Curating Pop: Exhibiting Popular Music in the Museum 9781501343575, 9781501343582, 9781501343612, 9781501343605

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Curating Pop

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Curating Pop Exhibiting Popular Music in the Museum Sarah Baker, Lauren Istvandity and Raphaël Nowak

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Sarah Baker, Lauren Istvandity, and Raphaël Nowak, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover illustration © Hugh Cowling All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Baker, Sarah, 1977- author. | Istvandity, Lauren, author. | Nowak, Raphaèel, 1985- author. Title: Curating pop : exhibiting popular music in the museum / Sarah Baker, Lauren Istvandity and Raphaèel Nowak. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019007906 (print) | LCCN 2019012015 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501343599 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501343605 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501343575 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501343582 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Music museums–Curatorship. | Popular music–Exhibitions. | Popular music–Historiography. Classification: LCC ML3470 (ebook) | LCC ML3470 .B356 2019 (print) | DDC 781.64075–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007906 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4357-5 PB: 978-1-5013-4358-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4360-5 eBook: 978-1-5013-4359-9 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For museum workers everywhere who are dedicated to storying popular music’s past

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements   1 Curatorial Practice in Popular Music Museums: An Introduction   2 Canonic Representations: The Celebration of Dominant (and Hidden) Histories   3 Selling the Museum Experience: Curation, Economies and Visitor Experience   4 Popular Music and Place: Local, National and Global Stories   5 Treating Objects like Art: Curating Material Culture   6 Telling Stories: Narratives of Popular Music’s Past   7 Curator Subjectivity: Influence and Bias in Popular Music Exhibitions   8 Living History: Nostalgia as Affective Curatorial Practice   9 Managing the Music: Sound in the Popular Music Museum 10 Beyond the Typology: Concluding Thoughts References Index

viii ix 1 17 35 55 73 91 109 127 141 155 165 175

List of Illustrations Figures Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 3.1 Figure 4.1

Figure 4.2

Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4

Figure 5.1 Figure 6.1

Hector Country Music Heritage Museum. Photograph by Sarah Baker 22 Autographed photographs on display at the Hector Country Music Heritage Museum. Photograph by Sarah Baker 23 The women’s wall of fame at the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame. Photograph by Sarah Baker 29 Heart of Texas Country Music Museum. Photograph by Sarah Baker 46 At Walk a Country Mile, ‘The story of Australian Country Music’ is told in a series of five short films. Photograph by Sarah Baker 66 Display at Walk a Country Mile focused on the involvement of radio station 2TM in making Tamworth the Country Music Capital. Photograph by Sarah Baker 68 Tamworth display case at Walk a Country Mile. Photograph by Sarah Baker 69 Details of Tamworth display case at Walk a Country Mile with Country Music Capital marketing material. Photograph by Sarah Baker 70 Memorabilia on display at KD’s Elvis Presley Museum. Photograph by Sarah Baker 76 Chronological narrative at the Ramones Museum. Photograph by Sarah Baker 95

Table Table 1.1

Research sites

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Acknowledgements The fieldwork for this book was made possible by grant funding from the Australian Research Council (DP1092910 and DP130100317). A huge debt of gratitude goes to all the museum professionals that gave their time to speak at length about their curatorial practice as part of these ARC-funded projects. Co-investigators on DP1092910 include Andy Bennett, Shane Homan, Peter Doyle, Motti Regev, Sara Cohen, Susanne Janssen, Timothy Dowd and Alison Huber. Shane, Peter, Alison and Motti conducted interviews with a number of the respondents we cite in this book (see Chapter 1), but all the co-investigators on DP1092910 played a role in shaping the project. Their subsequent work on popular music heritage has informed our approach in Curating Pop. As we worked towards the development of the typology, we published three articles in museum studies, heritage studies and cultural studies journals and thank the peer reviewers and journal editors for their generous feedback which helped refine our approach. Material or ideas from the following articles appear in some form in the chapters of this book: ●●

●●

●●

Baker, S., Istvandity, L. and Nowak, R. (2016a), ‘The Sound of Music Heritage: Curating Popular Music in Music Museums and Exhibitions’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 22 (1): 70–81. Baker, S., Istvandity, L. and Nowak, R. (2016b), ‘Curating Popular Music Heritage: Storytelling and Narrative Engagement in Popular Music Museums and Exhibitions’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 31 (4): 369–85. Baker, S., Istvandity, L. and Nowak, R. (2018), ‘Curatorial Practice in Popular Music Museums: An Emerging Typology of Structuring Concepts’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, doi.org/10.1177/1367549418761796.

Thanks go to Dr Zelmarie Cantillon for casting a critical eye over an early draft of the manuscript and for proofreading the final document. Thanks too to Professor Paul Long for his ongoing support for our work on popular music heritage. We would like to acknowledge the generosity and flexibility of the

x Acknowledgements

editorial staff at Bloomsbury Press, and extend thanks to the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre and the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University for supporting our research. Sarah Baker, Lauren Istvandity and Raphaël Nowak Queensland, Australia

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Curatorial Practice in Popular Music Museums: An Introduction

The first exhibition I ever curated, in 1984 I think it was, or 1985, was actually a popular music exhibition. It was called Beat … people almost couldn’t understand why on earth an Arts Centre would want to do it. Why would you want to display all this old stuff? Why would you want to tell that story? Why would you want to value that story? It’s been very encouraging to see that change actually and to see many museums and galleries all around the world exploring popular music. … I think a lot of cultural institutions look at popular music [now] because it is actually the art form of the twentieth century in a way. To see that coming to established institutions, that’s been an enormous change and a big shift. (Respondent 14, Arts Centre Melbourne) Since the end of the Second World War, popular music has developed as an important form of leisure. Its increasing stylistic and aesthetic diversification has been symbolized by a range of instruments, material objects and musicians, some of whom have been elevated to the rank of celebrity. Music is now described as having a ‘ubiquitous’ presence (see Kassabian 2013) in Western contemporary societies. However, the very status of popular music has been at the core of many vernacular, journalistic and academic discussions and debates. Simon Frith (1991) suggests, for instance, that popular music typically elicits three different types of attitudes: between a constant critique and rejection, an indifference and a permanent celebration. Popular music has undergone a process of legitimation (see Baumann 2007), whereby its status has been elevated over time. In this book, we are interested in exploring how popular music, the heritage of which is now deemed worthy of preservation, is integrated within museums. The example that opens this chapter is an extract from one of our research interviews. Here, Respondent 14 points to the extent to which the inclusion

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of popular music’s material past within a museum was once considered controversial. Popular music is often not deemed ‘legitimate’, or worthy enough, to be featured in a heritage institution, where it is seen by some as an ephemeral, throw-away or meaningless product of the cultural industries that does not deserve safeguarding within the museum. Despite this, there has been a recent move towards the celebration and preservation of popular music in vernacular and professional spheres. The question of its status, or of its appreciation by certain authors (journalists, academics and others), is superseded by the acknowledgement that popular music has a cultural significance that makes it worth remembering and preserving (see Bennett 2009; Kong 1999). Not only have popular music heritage initiatives and practices flourished over the last few decades but the very idea of preserving the heritage of popular music has become somewhat of an ‘obsession’ (Le Guern 2015). Over the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in published scholarship on the subject of popular music heritage, as evidenced by edited books and journal special issues on the topic (e.g. Baker [ed.] 2015; Baker et al. [eds] 2018; Bennett and Janssen [eds] 2017; Cohen et al. [eds] 2015; Leonard and Knifton [eds] 2015a). Popular music is largely defined in these works as a post1945 ‘form of music that is based on commercial aesthetics, produced within the framework of a music industry and primarily mass distributed’ (Brandellero and Janssen 2014: 225), but popular music can also be understood as extending further back in time than a presentist model allows (see Johnson 2018). Whether popular music is thought to have its emergence in the mid-twentieth century or much earlier, the academic interest in popular music as heritage has emerged, as Philippe Le Guern argues (2015: 157–9), firstly, from a generational ‘urge to look back on one’s own past’; secondly, from transformations in digital technologies which have subsequently ‘increas[ed] the importance and value of vernacular objects and deeply modifi[ed] our relationship to cultural memory’; and finally, as an ‘antidote … to the malaise caused by the increasing acceleration of social change’. The heritagization of popular music in its various forms and genres can be witnessed in the collection, preservation, representation and canonization of popular music histories in, for example, documentaries (Long and Wall 2013), archives (Baker, Doyle and Homan 2016) and critical lists such as Rolling Stone magazine’s ‘500 Greatest Albums’ (Schmutz 2005). It is only recently that this ‘looking back’ on popular music’s past has been recognized as a legitimate field of heritage practice. Popular music as heritage is ‘socially produced through the practices of a range of actors’ who deploy



Curatorial Practice in Popular Music Museums: An Introduction

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‘a variety of legitimising discourses … ranging from personal and collective attachment and memory to commercial endeavours rebranding and canonising’ popular music’s past (Brandellero and Janssen 2014: 220). As Andy Bennett (2009: 478) observes, the kind of shift being acknowledged by Respondent 14 in our opening extract can be partly attributed to the presence of baby boomers working within the cultural industries and heritage sectors who draw on ‘their institutional power and status’ to confer ‘critical acclaim, historical importance and cultural value’ to popular music. As a result, there is a broad acceptance within the heritage sector of cultural forms and associated artefacts that still exist within the living memory of the producers and consumers of this heritage (Long 2018). However, Bennett (2015: 23–5) also reminds us that the principal actors behind this broad acceptance bring to the ‘heritagization’ of popular music ‘the hegemonic grip of white, Anglo-American, middle class values’, producing a ‘highly selective canon of popular music heritage’ which ‘threatens to expunge a range of other ways in which popular music is remembered and celebrated, particularly in local and peripheral contexts’. One focus within the emergent body of literature on popular music heritage is the exhibition and curation of popular music in museums. Museums have been central to the institutionalization of popular music as heritage, offering interpretations of popular music’s history by way of ‘temporary exhibitions, permanent displays and dedicated visitor experiences’ that have ‘actively mobilised sounds, images and objects’ to capture the diversity of popular music’s material past (Leonard 2014: 357). Museum displays ‘make explicit’ (Hoelscher 2011: 204) popular music’s transformation into heritage and ‘help to validate the merits of the “heritigisation” of popular music’ (Leonard 2014: 358). Our core interest in undertaking this research was to speak to the people responsible for such displays: the curators. Museum curators are cultural agents, in that they ‘participate in a production of cultural value’ (O’Neill 2007: 15), and take on a great responsibility in communicating popular music’s past. The literature on curatorial practice refers predominantly to the responsibilities of housing and presenting materials in line with best practice guidelines, but lacks a formulation of such guidelines into any sort of typology of common strategies and concepts developed for the creation of exhibitions. The growing interest in the study of popular music exhibitions has occurred in parallel with the increasing number of popular music museums in operation across the world, such as those discussed in this book. The investment in establishing museums of popular music culture shows no sign of waning, with

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many others in development at the time of writing (e.g. Frankfurt’s Museum of Modern Electronic Music, the Estonian Music Hall of Fame, the Indian Music Experience). This trend is perhaps not surprising, considering it is now over sixty years since the declared ‘birth’ of ‘rock’ (Peterson 1990) and given these are institutions that emphasize and celebrate ‘shared generational experience and cultural memory’ (Bennett 2009: 476). For example, one of our respondents for this study was on a mission: To get up as many [music museums] as I can while I’m still able to do it, believing that the more we have the better it is, because more of our history and culture will be preserved, more education programmes will come out of it, and there’s strength in numbers. (Respondent 10)

The embrace of popular music heritage is now well established in both scholarship and museum practice. Much of the scholarship on popular music museums has emerged from the field of popular music studies. The most prolific scholar to have contributed to a greater understanding of the place of popular music in exhibitions and museums is Marion Leonard (e.g. 2007, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2018; Leonard and Knifton 2015a,b,c), whose work has become a touchstone for studies of popular music display and visitor engagement. Scholarship on popular music museums, including the work of Leonard, also engages with literature from museum studies and, increasingly, has found a home in heritage and museumfocused journals, including International Journal of Heritage Studies (Baker, Istvandity and Nowak 2016a; Fairchild 2018; Leonard 2014; Mortensen and Madsen 2015), Museum & Society (Fairchild 2017), Museum Management and Curatorship (Baker, Istvandity and Nowak 2016b) and Curator: The Museum Journal (Cortez 2016). This work broadly acknowledges, usually implicitly, the ‘new museology’ as offering a contextual frame for considering popular music museums. Vikki McCall and Clive Gray (2014: 20) note that the ‘new museology’, also referred to as new museum theory, ‘is a discourse around the social and political roles of museums’ which indicates a ‘shift in focus and intention within the museums world, away from the functional idea of museums’. Rather than an emphasis on ‘classic, collections-centred museum models’, new museology focuses on ‘new communication and new styles of expression’ and reconsiders ‘the position of museums in conservation, the epistemological status of artefacts on display, and the nature and purpose of museum scholarship’ (McCall and Gray 2014: 20).



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The concept of the new museum presents a significant shift away from the traditional mode of museum design and curatorship, which was underpinned by object-based displays, a focus on material authenticity in curation and an emphasis on the museum as a place of scholarly devotion rather than a leisure activity (Doering 1999). Instead, the new museum attempts to flip the traditional ‘top-down’ approach to curation, transforming both the presentation and appeal of these institutions as well as changing the ways in which museum content is perceived by visitors. Also termed the ‘post-museum’, Janet Marstine (2006: 19) suggests that such places ‘seek to share power with the communities [they] serve’, recognizing the co-construction of knowledge between museums and visitors. McCall and Gray (2014: 21) describe this ‘visitor-oriented ethos’ as being supported by a ‘shift in the identity of museum professionals from “legislator” to “interpreter”’. Hence, new museums seek to be more relevant, exciting and accessible to the general public through an emphasis on forms of ‘experiential learning’ that draw visitors into the interpretive process by way of discourses of memory and narrative (Andermann and Arnold-de Simine 2012). It is perhaps not surprising that new museology intersects with work on the popular music museum given, as Rhiannon Mason (2011: 23) observes, new museology is a ‘branch of museum studies concerned with those ideas central to cultural theory’. Reference to the new museology is particularly evident in Kathryn Johnson’s (2015) discussion of the David Bowie Is exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), for which she was an assistant curator. Johnson (2015: 6) highlights how the new museology marked a shift in undertaking and understanding curatorial practice and exhibition design, emphasizing a ‘questioning approach to curatorial authority’ and ‘increased recognition of the curator’s accountability’. Johnson (2015: 6) also makes explicit the link between the new museology and popular music exhibitions, arguing that these exhibitions ‘invite and require a curatorial approach and language that is in sympathy with this [new museological] trend towards inclusive and multivalent exhibition environments’. Engagement with the new museology can also be observed in the work of, for example, Charles Fairchild (2017, 2018) and Chris Bruce (2006), who adopt the notion of the ‘new museum’ as a frame through which to view the development of popular music museums, the exhibition of popular music and audience engagement. It is interesting to note that the increase in popular music museums has occurred alongside development and application of new museology theories.

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The focus on experiential learning in the new museum is particularly evident in the large number of popular music museums, such as the Museum of Pop Culture (formerly known as Experience Music Project) in the United States, which have embraced the use of multimedia displays, technological immersion and high-level interactional exhibits and have placed a strong emphasis on narrative in designing displays (Bruce 2006). Such an approach draws on the assumption, on the part of curators, that visitors are ‘amateur experts’ (Baym and Burnett 2009) who, particularly in the case of popular music museums, arrive at an exhibition ‘with a passionate and informed understanding of the subject’ (Pirrie Adams 2015: 114). Curators can expect visitors to be acquainted with the topics of exhibitions and to have developed their own viewpoints on them. On that note, Kathleen Pirrie Adams (2015: 115) observes that the ‘specific challenge for the popular music museum is how to effectively create a dialogue with its audience’s existent knowledge and attachments’. As new museums, then, popular music museums tend to emphasize a participatory experience, with an agenda that seeks to entertain as much as to educate, and in which display equates to spectacle (Bruce 2006). Fairchild’s (2018) work suggests the concept of the new museum can be applied across a range of music museums, both small and large. For instance, in his study of fifteen popular music museums in the United States and the United Kingdom, Fairchild (2018: 478–9) approached his fieldwork ‘through the prism of … [a] historical shift … definitively marked by the emergence of the “new museum”’ and he therefore ‘documented exhibits primarily as opportunities for a kind of communicative connection with audiences through strategically-constructed multimedia environments’. This book builds on the existing studies of popular music museums, particularly those which have involved interviews with curators and other museum professionals, in order to highlight an emerging typology of structuring concepts in curatorial practice. Focusing on curatorial practices and processes is important because, as Fairchild (2017: 87) observes, ‘many of the distinct and specific exhibitionary characteristics of popular music museums have not been closely examined’ in the existing literature. This is echoed by Alcina Cortez (2016: 153), who writes, ‘the efficacy of the processes whereby the meanings of popular music are made significant to museum visitors have not yet been fully assessed’. Elsewhere, Cortez (2017: 377) goes so far as to state that ‘established expertise on how to effectively exhibit is lacking’. She argues for a need to explore how curators respond to challenges regarding the representation and display of



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‘interpretive values’. To Cortez (2017: 373–4), this can be done by exploring the ‘practical strategies’ that attempt to better feature popular music in exhibitions, strategies that in fact ‘represent a primary responsibility for the field of museum studies and popular music studies, [sic] in order that popular music be effectively exhibited’. There is, it seems, broad acknowledgement that close attention should now be paid to popular music museums and exhibitions given the rapid surge of these activities taking place globally, with Marion Leonard and Robert Knifton (2015c: 111) noting that ‘it is important that we examine the processes and decision making which inform these representations and interrogate how the performers, events and audiences of yesterday are reimagined within these heritage institutions’. Further to this, Pirrie Adams (2015: 117) argues the importance of developing ‘knowledge’ (both theoretical and practical) about the curatorial strategies and how they in turn speak to different audiences. What all these scholars acknowledge is that there is currently a lack of detailed information on the processes and practices that contribute to popular music exhibitions explicitly. In this book, we seek to reveal some of these processes and practices in the hope that such information will be useful for future studies on the representation of popular music history in the museum and how visitors might engage with and feed back into these representations.

Research fieldwork This book draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted with museum professionals between 2010 and 2015. Interviews with museum curators and exhibition designers focused on museum functions, processes and practices, as well as on the value of collecting, preserving and displaying popular music’s material culture. The interviews emerge from two distinct, yet connected, projects funded by the Australian Research Council. The first project, Popular Music and Cultural Memory: Localised Popular Music Histories and Their Significance for National Music Industries (DP1092910, 2010–12), set out to identify and critique the ways in which local popular music histories are placed within broader national and international histories, including the role of museums in the preservation and construction of popular music’s past. Interviews were conducted with a range of music heritage practitioners, including archivists, documentary makers, music writers and magazine editors, as well as a broad array of music consumers.

