ABSTRACT
The introduction to this book considers questions at the intersection of social life, COVID-19, and culture and music spaces. It doesn’t dwell heavily on recounting the history and details of the COVID-19 pandemic but asks what the global pandemic has meant for culture, cultural production and consumption, and social life in general. In doing so, it works with two key conceptual frames. The first draws on Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘structures of feeling’, developing the argument that the pandemic and its associated impacts might mark a 21st-century turning point—perhaps a type of reckoning—in the way societies view and possibly value music and culture and how they think about their consumer lifestyles, cultural choices, and future selves. Additionally, via theories of the civil sphere and cultural public sphere, the introduction associates the pandemic as an episode of cultural trauma. In exploring structures of feeling, cultural trauma, and the cultural public sphere, the introduction sets up one of the key contributions of the book which is to explore across different international settings how cultural repair, creation, and innovation occurred in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This introduction also gives a substantial overview of each chapter, together with an illumination of the main ideas that coordinate the book’s contents: Affects, infrastructures, spaces, and futures.
