Remembering the 1960s: popular music and memory in Europe

Following the increasing attention paid to popular music in heritage discourses, this article explores how the popular music culture from the 1960s is remembered in Europe. I discuss the role of heritage organizations, media and the cultural policy of the EU in the construction of a popular music heritage of this period. Furthermore, I examine the ways in which attachments to local, national and European identities are negotiated. To this end, I draw upon interviews with representatives of museums, websites and archives. The article reveals a recurring tension between transnational and local experiences of the 1960s. It is found that media and heritage institutions like museums and archives predominantly have a national and local orientation, although narratives with a European vantage point are now emerging on the internet.     

Sustaining popular music’s material culture in community archives and museums

This article examines the challenges of sustainability faced by community archives and museums that are concerned with the preservation and display of the material culture of popular music’s recent past. The sustainability of grassroots sites of popular music heritage is of great concern due to their role in making accessible cultural artefacts that have limited representation in the collections of more prestigious institutions. Drawing on three sites that have ceased operation – Jazz Museum Bix Eiben Hamburg, Mutant Sounds and Holy Warbles – the article highlights difficulties faced by the founders and volunteers of physical and online archives in sustaining their ‘do-it-yourself’ heritage practices in the medium- to long-term.     

From Coombs to Crean: popular music and cultural policy in Australia

The many bodies administering Australian arts activity were incorporated within the Australia Council, established in 1973 by the Whitlam Labor Government to oversee Commonwealth arts policy under the direction of H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs. This article takes the establishment of the Australia Council as a starting point in tracing changing attitudes towards the practices and funding of popular music in Australia and accompanying policy discourses. This includes consideration of how funding models reinforce understandings of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms, the ‘cultural’/‘creative’ industries debates, and their effects upon local popular music policy. This article discusses the history of local music content debates as a central instrument of popular music policy and examines the implications for cultural nationalism in light of a recent series of media and cultural reports into industries and funding bodies. In documenting a broad shift from cultural to industrial policy narratives, the article examines a central question: What does the ‘national’ now mean in contemporary music and the rapid evolution of digital media technologies?     

Transcendent myths,mundane objects: setting the material scene in rock,soul, and country museums

The many varied myths of origins, aesthetic transcendence, and greatness that surround popular music continue to proliferate in a variety of forms. One comparatively recent type of institution producing such forms of mythology is the popular music museum. This article uses the familiar idea of the ‘experience economy’’ to examine how three popular music museums produce experiences through objects that, while they are deliberately cast as mundane and everyday, work to support widely-shared narratives of the musical traditions of which they are a part. I argue that they do so in the service of larger myths of popular music. In each case I examine, I show that the myths on display are specific to the music that forms that content of the exhibitions. I argue that the specific kinds of spectator experiences these museums seek to produce are designed to enhance the value of these museums and their collections through claims made on specific types of musical patrimony made material through carefully contextualized objects of display. As such, traditionalist myths of musical greatness and aesthetic transcendence are well-served by the forms of exhibition and display produced by these institutions.     

Performing Guangzhou and Guangzhou Ren: analysing popular music in Guangzhou

The main purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which popular music in Guangzhou is implicated in the performance of places and identities, and how it is located in Guangzhou. Drawing on the qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews, this research analyses the popular music and musical performances in Guangzhou through three spatial dimensions: the place of Guangzhou, the performance venues and the human bodies. The findings of this research suggest that popular music in Guangzhou sets up the emotional communications and engenders different spaces for the participants to negotiate their embodied identities; popular music and musical performances make the connections between three spatial scales—the place of Guangzhou, the performance venues, and the human body—through its capacity of social mediation and the musical performances articulate the power relations between local residents, the local and national authorities, and the global. This research can be read as a contribution towards the wider literatures on musical performance and the exploration of doing/making place and place-based identity through popular music.     

A cultural justice approach to popular music heritage in deindustrialising cities

ABSTRACT

Deindustrialisation contributes to significant transformations for local communities, including rising unemployment, poverty and urban decay. Following the ‘creative city’ phenomenon in cultural policy, deindustrialising cities across the globe have increasingly turned to arts, culture and heritage as strategies for economic diversification and urban renewal. This article considers the potential role that popular music heritage might play in revitalising cities grappling with industrial decline. Specifically, we outline how a ‘cultural justice approach’ can be used within critical heritage studies to assess the benefits and drawbacks of such heritage initiatives. Reflecting on examples from three deindustrialising cities – Wollongong, Australia; Detroit, USA; and Birmingham, UK – we analyse how popular music heritage can produce cultural justice outcomes in three key ways: practices of collection, preservation and archiving; curation, storytelling and heritage interpretation; and mobilising communities for collective action.     

