in the structure of the music industries, cities have moved in to embrace music’s capacity to attract tourists, generate income and foster certain forms of social well-being.  Music has become central, as well, to the ways in which cities are thinking about their night-time cultures, even as gentrification and complaints over noise have rendered the health of musical cultures in large cities uncertain.  This talk will look at the ways in which cities now view music through the prism of urban cultural policy.