Music festival

People have been enjoying public music festivals since ancient times. The ancient Greeks gathered at the Pythian Games to hear participants flaunt their musical skills. The Celts and Gaels of medieval Great Britain held cultural fairs featuring music and dancing. Later, in early modern Europe, the wealthy classes attended classical music concerts.

In the Western world, music festivals, as they are widely known in the twenty-first century, began principally with the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island in 1954. This event brought thousands of people together to hear jazz and gospel performances by some of the era's most popular musicians.

Other American music festivals that arose in subsequent decades include the Newport Folk Festival, the Monterey International Pop Festival, the Monterey Jazz Festival, and the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, more commonly known as Woodstock. These events gathered audiences of thousands to hear a variety of artists perform their music over several days. Meanwhile, comparable music festivals, such as the Isle of Wight and Glastonbury festivals, began appearing in the United Kingdom. Many other nations around the world started hosting their own diverse music festivals, and they have remained overwhelmingly popular into the twenty-first century.

Background

Since ancient times, music festivals have been part of the human tradition of communing publicly to enjoy shared interests. The people of ancient England, for example, gathered at the stone monument known as Stonehenge for community banquets. The ancient Greeks assembled at Delphi for the Pythian Games, where musicians displayed their musical skills to audiences.

The Middle Ages saw different British pagan societies gather for cultural fairs that heavily emphasized music and dancing. Music festivals even appeared in Europe's classical music eras of the 1600s and 1700s, as the wealthy came together in concert halls to enjoy symphonic performances. Another early example of a music festival appeared in the United States in the early 1800s in the form of the Second Great Awakening. This was a religious movement that encouraged Americans to reconnect with their faith. The movement hosted communal events called camp meetings, where people camped out for several days while praying, hearing sermons, and singing together.

However, the types of music festivals in which large crowds gathered at specific venues to see and hear musicians perform their music did not begin appearing in force until the mid-twentieth century. The 1954 Newport Jazz Festival, organized principally by promoter George Wein, was the United States' first annual jazz concert series. Its lineup of academic discussion panels and performing artists such as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dizzy Gillespie drew audiences of more than eleven thousand people over several days.

In the mid-1950s, this kind of youth-centered music festival was jarring to the conservative culture of Newport. The residents there were unhappy to see crowds of young people sleeping outside in tents and disregarding established social norms, such as not associating with people of other races. Historians generally regard the Newport Jazz Festival, with its encouragement of these emerging liberal attitudes in American youth, as the impetus behind the illustrious music festival culture that would soon arise in the United States and elsewhere.

Impact

The success of the Newport Jazz Festival led Wein to create the Newport Folk Festival in 1959 as a kind of companion event to his jazz program. Over the next few years, this new festival would have a momentous impact on American musical culture. In the early 1960s, the venue became one of the first major hosts of the folk singers Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, who would go on to become defining symbols of the national folk music scene. It was also at the Newport Folk Festival that Dylan later debuted an electric guitar in his music, a decision that elicited boos from staunch devotees of acoustic folk music. In addition to folk artists, the event also helped generate a kind of blues revival in the United States, as somewhat forgotten blues artists such as Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon later appeared on the Newport stage.

The United States continued producing large-scale music festivals later that decade. The 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, a one-off affair, introduced thousands of Americans to such artists as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and The Who. Other popular performers there included Simon and Garfunkel, the Grateful Dead, and Otis Redding.

The United Kingdom's Isle of Wight music festival began in 1968. What started as a small event that year grew substantially over the next two years. It eventually attracted such famous artists as Dylan, Hendrix, The Who, Joni Mitchell, and The Doors. The 1970 Isle of Wight festival attracted hundreds of thousands of people and is believed to be one of the largest such events ever to occur.

In the United States, the Woodstock Festival of 1969 is considered a defining moment in the history of American counterculture, the set of 1960s-era ideals that opposed traditional American social beliefs. The three-day music festival held at Bethel Woods, New York, generated an audience of about five hundred thousand, although concert organizers had planned for only twenty thousand. Woodstock epitomized the free-love attitude of the 1960s hippie movement. Thirty-two musical acts performed at Woodstock on that August weekend, including Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, and Canned Heat.

A diverse range of other music festivals appeared in the United States, the United Kingdom, and around the world throughout the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century. The year 1970 saw the creation of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in the United States, the Pinkpop music festival in the Netherlands, and the Glastonbury Festival in the United Kingdom. Brazil's Rock in Rio event began in 1985, while West Berlin's electronica/techno-themed Love Parade appeared four years later.

Lollapalooza, a music festival featuring alternative rock artists, was founded in Chicago in 1991. This decade would prove to be a fertile time for music festivals. The electronic dance music event KaZantip began in Crimea in this period, as did Australia's Big Day Out, Japan's Fuji Rock Festival, and the United States' Warped Tour and Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Thousands of fans attend these and other annual music festivals, such as Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits, in the twenty-first century, as the events continually evolved to suit changing eras.

Bibliography

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Brooks, Katherine. "Incredible Visual History of Music Festivals Will Remind You Why You Love Summer." HuffPost, 6 Dec. 2017, www.huffpost.com/entry/music-festival-photos‗n‗5374363. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025.

Meyers, Laura Marie. "A History of Music Festivals." Popsugar, 8 Apr. 2014, www.popsugar.com/entertainment/History-Music-Festivals-29236553. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025.

"The Original Isle of Wight Festivals – in Pictures." The Guardian, 12 June 2015, www.theguardian.com/music/gallery/2015/jun/12/the-original-isle-of-wight-festivals-in-pictures. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025.

Spence, Danielle. “From Woodstock to Coachella: 50 Historic Music Festivals.” Stacker, 9 Aug. 2022, stacker.com/music/woodstock-coachella-50-historic-music-festivals. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025.

"Woodstock Festival Opens in Bethel, New York." History, 15 Aug. 2024, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-woodstock-festival-opens-in-bethel-new-york. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025.