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The second project, Do-it-yourself popular music archives: an international comparative study of volunteer-run institutions that preserve popular music’s material culture (DP130100317, 2013–15), emerged from the findings of the first project and particularly looked at instances of community-based, volunteerrun archives and museums around the world which are working to assemble material related to popular music. The focus was on the work of volunteers in developing specialized repositories of popular music’s material past, and the contributions of these places to the preservation of this material past for the future. For ease of reference, in this book we refer to all our respondents as museum professionals but acknowledge that this is not necessarily a term used by volunteers to describe themselves (see Baker 2017: 112–14). On the other hand, a number of volunteer-managed archives and museums work tirelessly to achieve professional standards and museum accreditation (see Baker 2017: 162–6). At the same time, we acknowledge that some people working in the mainstream heritage sector, who identify as ‘museum professionals’, will find our reference to ‘untrained’ volunteers in DIY heritage institutions also as ‘museum professionals’ to be challenging. However, in popular music museums, including large-scale institutions, it is not uncommon for those involved in the curation and design of exhibitions to have backgrounds devoid of professional training in museum, archive or heritage studies. The backgrounds of curators in this study were mostly from outside of museum studies, which suggests that a range of engagements with the music industry come to bear on the work of curators. Often, curators we spoke with had backgrounds in music journalism, arts and event management, and the record industry, coming into curatorial roles as an extension of their experience in these areas. In both projects, it was established that enthusiasts play a crucial role in the way that popular music and its culture is remembered. In the context of this book, then, the notion of the museum professional is necessarily fluid. Table 1.1 outlines the twenty museums which were sites for this research. As the museum descriptions in the table might suggest, these sites cover a broad array of museum heritage activity, including ‘authorised’ museums ‘housed in purpose built or adapted buildings, staffed through a paid workforce and with multiple income streams that aid revenue generation’ (Baker and Collins 2015: 986), and museums that might be labelled ‘do-it-yourself heritage institutions’ (Baker and Huber 2013b) or ‘micromuseums’ (Candlin 2016), which are characterized by a volunteer workforce, ‘make-do-and-mend’ buildings and small budgets. The twenty sites primarily represent museums for which curating music’s history

Description

Non-profit. Aims to identify and preserve the history and traditions of country music. State funded. Fosters performing arts and houses temporary exhibitions regarding music and the arts. KD’s Elvis Presley Hawera, North Island, DIY museum. Aims to celebrate the life of Elvis Museum New Zealand Presley through display of ephemera. Powerhouse Museum Sydney, Australia State funded. Houses permanent and temporary exhibitions on modern arts and sciences. Australian Country Tamworth, Australia Volunteer-run. Aims to collect, protect, preserve Music Hall of Fame and display the history and heritage of Australian Country Music. Rock and Roll Hall of Cleveland, United Privately operated. Collects, preserves, exhibits Fame and Museum States and interprets the rock and roll genre. Georgia Music Hall Macon, United States State funded. Aims to recognize and champion of Fame music from the state of Georgia. Experience Music Seattle, United States Non-profit. Popular culture exhibitions and Project (now known educational programmes with an emphasis on as: Museum of rock and roll. Popular Culture) Walk a Country Mile Tamworth, Australia Non-profit. Interpretive centre with an account of the story of country music in Australia. Heart of Texas Country Brady, Texas, United Independent museum. Aims to represent country Music Museum States music’s colourful past through collection of artist’s memorabilia.

Location

Country Music Hall of Nashville, United Fame and Museum States Arts Centre Melbourne Melbourne, Australia

Museum name

Table 1.1  Research sites

14 22 6 18, 19, 28 9, 12 1 5

33 29, 30, 31, 32

1984 c.1986 1988 1994 1995 1996–2011 2000

2000 2000

Curatorial Practice in Popular Music Museums: An Introduction (Continued)

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Respondent no.

1961

Year opened

9

Location

Description

Prague, Czech Republic DIY museum. Aims to collect and preserve documents and objects of Czech and Slovak pop music history. Hector Country Music Hector, South Island, DIY museum. Collects sheet music, memorabilia Heritage Museum New Zealand and other country’s music-related artefacts from New Zealand and international artists. Museum RockArt Hoek van Holland, the Private museum. Exhibits artefacts relating to Netherlands Dutch rock and pop music since the 1950s. Reykjanes Museum of Reykjanes Peninsula, Local history museum. Presents temporary Heritage Iceland exhibitions on region’s history, including popular music. Ramones Museum Berlin, Germany DIY museum. Displays ephemera related to the Ramones. Nederlands Instituut Hilversum, the Nationally funded. Collects and displays voor Beeld en Geluid Netherlands audiovisual heritage of the Netherlands. The Grammy Museum Los Angeles, United Privately operated. Dedicated to the develop­ States ment, preservation, archiving and display of rare assets from the music industry. British Music London, United Privately operated. Permanent exhibition on Experience Kingdom past sixty years of British popular music. Tónlistarsafn Íslands Kópavogur, Iceland Local government funded. Supports research and dissemination of the history of Icelandic music. National Museum Nashville, United State funded. Showcases and educates on of African States musical genres created or impacted by American Music African Americans.

PopMuseum

Museum name

Table 1.1  (Continued)

27 2 17 24 16, 21 10

2002 2004 c.2005 2005 2007 2008

2019

13

2009–14 (reopened in 4 Liverpool in 2017) 2009 3

25, 26

Respondent no.

2000

Year opened

10 Curating Pop



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is the core business, but also include museums which have hosted major music exhibitions (e.g. Powerhouse Museum, Australia), or which are recognized in their national context as having an important role to play in the display of popular music (e.g. Reykjanes Museum of Heritage, Iceland). In this book, all sites are collectively referred to as popular music museums. We recognize that there are quite significant differences between the authorized and do-it-yourself museums that formed our sample. For instance, the Hector Country Music Heritage Museum, located in a converted garage in a remote town on the north-west coastline of New Zealand’s South Island, is far removed from the expansive Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum located in ‘music city’ Nashville (see Fry 2017: 114–24). However, as Fairchild (2018: 477) found in his study of thirteen US and two UK popular music museums, despite differences in scale, these are places with ‘important elements in common’ in that ‘they all use an array of mundane, everyday objects within larger, encompassing multimedia displays to uphold a range of musically-specific myths, such as those surrounding a musical tradition’s character and origins, as well as those attributing various forms of transcendent artistry and greatness to prominent musicians’. The upholding of myths is not the subject of this book, but the curatorial practices outlined herein are part of the process that leads to the reproduction of myths within popular music history. Wherever possible, interviews were conducted on site at the museum where the interviewee worked, and site observations were undertaken at that time to provide further context to the interview material. Beyond the specific institutional context, interviews were also scheduled with freelance curators and exhibition designers in Israel (Respondent 15 and Respondent 20) and Iceland (Respondent 11 and Respondent 23) and with a hall of fame designer based in the UK (Respondent 8). The majority of interviews were conducted by Sarah Baker, but a number of interviews were undertaken by other members of the research team involved in the Popular Music and Cultural Memory project, including Shane Homan (Respondent 14), Peter Doyle (Respondent 6) and Alison Huber (Respondent 18, 19, 28). Sarah Baker was joined by Motti Regev for the joint interview with Respondent 15 and Respondent 20, and by Alison Huber for the joint interview with Respondent 33. Interviews were recorded and transcribed prior to being thematically coded according to structuring concepts in the existing literature on popular music museums that had been identified by the book’s authors. A total of thirty-three interviews were analysed for this book. Our interest here is not in the exhibition as ‘finished text’ (Mason 2011: 28), and we do not include in the pages of this book lengthy observational

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descriptions of exhibitions, galleries or the contents of display cases. Such accounts representative of the types of exhibitions referred to by the museum professionals interviewed for this research can be found in the work of other scholars. In particular, we would draw our reader’s attention to exhibition reviews by Murray Forman (2002), Lucy Robinson (2018) and Emilia Barna (2017) and to work by Charles Fairchild (2017), Kathryn Johnson (2015) and Ulrich Adelt (2017), who all provide detailed accounts of museum displays. We also recommend pages within Robert Fry’s (2017: 114–43) book Performing Nashville for an excellent account of the city’s country music museums and exhibition spaces. We did not interview visitors to the museums of our study, and so, beyond the museum professionals’ own reflections on visitor engagement, also absent from the pages of our book is a consideration of how visitors might ‘construct multiple and differentiated readings perhaps in conflict with those intended by museum professionals’ (Mason 2011: 27). The visitor perspective can be found in the work of scholars like Marion Leonard (2010), Gaëlle Crenn (2015) and, from a tourist studies perspective, Leonieke Bolderman and Stijn Reijinders (2017). While we recognize that detailed analyses of exhibitions are highly valuable for revealing how popular music emerges as heritage and that visitors are ‘crucial participant[s] in the process of meaning-making’ (Mason 2011: 27) in museums, our central concern in this book is the process and practice of curation. We aim to present the ‘behind-the-scenes information’ and ‘day-today practical issues’ (Mason 2011: 29) that inform the production of exhibitions and the representation of popular music’s past.

Structuring concepts for curatorial practice: A typology In this book, we seek to provide a typology of structuring concepts that underpin the inclusion of popular music within heritage institutions and exhibitions. To do so, we examine and critically assess the clusters of structuring concepts predominantly developed by Leonard (2007) and Cortez (2015) and build on these by incorporating structuring concepts that have been observed by other scholars, including Stephen King (2006), Christian Hviid Mortensen and Jacob Westergaard Madsen (2015) and Arno van der Hoeven and Amanda Brandellero (2015). Through a consideration of the subjective experiences of curators involved in the exhibition of popular music in museums in a range of geographic locations, we argue that such a typology acts as a useful tool for comparing



Curatorial Practice in Popular Music Museums: An Introduction

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institutional practices internationally and for beginning to understand how popular music history is presented to museum visitors. A typology that outlines the structuring concepts of the curation of popular music in exhibitions can go on to be applied in the analysis of exhibitions in conjunction with other developing typologies of popular music exhibition and display, such as the four exhibitionary characteristics provided by Fairchild (2017) and the narrative framework put forward by Cortez (2017), which emphasizes textual, sonic and visual narratives. Accordingly, the provision of a typology of curatorial practice in popular music exhibitions is useful in that it has the potential to guide meaning-making for curators, museum visitors and scholars of popular music heritage. Leonard’s (2007: 148) early work on popular music museums emerged from her experiences curating National Museums Liverpool’s The Beat Goes On, ‘an exhibition which examines aspects of Merseyside’s popular music history from 1945 to the present day’. Based on interviews with private collectors and observation of popular music exhibitions held in a range of institutions, including Urbis, Tate Liverpool, The Barbican and the V&A, Leonard (2007: 153) identified three conceptual categories underpinning popular music exhibitions: ‘Canonic representations, contextualization as art and the presentation of popular music  … as social or local history.’ Leonard’s (2007) interest was in locating how collectors, custodians and curators value the material culture and heritage of popular music, and how in turn, visitors might value the artefacts placed on display in the exhibition. In a later work, she refers again to the three structuring categories of curatorial practice and notes the following: Some … exhibitions have focused on canonic artists or well documented music events, while others, notably in art galleries rather than museums, have focused on aspects of visual art related to popular music releases or movements. Alongside this, popular music has featured as a way to explore social and urban histories. (Leonard 2010: 174)

In both articles, Leonard draws attention to these three curatorial strategies as a way to provide a broader exhibition context to understand museums’ engagement with private collectors (2007) and audiences (2010). In an evaluation of Leonard’s conceptual categories in regard to a discussion of ‘the museum’s relation to the material culture of popular music’, Pirrie Adams (2015: 120) notes the importance of the categories in the ‘recognition of how collection and display both play a role in the evaluative process’, and that Leonard’s work

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highlights ‘the importance of the display strategies through which artefacts are situated, sequenced, juxtaposed, abstracted, narrated or dramatized’. Likewise, Cortez (2015), informed by Leonard’s work, has identified eight curatorial concepts typically guiding, or otherwise being objectives of, popular music exhibitions: tribute/celebration, place, art, statistics, industry, chronology, material culture and curator subjectivity. Whereas Leonard’s work mainly focused on popular music exhibitions in the UK, Cortez’s study involved interviews with curators and other museums associated with nine popular music exhibitions held in Portuguese institutions between 2007 and 2013. Cortez’s (2015: 298) work specifically focused on her interviewees’ ‘personal motivations, political agendas and their perspectives on exhibiting musicrelated themes in museums’, but, like the work of Leonard, is also informed by her own experiences working in the museum sector. Cortez’s development of the eight curatorial concepts also draws on a full discourse and multi-modal analysis of two exhibitions in which she focused in particular on textual, visual and sonic narratives (see also Cortez 2016, 2017). Cortez (2015: 308) describes the curatorial concepts that emerged from her observations, interviews and narrative analysis as being ‘covert’ curatorial strategies, and not immediately recognizable by visitors. Rather, the concepts are embedded or inherent within exhibitions, underpinning exhibition narrative and display and, ‘in a broader sense, an ontological conceptualisation of popular music in Portugal’ (Cortez 2015: 308). In this book, we aim to further the understanding of curatorial practices in popular music museums by assembling the structuring concepts identified in the above work of Leonard and Cortez into an extended typology of curatorial practice that includes the following eight components: celebrating dominant (and hidden) histories; economies and the museum experience; the influence of place; display of material culture; the narratives of popular music’s past; curator subjectivity and personal bias; memory and nostalgia and the inclusion of sound. In delivering our analysis of this typology in chapters devoted to each concept, we emphasize that in the context of popular music museums, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Though not all concepts will be apparent in any one exhibition, it would be rare to see just one strategy applied throughout a museum; rather, these concepts work to complement each other in different ways. Similarly, while some concepts are more dominant than others, we have attempted to eliminate any suggestion of a hierarchy within which curators may be working in applying these structuring concepts.



Curatorial Practice in Popular Music Museums: An Introduction

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The chapters in this book address each of these structuring concepts in turn and, in many ways, speak directly to King’s (2006: 239) observation that exhibitions reflect ‘the organization’s financial resources, accessibility of artifacts, space availability, the personal tastes of curator(s), and other seemingly invisible, yet highly important factors, including satisfying the museum’s target market/visitors’. However, we do not intend to present this as a definitive list of structuring concepts, and we recognize that we also do not include all concepts identified by others. For example, our typology excludes Cortez’s category of ‘industry’ due to our data reflecting that the relationship between popular music and industry is dealt with by curators as a component of other categories like ‘material culture’ and ‘narrative’. We also have not included structuring concepts that we suspect form an important part of curatorial practice but which our data did not sufficiently support. For example, we strongly suspect ‘affect’ is a standalone structuring concept, as it is highlighted in other aspects of heritage activity related to popular music (see Long et al. 2017) and particularly in regard to DIY heritage institutions or micromuseums where it has been identified as a key dimension of volunteer practice (see Baker 2015; Baker and Huber 2013b). However, other than in relation to nostalgia, as addressed in Chapter 8, affect in the context of being a structuring concept only appeared sporadically in the transcripts of a handful of interviews – for example, in relation to hiring practices (‘I tell people, “I hire because of your passion, number one.” Because this isn’t rocket science. Passion’ [Respondent 10]) and in terms of the notion that a museum professional needs to be cognizant that the curation of popular music involves ‘touch[ing] on the themes and ideas that are dear to [a visitor’s] heart’ (Respondent 6). Given such omissions, we therefore emphasize the emergent nature of the typology set out in this book. We see our work not as an attempt to fix in place the structuring concepts of curatorial practice in popular music museums, but rather as furthering a conversation that has been developing over time within and across the literature on popular music museums about what the curation of popular music exhibitions involves. As Nikos Bubaris (2014: 393) points out, ‘exhibitions are the focal points of engagement and interaction between the museum and its public’. Highlighting the structuring concepts drawn on by museum professionals in their curation and exhibition design is important because although visitors to popular music exhibitions and museums ‘engage with the material culture of popular music in highly selective ways’ (Pirrie Adams 2015: 123), informed by their ‘own knowledge, memories, associations, interests and experiences’ (Leonard

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2014: 259), these interpretations are made within the context of typologies of curatorial practice. As Leonard (2014: 359) rightly points out, such a typology ‘does not dictate the ways in which visitors experience a museum display’ but ‘nevertheless, the museum is active in suggesting ways of understanding’. By explicating the key structuring concepts that underpin this typology of curatorial practice, this book reveals how the popular music museum operates ‘as a site of contemporary cultural production’ where ‘ideas and meaning’ central to an understanding of popular music as heritage ‘are formed, presented, questioned and rearticulated’ (Bubaris 2014: 393). Teasing out the various components that inform curatorial practice in popular music museums brings to light ‘the complexity and multifaceted nature of the process of exhibition creation’ (Mason 2011: 27) as well as how ‘the curation of popular music histories and their presentation as heritage can be a charged and contested area with multiple stakeholders engaged – often with great passion – in shaping and responding to the museum presentation of materials’ (Leonard and Knifton 2015c: 108). To this end, this book operates as an open-ended guide for the curation of popular music’s past in the present and looks to the development of heritage practices that ensure popular music will be preserved, restored and narrated in the future.

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Canonic Representations: The Celebration of Dominant (and Hidden) Histories

Interviewer: Do you feel sometimes when you’re up to your elbows in actually doing it and selecting material and making decisions, in the thick of it, tensions between what you’ve got to put in and what you’d like to put in and what really you should put in, including celebrating the hitherto uncelebrated, perhaps, or cutting the over celebrated down a notch or two and so on. Respondent 6: Yes, you definitely do feel that tension. What you’ve got to put in, you know you’ve just got to put in certain things that just beg to be included. [As a curator] you might find them tiresome and tedious and you might not have a lot of respect or affinity for that particular type of music but you can’t … . Interviewer: Can you give us an example? Respondent 6: Well I’ve got nothing against John Farnham, but of course he had to figure pretty big in Real Wild Child!

