scholarly journals Understanding the Exhibitionary Characteristics of Popular Music Museums

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Fairchild
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Opportune Time ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
Museum Display ◽  
Museum Exhibition

The literature on the popular music museum has primarily focused on the study of heritage and cultural memory with a secondary focus on tourism. Given the unprecedented expansion of the museum sector worldwide in recent decades, which has produced an increasing number of major museums dedicated to popular music, it is an opportune time to expand this range of analytical concerns. Specifically, the development of popular music museums has not yet been closely examined within the broader historical trajectory of the so-called ‘new museum.’ This article seeks to outline the range of exhibitionary types commonly used in a range of high-profile popular music museums in pursuit of this line of inquiry. The goal is not simply to produce a generic survey or typology of displays, but to place the use of different forms of museum display within the specific historical trajectory that has produced steadily larger numbers of these kinds of museums in recent years. I organize these exhibitionary types into two broad streams of museum exhibition practice implied in the historical survey presented here: a populist-vernacular stream of museum display and an institutional-educational one. I seek to place the exhibitionary practices of contemporary popular music museums in a broader and longer trajectory of similar practices in order to get a more grounded sense of the more important characteristics of these kinds of museums.

Popular music heritage, community archives and the challenge of sustainability

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 476-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Baker ◽  
Jez Collins
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Technological Change ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Sustainable Practices ◽  
Community Archives

This article identifies the challenges community archives of popular music face in achieving medium- to long-term sustainability. The artefacts and vernacular knowledge to be found in community archives, both physical and online, are at risk of being lost ‘to the tip’ and, consequently, to ‘cultural memory’, due to a lack of resources and technological change. The authors offer case studies of the British Archive of Country Music, a physical archive, and an online Facebook group Upstairs at the Mermaid, to exemplify how and why such groups must strategize their practices in order to remain sustainable. By including both online and physical community archiving in the scope of this research, the authors find that despite key differences in practice, both archival communities face similar threats of closure. The article concludes with an overview of the general outlook for community archives, and possible solutions to this ongoing issue of sustainable practices and processes for this sector.

Tom Zé and the performance of citizenship in Brazil

Popular Music ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-237
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER DUNN
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Historical Trajectory

AbstractThis paper examines the recent historical trajectory of the idea of citizenship in Brazil through the perspective of Tom Zé, a composer and musician noted for his juxtaposition of avant-garde poetics and popular music. My study begins with his participation in the watershed Tropicália movement of the 1960s, focusing on his critique of consumer society and its implications for popular citizenship. In the early 1970s, the figure of the bourgeois citizen, or senhor cidadão, appears in his work as a caustic critique of those who benefited most from the expansion of capitalism during the period of authoritarian rule. With the re-emergence of civil society and redemocratisation in the 1980s, Tom Zé's work reveals a more affirmative notion of citizenship premised on the discourse of self-represenation among working-class subjects. Finally, this paper discusses Tom Zé's most recent work and its contribution to insurgent forms of citizenship in contemporary Brazil involving historically marginalised and impoverished urban communities within the context of neo-liberal globalisation.

Film Music in Concert

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilio Audissino
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Boston Symphony Orchestra ◽  
The Usa ◽  
John Williams ◽  
The Aesthetic

The Boston Pops Orchestra was the first orchestra of its kind in the USA: founded in 1885 from the ranks of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, its remit was to offer concerts of light symphonic music. Over the years, and in particular during the fifty-year tenure of its most famous conductor, Arthur Fiedler, the Pops established itself as the premier US orchestra specialising in bridging the fields of 'art music' and 'popular music'. When the Hollywood composer John Williams was assigned the conductorship of the orchestra in 1980, he energetically advocated for the inclusion of film-music repertoire, changing Fiedler's approach significantly. This Element offers a historical survey of the pioneering agency that the Boston Pops had under Williams's tenure in the legitimisation of film music as a viable repertoire for concert programmes. The case study is complemented with more general discussions on the aesthetic of film music in concert.

The Vietnam War, American Remembering, and the Measure of Sacrifice, Fifty Years On

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Beidler
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Robert Zemeckis

Fifty years on, the American experience of the Vietnam War seems suspended between ancient history and rapidly fading cultural memory; or perhaps consigned to the vicissitudes of that habit of negotiating between history (what happened) and memory (how it is retrospectively mythologized). This chapter considers Vietnam War writings, including Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977), and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), as well as popular music and films such as Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump (1994), in relation to the cultural lineage of those negotiations between history and memory. It considers literary engagements with more recent wars—such as Kevin Powers’ Iraq war novel Yellow Birds (2012)—that hark back to the Vietnam War. In discussing the war’s mythologizations and commemorations across history, the chapter explores the extent to which the Vietnam War has been seen to involve sacrifices that are politically and culturally redemptive.

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