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.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Our international fieldwork concludes

The final two stops on Sarah's international fieldwork trip were Seattle and LA. This enabled us to include in the research two more of America's popular music museums. In Seattle, Sarah visited EMP, a museum dedicated to popular music and science fiction and which is gradually expanding to a broader focus on popular culture more generally. In downtown LA, a trip was made to The Grammy Museum which showcases the history of the Grammy Awards, but also charts a number of key moments in popular music history through the use of interactive displays.


The visit to the Grammy Museum concluded the international component of the project's data collection. In total, this comparative fieldwork involved in excess of 50 interviews with a range of people invested in documenting popular music's history and collecting and preserving its material artefacts. Interviewees included book authors, journalists and magazine editors, archivists, music librarians, documentary producers, music consultants, radio editors, museum curators, music historians, museum volunteers, exhibition designers and sound engineers.Numerous archives and museums were visited, in addition to those already mentioned in previous blog posts. 2012 will be spent analysing this immensely rich data set.

The project team would like to thank everyone interviewed for "Popular Music and Cultural Memory" in Israel, the Netherlands, the UK, Iceland, Austria, and the USA for their contributions to the international, comparative aspect of this research.

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