(Respondent 6, Powerhouse Museum) The above extract from an interview with a museum professional from the Powerhouse Museum in Australia highlights the tensions experienced by curators in producing narratives of popular music history. Curators must negotiate how to feature star performers within exhibitions alongside lesserknown artists in the popular music canon, thereby producing a level of balance between the most well-known stories and those which have had less exposure in exhibitions, media and texts on popular music heritage. Dominant histories come to be privileged in exhibitions like Real Wild Child!, where curators exercise a sense of objectivity: ‘You’ve just got to put in certain things that beg to be included’ (Respondent 6). This curator goes on to add, ‘like [the Australian pop-rock singer John Farnham], there’s things you feel you should include, and it’s institutional imperatives and things like “oh, have we got cultural diversity?”’, which also suggests the influence of top-down museum directives. While noting

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a desire to ‘celebrate the hitherto uncelebrated’, hinting at potential scope to bring hidden histories to the fore, this curator continues, If there’s something you really want to put in, what often happens is there’s not enough room to put in everything anyway, and things that are kind of slightly indulgent would be the first to go because you’ve got to make cuts, because you’ve got to put in the things that should and have to be put in first. (Respondent 6)

Hidden histories, then, get pushed aside as the institutional preference is for recounting stories of the familiar, the celebrated, the stars. For a number of reasons, some of them financial, there is a tendency for popular music exhibitions to reinforce existing canons. As Charles Fairchild (2017: 88) observes, popular music museums ‘have a pronounced tendency towards familiar, traditional and safe forms of museum practice’. The celebration of dominant histories as a structuring concept for curatorial practice is just that – familiar, traditional and safe – and reflects a need to put on display ‘material from the most commercially successful practitioners within the transnational recording industry’ in order to connect with the majority of visitors (Knifton 2012: 22). The elevation of particular narratives in popular music history, especially those concerning individual artists, has been identified as a structuring concept for curatorial practice by Marion Leonard (2007) and Alcina Cortez (2015). Whereas Cortez (2015) names this concept ‘Tribute/Celebration’, Leonard (2007) calls it ‘canonic representations’. The different emphasis is due to, on the one hand, Leonard (2007: 153) noting an exhibition type that ‘replicate[s] received knowledge about popular music histories by concentrating on events that have already been given high levels of media and critical attention’, and on the other, Cortez’s (2015: 310–11) observation that curators were more concerned with raising the profile of lesser-known artists and challenging the heavily debated history of popular music in Portugal. Cortez (2015: 309) notes that her interviews with curators ‘revealed a commitment to crediting and paying tribute specifically to little-known musicians’. Such a desire to celebrate peripheral artists is also present in the interview with Respondent 6, as outlined above. However, in this account we also witness the pull of canonic representations in the rationale for exhibition development. Leonard (2007: 154) argues that subject selection for popular music exhibitions ‘highlights how certain artists, time periods and geographical locations are granted elevated historical importance’. She draws on the work



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of Sarah Thornton (1990: 89), who posits that four criteria determine the hierarchical importance of popular culture events: ‘sales figures, biographical interest, critical acclaim or amount of media coverage’. Leonard (2007: 155) highlights that a structuring concept of curatorial practice emerging from these four criteria is problematic in that it can ‘have the effect of guiding curators away from the everyday contexts of popular music’ – that is, obscuring the affective and embodied experiences of popular music as they occur for individuals within the lifetime soundtrack (Istvandity 2014). These everyday contexts relate to how people viewing an exhibition actually experienced the music at hand – if the avenues through which they accessed this music are ignored, visitors have fewer ways in which they can connect to popular music museums on a personal level. In a later work, Leonard (2010: 180) cautions that ‘it is important that the representation of music is not determined solely by the music canon and the most celebrated of music “moments” or scenes’. In relation to this, Robert Knifton (2012: 22) writes, ‘The tension here is between the celebrated and the overlooked, dominant narratives and hidden histories, and how these should be told.’ In this chapter, we consider how this tension plays out for the curators of our study, with particular attention paid to histories in which gender and race have been marginalized.

Dominant stories and major events: Where to start in the telling of popular music’s history? A curatorial emphasis on canonic representations draws on ‘a primary function of canons’, which is ‘their ability to bring order to chaos, to essentially tell a story of our cultural history and present it in its most awe-inspiring light’ (Jones 2008: 7). Popular music exhibitions seek to reduce an otherwise vast history of artists, genres, events and so forth into a version of the past that can be readily absorbed by a museum visitor through a focus on the ‘supposedly … undisputed “masterpieces” and “geniuses” of the art form’ (Regev 2006: 1). As Sarah Baker and Alison Huber (2013a: 230) have argued in relation to museums of country music and associated heritage activities in Tamworth, Australia, ‘canons provide an appealing solution to the problems associated with an excess of information, choosing for us what is important to single out for listening or … what one should remember’. Similarly, in the US context, Richard Peterson (1997: 199) notes that the construction of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

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‘helped to consolidate a single orthodox pantheon of significant contributors to the development of country music’. Museum professionals are therefore involved in ‘acts of cultural consecration’, in that canonic representation involves the identification and subsequent elevation of ‘a select few cultural producers and products that are deserving of particular esteem and approbation’ (Schmutz 2005: 1511). While curators tend to draw on pre-existing canons, they can also engage in acts of retrospective cultural consecration to lend legitimacy to the inclusion of hidden histories (Schmutz 2005). As Carys Wyn Jones (2008: 10) remarks, ‘Canons do not exist in a vacuum; they are supported and perpetuated by institutions.’ Popular music museums reinforce canons, but, as Bob Santelli (1999) observes regarding the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (Rock Hall hereafter), they also have a role in producing canons. Santelli (1999: 239), who has had creative input in an array of popular music museums in the United States, including the Experience Music Project, the Grammy Museum and the aforementioned Rock Hall, states that contributing to popular music’s historiography was one of the [Rock Hall’s] earliest goals, which was not just to preserve rock ’n’ roll history, but to identify it. The curatorial team attempted to build a rock ’n’ roll historiography where none had existed previously, one that would create a basic foundation from which future discourse on the music could be launched. Special exhibits, the permanent collection, interactive displays, and educational programs would all serve to complement such a canon. … Curators, most obviously in the narratives and texts they wrote to accompany exhibits, in the interactive modules such as ‘Five Hundred Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll’, and in the kind of artifacts exhibited and the space accorded [to] each display, created the museum’s own history of the music.

It is, of course, a big claim to suggest that a historiography of rock and roll did not exist prior to the opening of the Rock Hall in 1995, particularly given the role of music journalists – especially those from Rolling Stone – in the museum’s early curation (see Henke 2009). But what Santelli makes clear is the centrality of the canon in the Rock Hall’s curatorial practice. This emerged in our interviews with museum professionals at the Rock Hall: [In approaching curation of the museum] I highlighted certain things that I thought were of crucial importance and would look ridiculous if [we] didn’t have those, like the Beatles or Sun Records and stuff like that. (Respondent 12)



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At the Rock Hall, representing the canon is an expectation and is perceived by those we spoke with as providing their exhibitions with a sense of legitimacy. The museum’s legitimacy – achieved through processes of cultural consecration – is seen to hinge on the inclusion of artists, and even labels, which have loomed large in the history of popular music (Henke 2009: 104). The celebration of certain artists, or of certain aspects of popular music histories, necessarily creates a hierarchy of cultural significance. Beyond the Rock Hall, a reliance on the canon was evident across our interviews both in terms of curatorial processes and collection development. The Arts Centre Melbourne, for example, presents a yearly exhibition featuring an iconic figure in the arts: At the end of every year, [we have] a big exhibition called the Icon exhibition. So, we started with Kylie, we had Dame Edna, AC/DC, Nick Cave, Peter Allen, we’ve got Rock Chicks on now. … So, to a certain extent, those exhibitions have driven some of the collection development initiatives, particularly with Kylie, Nick Cave, Peter Allen. (Respondent 14)

At the Arts Centre Melbourne, the focus is on a single artist, but star performers also feature heavily in exhibitions with broader foci. In that regard, heritage institutions such as popular music museums and halls of fame not only draw on the influence of particular forms of popular music but also further raise, or reinforce, predetermined ideas of where events, trends and artists rank in relation to one another. To borrow the words of Vaughn Schmutz (2005: 1511), heritage institutions ‘elevate’ the cultural significance of popular music. Even in the micromuseums of our study, an inclination to celebrate wellknown artists within exhibitions was common, though in some cases exhibitions often revealed hidden histories unintentionally. For example, in the Hector Country Music Heritage Museum there was a strong desire to include star performers of international country music in the museum’s display. However, overlooked artists also ended up being included in this museum because the more celebrated performers often do not provide items for use by the museum (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2). In the below extract, the curator of the Hector Country Music Heritage Museum describes the frustrating process of securing signed photographs of country music performers for the museum’s collection: The last time I sent for autographs, I get one out of probably ten now. And I’ll tell you a story with [Australian performers]. I get what’s called the Australian Country Music Directory … I rang thirty-three Australians [usually the performers’ gatekeepers] and I spoke to them all and I told them I had a country

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Figure 2.1  Hector Country Music Heritage Museum. Photograph by Sarah Baker. music museum and would there be any chance of getting an autograph to add to the walls … do you know how many photos I got back and replies? … Two people, so I was so disappointed. (Respondent 27)

Part of this respondent’s disappointment relates to the impact this lack of engagement from star performers has on museum visitors. Visitors anticipate canonic representation, no matter how small a museum is, and so this respondent regularly receives feedback from visitors identifying ‘missing’ artists: And then you’ll get someone come and say ‘Where’s Garth Brooks?’ and I say, ‘Well, I’ve written to him three times and he’s never replied so I won’t bother again’. (Respondent 27)

Canonic representation may be achievable for large-scale institutions, but by happenstance, the smaller music museums often end up revealing the hidden



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Figure 2.2 Autographed photographs on display at the Hector Country Music Heritage Museum. Photograph by Sarah Baker.

histories of popular music even though the use of this concept within their displays is something to which they aspire. Star performers were recognized by many of our respondents to be critical in the display of popular music’s past for anchoring exhibition narratives and providing familiar content that appeals to a wide audience. The example from the Hector Country Music Heritage Museum demonstrates how a strong focus on the most celebrated artists might fail to emerge due to a lack of material in the collection. However, the more common theme from the interviews was that star performers become privileged over hidden histories of popular music’s past due to the number of very different constraints curators work with – the space available for the exhibition (see Chapter 4), telling a coherent story (see Chapter 6) and so on, all of which impact on the choices curators make about what to display (and how to display it) and what they can feasibly overlook. Take, for example, the following account from the Powerhouse Museum curator. After being asked by the interviewer (Peter Doyle) if Slavic language Australian pop records should or could be included in exhibitions on popular music history in Australia, Respondent 6 answered as follows: No. We’re talking here about mass culture, about the experience of most people in order to create something that most people who walk in the door will understand and to be part of their lives. So much has happened in the world, you can’t put the whole of the past in a museum. I’m sure the stories you talk about would make

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Curating Pop interesting stories but if you’ve got a certain amount of space to tell the whole thirty-year history of Australian rock music, you’re not going to put in a section about Slavic records [in Australia] or whatever. This is pretty much mainstream and you can’t tell the whole mainstream [story] let alone start telling [minor stories]. Look, I have a quote above my desk from [Respondent 5, a curator at] Experience Music Project in Seattle, and it’s a quote [from when they were] developing an exhibition called Bob Dylan’s American Journey. It says something like this, and it relates to when people are telling [the curator they] should do this or [they] should do that in his [or her] exhibition, and it’s like: ‘There are so many rabbit holes I could’ve gone down that it would’ve been like people would’ve been standing in the exhibition going “What’s going on here, I don’t understand it.”’ So when you’re developing an exhibition, people often come up to you and urge you to go down a rabbit hole that you don’t want to go down and sometimes that rabbit hole might come from someone else in the institution who has a worthy concern – they think you should tell this story of this migrant or this whatever, and I try to avoid the rabbit holes because they can lead you away from your core theme. When you’ve got a limited space you’ve got to stick to it.

This curator went on to say the following: Whatever you’re producing, whether it’s a publication or an exhibition, you can’t include everything. It’s not an encyclopaedia and I guess you have to make those calls and just stand by them and cop the flack. (Respondent 6)

This particular curator attempts to reduce negative responses an exhibition might draw from visitors by ‘try[ing] to cram in as much content as I possibly can’, acknowledging that while an exhibition can ‘never [be] comprehensive, … if it contains a critical mass of content … people will walk out thinking “well that’s a pretty convincing account of this complex subject”’ (Respondent 6). The challenges presented by both Respondent 6 and Respondent 27 bring to light the tensions curators face when balancing dominant narratives and hidden histories. Respondent 6 demonstrates that curators can be limited in the extent to which stories of lesser-known artists, labels and so forth can be highlighted. Respondent 27, in the context of a micromuseum, reveals the opposite – that sometimes curators are limited in the extent to which star performers can be showcased in popular music exhibitions. Both cases lead us to consider how the concept of canonic representations can only ever offer up limited histories of popular music’s past. Such limitations are further mediated by issues such as the objects available or accessible to institutions, the interests of visitors and the spatial features of the museum itself.



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Hidden histories of race and gender A reliance on dominant stories to guide curatorial practice can have quite significant consequences for visitors’ takeaway understanding of popular music’s past. In particular, a focus on dominant histories can lead to ‘a broad flattening of racial and social divisions’ (Fairchild 2017: 88). Most recently, this has been highlighted in Ulrich Adelt’s (2017) study of the display of electric guitars in the Rock Hall and the Experience Music Project. For Adelt (2017: 209), ‘both museums solidify a white patriarchal perspective’ and ‘directly and indirectly adhere to racialized and gendered hierarchies’. This blurring of racial and gendered contributions in the genre is a by-product of, in the case of the Rock Hall, a desire ‘to preserve a canonical version of the genre’ of rock and roll which ‘primarily speaks to a baby-boomer audience’, and, for both museums, an approach interweaving education with entertainment that ‘is clearly tied to capitalist notions of popular music distribution and commodification’ (Adelt 2017: 208). Adelt notes that Western imperialism and colonialism have shaped the curation of exhibitions in museums of popular music, just as has occurred in museums of high art and natural history. Drawing on the work of Gyan Prakash (2012), Adelt (2017: 209) states that ‘like other museums, to create a sense of cultural wholeness, [popular music museums] “assemble fragile fragments, often erasing marks of violence on them” and engage in processes of mythmaking and discourses of authenticity’. Referring specifically to the Rock Hall, Adelt (2017: 210) posits that the celebration of popular music in the museum has involved ‘willfully ignoring the racist and sexist history of rock and roll’. While aspects of popular music’s past that might challenge the celebratory feeling of the museum space are largely absent from the Rock Hall’s exhibitions, Adelt (2017: 211) also acknowledges the museum’s ‘strong commitment to diversity’ beyond its presentation of a dominant history based on ‘the white men who have been canonized as “classic rock”’. With Adelt’s observations in mind, we now turn to a consideration of how hidden histories of race and gender come to feature in popular music exhibitions.

Revealing race The tensions of race have always been at play within the field of popular music (see Haynes 2013). Born from African American rhythm and blues traditions, early popular music genres of pop and rock – especially in the United States –

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often drew on the musicality of black musicians, while at the same time gentrifying tunes for white audiences by releasing them under white cover artists. The dominant discourses of popular music, at least in their earlier incarnations, favoured white histories that downplayed the significance of African American music and artists (see Wald 2009 for a thorough alternate history). There is a clear danger, then, that in developing museums which celebrate popular music, these sites will further consolidate skewed histories. Stephen King’s (2006: 237) scholarly examination of the Delta Blues Museum identifies the extent to which music museums can ‘perpetuate White control over an African-American art form’. He notes that to all appearances, the museum’s ‘permanent exhibit serves as a powerful reminder of the important role African Americans played in the creation and development of one of America’s most popular music idioms’ (King 2006: 237). However, he also points out that at the time he was writing, there had never been a director or curator at the museum who was African American. For King (2006: 237), the Delta Blues Museum ‘signifies how White promoters and organizers are largely in control of rhetorically creating and disseminating cultural narratives of Mississippi’s blues culture’. Such tensions are evident in other museums that look towards mainstream popular music. In a review of the Rock Hall, Charles Bergengren (1999: 549) notes ‘great respect is paid to Black performers and the seminality of their contributions’ in the museum’s exhibitions, yet ‘the museum is not perceived from a Black perspective’. This results in ‘the inevitable conflicts and dissenting perspectives readily apparent in the history of popular music’ (Fairchild 2017: 88) to be whitewashed, quite literally. In the case of the Rock Hall, Bergengren (1999: 549, original emphasis) highlights ‘there is nothing about white co-optation of Black culture or talent, even of underpaid musicians, much less the “How we survived Babylon” or “How we made it through our Holocaust” slant we might get if Blacks were really in charge of the show’. This critique aligns with what Larry Juchartz and Christy Rishoi (1997) call a ‘sanitization’ of popular music in music museums. What Bergengren (1999) and King (2006) highlight is the importance of the racial identity of the curator in revealing racialized narratives of popular music culture. The majority of the museum professionals interviewed for this research were white and, not surprisingly, matters of race were rarely raised in their responses. One exception to this was an interview with a participating curator at the Grammy Museum. As if picking up on the critiques of King and Bergengren, Respondent 10 reflected on the need to employ curators with diverse racial



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and social backgrounds in order to produce exhibitions which speak to the community in ways that are respectful and credible: I have a 25-year-old African American girl, no music museum in America, [the] Rock Hall, nobody could ever do a hip-hop exhibit, a true hip-hop exhibit. [Admittedly they] did one at Experience Music Project [but that was] because [they] bought all this stuff, it was the origins of hip-hop from the Bronx, paid a lot of money to buy this stuff [to have] the exhibit. [However, for] this exhibit [at the Grammy Museum, we had an] African American, [who had] never curated, she’s two years out of college, and she curated [the hip-hop exhibit], with my help and guidance. … She created it and got the [objects], and got the belief in the hip-hop community that what the Grammy Museum was, we’re with you. So now we have – no music museum has the relationship with hip-hop that we do. Nobody. And that’s from Kanye [West] on down. (Respondent 10)

Respondent 10 feels quite strongly that the success of the Grammy Museum’s Hip-Hop: A Cultural Odyssey exhibition was due to the involvement of an African American curator. In contrast with the Experience Music Project, the Grammy Museum did not have the financial resources to purchase a collection for the exhibition and relied on the development of trusting relationships with members of the hip-hop community in order to gain access to objects and stories that would bring the genre to life for visitors. Respondent 10 continues, I did that by letting an African American, not a middle-aged white guy, try and do, number one, and with her total naivety [having never curated an exhibition before], just let her go, and it worked. And when the [community] saw the results, they were like, ‘Yes, cool. We’re with you.’ … [Respondent 12 at the Rock Hall] is my age, [he] doesn’t belong in the hip-hop community, [Respondent 12’s] not credible, nor am I, nor is [Respondent 5 from Experience Music Project]. We’re just not. But a 25-year-old, attractive, well-educated, determined African American woman with a head on her shoulders, that’s relevant, and that’s how we did it. (Respondent 10)

In Respondent 10’s account, the benefit of having an African American curator, who is also young and female, is framed primarily as one concerning the ability to make connections with a community of interest who have access to artefacts needed for the exhibition. The narrative is less about how the African American perspective of the emergent curator might challenge the way the history of hip-hop might otherwise be told if the curators were middle-aged white men. Instead, this perspective is considered in relation to the issue of representation,

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which provides the institution with the credentials to tell the story of a particular popular music genre. As the above extract with Respondent 10 shows, gender also remains a critical issue in the curation of popular music exhibitions.

