ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of music in touristic experiences of place, focusing in particular on the way music tourism relates to processes of identity-work. It describes a process of musical identity-work, exploring three levels on which tourist identities are negotiated and performed while visiting music-related locations: the personal, cultural, and embodied. Music, like tourism, involves cognitive, emotional, and embodied social processes in which personal and cultural identities are negotiated and performed. Music tourism had a strong personal emotional component for the interviewees. Music likewise has been studied for its physical, embodied qualities, which in music tourism research has led to a focus on live music events. Music tourism for the interviewees contributed to a sense of personal and cultural identity, and to some extent their activities fulfilled a need for nostalgia, authenticity, and belonging. Music affords what Simon Frith calls ‘identity journeys’ that ‘enable us to place ourselves in imaginative cultural narratives’.
