Popular Music and Cultural Memory seminar - tales from Israel and Australia

Our Israeli partner investigator, Motti Regev, is currently visiting Brisbane and will be presenting a seminar paper at Griffith's Gold Coast campus today. His paper will provide a summary of key themes arising from the interview data collected in July/August 2011, when Sarah and he conducted fieldwork in Tel Aviv.

Also at the seminar, Sarah will be presenting a paper about the social and cultural functions of the Victorian Jazz Archive. The paper, co-authored with Alison Huber, considers the important work being done at this DIY institution by volunteers as they seek to collect, preserve and make public Australia's jazz history.

This lunchtime seminar will be held in G02 2.09 from 12-1.30pm.

Publication: Locating the Canon in Tamworth

Sarah and Alison have co-authored an article about the appearance and construction of a country music canon in Tamworth, Australia.  The piece will be published in a forthcoming edition of the journal, Popular Music (2013, 32(3)).  The article is based on fieldwork Sarah and Alison undertook in 2011, and is interested in the means through which certain aspects of popular music's historical past comes to be remembered over others.  Read the abstract here:

Our project in Adelaide, Canberra, Sydney

Project team researcher, Ian Rogers, has been gathering interview data in Australian capital cities over the last couple of months, and has spoken to dozens of locals about their city's music scenes, and the personal memories that coalesce around music practices there. First stop was Adelaide, a place whose vibrant music scene sometimes doesn't receive the recognition it deserves. Ian visited lots of music venues in the city and found a community of enthusiastic music listeners who were keen to participate in our project. Next on the itinerary was our country's capital, Canberra. On the day Ian landed, the Canberra Times featured a nostalgic piece on the twentieth anniversary of US band Nirvana's performance in the city, which set an appropriate backdrop to a series of interviews with people involved in the music scene there. Last stop was Sydney, where Ian interviewed a range of performers, audience members, record store workers, and radio people, and spent time exploring the city's inner city scenes that weekend visitors are rarely able to experience without a guide.

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.

Nashville: 'Music City'

Sarah is currently soaking up all things country in Nashville, Tennessee. Given her visit to Tamworth, Australia's 'country music capital', at the start of the year, it was fitting to include 'Music City' into the US leg of the international fieldwork. The popular music heritage industry in embedded in the fabric of Nashville, with its 'Honky Tonk Heroes' guitar artwork:

 and its 'Walk of Fame Park'

But the key focus of this trip was the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, which is perhaps the most impressive of America's music museums.

One of the great things about this museum is that it makes overt the connection between the display material and the archive, with visitors able to see into the Frist Library and Archive as they view the other exhibits. Interactive consoles also give visitors the opportunity to access selected images from the archive's photo portfolio as well as an opportunity to explore some of the "rare record spins" to be found in the collection.

The project visits New York, Cleveland and Atlanta

For the last month or so, Sarah has been in the USA chasing interview leads and visiting popular music archives and museums. She began in New York City where she interviewed the folks who collect, catalogue and preserve the massive vinyl collection that is ARChive.

This was followed by a trip to Cleveland, Ohio, for a tour of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and it's special exhibit 'Women who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power'. This visit coincided with the 16th American Music Masters week, meaning Sarah also had an opportunity to attend a series of events honouring the work of Aretha Franklin.

Next stop was Atlanta, where Sarah met with another of the project's partner investigators, Professor Tim Dowd. Unfortunately, some months earlier had seen the closure of the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon, Georgia, a place Sarah had originally planned to visit. The closure of the GMHF is indicative of the serious funding issues faced by many small popular music museums in the US and elsewhere.

While in Atlanta, Sarah caught the Smithsonian's traveling exhibition 'Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment' at the Atlanta History Center, and also visited the  Georgia State University Library where she was given a detailed tour of the Popular Music and Culture Collection which houses many important artefacts relating to the lyricist/composer/performer Johnny Mercer.

Our project returns to Iceland

Sarah made a brief return trip to Iceland this month to do some follow up interviews at Tonlistarsafn Islands, the Icelandic Music History Museum.

Our project visits The Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision

Still in the Netherlands, from 30 September to 7 October Sarah was based in Amsterdam where she made a trip to Hilversum to visit  Beeld en Geluid, the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision.

Beeld en Geluid houses a massive underground audio-visual archive (reportedly over 70% of the country's audio-visual heritage), and the facilities are rather impressive as the photo below indicates:

In addition to its archival facility, Beeld en Geluid also hosts "The Experience", a range of interactive exhibits including a 'Pop Studio'.

Our project in the Netherlands - Rotterdam, Hoek van Holland and The Hague

For the last couple of weeks Sarah has been in Rotterdam working closely with one of the project's partner investigators, Susanne Janssen and her Dutch HERA team who are involved in the European sister project to 'Popular Music and Cultural Memory', called POPID. While in Rotterdam, Sarah had the opportunity to present a seminar paper at Erasmus University. The paper, 'Memorialisation of country music in an Australian town' was based on research conducted earlier in the year at Tamworth, and was co-written by Alison Huber.

During her time in Rotterdam Sarah made two trips to Hoek van Holland to visit Museum RockArt, a small museum that collects and displays items related to Dutch popular music history, including material related to the key global performers who have influenced the music culture of the Netherlands.

Museum RockArt is an example of what Sarah and Alison term "DIY institutions". They define such institutions as 'places of popular music preservation, archiving and display that exist outside the bounds of "official" or "national" projects of collection and heritage management' and which emerge 'from within communities of music consumption' (Baker & Huber, forthcoming). DIY institutions are staffed primarily by volunteers and Museum RockArt is no exception --- having a core group of volunteers that bring the museum space alive for visitors.

The people at Museum RockArt also had a hand in curating the Golden Earring: Back Home exhibition that Sarah visited  at the Haags Historich Museum in The Hague. The exhibition was a celebration of 50 years of the (arguably) seminal Dutch band Golden Earring.

The "Home of Metal" exhibition in Birmingham, UK

Still in the UK, Sarah traveled to Birmingham last week to view an exhibition at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery called Home of Metal. The focus was the last 40 years of metal music and its relationship to the British midlands.

Sarah was lucky enough to be at the museum at the same time as Noddy Holder, the lead singer of Slade, who was there to produce a story about the exhibition for Sky Arts. Noddy showed Sarah what he considered to be one of the best items on display - the letter from Lars Ulrich (Metallica) to Brian Tatler (Diamond Head), written when Metallica had not yet "made-it".

Noddy's highlight: the letter from Lars to Brian

Sarah made sure she purchased a Home of Metal 'family tree' tea towel at the exhibition shop before heading back to London!