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 14 The seasonality of music Despite the apparent flightiness, there are several discernable factors that give Freetown’s music event scene, the city’s music market, and the patterns of audiences’ attendance a broad but nevertheless identifiable structure. In fact, we can even speak of a rhythmic pattern that structures the city’s music life into an annual cycle. Four broad factors determine this cycle. These are the climate, agricultural planting and harvesting seasons, legal and religious holidays, and seasonal migration. These four factors form the broad coordinates within which Freetown’s music scene is balanced between order and chaos, between a fragile stability and unintelligible turbulences, between a semblance of predictable regularity and the total dissolution of any planning into a most wayward, spontaneous and unpredictable randomness. As these four factors and the implicit broad, annual rhythm they bestow upon Freetown’s music scene were neither discussed nor mentioned in any earlier writings on the city’s music life, I will in the following section discuss each of the four in more detail. I assembled, or “discovered”, this list of four determinants via various sources and insights. To a certain extent, it was through interviews with Freetonians, in which I attempted to gain a broader knowledge about patterns of attendance, that several elements of the four respective factors were brought to my mind. In the first place, however, it was the very haptic experience of visiting music events – or struggling to visit music events – that opened my eyes for these broader patterns . Rains, heats and breezes As I arrived in Freetown in early August, the first and in fact the main determining factor literally subdued me and my research to its overwhelming powers, that is: Freetown’s extreme climate. For the first four weeks of my stay, the weather manifested its hegemony over Freetown’s night (and day) life in the Chapter 14: The seasonality of music  127 form of heavy rains. Furious pelting beats incessant tattoos on iron roofs. Soaked pedestrians caught outside wade knee-deep through sudden torrents. At the climax of the rainy season, which occurs around July and August, rains can take on dramatic scales – with an average of 894 mm and 902 mm per day and twenty-seven and twenty-eight wet days per month in July and August respectively (BBC 2010). Given the city’s poor sewerage, housing and transport infrastructure , a single heavy rainfall can often flood whole neighbourhoods and cause large parts of road traffic to stop for hours and in some areas even for days. The risks that a music event may be rained-out, that its audiences may be rather busy rescuing their goods and chattels from the floods, or that no transport is available to bring people to the respective location are among the most elementary , and natural, factors that make organizers of music events think twice before they schedule an event in these months. At the other end of climatic conditions and their music-related constraints is heat. During the hottest months of the dry season from February till May, temperatures can take on similarly dramatic scales. The most sizzling months come in March and April, when temperatures can reach 40 degrees and more. During most of the dry season, the temperatures deviate little around an average of 31 degrees Celsius; tables crack, everything dries out, and Freetonains generally forget there was ever a time it was cool and wet. Together with the constantly high humidity, which seldom falls below 80% (BBC 2010), the dry season’s heat literally tranquillizes the city’s reveling folks. These two extremes of Freetown’s binary climate are somewhat interrupted by the season of the Harmattan, which, in the months of December and January, combines relatively cool temperatures with washed out skies. Freetown’s music event calendar reflects these three seasons and can be divided along their lines. Roughly, the musical cycle consists of three different periods: a low, a medium, and a high period of music events. The low music event period, with only sporadic performances, parties, festivals, carnivals, parades, concerts, album releases etc., starts around February. That is after the Sahara wind stops cooling down the air and when temperatures begin their slow but steady rise. The low period further stretches throughout the rainy season and ends after the heaviest rains cease around the months of August or September. The medium period of music events lasts from the end of the main rainy season until the beginning of the...

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