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This article discusses the findings of an Arts and Humanities Research Council project researching how music festival communities in Scotland can address issues of environmental sustainability and climate change. It investigates how music festival communities are constructed with a focus on what role, if any, they might play in responding to the global challenge of environmental sustainability. Using music festivals in Scotland as a case study, we employed a variety of research methods to interrogate different constituents in music festival communities about their views and behaviours regarding climate change and environmental sustainability. These included festival audiences via onsite questionnaires; festival organisers and promoters via interviews and focus groups; and musicians via creative practice-led research. We conclude that rather than necessarily being a site for progressive or utopian socio-cultural experimentation (as they are occasionally portrayed in festival literature), music festival communities engage in complex and often contradictory behaviours when it comes to responding to – and making sense of – their own complicity in social challenges such as climate change.

Experiments in Schizoanalysis is a series of experimental critical texts that aim to seek an understanding of the works of conceptual music that are their focus by miming their effects rather than attempting to conceptually contain them via traditional forms of analysis. They do this by exploration of modes of schizophrenic thought and their means of communication, which can be seen to be closer to a form of musicality than standard ‘rational’ or analytical discourses. The textual material that is used as a kind of plastic matter with which to fashion this text-music is a discussion of certain avant-garde philosophical approaches to writing that serve as precedents for this type of methodology. Each experimental text seeks simultaneously to mime the action of a specific piece of conceptual music, whilst demonstrating aspects of the experience of a relevant symptom of schizophrenia via the exploration of a certain modern philosopher’s approach to the creation of a text that - like music - embodies its effect rather than proposing or arguing it. My thesis then, is that conceptual music can be used as a model for enacting an alternative (or ‘experimental’) form of music criticism (schizoanalysis). This is the process of conducting something akin to ‘ennacted thought experiments’. The specfic thought experiment that is being enacted in this text is an exploration of the hypothesis that music criticism can be a form of music. The first experiment - “Cata…” - uses the symptom of the ‘truth-taking stare’ to form a textual performance of Two Umbrellas, a conceptual piece by George Brecht, and focuses on the practice of ‘Applied Grammatology’ as defined by Gregory Ulmer with relation to the work of Derrida. The second - “Catachresis” - is an exploration of schizophrenic ‘disturbances of distance’ with their peculiar effect on language, which aims to mime the effect of John Cage’s text piece Mureau, using Wittgenstein’s theories of language where ‘the meaning is the use’. The third experiment -“Catastasis” - takes the symptom of ‘cognitive slippage’ as a means for exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytical techniques in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. Duchamp’s Large Glass (or, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even), here viewed as a piece of music, is the subject of this chapter. Finally, “Catastrophe”, seeks to demonstrate the schizophrenic experience of auditory hallucination whilst exploring schizophrenic delusions of world catastrophe via Derrida’s musical philosophical work The Post Card.

[...]it avoids the ‘How to Write a Hit in Three Easy Steps’ approach of many other books on the subject, despite the use of the word ‘great’ in the title and reference to ‘hopes of creating a smash hit’ in the synopsis. [...]a focus on ease and speed with relation to commercial success can make other books problematic recommendations when looking for well-rounded reference texts for academic programmes in songwriting. The contrast between the laying out of very basic instruction and the inclusion of some quite complex exploration of melody and harmony that requires prior musico-theoretical knowledge highlights an underlying lack of clarity about who constitutes the audience for this book.