Welcome to our website, the online home of our Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project, Popular Music and Cultural Memory: localised popular music histories and their significance for national music industries. Visit our site regularly for updates on our research's progress, as well as links to our project's outcomes as they appear. Find out more about our project and its aims here.

Friday, December 3, 2010

Tamworth, here we come!

In 2011, our research project will be hitting the road. The first stop on our Australia-wide tour is the Tamworth Country Music Festival in NSW.

Sarah and Alison will be in Tamworth from 13-24 January 2011 to interview some of the 60,000-odd pilgrims who travel to this event at the home of country music in Australia every year. We also want to talk to some of the many people who contribute to the festival behind the scenes, and to those who work to preserve the heritage of country music in Australia.

Are you going to the festival? Do you live in Tamworth? Would you like to be part of our research? Drop us a line at musicmemories@griffith.edu.au
to find out more.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Chapter published on the 'Classic Albums' series

In an earlier post, Alison wrote about the importance of television documentaries as a 'medium that circulates stories about popular music to a wide audience'. One such documentary is the series Classic Albums and Andy and Sarah have a chapter on this documentary series in a book edited by Ian Inglis which is being published this month, called Popular Music and Television in Britain (Ashgate, 2010). Their chapter, titled 'Classic Albums: the re-presentation of the rock album on British television', considers how the documentary series presents a version of rock history that is consistent with the 'rock canon' (as produced in magazines like Rolling Stone, for example), but which emphasizes emotional dimensions of record production as contributing to the albums' canonic status.