Introduction

THIS CHAPTER CHARTS a journey through the staging of musical heritage in Europe. It draws from the experience of programmers of world music festivals and performances who work across the continent. These programmers engage with music acts from diverse heritages and contemporary expressions thereof, from rural folk in Germany and Slovakia, to ritual and ceremonial sounds from Uganda and Thailand. They also work with the hybrid tunes emerging from serendipitous creative encounters that urban living facilitates between musicians coming from different traditions.

I argue that these programmers through their activities are pioneers in creating and fostering an understanding and practice of heritage that is sensitive and deferential to the complexity of contemporary societies. More specifically, they are enacting superdiverse heritage. The concept of superdiversity coined by Vertovec has enhanced our analytical and methodological tools when it comes to the study of contemporary urban societies and the people who inhabit and flow through them. Firstly, it offers a lens to explore the changing composition of our societies from a perspective of ever-growing complexity. Secondly, it gives us an instrument that allows for an in-depth exploration of how underlying and existing structural and cultural dynamics combine in different superdiverse settings, where previous categorical distinctions and classifications of social groups become blurred. As we see in what follows, this analytical and methodological perspective is very helpful when reflecting on the daily practices of world music programmers. Indeed, their perspectives and experiences allow for a privileged viewpoint from which to explore what heritage comes to mean, and what practices are associated with it, against the backdrop of superdiversity.

Building on interviews with the music programmers and on secondary document content analysis (mission statements, work plans, and past activities), my analysis reveals how these organizations work at the boundary of cultural, symbolic, economic, and social values in preserving folk traditions and stimulating continuity and change in contemporary music practices in Europe. In so doing, these organizations and their cultural programmers relate with the intangible cultural heritage of superdiverse urban (and rural) settings on a daily basis, through their practices of music discovery and renewal, through music staging, and through engaging in memory work.