Musical memory,heritage and local identity: remembering the popular music past in a European Capital of Culture

This paper explores the relationship between rock music, collective memory and local identity, by focusing on events connected to Liverpool's status as European Capital of Culture 2008. The first part of the paper describes these events and how memories of local rock music were attached to heritage and local identity and mobilised to validate Liverpool as a capital of culture, whilst in turn the city's Capital of Culture status served to validate particular ways of remembering the local musical past. The second part of the paper considers the broader significance of these events by relating them to three pan-European trends in cultural policy: the development of the cultural and heritage industries; the protection and promotion of local culture and identity; and the fostering of cultural diversity and integration. It highlights the general significance of the popular music past for cultural policy in Europe, but also the politics of popular music memory and how it involves a complex and dynamic process of negotiation that relates to cultural policy in particular ways. The paper concludes by arguing that popular music offers a specific and productive focus for research on cultural policy, heritage and local identity in Europe.     

Chinese popular music as a musical heritage and cultural marker of the Malaysian Chinese

Chinese popular music, inspired by pre-war Shanghai music known as ‘shidai qu’ (时代曲) (songs of the era) and evolving to include Canto pop and Taiwanese Mandarin songs, has always been popular among the Chinese in Malaysia. This music is featured on radio, television, karaoke, and performed by orchestras such as the Dama Chinese Orchestra (大马) to enthusiastic reception. The songs have a broad appeal that transcends time, generation, and place. Of significance is the observation that the music has become a cultural marker and musical heritage for Chinese in Malaysia and in the region. The paper looks at factors behind this development.     

‘Lend me your ears’: social policy and the hearing body

Recent developments in music regulation policy in some European countries show a recognition of changes in the built environment, contemporary demographics and the sonic profile of popular music. These initiatives have not been echoed in Australian music policy, where the primary focus is on the cultural and economic conditions of production and consumption, with little interest in the mechanics and biology of sound production and circulation, and their social welfare implications. Within the general category of noise pollution, it appears that the proliferation of low-frequency noise (LFN) is the fastest growing problem, in which contemporary popular music is increasingly implicated. This paper explores why LFN should suddenly become so pervasive that it has begun to attract specific social policy and legislative measures, its own scientific journals, and attempts to establish standards of its measurement specific to a profile that evades traditional sound pollution analysis.     

The role of classical music in the construction of nationalism: an analysis of Danish consensus nationalism and the reception of Carl Nielsen

ABSTRACT. Very little research has been conducted into the relationship between classical music and nationalism. This is a shame as music has played a significant role in the construction and consolidation of nationalism in many European countries. This article illustrates this by analysing the role of classical music and, in particular, contemporary serious music in the construction of Danish consensus nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s. In so doing, it explores the repression of the modernist expression which was and still is considered a Continental European phenomenon in favour of a local and traditional expression. Furthermore, it analyses the elevation of Carl Nielsen to the position of Danish composer par excellence.     

Rethinking music geography through the mainstream: a geographical analysis of Frank Sinatra,music and travel

This paper brings a new perspective to music geography by focusing on how a particular mainstream musician helped to construct, subvert, and circulate meanings associated with travel. It asserts that Frank Sinatra, via his music and actions, engaged with travel in ways that frequently ran counter to how it has commonly been enacted in American music and popular culture. Particular attention is paid to the singer’s travel-themed album, Come Fly With Me. By the time of its release in 1958, Sinatra, via a public persona that encompassed performer, ‘playboy’ and businessman, was a central figure in promoting an alignment of leisured mobility with postwar economic success. The paper interrogates how Sinatra’s celebrity allowed him to embody travel in certain real and imagined ways. It also examines what the resulting representations revealed about performances of gender, ethnicity, and status, and the expected modes of behavior that were associated with them, in America’s postwar consumer-driven society.     

Vernacular culture and the place of folk music

This paper focuses on an evening event at the Community Centre, Jacksdale, Nottinghamshire, UK in 2001 featuring a group called The Chase, performing folk music and dance from France and other European countries. It raises a series of issues concerning the relationships between folk culture and modern everyday life. These questions intersect with debates concerning authenticity, tradition, working-class culture, community and sense of place. The paper develops the concept of vernacular culture within a dynamic and plural conception of place as a means of theoretically locating folk music within modern everyday life.     

Social and Material Connections: Otis T. Mason’s European Grand Tour and Collections Exchanges

As a method of collections building within the practice of natural history, the exchange of duplicate specimens was carried out by anthropology curators and collectors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper examines exchanges resulting from a three-month tour of European museums by Smithsonian Institution Curator of Ethnology Otis T. Mason in 1889. Framed by the idea of a network of social and institutional ties, we evaluate the role of specimen exchange in the development of anthropology and museums on an international scale.     

