Word came this afternoon that this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival has sold out. Or at least, Sunday has sold out*. And the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is in the middle period of a Beethoven Festival. And the Grant Park Music Festival will soon be upon us, starting next week. Lollapalooza arrives in August, and there’s an entire website dedicated to the various music festivals that land in downtown Chicago throughout the summer. So it’s worth thinking a little bit about what makes a festival a festival, and what happens to festivalgoers.
When I was at Time Out Chicago, we (me, the music editor, and the art editor) had a standing joke that all you needed for a festival was two shows and a panel discussion. It seemed like we were inundated with the buggers; every other week, another one was starting up, on some subject or theme or artist, and lord only knows if they were viable enterprises or not. Still, we persevered, because there’s something about a festival that gets people going.
Like everything else, that excitement is due to several factors: a concentrated dose of one person’s art; a closer look at an artistic movement you may not have encountered much until now; and the social factors. By that I mean, seeing the same people, and being in the same place repeatedly. You start noticing who’s sitting by you, and that you saw them just the other day, and the fact that you were just in this building once this week already helps establish a routine. “This is mine. I belong here,” you start to think.
Having gone to a couple of these Beethoven Festival concerts so far, it’s starting to get into my consciousness. The pre-concert chamber-music performance the CSO players have put on show you another side of Beethoven, and another side of their own playing. That’s always welcome. The symphonic concerts put you in repeated contact with one of the great musical minds of history, and my thoughts invariably end up as they do in these sorts of things, reflecting that someone else nearly 200 years ago heard these same notes, in another concert hall. A listener can follow in greater detail the paths traced by Beethoven’s mind when one symphony follows close on another’s heels.
My point is, what with all these festivals coming up, it can be some enjoyable mental jujitsu to think through what makes them a festival, and not just a collection of shows. Because all you really need for a festival is two of them, plus a panel discussion.
*300 additional Sunday tickets have been released