Gendering popular music’s past Women’s contributions to the history of popular music are by and large downplayed in exhibitions regardless of the genre being celebrated. In fact, women tend to either ‘go missing’ in popular music histories (see Strong 2011), or their artistic merits are not truly acknowledged as the origin of stylistic expressions (see McMullen 2014). When women do appear in the narrations of popular music’s past, their valorization tends to be ‘because they’re women, not because of their artistic merits’ (Juchartz and Rishoi 1997: 329). For example, in an early descriptive account of the Rock Hall, Juchartz and Rishoi (1997: 329–30) observe that ‘in the “Early Influences” exhibit, … only a handful of women are honored with inclusion’ and that while commercially successful female artists like Madonna feature prominently, women like Patti Smith and Debbie Harry are marginalized: ‘Their numbers and placement are far outweighed by that of their male peers.’ In a review of the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes & Rage exhibition, Murray Forman (2002) makes similar observations about the place of women in such exhibitions. He notes that although the curators of Hip-Hop Nation queried the role women might have played, the resulting exhibition failed to offer a convincing response, and the walltext accompanying the display ‘in essence, offers an implicit rationale (albeit from a critical perspective) for “derogatory” practices and other industry constraints to women’ (Forman 2002: 122–3). Forman (2002) rightly notes that popular music exhibitions reproduce the gender dynamics of the music industry. Rosa Reitsamer (2018: 29) argues that in recent times, museums have ‘sought to redress the absence of women from rock’s established narratives’ by way of exhibitions which are exclusively focused on female performers. Perhaps in light of recognition of the dominance of canonic representations in music museums, which reinforce a history of popular music dominated by male performers, there has been a noticeable push in a range of institutions to insert women into popular music’s historiography and ‘to correct the male bias that has contributed to the scarce presence of female artists’ in exhibitions (Reitsamer 2018: 30). For example, at the entrance of the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame, nestled between merchandise available for sale, is a ‘tribute to the women of country music’, which displays plaques of female performers awarded inclusion



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Figure 2.3  The women’s wall of fame at the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame. Photograph by Sarah Baker.

to this ‘wall of fame’ (see Figure 2.3). The structuring concept of canonic representations remains central to curatorial practice even in an effort to reveal hidden histories, with Reitsamer (2018: 30) noting that the Rock Hall’s Women Who Rock exhibition was ‘aimed at the construction of a canon of “great” female artists’. While oft-uncelebrated women of the music industry are showcased in such exhibitions, Reitsamer (2018: 29) also warns that ‘grouping female performers together’ can also be understood as a ‘strategy of excluding the work of female performers from the canon’ (emphasis added), rather construing them as ‘a perpetual novelty’ that justifies their peripheral position in these museums. Below, we consider two examples from the museums of our study – Women Who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power and Rock Chicks – where women’s histories were inserted into the museum through special exhibitions which reveal the gendered histories of popular music’s material past.

Rock Chicks: An exhibition An Australian example of an exhibition focused on female narratives in popular music history is provided by the Arts Centre Melbourne exhibition Rock Chicks.

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While the show is clearly gendered in that its focus is on women in the music industry, the key driver for the curator was to reveal hidden histories: So, in a way, I didn’t really want to do a gender show. I mean, it is a gender show in a way. I think it was about partly telling these untold stories and the difficulties that – there’s a particular period in music history that was incredibly difficult to find anything on, and that was the alternate scene that was going on whilst pop music was going on in the 1960s, which was the group of women who came from jazz and folk and went into prog rock and hard rock. It was so … very badly represented. Wendy Saddington, Margret RoadKnight, Carol Lloyd. We just couldn’t even track down some of these people, couldn’t even find them. When you come – when I was trying to read stories about them, read anything about them, and also the women in bands like SCRA [Southern Contemporary Rock Assembly], for example, Flake, there were many of them and their stories have disappeared a bit. So that was, in a sense, one of our curatorial objectives. I think also when people think about women in music it’s so stereotyped around Chrissy Amphlett. So I was very keen to look at the fact that that’s one manifestation, but there are many others, and really to reflect some of that diversity and that experience and stuff. (Respondent 14)

At the time of the exhibition in late 2010, Arts Centre Melbourne was not attached to a hall of fame1 and so didn’t face the same issue as the Rock Hall of needing to showcase inducted performers. Rather, a broad cross section of female artists could be incorporated with the intention of detailing stories which have largely gone undocumented in ‘the annals of popular music history’, which ‘tends to be written from quite a male perspective’ (Respondent 14). The curator recognized that ‘when women are included [in histories of popular music], it tends to be the well-known or the pop music people’ (Respondent 14). In contrast, Rock Chicks sought to tell the stories of artists on the periphery, such as Jane Clifton and the ‘alternative [Carlton] scene that’s been going on since at least the early ’60s’, which is ‘fascinating, but very poorly documented’ (Respondent 14). The curatorial approach for Rock Chicks was quite different to that taken by the Rock Hall for Women Who Rock. The curator explained that in order to present a broad narrative relating to women’s contributions, the structure of the exhibition centred on

At the time of writing in 2018, Arts Centre Melbourne hosts the Australian Music Vault which incorporates the Australian Recording Industry Association Hall of Fame.

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some of the, if you like, major musical genres and to provide a focus on – to make sure that in each one of them, where possible, we had a songwriter, we had a front woman, we had an instrumentalist, an all-girl group and so on. (Respondent 14)

Working with the women who would be showcased in the exhibition, where possible, was a priority for Arts Centre Melbourne. The responses of female artists surveyed by the museum revealed the belief that ‘their gender is not relevant, that they’re musicians first’ (Respondent 14). The musicianship of the women who featured in Rock Chicks was highlighted by way of the exhibition’s structure; Respondent 14 reported that these performers were ‘just so pleased, in a way, to be recognised’. But even in an exhibition like Rock Chicks, canonic representations must come into play in reducing the ‘big narrative’ (Respondent 14) to a handful of women attached to various genres. The visitor’s understanding of women’s contributions to popular music is framed by ‘calling attention to a small number of examples’ and, as per the function of the canon, ‘a discrete number of texts come to stand in for a much more complex reality’ (Baker and Huber 2013a: 228, 230).

Women Who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power A curator at the Rock Hall spoke at length about the curation of the special exhibition Women Who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power, which was on display at the time of our interview. Respondent 9 spoke of how an exhibition featuring female performers ‘was something I advocated for’ from the moment they arrived in the Rock Hall’s curatorial department, but that getting support from others in the department for such an exhibition was a significant challenge: There was always a reason not to do it, either John Lennon or Bruce Springsteen or the fact that it was going to be so many different artists. If you go with one artist it’s usually much easier to curate, it’s just easier to curate a show for one artist than it is for multiple artists. … [The curatorial team] eventually came around to the idea that there’s no reason not to do it, we’ve got enough [material] here in house that we could do it without contacting anybody [for loans], so let’s just do it. (Respondent 9)

Planning for the exhibition then involved drawing up a wish list of women for inclusion, an activity Respondent 9 describes as ‘the hardest thing I think that we’ve ever done’ due to a desire to include high profile performers as well

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as ‘people that maybe weren’t necessarily front of mind, people who would be a little like, sort of surprises to the public, people that we didn’t necessarily know so much about’. Although the Rock Hall did not want to simply ‘have all the usual suspects’ represented in the exhibition, there was an institutional imperative to at the very least ‘represent our inductees’ (Respondent 9). And so, as Respondent 12 said of the exhibition, ‘We obviously went to all of our female inductees and tried to see if they would be part of it.’ To work within the constraints of the exhibition space, the initial list of potential subjects, which was described by Respondent 9 as ‘just ridiculously huge’ and containing ‘volumes and volumes’ of names, was reduced to a ‘final list of people who were really important to represent with three dimensional objects’. Again, the canon – even if only that of female artists – heavily influenced curatorial decisions in this exhibition. Although the Rock Hall had originally reasoned that there was enough in the museum’s collection to put on the Women Who Rock exhibition, matching the existing collection with the final list of significant performers revealed that additional artefacts would be needed. This posed more challenges for the curatorial department: People like the Ronettes, for instance, came up with nothing, they had nothing for us and that was really disappointing – it was like, [they were] recently inducted, visually dynamic and I really wanted to represent them. So that was a real challenge, someone like Lauren Hill also [gave] no response. … But it was really a challenge and frustrating in some ways. The Go Go’s, we tried to, we reached out to them and were – we weren’t rebuffed, we just didn’t get called back. (Respondent 9)

The lack of available objects reduced the opportunities for telling the stories of a number of female performers who had otherwise made the final list for inclusion. When the exhibition opened, female performers who were not represented expressed disappointment at their exclusion from the narrative: Respondent 9: Where am I? … that certainly was the reaction of the Go Go’s, they, their gate keeper had not pulled them into the loop at all. They were furious because apparently they’re very accessible via Twitter or Facebook, whatever, and we don’t go that route, we try to be as professional as possible and go through the proper channels, and when I explained to them who I had spoken to and I even, I had the emails to show them and they were very apologetic and said, well, how can we make this right. …



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Interviewer: So is there some way, like in the, for the example of the Go Go’s, is there some way to then re-incorporate them into the museum? Respondent 9: Well, what we did, we got a guitar from Jane Wiedlin and we put it in our promenade, our ground floor guitar cases, we have freestanding guitar cases that are in the lobby, and we put a Women Who Rock label above that part of the guitar case so it’s sort of incorporated into the exhibit, geographically it’s kind of far away, but it’s still, it’s got the brand of the exhibit name on it, and other artists that we weren’t able to get 3D artefacts from, we tried to represent with the album covers that are on the sixth floor. … Choosing the album covers I had initially picked out a bunch of portraits, album covers that were portraits, of artists, and then I thought okay, well, this is a way that we should get all the inductees that aren’t in, in the exhibit, so Dinah Washington, Dusty Springfield, Donna Godchaux of The Grateful Dead.

The example of this exhibition curated by the Rock Hall suggests that the inclusion of female performers is met by challenges, not only in making decisions about who should be included in the popular music canon but in being able to retain enough material objects and artworks that celebrate their careers to justify and sustain their presence in museum spaces.

Authorizing the canon Canonic representations, as a structuring concept of curatorial practice, are based within ‘a hegemonic “authorized heritage discourse”’ (Smith 2006: 11). In engaging canonic representations, popular music museums further institutionalize canons of popular music. Throughout this chapter we have teased apart the tension between the emphasis on dominant stories of popular music histories and curators’ desires to include the uncelebrated and forgotten artists. The focus on ‘masterpieces’ and ‘geniuses’ (Regev 2006), or what Respondent 9 refers to as the ‘usual suspects’, responds to particular expectations from museum visitors, as well as curatorial constraints, such as the availability of certain material objects. In other words, popular music exhibitions tend to elevate the status of those that already have the esteem and approbation of music consumers (Schmutz 2005) despite curators also recognizing the value of uncovering hidden histories. Dominant histories play a part in ‘constituting and legitimizing’ what popular music heritage is by focusing attention on a tiny cross section of popular music’s

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past that, in the context of the museum, signals the priority for these to be the histories that are ‘care[d] for, protect[ed] and revere[d]’ for the education of future generations (Smith 2006: 29). However, as Les Roberts and Sara Cohen (2014: 258) note, ‘Just how meaningful authorised popular music heritage discourses are in terms of how individuals celebrate and curate their own music memories, or exactly how they might inform or relate to personal ideas of heritage, memory and identity is by no means self-evident.’ Hence, canonic representations is a structuring concept that benefits from being used alongside other structuring concepts of curatorial practice that are cognizant of the interpretive capacity of visitors and the importance of memory (see Chapter 8) and narrative (see Chapter 6) for co-constructing knowledge in the ‘new museum’ (Andermann and Arnold-de Simine 2012; Marstine 2006). In sum, popular music exhibitions largely reproduce canonic representations in their approach to popular music histories. Even in exhibitions where curators attempt to raise the profile of marginalized groups of artists, the notion of a canon – a hierarchy of importance – is at play. In this way, canonic representations as a structuring concept presents a recurrent issue for curation, but one which is a necessary tension in creating balanced and more inclusive narratives surrounding popular music heritage.

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Selling the Museum Experience: Curation, Economies and Visitor Experience

Well, it’s interesting because unlike a lot of museums, a large portion of the way we operate [is] almost like a business, but it’s the ticket sales and stuff that people buy in the store, that’s a big portion of our revenue, and we do get underwriting, some grants and some stuff from foundations and things, but I would say the main part of our economic operation is based on ticket sales and selling things in the store, and what’s been interesting also is that we’ve actually done quite well during the last few years despite the recession and all that. (Respondent 12, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum) Popular music heritage institutions are constantly under economic pressure. Budgets are often tight and funding streams uncertain. Museum directors and curators primarily rely on the number of visitors that come through the doors to balance budget outlays on exhibition materials and running costs. Also referred to as ‘statistics’ (Cortez 2015) or projected ‘attendance figures’ (Leonard 2007), the need to understand how visitor fees as revenue streams will ensure a financially successful exhibition can affect curatorial decisions. Bruno Frey and Stephan Meier (2011: 412) write that ‘the management of the collection, pricing, special exhibitions, and ancillary activities’ are key concerns from an economic point of view, with museums seeking to attract more visitors and increase revenue opportunities. This chapter touches on some of the economic pressures on popular music museums and the impact of these on curatorial practice. The opening extract from an interview with a curator at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (Rock Hall hereafter) highlights the focus on finances. Respondent 12 continued, Respondent 12: We’re having a really good year this year. We’re about what we budgeted in terms of our ticket sales and all that, and we’ve had two or three

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Curating Pop really good years. So it’s very interesting, and I don’t really know why that is and I’m glad that it’s happening because I read that a lot of other museums aren’t doing well, and one of the initial things that I thought [is] I run into people in Cleveland and they’d say ‘oh, I haven’t been there yet’ or whatever, even though they live here, so part of me is thinking that maybe with the recession that caused people in Cleveland to say ‘instead of going to New York this year [we] will just go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’ or something like that. Interviewer: Home-based tourism? Respondent 12: So I think that’s probably a portion of it, and then our big exhibit before Women Who Rock was Bruce Springsteen and he’s got pretty diehard fans. I’m sure people have come in for that and our Women Who Rock exhibit got a lot of publicity across the country. So I don’t know how it’s all being driven, but fortunately we’ve been doing okay despite the recession.

We begin with this extended extract from Respondent 12 because it moves quickly from the broader institutional context to referencing the special exhibitions Women Who Rock and From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Springsteen. The suggestion is that special exhibitions like these drive attendance and generate revenue, but comments like ‘I don’t really know why that is’ and ‘I don’t know how it’s all being driven’ equally highlight a sense of uncertainty around the underlying economic processes. In Alcina Cortez’s (2015, 2017) work there is a suggestion that popular music museums will continue to promote exhibitions, or go out of their way to curate exhibitions, on those artists, genres or narratives that draw the largest attendance in an effort to remain sustainable. Musicians’ popularity therefore equates to their capacity to attract visitors to music museums. In Marion Leonard’s (2007: 155) discussion of ‘canonic representations’ as a conceptual underpinning for popular music exhibitions (see also Chapter 2), she notes a ‘perceived link between displaying rare or “fantastic” objects and museum attendance figures’, adding that ‘this understandably is a key consideration for both public and private museums who depend upon visitors to justify their function and to finance, either directly or indirectly, their operating costs’. Cortez (2015), however, contends that this practice is not clearly evident in the Portuguese exhibitions she studied. Rather, Cortez argues that curators were unable to follow visitor trends, or only did so coincidentally, due to budgetary constraints. In her experience, the rationale for each exhibition tends to be more circumstantial than market-oriented. In either



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case, economics remains central to the design of popular music exhibitions, either through purposeful purchase and display of objects relating to particular canonic representations (as in Leonard 2007) or via budgetary constraints that prevent curators structuring exhibitions around stories that demand greater material collections (as in Cortez 2015). Returning to the above example from the Rock Hall, it is hard to imagine that the decision to invest in a blockbuster exhibition such as the one dedicated to Bruce Springsteen – and to do so at a time of economic downturn when the cultural sector was struggling – was not a conscious one. Although economic processes were sometimes unclear to the museum professionals interviewed for this project, they often recognized the potential of exhibitions to boost revenue and expressed a desire to curate an experience that would attract visitors. Providing value for visitors is seen to translate into value for the museum. Of course, curators do not solely think of the economics that popular music exhibitions will provide for the museums. Visitors’ experiences are key to the design of exhibitions (see Chapters 6 and 8). However, for many heritage institutions, their economic survival is a constant concern. Charles Fairchild notes the importance of the ‘experience economy’ as a concept for understanding exhibitionary practice in music museums and draws on Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s (1998) observation of ‘the “progression of economic value” from a [sic] economy of things to an economy of ideas’ (Fairchild 2018: 480). Using the concept of the experience economy in the museum context, we are invited to distinguish between visitors’ appreciation of objects within the museum and the value placed on the whole museum experience by visitors. Catering to the latter has become a key tactic of ‘new museums’, whose use of interactivity and specially designed buildings and spaces allows institutions to capture the imagination of visitors in more holistic ways than in traditional models of museum practice. This was clearly the case for several sites in our study, such as at Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid: Well, the initial idea of the [Sound and Vision] Experience was opening up the archives to the larger public, but doing it in a way that is modern, interactive, not boring. When we opened we were forbidden to call it a museum because we weren’t a museum, we were an experience, but now we’re shifting the words because we are actually a museum. … A museum where you can do a lot, where you can see a lot, where you can experience a lot, but before this building was built we had like a broadcast museum. It was small. It had a lot of glass and

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Curating Pop a lot of objects you could look at, old TVs, old radios. … When we got the money from the government to build this building we had a task like opening up the archive to the greater public, and that is what we did in Experience. (Respondent 16)

In the above extract, the curator details the process of transforming their collection and previous exhibition practices into something that was attractive to the public, yet could still be deemed a museum. It would seem, too, that the idea of a museum visit as an ‘experience’ is not lost on curators and directors – indeed, several sites incorporate this suggestion into their titles: Interviewer: So why was it called the British Music Experience? Respondent 4: It was our working name all the way through the project and we got to the point where we thought ‘what are we going to call it?’ And the British Music Experience seemed to fit. It’s about British Music and it is about the experience. You experience things in the music and video, you can see people dancing to holograms, playing guitars, you get a sense that you’re not just looking at stuff in cases.

In a similar way to Respondent 16, the curator at the British Music Experience contrasts their exhibition practice from those museums which rely on passive engagement with displays through glass cases, emphasizing instead the elements that together indicate and produce a higher-order concept through which visitors will encounter the experience. In this chapter, we investigate how curators at popular music heritage institutions develop strategies to ‘get people through the door’. For most curators we spoke with, these strategies are rooted within the experience economy, which places the overall experience of visiting a museum at the core of the design and curation of popular music exhibitions.

Understanding museum visitors: Demographics and strategy Our respondents described a number of upstream strategies for the development of future exhibitions, which relate to the demographics of visitors as well as to their knowledge in, and taste for, popular music. In this section, we explore why using statistical information on visitors is critical for popular music museums. We highlight some examples of the impact of local visitors versus out-of-towners, and intergenerational appeal, on the rationale and design of



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exhibits. Our discussion suggests the importance of understanding economics in the museum goes beyond the link between attendance figures and canonic representation (Leonard 2007), where ‘statistics’ may not be as circumstantial as Cortez (2015) suggested.

