Musical Gentrification and Socio-cultural Diversities, Ph.d.-project: Popular and Distinguished Communities: Gentrification of Country Music Culture in Norway – a Festival Study, 2017

This Ph.d. project presented an ethnographic analysis focused on the development of program content and audience composition characteristics at The Norwegian Country Meeting after this festival achieved the status as a Norwegian hub festival within the genre of country music in 2012. The study looked at the effect specific cultural policies and authoritative criteria for artistic quality, innovation, and audience development may had on a popular and commercial cultural event and its nature of expression. Among other things, the study showed how country music was experienced at an individual and a collective level. The ritualistic festival experience was shown to carry both liminal and non-liminal characteristics. The study employed and connected concepts such as 'cognate musical forms', 'hard-core/soft-shell country', and 'musical habitus' to provide a nuanced description of the manifestation of so-called 'omnivorous' taste in music. Furthermore, the study demonstrated how taste and distaste were articulated in intertextual discourses and across social fields as dialogue and monologue, and as 'didactic cosmopolitanism' - a term introduced in relation to the emergence of communities at the micro level of cultural practice, which in turn was linked to some of the structural prescriptions arising from democratic cultural policies.

The project consist of several subprojects. This file contains data from the Ph.d. project. Qualitative data can be made available for research purposes by order.