Deciphering movement and stasis: Touring musicians and their ambivalent imaginings of home and belonging

This article explores a reconceptualisation of movement and stasis in the narrations of contemporary touring musicians in Europe and the USA. Within these two music markets, touring has become a necessity that derives from and simultaneously pushes commercial success. By analysing the experiences of touring via the embodied and the imaginative, and drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with musicians on tour, the article contributes to an understanding of ambivalences regarding home and belonging in a 'mobile' setting. For musicians spending much of their time on the road, categories of immobility and mobility can no longer be framed as synonyms of home and away. Rather, both can be conceptualised as familiar and alien, depending on the individual, temporal and structural circumstances. The very blurring of the boundaries of movement and stasis enables a shifting of perspectives in which 'home' and 'tour' may be experienced as either a source of stability or transience.