A number’s game Respondents put an emphasis on attracting a sufficient number of visitors to justify both the existence of a museum, as well as individual exhibitions. For the majority of institutions, revenue depends on visitors’ entry fees. In that regard, they must – through careful planning and strategy – work to ensure a certain amount of visitors per year, rationalizing the worth of each exhibition in fiscal terms: So it’s an ongoing sort of discussion, but the key thing for me is when I look at the numbers, can I draw enough people through the front door to justify the expenditure required. (Respondent 8)

While this may seem a simple equation, forecasting numbers involves a more in-depth understanding of who typical museum visitors are within a community and how visitor demographics might change over time. At the Rock Hall, for example, workers observed a gradual change in museum visitors: Respondent 9: When I first started working here …  when I worked on the floor, our typical visitor was a man in his sort of mid, middle age, well forty, fortyfive, let’s say, whose favourite band was the Rolling Stones. Interviewer: So baby boomer guys? Respondent 9: That’s basically it. Interviewer: White? White middle class? Respondent 9: Yep, white, middle class, suburban. Most likely not from around here, I mean people from Chicago would probably be the closest, or New York City. But people who actually lived in the north-east Ohio area didn’t come here, and now when I go out on the floor I see a lot more diversity, I see a lot more kids, I see a lot more African Americans, I certainly see more people, or I know just from our numbers that there are more people from the north-east Ohio area coming here which is great. More women, I do see more women.

This curator was asked to reflect on whether the increase in women was in relation to the exhibition that was showing at the time of the interview, Women

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Who Rock. Their response revealed a tension between the view of the curatorial team and the institution’s ‘statisticians’: Respondent 9: Our focus groups in our studies tell us that it doesn’t really matter what exhibit we have here, that the people come here sort of as a pilgrimage, so they’re going to come no matter what the exhibit is. I don’t know that I believe that entirely, but I mean the statisticians know better than I do. Interviewer: I mean, if it’s an exhibit which is about a particular band, then I would imagine you’re more likely to get people who are huge fans— Respondent 9: Who like that band. Interviewer: —of that band who might come here, they might not have otherwise come here, but they make the pilgrimage especially— Respondent 9: I agree.

Respondent 9’s own view was that a band-specific exhibition would draw fans ‘who like that band’ and who make the pilgrimage to the Rock Hall specifically because of the exhibition. The focus group results may indicate otherwise, but the beliefs of the curatorial team around what types of exhibitions might attract visitors may still guide curatorial practice even if this is not overt.

Impacts of local and travelling museum visitors As someone who had been involved in the curation of exhibitions in three major popular music museums in North America, Respondent 10 had a detailed understanding of visitor statistics: Because in America, and music museums is all I can speak to, if you’re getting 20 per cent of your locals supporting and being vibrant visitors and members in your museum, you’re doing well. At Experience Music Project, I don’t know what it is now, but [a few years back], 77 per cent of the people who were coming were from out-of-town-ish. Which meant about 20 per cent, 25 per cent [are locals], which is great. In Cleveland [at the Rock Hall], 96 per cent from out of town, only 4 per cent or so were local, which is terrible. Here [at the Grammy Museum], 80 per cent of people who come here are local, only 20 per cent are tourists.

This curator explained that the Grammy Museum is not located in ‘a tourist area of Los Angeles’, and local visitation is comprised of a significant proportion of school groups, as well as people combining a museum visit with an event at the adjacent Staples Centre (Respondent 10). The downtown location of the



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Grammy Museum influenced the aims of the museum from the outset, because it was understood that the tourist market would provide only a small number of visitors until the surrounding area developed to be more tourist-friendly, with hotels and related amenities. As Respondent 10 described it, So, I have done the hardest part first, committing in this crazy kind of town with beaches, and football, and everything else that goes around here, to convince locals to support me, become members and be my main nucleus. Now that I have that in place, as long as I can nurture that, I will be able to then, as the tourists start to come, because they all go to the west side, to the beaches, Santa Monica, Universal Studios, etcetera, when they start coming down here, I’m in great shape.

The Grammy Museum not only finds itself in a cultural context that is apparently not favourable to the preservation of popular music heritage but its geographical location in Los Angeles makes it difficult to access. This raises questions as to who will go to the museum and whether they will have money to spend on a ticket by the time they arrive at it. A curator at Experience Music Project reflected in their interview on the location of the Grammy Museum and the challenges that location raises: With the Grammy Museum, it’s going to be down where LA Live is, Staples Center and all that. I think okay, you’re going to a Coldplay show, you’re throwing down 120 bucks, are you going to go spend another 25 dollars? And do you have the time? No way. You’re like, this is already pinching me up pretty hard. I’m going to go to the show. Maybe I’ll have dinner. Which is another 50 bucks. But I am not – and I don’t have another two hours to go through this place. And I’m not coming back here for a while. And I think that was – I had the same thought, well, you’ll have all that captured audience, but they don’t have the time or money to do it. And I think that’s one of the things that makes it a huge challenge. (Respondent 5)

Curators have to consider different types of potential visitors – the tourists that will make the museum one of the many sites they visit in a city and the locals that will want to know more about the cultural places their city offers. In the case of the Grammy Museum, Respondent 10 knows the limitations of the city and the difficulty in drawing on home-based tourism. The input of tourists that visit Los Angeles is critical for the Grammy Museum’s existence; however, as mentioned by Respondent 5, the museum must also exist in competition with a number of other institutions and cultural practices that are on offer. The issue of

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creating exhibitions that appeal to visitors, both local and visiting, is therefore critical for curators to address.

Intergenerational appeal Another demographic dimension to visitor statistics mentioned by interviewees was that of age, specifically as it relates to the idea of distinct generations: Well, it’s interesting because when we first opened it was a lot of baby boomers and from that generation of people. Now, like I say, it’s more families and we do get a lot of families here, people coming in with their kids and all that, and it’s pretty much a wide age range from even younger than teenagers, if they’re with their parents, up to people in their sixties or seventies or something, and generally, like I say, they’re generally rock and roll fans. (Respondent 12)

The broadening appeal of certain special exhibitions, and subsequently of the popular music museum, relates to a target audience being accompanied by visitors from younger or older generations, or curators devising exhibitions which include narratives that would have broad appeal across various demographics: The cool thing is also we’ve noticed that we get a lot of families that come and visit here and most times you’ll see the parents walking the kids through and explaining ‘this is the Beatles and they did this or whatever’, but then when it comes to that section [Right Here, Right Now which features current artists], you see the kids telling their parents ‘oh, that’s so and so and he did this and whatever’, so it also makes that fun. (Respondent 12)

Of course, the wide-ranging appeal of certain popular music stars can genuinely draw large numbers of visitors from various demographics to popular music museums, including those who would not normally venture into cultural institutions of the performing arts. The respondent from the Arts Centre Melbourne, for example, discussed the impact of the exhibition AC/DC: Australia’s Family Jewels: When we had AC/DC on and we saw the black T-shirts and the jeans coming across Flinders Street station you knew they hadn’t been to the Arts Centre before. They were mainly men, maybe in their 40s or 50s even, coming over and wanting the AC/DC experience. What’s really great in these exhibitions is where you see the cross-generational discussion happening. So, there’s a lot of, I’d say, parents bringing their children along for a communal experience at an exhibition: ‘Oh, Dad was actually cool. I like AC/DC too.’ (Respondent 14)



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Our respondents also identified the incorporation of multimedia technologies as a driver of intergenerational appeal. For example, Respondent 10 described how the Grammy Museum’s Say it Loud: The Genius of James Brown exhibition was purposefully designed as a rich multimedia experience that would provide an ‘interactive, probably fun’ environment – ‘I want you to bring your kids, and you can dance with James Brown … it gets kids involved, because I want young people to connect’ (Respondent 10). For Respondent 10, technology is essential in order to ‘do anything of substance’ in the ‘30,000 square feet’ available to the Grammy Museum (Respondent 10). The importance of technology was directly linked to the need for ‘music museums today [to] absolutely supply interactive activities for kids to engage with the music’, with technology providing an opportunity to ‘make that musical experience deeper’, engaging again with the experience economy: Seeing Prince’s shoes on the wall, and Elvis’s jacket. That’s great for baby boomers because we grew up in a passive museum experience. Kids today, it’s all about ‘I want to do. I want to do.’ So I’m not interested in baby boomers here, even though I get a lot of baby boomers. (Respondent 10)

The general consensus from our respondents was that ‘young audiences demand the newest, greatest, fastest technology possible, or else they’re out of there’ (Respondent 1). While keeping up with technological innovation is a challenge for all museums, it can be a pressing issue for micromuseums operating on shoestring budgets. But even for those micromuseums which are technology-poor, intergenerational wonderment can be found in older forms of technology which children may not have encountered before. This was particularly evident at the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame: Grandparents bring the kids to the museum, and they talk about music, and you know, all that sort of stuff. … So they can have a chat, and kids say, ‘but I get [my music] off the net’, we say, ‘we didn’t have that’. [Kids look at] the windup gramophone [and] go—‘how many times does the record go around?’ … when [the record’s] finished, I said, ‘did you get it?’ ‘No’—I said, ‘78’—‘how do you know that?’ … Just those sorts of things, you know, because they don’t know. (Respondent 28)

Through popular music exhibitions, curators frame the question of heritage as an experience that ‘fills the gap between generations’ (Le Guern 2015: 159), or which operates as an ‘intergenerational transfer of memories’ (van der Hoeven

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2015: 215). Achieving intergenerational appeal means curators must strategize to please nearly all visitor demographics.

What do visitors want? Creating the ‘right’ museum under budgetary pressures As ‘new museums’, popular music museums draw on economic development strategies as a way to respond to the uncertainty of their economic survival. In our sample, we note that institutions of different sizes attempted to create the ‘right’ museum in regard to their own features. The issue of economics has a lot to do with the size and profile of heritage institutions. Logically, larger sites in our research were able to draw on a greater range of resources when curating popular music exhibitions. Hence, they can attempt to not only attract a wider range of museum visitors (across ages, genders, ethnicities and classes) but also focus more intently on the overall visitor experience than smaller museums. On the other hand, the ethos of the experience economy was still at play within museums with budgetary constraints, though in these instances, curators would focus on getting the basics right to create an experience for visitors. Creating the ‘right’ kind of museum should ideally translate to balancing budgets through visitor fees. For micromuseums that do not always have the capacity to put on special exhibitions and instead rely on permanent displays, creating a museum that will be attractive to visitors without the technologies and innovations available to museums with greater budgets becomes a priority from the early stages of development. Prior to the establishment of the Heart of Texas Country Music Museum, for example, its founding volunteers took a road trip to visit various music museums across the United States in order to get a sense of what might work for their permanent exhibition: Respondent 30: I think it’s about five years that we worked before we started the building, and I travelled a lot with [the founder], and we would go to these different museums in different parts of the country and look at them. … We did the research. Looking at the different ones where we would go and pick out the good parts that we liked and all this, and this is where we got a lot of our ideas. … Interviewer: So from looking at all these country music museums, you were able to pick out the things that worked for you.



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Respondent 30: We would go through … . Respondent 31: Tell [the founder of Heart of Texas Country Music Museum] what we liked, and what we didn’t like. Respondent 30: We discussed things as we saw them. ‘Oh, look at this. This looks great. Oh, my goodness. Can you imagine having this in here?’ You know?

The volunteers spoke in particular of two museums with practices they wanted to avoid in their own venture: Respondent 30: We saw Dolly Parton’s. We saw Loretta Lynn’s. We saw Jim Reeves’s. … We saw Lefty Frizzell’s. … Respondent 31: You know, I was really disappointed in Dolly’s. Respondent 32: I was too. Respondent 31: It was old, old buildings and little old rooms. Respondent 32: And there was a lot of pictures on the wall of her with the costumes. Just a picture. Respondent 31: I’m glad I saw it. Respondent 32: It wasn’t the real dresses, and things like that. I was real disappointed in it. I was disappointed in Jim Reeves’s. Interviewer: Oh, really? Respondent 31: It was in a house too. Respondent 32: It was in a house, and a lot of cats in there. … It was dirty. … Respondent 30: Nasty. I didn’t even get to—I went in, but I went out . … Interviewer: So, was that something that you noticed in some of those other museums as well? The ways in which they had the light, dark? Respondent 31: You know, Dolly’s was dark. Respondent 30: They were crowded, and they were very dark. Respondent 31: And they were in little individual rooms. Respondent 32: A house. Well, it was really a house. Respondent 30: They would take an older home and renovate it to put a museum in, and they didn’t have anything like—well, they had display cases but nothing— Respondent 32: Nothing like this. … Dolly’s kind of had, the best I can remember, it had a room that go[es] this way, a hall, and then the hall would go that way, and it wasn’t altogether. It was just divided and it was just big pictures of her on the walls— Respondent 31: In different dresses. Respondent 32: —in different dresses. … And hers wasn’t real clean neither.

The Dolly Parton museum left the group with a desire to display original costumes of country music performers rather than relying only on images, whereas the

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Figure 3.1  Heart of Texas Country Music Museum. Photograph by Sarah Baker.

Jim Reeves museum highlighted a need to focus on cleanliness. Both museums were viewed as a let-down due to the space, environment and presentation of materials, which made for an overall poor experience. For the visiting soon-tobe-curators, this underscored the value of having a purpose-built establishment with light, open spaces for exhibitions. The application of all of these learnings can be witnessed in the Heart of Texas Country Music Museum today. Figure 3.1 depicts the museum in 2014 and illustrates the breadth of items on display, including a wealth of original costumes, the museum’s attention to detail and cleanliness of the exhibition space, and its light and airy atmosphere, helping to produce a base-level positive experience for visitors. More established museums with larger yearly budgets often have more freedom in preparing exhibitions because they possess a greater breadth of objects in their collections on which to draw. Using an experience economy approach, these institutions can ‘focus on the unique and compelling nature of the experience’, which ‘is meant to make these places stand out from within the competing ruck and maw of competing institutions such as the shopping mall, theme park, or proliferating urban “brandscapes”’ (Klingmann 2007, cited in Fairchild 2018: 479). In this way, material objects can be used as a basis for constructing an exciting museum experience for visitors on a conceptual level.



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Take, for example, the National Museum of African American Music, which was still in development at the time of our interview: I’m not a historian, not a museum professional, none of that. It was truly a business understanding, which is how you organize an institution. So what I did was we looked at everything that had been done, studies, things of that nature, and just really started to look at the landscape of other museums around the country, looking at Nashville’s market, and looking at Nashville’s theme, if you will, of ‘music city’, and, really, how do we tie into that. And so we realize, well the National Museum of African American Music, and you start thinking  – it was an ah-ha moment. It was a matter of seeing, there’s nothing else like it, it makes sense globally, it ties into Nashville’s market, if you will, of being a musical city. Because country music is the big piece, and I know from a tourism standpoint, broadening the music standpoint so that when people, regardless of where you are when you think of Nashville, you think of music, more so than one genre. So this institution really starts to connect all genres to Nashville. We have a wonderful classical music scene here, we have Grammy Award-winning symphony, we’ve got the Barbershop Harmony Society, we’ve got all of these different components. So this just kind of makes sense in the landscape. And we looked at other cities and either most museums are either genre or artist specific, but nothing really tells the whole story. (Respondent 13)

While the language here is quite different to that used by the volunteers of the Heart of Texas Country Music Museum, the process being undertaken is the same. Both stories emphasize the need to know the competition and find your point of difference from these competitors. The above curator speaks of an interest in understanding what the National Museum of African American Music can offer visitors in the way of experience in a much more developed way than is available to smaller museums. Respondent 13 also recognizes the importance of making their music museum different in a range of ways to other cultural institutions in Nashville which are all vying for visitors and prestige and competing for a similar pool of public subsidies and donations (Frey and Meier 2011: 410).

High risk, low return: Examples of unsustainable exhibitions Balancing curatorial decisions with projected visitor-generated revenue is a matter of life or death for certain institutions, who may need to compete

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with other institutions (heritage or otherwise) for continued patronage. However, they can also help one another in terms of developing best practice and ensuring the museum’s ongoing existence. As Respondent 5 puts it, ‘You don’t have to make the same mistakes we made; let us help you.’ Curators must consider the costs of developing new and future exhibitions and the number of visitors they will need to attract in order to finance them. In the view of one respondent, it is only pilgrimage sites like the Rock Hall that can ‘rely on the gate alone’ (Respondent 10). For other music museums, ‘the challenges will always be revenue and money’ (Respondent 10). This has become increasingly acute following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and more recently the introduction of austerity measures which have impacted cultural institutions through funding squeezes (Baker and Collins 2017; Baker, Doyle and Homan 2016). As Cortez (2015) highlights, the current financial constraints on the cultural sector require museums to adopt an economic strategy for their own survival. In the following section, we examine three examples of music museums that faced the consequences of poor planning, where they became unsustainable and closed their doors shortly after opening. As Leonard (2018: 266–7) suggests, while the subject matter of popular music – which continues to justify its place in the museum – is often publicly blamed for the demise of these institutions, there is a need to look more closely at a range of factors including funding, business strategy, location, programming and visitor numbers.

National Centre for Popular Music, Sheffield The National Centre for Popular Music (NCPM hereafter) opened in Sheffield, England, in 1999, and closed its doors only one year later. Jacqueline Kam (2004: 170) states that the idea for a major cultural project in Sheffield started in the early 1980s. From the early 1990s, a whole team was working for the city council on a popular music exhibition, some of whom went to visit the Rock Hall. Acquiring sponsorship from various institutions in the UK (primarily the National Lottery), the ‘scale of the project soon tripled’ (Kam 2004: 171) and criticisms of the NCPM began circulating more widely: The NCPM was being criticized in the national press over its contents long before it was opened to the public on 1 March 1999 to mixed national reviews. The Centre was the first in the world to provide highly interactive insight into the creative and artistic workings of the music industry. It was promoted not



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as a museum, but rather as a high-tech machine to let visitors experience the workings of pop music through their own senses. (Kam 2004: 172)

The reality of the museum’s success, or lack thereof, quickly became clear. Three months after its opening, the institution dismissed nine of its staff. NCPM counted on 400,000 visitors per year, but had only received 104,000 in its first six months (Kam 2004). Kam identifies four main reasons for the failure of the NCPM: the business plan, the concept, the expertise and leadership, and the institutions attached to the development of the project. Kam argues that all individuals and institutions involved followed their own personal ambitions, rather than thinking collectively about the institution. She concludes that ‘participants were constrained by inexperience and by rules and conditions, so that little attention was paid to the possible consequences of their narrow focus, and the impact of their individual decisions and actions on the project as a whole. In achieving their individual successes, they unintentionally contributed to the project’s eventual failure’ (Kam 2004: 185). Tara Brabazon and Stephen Mallinder (2006: 102) have a more conceptual perspective on the failure of NCPM, arguing that ‘the rapid demise of the Centre was symptomatic of a lack of public support, both local and national, an inability of bureaucratic infrastructure to construct a facility that captured popular music’s function in the community and incorporate appropriate long term strategies to combat short term recalcitrance’. Attention is drawn here to a failure to truly understand and represent the meaning of popular music in local and broader communities, alongside short-sightedness in the appeal of such an institution. Following its demise, the NCPM became an example of ‘what not to do’ for other institutions: We learnt our lessons from Sheffield. The lessons were many. The memorabilia wasn’t great. The building was fantastic but the content wasn’t particularly good. Engagement with the music industry, you just need to have. … The artists are important to get on board, but also the national bodies, the collecting societies, the trade organizations, so everyone has put in. And, of course, it was in Sheffield, which is a good music city but not really on the tourist map. You need a lot of tourists to make it sustainable. (Respondent 4)

The mistakes in this case were many and the consequences came swiftly. It is difficult to say exactly how this series of poor decisions came about, but perhaps the management committee also suffered from a lack of successful models on which to base their ideas. Nonetheless, the NCPM became a catalyst for

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widespread discussion on the intersection of popular culture and museums (Leonard 2018), making way for stronger institutions and exhibitions on popular music to follow.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex, New York City An Annex of the Rock Hall opened in New York in 2008, twenty-five years after the original museum opened in Cleveland. However, the Annex only stayed open for about a year. Two respondents raised the closure of the Annex during their interviews. The respondent from the Grammy Museum (Respondent 10) described how five music museums opened at the time the economy crashed in the late 2000s: the B.B. King Museum, the Museum at Bethel Woods, British Music Experience, the Grammy Museum and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex. Respondent 10 reported that a friend from the Smithsonian stated, ‘this is the worst time in the last seventy years to open a museum’. This respondent then noted that the directors of these five institutions were all communicating with each other: ‘freaking out on the telephones’ and taking ‘informal bets as to which one would be the first to close’. Of these museums, it was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex that closed, despite their being located in ‘the best city in the world, in America at least, for museums’ (Respondent 10). Respondent 10 argued the closure of the Annex ‘had nothing to do with the economy’, but was rather a result of ‘mistake after mistake’ by the museum administration. Respondent 12, in contrast, pointed to location and economy as the two factors which contributed to the closure of the Annex: I think there were two issues with it. It was a really nice museum, but [for] one, it was down in Soho and wasn’t in a real touristy district, so it was off the tourist path, and then the other thing was when [it] opened, it was right around the time of this recession was heading in and all of that, so the economy wasn’t doing real well and all that. So there was a combination, plus I think the other thing … is that in New York, there is so much competition and there’s so many other museums and things to do. (Respondent 12)

The success of the Rock Hall in Cleveland was unable to translate to visitor numbers for its New York offshoot due to the prominent status of the Rock Hall in Ohio’s cultural landscape. Respondent 12 described the Rock Hall as ‘one of the main attractions in Cleveland’ and that ‘if you come to Cleveland you’re going to come to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, nine chances out of ten’ (Respondent 12).