Music in factories: a twentieth-century technique for control of the productive self

This paper discusses the historical use of music to produce more efficient, more committed, industrial workers. First emerging in academia early in the twentieth century, psychological interest in the industrial application of music had grown into a topic of popular interest and government investigation by the 1940s. Catalysed by the need for vast increases in production and the desire to cultivate ‘citizenship’ amongst industrial workers which the Second World War produced, consideration of how music could be employed as an affective soundtrack in factories—to raise employees' work rates, to increase their efficiency, to combat fatigue and boredom, to improve morale, to access and manipulate their emotions and loyalties—became a prominent area of psychological research. This paper examines that psychological research and its largest scale application in the BBC radio show Music While You Work, broadcast daily to millions of British factory workers from 1940 until 1967. The paper focuses particularly on conceptualizations of music's affective power and its utilization to exert ‘emotional control’ over spaces of work and the working self. This paper is centrally concerned with the practice of Music While You Work as a programme broadcasting specifically for factory spaces, and how this confronted the BBC's music policies for a national and domestic audience, impacting on the radical nature of the affective soundtrack to work which was produced.     

The sound of yesteryear on display: a rethinking of nostalgia as a strategy for exhibiting pop/rock heritage

The increasing presentation of popular music culture as heritage is manifested in the recent proliferation of museums of pop/rock culture. This calls for an examination of the current practices of disseminating pop/rock heritage through exhibitions. Two trends have been identified and criticised by previous commentators: first, the prominence of nostalgia in exhibition narratives and second, that exhibitions of popular music tend to display ancillary objects rather than music itself. This article offers a rethinking of nostalgia as a strategy for disseminating pop/rock heritage and explores the potential of music as a trigger for nostalgic experiences in exhibitions. While agreeing with much of the critique levelled at the nostalgic approach to pop/rock culture, we suggest that with a more nuanced conception of reflective nostalgia, the affective appeal of the nostalgic approach can be harnessed without giving in to glamourised oversimplifications of the past. Further, we suggest that mediated memories can form the basis of nostalgic feelings and thus enable the nostalgic approach to span the generational gap and engage visitors who do not have a lived experience of pop/rock heritage. We will illustrate this by contrasting our approach to that taken at ABBA The Museum.     

Identity predicaments and the music metaphor in contemporary Irish fiction

Abstract

Ever since Jimmy Rabbitte proffered his oft-quoted “niggers of Europe” line in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1987), contemporary Irish culture, especially during the boom years, was characterised by an insistent revisiting of popular music as a metaphor for interracial and/or intercultural connection or understanding. Cross-cultural identification through music may be seen, in Werner Sollors’s memorable terms, as an eschewing of “descent” relations in favour of “consensual” relations. This essay revisits the music metaphor as it has manifested itself in Irish fiction since it was announced officially that Ireland had entered recession in 2008. Specifically, it explores Kevin Curran’s Beatsploitation (2012) and Joseph O’Connor’s The Thrill of It All (2014) arguing that, through their deployment of the music metaphor, the novels stage the murky politics of contemporary Irish iterations of consent and descent. By exposing the extent to which the rhetoric of Irish economic recovery is yoked to paradoxical invocations of volitional and ancestral Irishness, the novels urge their readers to consider the ways in which discourses of economic recovery work to reinforce and perpetuate patterns of exclusion and marginalisation established during the Celtic Tiger years.     

Cultural policies for national music in South and North Korea (1960s–70s): a comparative study

ABSTRACT

This article is a comparative study of the cultural policies of North Korea (DPRK) and South Korea (ROK) in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically concerning the disciple of music. In this period, both South and North Korean regimes demonstrated similar conceptualisations of ‘national music’, harmonising Korean traditional music with western musical styles, but the end result differed in the two regimes. The DPRK developed national music through a homogenised musical style by assimilating Korean folk music with a western musical style while excluding traditional court music, with drastic modifications to traditional instruments and musical forms. In contrast, the ROK’s policy on establishing national music resulted in a combination of traditional court music for the ruling class and western classical music, indicating elitism. Particularly, this article argues that these distinct features of their national music were the result of differences in the strength and interest of government officials between the regimes.     

Books as museum objects

This paper considers the problems raised by the holding of books in museums, as opposed to libraries, when they have been collected and donated to such institutions, not primarily as works of reference or as literature, but rather as art objects in themselves. Books in such a context present difficulties for curators and public alike, and these issues range from the organisational to the philosophical. Matters of conservation, presentation and Interpretation are all touched upon in order to stimulate discussion of the very nature of books themselves.