Keeping it Country while Dancing with the Elite

Abstract

This article examines programme and audience development at the Norwegian Country Meeting after this festival achieved status as a Norwegian hub festival for country music in 2012. Building on ethnographic data, this article focuses on the effects cultural policies and authoritative criteria for aesthetic quality have had on a popular musical event. The results show how cultural policy may be operationalized based on the dominating preferences of the cultural elite. In this context ‘musical gentrification’ (Dyndahl et al. 2014), a structural phenomenon in which low culture is absorbed into the legitimate culture with inclusionary and exclusionary outcomes, becomes a central theoretical concept. The significance of the study is reflected in its descriptions of how cultural practices and policies relate to wider systems of power and socio-aesthetic inequality.

Keywords

• country music
• festival audiences
• class distinctions
• cultural policy
• quality judgements
• musical gentrification