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Although the economics of the place were never officially given as the reason for the closure of the Annex, an article in The New York Times pointed out that admission to the Annex was more expensive than the Cleveland site ($26.50 versus $22), and the Annex was also less generous in offering discounts for children and older people (Rohter 2009). Moreover, ‘Visitors typically spend four or five hours looking at the Cleveland exhibits, whereas an estimate of the time required for a full viewing at the annex, even with its high-technology features and club ambience as lures, is less than two hours’ (Rohter 2009: n.p.). In this case, there are again numerous factors that suggest the museum was unsustainable. High visitor prices driving down numbers, an out-of-the-way location and high competition with other well-established heritage institutions quickly disabled the success of the Annex, despite the optimistic intentions of the directors.

Georgia Music Hall of Fame, Macon Georgia Music Hall of Fame opened in 1996 in Macon, Georgia, USA, and closed in 2011. Unlike the previous two examples – the NPCM and the Rock Hall Annex – it had a reasonably long existence, and therefore had the time to become an established institution of popular music heritage. However, its economic survival was always fragile: When I [became involved with the museum] in 2006 and got my first look at all the historic records and all the history of the institution, and the financials, I realized right away, wow, we’re living on a house of cards. The state is paying 70 per cent of our operating budget. The original feasibility study and projection said that this institution was going to have 150,000 people a year, and be selfsustaining in three years, yet ten years later, we averaged 30,000 visitors per year, and we only generate[d] 30 per cent of our income, and where the heck have the red flags been all these years? … State budgets were flush at that time, so the directors were just sitting back and taking that money, and sending in the reports, you know how the bureaucracy works. … I don’t know in Australia if you have the story of the ant and grasshopper, and its whole moral is during the winter one of them is saving the nuts for the winter, and the other one’s out partying and spending all the nuts, and so when hard times come, one is prepared and one is not. And so we put together a plan that we would raise an endowment and try to do a capital campaign to raise 10 million dollars and have an endowment, so if anything ever happened, we’d have the interest income to replace the state appropriations we were getting each year. And the

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Like the Rock Hall Annex, the already fragile economy of the museum was battered by the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. At the same time, Respondent 1 details a lack of concern for attaining increased financial independence from government funding sources, and a complacency in ensuring budget outlays for exhibits were met by visitor revenue streams. However, the museum did not fold immediately, continuing for another three years: And so, then, right away, our funding started getting cut, 30 per cent, 40 per cent, 60 per cent, and once it began to get cut at that level, there was just no way to make up the losses. We cut staff from nine full time people and six part time to two full time and six part time, still open seven days per week, and then for the fiscal year, FY12, beginning July 1, we were eliminated from the budget completely. So we entered this long period of politics and back and forth, and should we move the museum, and the board finally decided that they would close it. But it was a long process, and I think you can look back, and hopefully my perspective from being able to look back and say there were a lot of things that were done wrong, or should have been done differently, I won’t say wrong, in the beginning that may have prevented that. But it’s a tough row to hoe with the music museum, because it’s a niche. And if you look at numbers from the American Association of Museums, your cultural heritage museums and your niche and your specialty, they’re right around 25,000, 30,000 visitors per year, and that’s just not a lot to create the income you need to have exhibits now, today, based on technology. You’ve got to have [technology], so it’s hard. (Respondent 1)

Interestingly, the curator suggested that the museum failed to keep up with trends in engaging visitors with technology. But, as with other museums discussed in this chapter, it was location that proved a key factor in the struggle to reach projected visitor numbers. Macon was selected for the site of the Georgia Music Hall of Fame because of its rich music heritage. At times of economic downturn, however, tourists no longer made their way to Macon: Interviewer: And so you said that it obviously didn’t meet the visitor numbers that had originally been anticipated. Who were the visitors to the museum? What was the kind of demographic?



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Respondent 1: That’s a good question. A lot of the visitors were tourists. Tourists coming through Georgia. The bus tours on the way to Savannah, certainly you had your Georgians and your school children, and I’m not even going [to] include school children there, because they were pretty much from a 100-mile radius, but your average visitor were tourists. I could pull the numbers, but you know, some of the top states of origin were Florida, the Carolinas, Texas, New York, Michigan, California. It’s very interesting where the visitors came from. And they were older as well. Your average visitor was really thirty-five to sixty-five. And a lot of times travelling either south to Florida or returning or to Savannah. Interviewer: So there’s a kind of like, people on road trips. Respondent 1: Exactly. Your average leisure traveller. Which tended to be in that age group. International visitors—at times our international visitation was as much as 13 per cent. UK, Germany, Japan, and the interesting things about our international visitors, they’re so in tune with American music. Oftentimes they would come in and just know more minutia about American music history than someone who grew up near Little Richard. … There was just great, very palpable respect for music and music heritage.

Despite the projections, the museum was unable to retain a high enough level of visitors to be sustainable in the face of increased cuts to government funding. Location is key to attracting both local and international visitors, as well as new and return visitors who might make the effort to travel further for an engaging exhibition.

Making ‘the numbers’ work In this chapter, we have focused on how heritage institutions use figures and statistics as key denominators to develop popular music exhibitions, in line with the idea of the ‘experience economy’. This structuring concept of curatorial practice directly relates to the survival of heritage institutions and goes beyond the content collections to the decisions that manage the running of popular music museums. These museums attempt to identify who their potential visitors are – locals or out-of-towners – and draw on an intergenerational appeal for their exhibitions. However, though those we interviewed often mentioned visitor numbers in passing, particularly in regard to knowing who their visitors are, they did not provide much insight into how exhibitions might be developed in relation to specific statistical considerations. This was even the

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case for museums in the process of establishing sustainable business models prior to opening: Interviewer: So who are the expected visitors? Who’s going to be coming to the museum, and what about in terms of figures? Is there a kind of number that you need to be reaching in order to make this a viable project? Respondent 13: Well, absolutely … we’re looking at an even more robust [business] model at the present time, so the numbers may change … just from a purely break-even standpoint, we just need 66,000 people to walk in the door. Each year … looking at it from how we designed it and the models we’ve used, looking at best practices around the country, what works, what doesn’t work, … talking to a lot of people, having a lot of conversations with museum professionals … going back to your question, the numbers and sustainability, the numbers are low, a lot lower than when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened—I think they had 800,000 visitors their first year. The Country Music Hall of Fame annually sees about 250,000 visitors, so for us, understanding the market and really with all of our market studies and everything, we see there’s a large percentage of people who are excited about this. Which is fantastic. However, we have to make sure that it makes sense, and can sustain itself. … A lot of the first studies that were done, and even some of the subsequent studies, we looked at the lowest number and said how do we make that number work, and everything else on top of that is very good.

Undoubtedly, all the museum professionals who were interviewed had a sense of ‘the numbers’. What were less concrete were the conclusions that could be drawn from the rationalizations which emerged from business modelling and the relationship between visitor numbers and exhibition design strategies. Predominantly, we perceive a strong curatorial relationship between choosing exhibitions and subsequent themes and narratives that have the widest appeal with a knowledge of visitor demographics and expected numbers in order to balance budgets. Hence, curatorial decisions both affect and are affected by budgetary constraints that stem from forecasted visitor revenue. Further to rationalizing exhibition topics, the need to create engaging, holistic experiences for visitors can be seen in decisions in a range of structuring concepts including canonic representation (see Chapter 2), nostalgia (see Chapter 8) and narrative (see Chapter 6). In this way, it is essential that a curator takes into account the target market and the anticipated consequences of design and curatorial decisions in light of the larger institutional context.

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Popular Music and Place: Local, National and Global Stories

It’s sometimes hard for people to realize, but we’re an international arts organization. Our mission is to identify and preserve the ongoing history of country music. We’re also a local history museum, in part because we’re in Nashville and in part because Nashville has played such a central role in country music history for so many years. We feel a responsibility to preserve the history of country music in Nashville, but we do that in the context of other genres. (Respondent 7, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum) This opening extract from a museum professional at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum emphasizes the centrality of the connection between music, museum and place in the way this institution orients itself to its mission to collect, preserve and interpret country music history. The strength of such a connection was articulated by many of our interviewees in relation to their own institutions. Whether a museum is situated in a recognized music city, like Nashville, or in a locale not widely known for any specific contributions to a musical form, geographical place was used as a structuring concept to establish a meaningful link for visitors between the museum and its location, and, more broadly, as a way to structure the presentation of artefacts through the creation of place-based narratives in exhibitions. Marion Leonard (2018: 265) describes place as a ‘central organising narrative’ for popular music museums and notes that the ‘basis for the establishment of many music museums is tied to location as initiatives have developed from a desire to commemorate sites associated with artists, music production and industry’. Similarly, Alcina Cortez (2015) notes in her research on Portuguese music museums that place enables curators to highlight the connection of artists with a local identity. Drawing on aspects that connect popular music with place enables curators to highlight the apparent influence of geographic location on musicians’ careers,

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and vice versa. However, the connections made between music and place in the museum context often build upon, and contribute to, myths of popular music’s past and its origin stories. In regard to the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, for example, the location of Macon, a central, well-connected town, was seen to ‘make sense’ as the site for the hall of fame due to it being the home of a number of artists deemed significant to the development of popular music in the United States of America: Because Macon has such an incredible music heritage with Little Richard having been born there and Otis Redding having grown up there, and the Allman Brothers Band, and Capricorn Records. Just very rich for such a small town. … The history is undeniable, Macon helped shape American music, Macon artists. (Respondent 1)

The museum professional from the Georgia Music Hall of Fame named a couple of significant artists from Macon to justify the location of the heritage institution. Respondent 1 also framed Macon through its contribution to American popular music as a whole. As Charles Fairchild (2018: 478) observes, ‘popular music museums rely very strongly on persistent, long-circulating, and fairly specific myths about popular music’ and they do this ‘in order to enhance the perceived value of the spectator’s experience, and by extension, the perceived value and legitimacy of the collections and the institutions themselves’. These mythic qualities can often relate to place. Place-based mythology can also be observed in the foundation narrative of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (Rock Hall hereafter) which draws a very strong connection between place and institution. A respondent from the Rock Hall emphasized why Cleveland is the ‘real home’ of rock and roll and thus the ‘right home’ for the museum, as opposed to other recognized music cities where a national museum of rock and roll might have otherwise been based: Their original [plan] was just to build a smaller museum in Manhattan and then basically Cleveland came forward and said it should be a world-class museum and should be in Cleveland, and the rationale used was that in Cleveland where Alan Freed, the DJ, coined the term rock and roll and first started calling this music rock and roll. Elvis Presley played his first show in the north in Cleveland and during the ’70s and ’80s, this radio station here, it’s still around, but back then, WMMS, it was a real powerhouse radio station, and so they broke David Bowie and he played his first US shows in Cleveland, and Bruce Springsteen outside of New Jersey, that’s the first place he broke out of and all that. (Respondent 12)



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The location of the Rock Hall is now considered natural – though it had to compete with other music cities such as Memphis, Detroit, Cincinnati and New York in its bid to become the primary museum site – and is justified by this museum professional due to the connection of the city with significant musical expressions and events. Cleveland has for some time been labelled as the birthplace of rock and roll, with the city even taking steps to make this claim geographically through the use of historical signpost markers (see TripAdvisor 2018). The above comments by museum professionals at the Rock Hall, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and the Georgia Music Hall of Fame reveal the centrality of place for understanding the relationship between the popular music museum and its location and, in turn, the focus on place in foundation stories and exhibitions. The role of place can be seen to interface in two key ways. For some museums, the focus is on showcasing music and artists that hail from the state or city in which the museum is located; for others, place is a way of rationalizing the location of the museum based on genre. The above curators also draw attention to the local as connected to national (‘Macon artists helped shape American music’) and global (‘we’re an international arts organization’) contexts. In this chapter, we first consider how the idea of place can be used as a structuring concept by curators in music museums, before considering some of the key ways in which music, place and heritage interact in the museum space.

Using ‘place’ to design exhibitions ‘Place’ was identified by Leonard (2007: 156) as having an important role in the museal display of popular music, particularly in regard to displays ‘present[ing] a perspective on local social history’. Museums often make a concerted effort to include within their displays ‘certain musicians and music scenes’ connected to the museum’s locality, with Leonard (2007: 156) arguing that the incorporation of local artists and a focus on the music history of a location reflects an effort in ‘telling a “people’s history”’. At the same time as place may contribute to the structure of popular music exhibitions, so too do the exhibitions ‘give form to understandings of place and local cultural identity’ (van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015: 43). Place is a structuring concept that often centres on the local, considers musicians and sub-genres with connections to particular physical sites and tends to have a temporal dimension. When describing the

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curatorial beginnings of the Rock Hall, Jim Henke (2009: 105) emphasizes place as a structuring concept and draws attention to its intersection with relevant decades: I identified several ‘chapters’ that would help us tell the story of the history of rock and roll. One chapter, or exhibit, would examine the role that various cities played in the music’s history: Memphis in the 1950s, Detroit during the Motown era, London and Liverpool during the British Invasion, San Francisco during the psychedelic era, New York and London during the punk period, and Seattle during the Grunge era.

The reference to ‘chapters’ highlights the way in which place, in conjunction with specific eras, can be useful in compartmentalizing popular music history. At the same time, place can be simultaneously used in music museums to convey a particular sense of authenticity and cultural identity (see Connell and Gibson 2003). As a structuring concept, however, place can be problematic in that it risks over-emphasizing the significance of a place in the cultural biography of an artist, genre or music scene. In the context of the Rock Hall, Larry Juchartz and Christy Rishoi (1997: 324) argue that the spatial and temporal partitioning created by Henke’s ‘chapters’ has the effect of placing ‘boundaries on each city’s period of musical pre-eminence’ with the ‘overall effect’ being that ‘rock unfolded in a tidy cause-and-effect fashion’. Similarly, Leonard (2007: 156) takes issue with curators who attempt to reconstruct local social histories of popular music, where they ‘tend to replicate the dominant hegemonic versions of history’ and privilege the canonic ‘at the expense of the everyday’ experiences of music in place and time (see also Chapter 2). The curatorial engagement with local histories of popular music often occurs with reference to global music histories. For example, exhibitions can ‘give places meaning by engaging with the particular ways in which international developments such as punk and hippie culture resound into specific localities’ (van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015: 47). As a structuring concept, place is not intended to mask ‘global cultural flows’ (van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015: 46), particularly considering that no place can be considered devoid of outside influence (Connell and Gibson 2003). By emphasizing place within popular music exhibitions, curators in fact engage in ‘place-making’ or ‘place-production’ (see Darvill 2014), whereby a place is not simply seen as a geographical area where a particular musical expression emerges, but becomes associated with it to the point where it becomes known for its music. Arno van der Hoeven and Amanda Brandellero (2015: 37) identify three related processes



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by which curators and archivists of popular music ‘give places meaning’. These are the following: ‘The framing of local sociocultural histories through popular music; the contribution of popular music to a sense of belonging in local communities; and the documenting of the artistic legacy of place’ (van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015: 43). These approaches are a useful starting point to consider the ways place was referred to within descriptions of curatorial practice in our interviews.

Collecting local histories Museums contribute to the articulation of local histories by way of collection and display (van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015). Even for museums not overtly focused on the music of the city or region in which they are located, place-related collecting practices are not uncommon. The Experience Music Project, for example, had its origins in a Jimi Hendrix collection, then broadened to collecting items that gave context to the Hendrix story. When the museum’s exhibition space significantly expanded ‘from 10,000 square feet to 135,000 square feet … the curators started saying, well, if we got this, we got that, and wouldn’t it be great to have something focused on the local or regional music scene, so let’s start collecting that’ (Respondent 5). Though the focus eventually broadened to collecting items beyond the northwest region of the United States, exhibitions featuring Northwestern artists, such as Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses, provided opportunities to add strategically to the collection with a ‘limited budget’ (Respondent 5). Place was particularly important in grounding the narratives told in museums dedicated to the documentation of music from specific geographic locations, with the place in question celebrated as being a special, nurturing environment for popular music of great cultural significance. At the Rock Hall, local histories have been showcased in some form or another since the museum opened. Andy Leach and Jennie Thomas (2018: 5) note that ‘local photographers, deejays, radio stations, musicians, and the music press have been featured in exhibitions and educational programs over the years’ and that ‘a number of artifacts in the museum’s permanent collection help illustrate and preserve Northeast Ohio’s music history’. The Rock Hall has actively sought out artefacts for its Northeast Ohio Sound Archives, which has been formalized through the establishment of the Rock Hall’s library and archives arm that opened to the public in 2012 (Leach and Thomas 2018: 6). An example of an

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artefact seen to represent local social history is a baby grand piano on loan to the Rock Hall from musician Ian Hunter: A couple of year[s] ago Ian Hunter came through, and then we were giving him a tour and then at one point he said, ‘you know, I’ve got the piano that I wrote ‘Cleveland Rocks’ on, would you like that?’, [I replied] ‘Yeah, it makes sense to have that here’. (Respondent 12)

Artefacts connected to songs which reference place, such as the ‘Cleveland Rocks’ piano, are equally important in underscoring the cultural relevance of local histories. The chief curator at the time of the piano’s arrival at the Rock Hall, Jim Henke, was reported to have said, ‘It’s a great thing for us to have, given how identified ‘Cleveland Rocks’ is with the city’ (cited in Glide Magazine 2007). The piano has since come to represent the city of Cleveland and its cultural creativity. This example confirms Leonard’s (2007) argument about museum displays as symbolizing local culture, notably through the use of material culture. Besides objects, music and lyrics within exhibitions have an important role to play in the celebration of place because ‘they often relate to local themes and events’ (van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015: 44). Indeed, music sociologists have paid particular attention to the interaction between music and place. Through a case study of immigrant Jews connecting biography, cultures, music and place, Sara Cohen (1995: 438) suggests ‘musical practices and interactions … [help] to define the particular geographical and material space within the city that they inhabited and, at the same time, they invested that space with meaning and a sense of identity and place’. Also delving into the music and place relationship, Andy Bennett (2002) develops the reasoning of Cohen (1991), Ruth Finnegan (1989) and others to explore the process of myth-making and the romanticization of place via place-based music practices. Hence, music has a very particular relationship with place, one that can be extended to music museum visitors in relation to their own experiences of culture and place.

