Chicago's Grant Park Music Festival, a free classical music series, provides a case study for exploring how music festivals contribute to the musical life of cities. Each summer, the Grant Park Music Festival Orchestra and Choir perform dozens of free performances at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park and in residential neighborhoods. In 1935, James C. Petrillo, head of the Chicago local of the American Federation of Musicians, initiated the festival, then called Grant Park Concerts, to employ musicians during the Great Depression with funds from the federal Works Progress Administration. Changes in the city's cultural policies, its demographics, financial support, and expectations for how the festival serves the community have impacted how it programs its season and seeks audiences. Based on archival research, this article focuses on how the festival as a civic institution creates a listening public invested in particular narratives of Chicago as a dynamic city through programming music in public spaces. Looking at Grant Park Music Festival from contemporary and historical angles provides insight into how changes in aesthetic and social values, funding for the arts, and urban planning shape the way a festival engages with the city.

The Banff Summer Festival of the Arts and the Stratford Summer Music Festival have been unrecognized sites of operatic innovation in Canada. Indeed, the flourishing of what might be termed “new music theater” in Canada is imbricated with the history of these two festivals. Archival research reveals that the inventive, often revolutionary, approaches to music theater honed at Stratford and Banff from 1970–1990 ultimately defined the course of Canadian new music theatre in the decades that followed. Founded in 1953 as a Shakespeare festival, the Stratford Festival eventually became renowned for its (nearly exclusive) focus on musical theater. At Banff, discussions about generic innovation occurred regularly, producing what I suggest was one of the foremost centers in the world for innovation in music theater. Charting the development of opera in Canada through conversations that took part at the Banff and Stratford festivals during the period 1970–1990 reveals the unique possibilities that the peripheral positioning of these festivals—aesthetically, critically, and geographically—offered to the development, dissemination, and innovation of so-called new music theater in Canada.

Cornerstone was an annual four-day-long Christian rock festival in Illinois that ran from 1984 until 2012, first in Chicago's northern suburbs and then on a former farm in the rural western part of the state. Most attendees camped on-site, and many arrived one or two days early when the campgrounds opened before official programming started. Like many contemporary multi-day festivals in relatively rural or remote locations, Cornerstone's festival grounds and campsites functioned as a temporary village. For many attendees, music festivals have supplanted local scenes as loci of face-to-face musical life. Outside Cornerstone, participants’ musical lives might be curbed by family, professional obligations, geographic separateness, or cultural stratification. Inside the festival's physical, social, and cultural spaces, however, a cohesive music scene manifested for a brief time every year. This article examines the production of space and place at Cornerstone. In doing so, it contributes a vital link between scene theory and the growing ethnomusicological literature on festivals.

After the Obama administration (2009–17) began authorizing musical exchanges with Cuba in 2009, Havana's music festivals became a primary site for transnational interactions and a public face for US-Cuban engagement while politicians worked towards normalization in secret. This article uses field research from the Havana International Jazz Festival, interviews with festival participants, and media coverage to explore Cuban music festivals as politically liminal spaces where musical and political life commingled to reflect the changing US-Cuban relationship. While diverse lineups attracted international tourists, artists faced bureaucratic challenges to legally traverse the Florida Straits and create music in the context of intercultural dialogue. Despite these difficulties, Havana as a festival space encouraged musicians to defy genre conventions, explore cultural commonalities, and negotiate social differences on stage during the Havana Jazz Plaza Festival. These transnational interactions culminated in Arturo O'Farrill's album Cuba: The Conversation Continues, which was recorded by US and Cuban musicians in Havana during the 2014 jazz festival and is characteristic of festival exchanges in its representation of a more harmonious international relationship.