PhD candidate Mark Mahoney has been awarded a prize for Best Research Paper in Jazz and Improvised Music by the Jazz & Improvisation Study Group of the American Musicological Society. The essay, titled "'Europe’s Answer to Woodstock': Genre, Politics, and Genre Politics at the 1969 Actuel Festival,” examines the 1969 Actuel Festival held in Amougies, Belgium — a five-day event featuring free jazz, progressive rock, and European “new music” — as a site where the utopian aspiration of genre fusion was simultaneously articulated and undone.
Drawing from contemporary press coverage in French and English, Mark contends that the festival’s apparent failure to “abolish the barriers” among genres, as organizer Jean Georgakarakos had promised, reveals genre as not merely an aesthetic category but a material and political one structured by overlapping inequities of race, commerce, nationality, and gender. Examining the festival against the backdrop of post-1968 French political culture, he traces how the competing authenticity discourses of free jazz and rock mapped onto racialized divisions at the festival. The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s provocative performance emerges as a theoretically generative intervention on those very dynamics, playing with the forms of rock and funk in order to expose their racial economies rather than transcend them. The festival’s legacy, he concludes, lies less in its success at realizing cross-genre dialogue than in the clarity with which its failures illuminate what genre boundaries so often conceal.
Mark’s prize will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in November, 2026.