Producing place and cultural pride By delineating local music histories through collection and display, museums can help produce a sense of place. For tourists, this operates at the level of city



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marketing, but for locals of the city or region in which the museum is based, the incorporation of local music histories can ‘resonate with local identities and foster a sense of cultural pride’ (van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015: 48). Our respondent from the Georgia Music Hall of Fame created a music magazine dedicated to Georgia’s music heritage after the Hall’s closure. In the following extract, Respondent 1 is describing the magazine, but went on to say ‘the museum was essentially the same thing’: We say our mission is to celebrate Georgia’s ‘legends, landmarks and unsung heroes’. And what I’ve really always wanted to do is to tell stories about everybody in Georgia music, so we always include [in the magazine] a couple of legacy stories. Stories about Georgia’s music heritage that we want people to know and to be proud of, and then we want them to know who’s on the charts, and then we want them to know that there are artists in every genre, but we’re all connected by this thread. It’s geographical. It’s Georgia, but it’s cultural and it’s spiritual and it’s so many things, and it’s something that emotionally connects us, which I think that’s what’s important about music, but I think your native land, there’s something very connecting, and that’s what we wanted to do. (Respondent 1, emphasis added)

This respondent pointed to pride in place as something that can be represented or expressed by music – in showcasing artists from a particular region, curators can connect visitors and place relatively quickly. Such values can be particularly effective in tandem with exhibition narratives that operate to ‘affirm a sense of uniqueness and difference’ for local communities (van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015: 45). As a further example, the connection between music, place and local identity was also evident in exhibitions housed in cultural centres in regional Iceland. Respondent 11 described an exhibition held in a village in the northeast of the country, which focused on two musician brothers: The composer brother wrote jazz music, beautiful ballads and things, and then the lyrics brother, he wrote the lyrics. … The lyrics were so local, down home, provincial, you know? … So they were born [in that village] … their father was from this region and then they moved regularly … but they always went back to this place of origin. … So the home town … kept the memory alive. They were very fond of [the brothers] and they wanted to do something about their history and did.

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Although it is often impossible to actually account for the importance of a place in the career and history of an artist or genre, place is emphasized in exhibits as the origin of a popular music product. In the case of the Icelandic musical brothers, there was an emphasis on familial roots in place (they were born in the village/their father ‘was from this region’) which cements an origin story and legitimizes the local-ness of the brothers’ lyrical content. The focus on one place can de-emphasize the impact of other places on musical output (the Icelandic brothers, for example, ‘moved regularly’) and so place-based exhibitions potentially ‘play down any historical discontinuities’ (Cortez 2015: 312). But for local people, the kinds of origin stories evident in the exhibition of the brothers can ‘foster a sense of belonging’ and enhance ‘feelings of community’ by way of an emphasis on place (van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015: 45).

Place and artistic legacies Curators also focus on place in order to highlight the range of artists who might have contributed to the local cultural scene over time. The artistic legacies that are documented in exhibitions may be canonic in a local context but relatively unknown to out-of-town visitors, or otherwise not connected in the public imagination of the place being celebrated. A respondent from the Rock Hall, for example, recounted the reaction of a music journalist following a visit to the museum: Well, it’s interesting because one of my friends who’s a writer for Rolling Stone and at one point, this is several years back, he came out to see the museum and then when he went back and [told me] the Cleveland [display] was his favourite exhibit because ‘as much as I know about music, I never really realized all these bands came out of Cleveland’ and stuff like that. So to hear someone who’s pretty much an expert on rock and roll, but then hear him say that, that made me feel good about doing it. (Respondent 12)

This particular display is part of the Rock Hall’s Cities and Sounds gallery, which, as Ulrich Adelt (2017: 216) argues, ‘attempts to give Cleveland (and the Midwest more broadly) equal importance to Memphis, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, London, and Liverpool’. Within the exhibition, place is used to represent the musical successes of Cleveland musicians and the contributions of America’s Midwest to the greater trends in popular music in the Western world.



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Curators also draw on artistic legacies as they relate to place in order to communicate to visitors ‘that their local music culture is more diverse than is generally thought’ (van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015: 48). At the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, for example, the museum’s function as a purveyor of local history (as indicated in the interview extract that opened this chapter) is evident in the special exhibition Night Train to Nashville: Music City Rhythm & Blues, 1945 to 1970. While this is first and foremost a museum focused on country music, special exhibitions are used to underscore that musical activity in Nashville extends beyond country music and that other local music cultures of the area informed country music practice. In regard to the Night Train to Nashville exhibition, our interviewee noted the following: The fact is this was an R&B centre. We had people like Jimi Hendrix, all sorts of local writers and artists and songwriters and artists and performers. A lot of those people worked with white musicians and white producers because musicians don’t worry about colour lines to any great extent. So those boundaries were much more porous in the era of segregation than a lot of other boundaries were in terms of social interaction, employment or what have you. (Respondent 7)

The inherent cultural connections that tie different cities together through the collaboration of musicians also enable curators to celebrate the diversity of their city. In that regard, the connections between music genres, styles and musicians enable the inclusion of a greater array of elements that are displayed as being representative of a place.

Situating place, incorporating nation Leonard (2018) observes that, like place, ‘nation’ also works as a structuring concept for curators of music exhibitions and underpins the formation of numerous music museums including, for example, Rockheim, Norway’s national museum of popular music, and Ragnarock, Denmark’s national museum of music and youth culture. Museums incorporating the concept of ‘nation’ are not always strictly nationalistic in their agenda, but often operate as such in the absence of authorized (government-funded) national institutions. For example, in Britain, the archiving of popular music is overseen by a national heritage institution, the British Library, which houses a sound archive. However, there

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is no museal equivalent at the national level focused on the display of British popular music. As such, other enterprises have sought to fill this void. Take, for example, the below extract from an interview with a curator at the British Music Experience, a museum described in promotional material as ‘a permanent exhibition dedicated to the history of popular music in Britain’ (British Music Experience, n.d.). In explaining the challenges of being called an ‘experience’, rather than a ‘museum’, he stated the following: If it was the ‘British Music Museum’, half the battle’s done, you know what it is. So we’ve struggled a bit in that respect. … People like it when they get here, but getting here’s the problem. … You go with the British Music Experience and people go ‘well yeah, what is it?’ And you don’t have much to play with on leaflets and advertising, so you are strap-lined with something along the lines of the ‘National Museum of Rock and Pop’ or the ‘National Museum of Popular Music’ or ‘British Music Museum’. … ‘British Music Museum’ would have caused us problems because we’re not national, proper national … it is by default [national]. (Respondent 4)

Regardless of whether they hold national status, such museums ‘have been established to promote, narrate and engage visitors with objects and interpretation which draws links between music and nation’ (Leonard 2018: 265). Museums like the British Music Experience ‘bring to the fore … national manifestations of popular music’ (van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015: 11) without the need for an official-sounding title. Our interest here is on how narratives of music and nation intersect with curatorial desires to highlight local social histories, and their attempts to keep at bay the global practices, processes and products that may otherwise overwhelm the story of what might arguably be the unique musical offerings of a place. Motti Regev (2013: 89), in a discussion of pop-rock as a field of cultural production, notes that ‘pop-rock’s historical narrative, artistic ideology, and canonical world have been consistently introduced into the realm of national cultural contexts since the moment of their inception’. He further states that ‘musicians, critics, and other actors in national fields of pop-rock’ – and we would include music museums in the category of other actors – are ‘constantly engaged in nurturing their self-image as equal participants in the modern musical art of pop-rock’ otherwise dominated by Anglo-American music production (Regev 2013: 88). In music museums, then, the ‘foreign roots’ of particular music come to be ‘concealed (i.e. erased) beneath a layer of local and national meanings’ (van der



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Hoeven and Brandellero 2015: 11). We explore this idea below with a case study of the Walk a Country Mile permanent exhibition.

Walk a Country Mile: Producing the place of Australian country music At the time of our visit in 2011, Walk a Country Mile was a permanent exhibition housed in the guitar-shaped Tamworth Visitor Information Centre. Tamworth, a rural city located in the state of New South Wales, is Australia’s selfproclaimed ‘Country Music Capital’. The town is heavily invested in the public memorialization of Australian country music history and the role Tamworth has played in that history, with country music heritage materialized in a range of ways, from museums of memorabilia (Walk a Country Mile Museum, Australian Country Music Hall of Fame, Wall of Fame at Lindsay Butler Studio), to likenesses of country stars created in wax (Gallery of Stars Wax Museum), to huge granite boulders housing plaques of tribute (Roll of Renown monument, Tamworth Songwriters Association Tribute monument), to a large-scale replica of the Golden Guitar statuette awarded during the annual Country Music Award ceremony (the Big Golden Guitar), to names fixed in footpaths to commemorate award winners (Winners Walkway, Galaxy of Stars), to bronze busts that sit sentry over the city’s Bicentennial Park. (Baker and Huber 2013a: 228)

These sites of country music heritage in Tamworth work to emphasize ‘that Australian country music has a history that precedes’ the influence of styles from America, ‘with roots to be found in a well-established folk music tradition and bush poetry and balladry’ (Baker and Huber 2013a: 227). As Sarah Baker and Alison Huber (2013a: 227, original emphasis) have argued, ‘staking a claim for an Australian kind of country music is explicitly intertwined with heritage discourse in Tamworth and the way that country music’s past is remembered’, suggesting the importance of place in the exhibition’s representation. An emphasis on creating a story that would underscore the Australian-ness of Australian country music was evident in the interview with a respondent who had been involved in the creation and curation of Walk a Country Mile: So, we came up with this concept of, not a historical – it’s not strictly an historical facility – it’s something that tells the story of Australian country music, so it’s rather a narrative, in artefacts and film, about how country music developed

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At the core of the exhibition was a series of five films (see Figure 4.1), each approximately three minutes long, which recounted the history of country music’s development in Australia using archival footage, stock images, an accompanying soundtrack and narration by national icon John Laws. The script for the films provided the overarching story for the exhibition, beginning with

Figure 4.1  At Walk a Country Mile, ‘The story of Australian Country Music’ is told in a series of five short films. Photograph by Sarah Baker.



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‘The Foundations 1788–1920s’, which emphasizes how songs and sounds were brought to the country by the convicts, soldiers and settlers of the First Fleet, and that ‘as settlement expanded, so did our music’, with new songs emerging ‘as our nation’s story unfolded’. The story of Australian country music continued in ‘The Birth of Country Music 1920s–1940s’, which emphasizes the impact of the radio and the gramophone on the development of Australian country music and charts the first recordings by Australian performers. The next film, ‘Country Comes of Age 1940s–1960s’, charts the genre’s post-war boom in Australia. The fourth instalment, ‘Tamworth takes its place 1970s’, shifts the focus from the national to the local, situating the role of Tamworth in focusing the nation’s attention on country music and the town’s contribution to ‘the resurgence of Australian country music’. The final film, ‘The New Wave 1980s–2000s’, focuses on the ‘amazing growth’ of the genre and concludes with the affirming words, ‘For more than 200 years, music has told the story of the land and its people. With this heritage and tradition to build on, Australian country music looks forward to an exciting future. Country Music is truly the Music of our Country.’ In their article on the canon of Australian country music, Baker and Huber (2013a: 237) observe a heritage logic operating in Tamworth that ‘has evolved through a desire to distinguish Australian country music from its American counterpart’ and which functions to elevate those artists ‘that do not replicate US styles but, rather, are distinctive in their performance of a particular kind of “Australian-ness”’. This heritage logic is particularly evident in Walk a Country Mile. Respondent 33, one of the script authors for the five films, explained the following: Obviously, in an exhibition like this, you want to show an exhibition that illustrates the heritage links of where this music developed from, that it didn’t suddenly start with some hillbilly in 1936 singing American songs. It’s got much deeper roots than that. … People are wrong when they refer to it as this Americanized, superficial sort of popular pap. There is a lot more to it than that. Yes, of course there is elements of that in it, but it really does have a significance to Australian heritage and Australian history. Social history. And that’s quite important. (Respondent 33)

The emphasis on nation in the films was reinforced in other aspects of display. Timeline panels accompanied each film to reinforce key moments in country music history, and these were situated alongside important moments in the nation’s social history. For example, in ‘Country Milestones Timeline 1940s–1960s’, the first year of recording for artists like Dusty Rankin (1948),

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Schneider Sisters (1950) and Joan Ridgeway (1953) appear alongside historical firsts for General Motors Holden in Australia, such as ‘First Holden Launched’ (1948), ‘First Holden Ute’ (1950) and ‘FJ Holden launched’ (1953). Country music milestones like first recordings, hit songs and the establishment of institutions of country music were represented on the timelines with the outline of an Akubra hat, with moments of Australian social history indicated by a kangaroo – in these small ways, Australian-ness was further reinforced. While the nation is at the heart of the films, which provided the ‘basic element’ of the exhibition (Respondent 33), many of the displays in the exhibition gave the sense that the real story being told in Walk a Country Mile concerned Tamworth’s place in the development of country music in Australia. Displays on the involvement of Tamworth radio station 2TM in the push for the city to become the Country Music Capital (see Figure 4.2) and the collection of artefacts relating to the marketing and promotion of Tamworth as Country Music Capital (see Figures 4.3 and 4.4) worked to situate the national story in place. In doing so, they also underscore for the visitor the importance of their experience of Australia’s country music heritage in Tamworth. This made

Figure 4.2  Display at Walk a Country Mile focused on the involvement of radio station 2TM in making Tamworth the Country Music Capital. Photograph by Sarah Baker.



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Figure 4.3  Tamworth display case at Walk a Country Mile. Photograph by Sarah Baker.

sense, of course, in the context of Walk a Country Mile being situated in the Tamworth Visitor Information Centre, but the same story was being told in the exhibition’s previous home at the Tamworth Regional Entertainment and Conference Centre. More pertinent is that Walk a Country Mile was designed and curated by the same people who had been behind the initiative in the late 1960s to proclaim Tamworth the Country Music Capital of Australia. Walk a Country Mile was an extension of those activities and shared similar ‘fundamental principles’:

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Figure 4.4  Details of Tamworth display case at Walk a Country Mile with Country Music Capital marketing material. Photograph by Sarah Baker. It was all about developing Australian country music rather than just being an adjunct to American country music … we’ve always believed that we are building an industry based on Australian talent, Australian experience, and that’s what it’s all about. … It became more and more evident over the years that what Tamworth had done was take a very disparate group of independent singers and artists, who were scattered all over Australia, who had no coherent identity as a country music industry, and we pulled them all together once a year in one place, where they could talk to each other, where they could meet each



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other. … And so what Tamworth created was a coherent country music industry in Australia that hadn’t existed before. (Respondent 33)

So the exhibition was, in many ways, a celebration of Tamworth as Country Music Capital and a reminder of the impact Tamworth has had on country music since the 1960s. Part of this impact is the role Tamworth has played in raising the profile of Australian country music, of lifting it above its label ‘as an inferior shadow of American country music’ and warding off the Americanization of Australian country music ‘as globalization expands’ (Respondent 33). Walk a Country Mile therefore made a strong connection between the local manifestations of the country music industry in Tamworth and the national characteristics of the genre – characteristics that this permanent exhibition and other heritage initiatives operating in Tamworth have ‘created, constructed and conveyed’ (Negus 1996: 181). The Walk a Country Mile exhibition hosted in Tamworth was constructed in relation to the supposed connection between the music and the country in which it has emerged and gained significance. The different elements of the exhibition communicated a perspective on cultural identity that was particularly related to place and the discourse of Australian country music.

The overemphasis of place Our interview data suggests that place can be an integral part of museum planning, both in terms of the physical site of an institution and the role of place in shaping the heritage narratives within. As a structuring concept for exhibitions, place is most clearly evident in those museum sites whose purpose is to showcase a region’s talents, which is often the case with halls of fame, such as the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and others we visited for this research. In other cases, place finds its way into the rationalization for the museum’s existence, such as the Rock Hall, or provides a jumping off point for curators who wish to show the contribution of a region to a greater genre, through either the impact of local or travelling artists. Les Roberts and Sara Cohen (2014: 258) argue that ‘the extent to which [heritage institutions] work to shape ideas of nationhood, collective memory, place, locality and identity … is difficult to reliably determine in the absence of analyses drawn from audience-based qualitative research into the ways popular music heritage is consumed, negotiated and performed in practice’.

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While our research does not engage with visitor opinions, we have shown in this chapter, through curators’ accounts, that concepts of place, and by extension, nation, are indeed prevalent in the process of formulating popular music museum exhibitions, where such sites work to produce and maintain certain discourses of place relevant to their local region. In connecting popular music with a particular place, curators of popular music exhibitions attempt to provide concrete and tangible elements to communicate a connection between cultural identity and visitor biography via the expression of place in music. However, as Charles Fairchild (2018) notes, concepts of place and/or nation are structuring concepts that aid in the development of place-based mythology. Indeed, there is a tendency to overstate the importance and influence of geographical location on the composition or performance of popular music within heritage institutions and cities themselves (e.g. Cleveland). As such, the use of place in popular music exhibitions represents an important tool for the articulation of local cultural heritage and its wider impacts, but is also one which – like other structuring concepts – can perpetuate inaccuracies and a romanticization of popular music history.

