Framing performance and fusion: how music venues’ materiality and intermediaries shape music scenes

How do performances contribute to meaning-making processes in cultural fields? This paper focuses on the spaces where performances happen and how music is framed and staged by intermediaries. I engage critically with cultural pragmatics from a Bourdieusian perspective to argue that performance contexts are central to the structure of music scenes, and that fusion may be understood as a moment when the “rules of the game” (Bourdieu 1993) of a cultural field are enacted, perpetuated, or contested. This article points to the role that cultural intermediaries play in shaping performances, interpreting systems of collective representation, and achieving fusion. I devise a framework to analyze how the Parisian music scene is organized and structured by a pure/impure binary linking specific music genres to performance contexts. I also examine how cultural intermediaries in Paris work within this frame, playing with performance “rules” to shape audiences’ understandings and experiences of music in particular venues. Drawing on ethnographic observations conducted in two major venues, I show how bookers attempt to transform the “rules of the game” and position their venues as part of the avant-garde by mixing “pure” and “impure” elements of performance during the events.