Musiklandskap : musik och kulturpolitik i Dalarna / Daniel Fredriksson.

Diss. Umeå : Umeå universitet, 2018

In this thesis, I study how conditions for music-making can be developed, maintained and challenged through government support processes in the Swedish region Dalarna. The research questions focus on the ways music, policy and governance relate to each other, what kinds of musicians and ways of making music are favored in these relations, and the agency and meaning of place. The study is made through participant observation of musical events, cultural policy meetings, and the everyday practice of cultural policy officials; interviews with musicians, organizers and cultural policy officials; cultural policy documents as well as musicians’ and organizers’ public documents such as concert posters and websites. The musical landscape of Dalarna is summarized as a complex web with pathways that reach far beyond the geographical borders of the region. The cultural cooperation model works as a hierarchy from center to periphery, from the national government, through agencies, regional government, musical institutions and organizers, musicians and audiences. We can analyze all these practices as being part of music, as musicking. But we could also describe them another way, where the practice of cultural policy is dependent on and conditioned by the musical practices it is set to govern. In this way, musicians are always in some way also creating policy. I discuss genre hierarchies and further argue that music can, or should, not always be motivated by its effects on regional development or its social impact, it also needs to be allowed to be unhealthy and unprofitable. When we support music, we should be aware that it can be a hobby as well as a business, a serious artistic endeavor as well as play. And more often than not, music is all of these things at the same time.