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Treating Objects like Art: Curating Material Culture

It’s still a challenge to find places that will take an [travelling] exhibit, if they’re not a music museum. And art museums typically won’t do it because they’re like, ‘well, that’s material culture and we’re not interested in that’. In fact, it scares them. But it’s interesting because I think as they try to broaden their own audiences, they’re more willing to take those risks. And the [Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–1966] exhibit was an interesting example of that, where it ended up going to the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, in part because we just said, ‘well, Dylan went to school in Minneapolis, he’s from Minnesota’, [and they realized] ‘this would be a really good show for us. We can add some art from our collection, make it okay’. (Respondent 5, Experience Music Project) In the above extract, a curator from Experience Music Project is discussing the potential reach of Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses in the form of a travelling exhibition, observing the tension between art and material culture in the context of the display of popular music heritage. Although the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (Rock Hall hereafter) told the Experience Music Project it would take the Nirvana exhibition ‘anytime you want’ (Respondent 5), other institutions lacking a music focus had been less receptive, because they viewed the material objects of popular culture as distinct from the more art-like materials they often use. However, as this respondent found in relation to an earlier exhibition on Bob Dylan, such objects can be assimilated into art museums if the right curatorial strategy is employed. Material culture is the primary source of objects for museums of all kinds, and in more recent times has re-emerged as the focus point ‘for understanding museums and what they do’ (Dudley 2010: 1). In popular music museums, material is often considered far more ephemeral, where the disposability of objects belonging to popular culture (considered

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‘low art’) is often at odds with the authenticity and legitimacy strived for by popular music museums and other traditional heritage institutions. However, an increasing trend within popular music preservation is to display this ‘low art’ as ‘high art’, thereby elevating both the status of the museum and its collection. Hence, the traditional structures of the art museum are being used as a frame of reference for curatorial practice in popular music museums, despite a perceived clash between high and low art values. In this chapter, we explore the concept of material culture in popular music and the way it functions in the museum space, but moreover, we argue that the use of material culture as a structuring concept of curatorial practice in popular music exhibitions is guided predominantly by the view that these objects should be treated and displayed in a similar way to high art.

The material objects of popular music’s past Popular music is not only aural but rather is multi-modal: fashion, literature, language, music and technology are among the aspects of life that are constitutive of popular music culture(s). It is difficult to explain or represent popular music heritage in the museum without reference to the other aspects of culture that influence, or were influenced by, the sound of music. Marion Leonard (2007: 151–2) divides the material culture of popular music into six categories which inform curatorial and collection practice: The first of these is music related material manufactured for general commercial sale (records, posters, merchandise, etc.); secondly, manufactured material which was originally available only to a select group (such as fan club releases, material sent to retailers and promo material sent to journalists and DJs); thirdly, material produced within a music culture (by fans, promoters, artists, enthusiasts, etc.) or by a musician (lyric sheets, set lists, demos, etc.) which was not sold commercially in its original form; the fourth category is material which has a transitory exchange or promotional purpose such as concert tickets or billboard posters; the fifth category is clothing worn by musicians (including stage costume) or by others which might typify the style of an era, music movement or following; and the final category is that of material which has a contextual relationship with a musician or music scene and which might not otherwise have a popular music association and may, in fact, otherwise be a mundane item.



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Curators select artefacts from across these categories depending on what materials are available in the existing collection or on loan. Some museums, particularly larger institutions with good access to materials, will display artefacts from across all categories. Others, particularly the micromuseums of our study, often focused on items from selected categories. KD’s Elvis Presley Museum, for example, concentrated its display on objects from the first of Leonard’s categories. Figure 5.1 illustrates the vast array of memorabilia that could be found in this private museum housed in the garage of KD’s home on the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island, from mugs and wall clocks to match books and lava lamps. At the back of the museum was the ‘Record Room’, which displayed all the records in KD’s collection. Also in the photograph are items from the fifth of Leonard’s categories, with the museum displaying a number of items of clothing which typify the outfits worn by members of the rock and roll scene in New Zealand during Elvis’s time. The range of material culture on display in popular music exhibitions highlights not only the extent to which cultural significance in popular music is expressed through different objects but also that curators of popular music exhibitions take advantage of the different types of objects from which they can choose, in order to further raise the interests of visitors. Popular music itself is, of course, intangible – hence, Robert Knifton (2012: 23) notes ‘music exists on the cusp between material and immaterial heritage, encompassing elements of both in the cultural composition. These objects do not generally narrate their own stories, but need to be interpreted in order to bring them to the fore’. The invocation of immaterial heritage and intangible memories related to that heritage requires the tangibility of objects. As such, the objects and their display are often the primary focus of curators’ approach to exhibits: The number one thing for a designer is the visual side—to be able to create the visual side that is interesting too, to visitors … costumes and the clothes and then photographs and videos and films and then, of course, music itself. (Respondent 11)

While acknowledging the necessity of including the sound of music in exhibitions (see Chapter 9), this Icelandic Respondent also emphasized the central mode of museums as being visual. Visitors expect to look at objects on display, despite the subject matter itself – music – being perceived as a primarily aural medium. Popular music museums are places where the story of an art form is told by way of its material culture – as Respondent 12 puts it, ‘Unlike an art

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Figure 5.1  Memorabilia on display at KD’s Elvis Presley Museum. Photograph by Sarah Baker.

museum … hanging the art on the wall, here the music is the art.’ The design of exhibitions of popular music often ensures visitors can engage with a range of mediums beyond any music that may be playing in the vicinity of a display case; it is material culture which gives popular music its ‘exhibitability’ (Cortez 2015: 315). The collection of objects related to music genres or artists therefore



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serves the purpose of contextualizing the music at the heart of popular music museum exhibitions. As curators emphasized, there is also a desire by visitors to observe something of the artists behind the music, or to catch a glimpse behind the scenes into creative processes. Some curators identified that, despite the various artefacts that can be drawn on for exhibitions – as suggested in Leonard’s categories – there are some genres that are more difficult to represent than others using material culture. Hip-hop and urban music were seen as particularly problematic in this regard. A curator at the British Music Experience, for example, observed that the importance of urban music in the recent history of British music has been downplayed in the Edge Zone 7: 1993–2009 gallery. While recognizing that ‘urban music is a big thing’ there was a lingering question of ‘how do you present that in objects?’ (Respondent 4). The British Music Experience is object-driven, but for urban music, whose significance hinges on more intangible musical elements, ‘There’s not much. There’s no instruments. The outfits are street wear. It’s not there’ (Respondent 4). At the Rock Hall, a similar sentiment was expressed in terms of hip-hop. The genre was considered visually exciting in the array of outfits and stage costumes that could be displayed. However, in the context of a museum which has a heavy emphasis on the display of instruments, the lack of instrumentation in hip-hop was seen as a challenge: Respondent 9: Well as far [as] my experience [of] it, the only problematic aspect was instrumentation, because the clothing sort of ran the gambit—I mean, in that exhibit we had everything from a Cab Calloway suit because we think of Cab Calloway as being one of the influences— Interviewer: The precursors. Respondent 9: —of hip-hop, but things like the Salt-N-Pepa jackets … . Interviewer: It can be visually exciting, it’s not just tracksuits and sneakers. Respondent 9: It can be very visually exciting, but the lack of instruments— I mean, there’s only so many turntables and mixing consoles that you can put out before it gets kind of dull.

The material culture that can be derived as representative of a genre can differ vastly. For music styles that go beyond physical instruments and into electronica, there is a reduction in the ways the music itself can be signified. Respondent 9 pointed out the use of mixing consoles in particular as limiting – such pieces of equipment are less likely to be personally modified than instruments such as guitars or drum kits, and, despite being crucial to the production of electronic sounds, are rather less visually appealing. Curators must therefore abstract

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elements of the music itself and draw additionally on the material culture found in the scene at large – for example, fashions, politics, geographic locations and so on.

Traditional frameworks: Treating popular music’s material heritage as ‘art’ Although popular music museums are rich in material culture – the Dylan exhibition referred to by Respondent 5, for example, featured among other artefacts ‘handwritten letters and lyrics and musical instruments’ (Business Wire 2003) – they often draw on the exhibitionary characteristics of art museums to guide their practice. Indeed, art has been identified in the literature on popular music museums as a structuring concept for curatorial practice (Cortez 2015; Fairchild 2017; Leonard 2007). Leonard (2007: 155) has observed a ‘tendency within museums and galleries … to curate popular music as one might a visual art show’, in which the artefacts of popular music’s material past are ‘left to speak for themselves as autonomous aesthetic objects’ and which may also be accompanied by the work of visual artists. In doing so, popular music exhibitions risk ‘plac[ing] music in the service of art’, with Alcina Cortez (2015: 312) noting that the Portuguese exhibitions of her study mirror exhibitionary practices of art museums in which ‘the prior existence of a collection certainly constituted the greatest determinant of the exhibition’ with the ‘objects on display becoming the end point of interpretation’. As such, the artefacts of popular music’s past often come to be displayed in museums ‘with the minimum of contextualization’ (Leonard 2007: 155). In a discussion of the exhibitionary characteristics of popular music museum displays, Charles Fairchild (2017: 88) outlines the shared qualities of art museums and museums of popular music in relation to their communication of ‘the value and legitimacy of their collections’: Art museums display exemplary works of demonstrable historical importance and pieces regarded as worthy of imitation. These institutions enhance the reputation of artists by cultivating their works with an aura of material and conceptual uniqueness (Henning 2006: 16–17). The canonization of exemplary works is generally organized by medium and historical period as well as through the thematic juxtaposition of various works and artists. These display techniques



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exist in an implicit and intertwined relationship with mediating critical discourses in art criticism and art history. (Fairchild 2017: 88–9)

These characteristics are drawn on by popular music museums in the way ‘they canonize artists’ and arrange the objects on display (Fairchild 2017: 89). As Fairchild (2017: 89) argues, the visitor to the popular music museum is ‘meant to see and hear extraordinary works produced by extraordinary artists usually organized in a narrative or historical sequence centred on the musical tradition or genres to which artists contributed’. Herein, the popular music museum draws further similarities to the art museum, this time in the form of ‘retrospective cultural consecration’, a process partially conceptualized by Vaughn Schmutz (2005: 1511) which ‘is a means of recognizing the greatest individual works or artists in an art world as well as lending legitimacy to the entire field of artistic production’. Curatorial practices in popular music museums that not only treat material culture with the seriousness of high art but also work to highlight the most influential and historically significant figures and trends are therefore also contributing to the legitimization of popular music heritage within larger heritage frameworks. Certainly, some ephemera associated with popular music was conceived as, and continues to earn respect as, artwork. Album covers that explored cultural trends like psychedelia or absurdism (e.g. those by Storm Thorgerson, responsible for many of Pink Floyd’s memorable covers), revealing and intimate photography (e.g. from famed rock photographer Annie Leibovitz) and the graphic design of countless gig and concert posters emerging in the 1960s whose ‘classic’ layouts and styling became replicated and reproduced globally (e.g. www. classicposters.com) represent key avenues through which popular culture and art are connected (Inglis 2001). For some genres, like the aforementioned music of hip-hop, artwork is a significant part of the related subculture. In a review of the Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes & Rage exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which included a number of canvases from the museum’s collection in the display, Murray Forman (2002: 109–10, original emphasis) singles out ‘a Quinones triptych portraying murdered rapper Tupac Shakur’, noting the following: As evocative as the painting may be, it is a relatively mediocre representative of graffiti. … In contrast, Tracy’s Subway Door (c. 1985) from the BMA collection, consisting of spray paint on an actual metal train door, was more interesting as

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These aspects further aid the interpretation of popular music objects as art; paired with strategic display and curator attitudes, popular music museums have found ways through which to heighten the significance and status of popular music ephemera.

Case study: ‘Art’ in Israeli rock music To illustrate how ‘art’ operates as a structuring concept of curatorial practice we draw our reader’s attention to the way in which two freelance curators in Israel discussed the exhibition they co-produced on Israeli rock. The curators were interviewed together and though the exhibition they curated was no longer available to view, they brought to the interview a folder containing a collection of exhibition pamphlets, media coverage and critical reviews which helped guide the conversation. Both respondents described a high art approach to curating the exhibition contents: We’ve been working on the different aspects of such an exhibition from the point of view of art. That is, the theatrical part, lighting, the scene itself, the background, the intercommunication of the singers, the visual part – fashion, the space itself, the relations between space and singers and crowd and crowd and singer, and space as a total art. (Respondent 15)

The exhibition emphasized the visual aspect of Israeli rock music and involved the participation of ‘photographers and designers and artists’ (Respondent 15), including two works of art produced especially for the exhibition. Respondent 20 went to lengths to highlight that theirs was not an ‘exhibition of the history of Israeli rock’, but rather a ‘visualization’. Approached as art, the exhibition offered the viewer ‘just a piece, a fragment, … a visualization of a part’ of Israeli rock culture (Respondent 15). As a way to illustrate for the interviewer what it means to curate popular music from the point of view of high art, the respondents used the example of an installation of posters by one designer which were framed as might be expected of art works on canvas, explaining: Respondent 15: We have opted for an installation which is more museum-like, and not rock-like. Respondent 20: So we framed it.



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Respondent 15: We framed, we made it presentable and according to gallery criteria, and not as some suggested to have a very noisy place, rock place, because this was, you know, an idea, an idea, so that most of the exhibition is really—maintains the criteria of museal criteria, so that you can see better— Interviewer: It’s the aesthetic of the art gallery, rather than the music itself? Respondent 15: Yes, exactly.

The concern for structures based in traditional frameworks was reinforced at various points throughout the interview. For example, when describing the exhibition’s ‘simulation of a club’, Respondent 15 noted: But you see, though it’s a simulation, there is still an organization, and criteria, the formal criteria of a gallery. (Respondent 15)

When Respondent 20 talked the interviewer through the part of the exhibition focused on DJs, Respondent 15 noted the following: But you see what [Respondent 20] did there—[Respondent 20] guarded, [Respondent 20] maintained—here you see a sort of—[Respondent 20] put all this on the wall, and you see the balance, absolute balance, you see visual balance that we have, that [Respondent 20] maintained. (Respondent 15)

By the end of the interview, a very clear curatorial philosophy had emerged, one that tempered a perceived chaos of rock with the structure of the gallery: Respondent 15: The rhythm and the equation of rhythm to art, for example, in the talk of the gallery, I suggested that the rock and roll is, is a little bit like if you compare it to art and art history, you can see it is an archetype, is a very old archetype of chaos, of challenging, like Dionysiac, totally Dionysiac, anti-ruling … such a phenomenon which is also in Israeli art, though in Israeli art, in the Israeli scene, the rock has always a political protest, and also something very important, that the rock people are generally of the left wing, generally, and many of the songs are also for peace – this is very important in this rock scene in Israel. So one part is this protest, Dionysiac part. Second one is a comparison to the Baroque in art, or Rococo, and to all art which has a fourth dimension of time … because if you look at the Renaissance, so you see Mozart and you see something which is very, very structured, but if you have rock, it is a flowing, like in Baroque, there is a flowing composition. You can’t have separate parts like in Renaissance, so in Baroque and Rococo, you have it flowing and you are always going to the unknown, so this is also a part of the Dionysiac part – Dionysus, all the chaos, you don’t know where it goes to. So, um, I thought—we thought the exhibition would be an

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The above example suggests that popular culture, and the material objects that symbolize it, is in fact a good fit for the museum space in that it enables structure in the exhibition while nevertheless letting ‘chaos’ run throughout. Context is also important when considering the Israeli curator’s approach to the exhibition visualizing the country’s rock music culture. Respondent 15 has a background in theatre and spent two decades as an art critic, while Respondent 20 has a background in art history and spent over two decades working in galleries. Their exhibition of Israeli rock was presented in an artistic centre in Tel Aviv which includes gallery space they described as ‘poor’ but ‘dynamic’ – not a commercial gallery, nor a gallery of ‘consensus’ (Respondent 15). The philosophy guiding their practice emerged from their respective backgrounds in the art world and is enacted in an exhibition space that seeks out ‘new things, some novelties, some fresh air’ (Respondent 15). As Fairchild (2017) suggests in the case for many popular music museums, the Israeli rock exhibition blended traditional art museum approaches that canonize artists with an understanding of modern cravings for innovative perspectives on content.



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Case study: ‘It’s all art’ in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum The Israeli rock exhibition was the most overt example to emerge from our research of the framework of the traditional art gallery acting as a structuring concept for music museums. However, reference to art finds its way into discussions of very different exhibition contexts to that experienced by the freelance curators interviewed in Israel. As a point of contrast, we turn now to the Rock Hall, where, during the course of the interview, the curator made a passing observation that the Rock Hall was not a ‘real museum’ (Respondent 9). When asked to expand on that point, the curator said the following: Respondent 9: I mean, I was really joking, I do think of this as a real museum, but is— Interviewer: But there is a point of difference is there? Respondent 9: Yeah. Interviewer: So how do you see that? Respondent 9: Well, we’re dealing with an intangible, we’re dealing with popular culture, we’re very young, most of our—a large chunk of our collection is loaned to us, we don’t really have a substantial collection of our own.

This point of difference between ‘real’ museums and popular music museums was followed by an observation that the Rock Hall is ‘very much resented by the other cultural institutions’ in Cleveland, including the Cleveland Museum of Art (Respondent 9). Queried about this resentment, the curator responded, ‘Because we get a lot of attention, we get a big chunk of public funds that they feel we don’t have the right to because we’re not a real museum’ (Respondent 9). A ‘real’ museum, following this curator’s logic, would deal with the tangible, with forms of ‘high culture’, with material whose age makes it worthy of heritage status, and which own a substantial collection of artefacts. A real museum may also struggle to attract attention and public funds. While Respondent 9 identified the Cleveland Museum of Art to be the kind of ‘real museum’ imagined here, this curator also noted that such places increasingly turn to popular cultural forms to attract younger visitors: It’s so funny to see the Cleveland Museum of Art going after their young members and having big rock and roll parties under the Picassos, I’m like, ‘come on you guys, we’re all in this together, it’s all art’. (Respondent 9, emphasis added)

When Respondent 9 was asked what the challenges are for the Rock Hall moving forward, their response further underlined a desire for it to be recognized as a real

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museum focused on a legitimate form of art. The response also highlighted that this understanding needs to occur within the institution and among its public rather than among the other cultural institutions referred to earlier in the interview: I think that our major challenge has always been, and I think going forward is going to be, having leadership that understands that, understands both aspects of popular culture, that understands that this is art, that this is serious stuff and that we can’t run this like an amusement park – we’re a museum. But at the same time, we have to appeal to our populace, but at the same time we have to educate and we have to try to make them understand that this isn’t just wallpaper, or the soundtrack of their life, as important as that might be, it’s the soundtrack of the unfolding of world history, and we, I think to me that’s the major challenge, is trying to get people to understand that it’s not just entertainment. (Respondent 9)

Despite a perhaps flippant comment about not perceiving the Rock Hall as a real museum, the curator pointed out that in order to further develop the standing of their institution, future leaders will have to balance the popularity of objects within the collection and the hedonistic nature of many accompanying stories with the seriousness of caring for and displaying material culture as valued heritage. In this way, Respondent 9 espoused and effectively promoted some of those classic exhibitionary characteristics of the art museum (as per Fairchild 2017) in order to legitimize the rationale of the Rock Hall holistically.

Star objects: Capturing visitor attention The use of star objects – also called ‘signature objects’ (Carliner 2001) or ‘the charismatic or auratic object’ (Pirrie Adams 2015: 120) – is a component of a curatorial approach that has an emphasis on material culture. This strategy is used by many heritage institutions, including art galleries and traditional museums, but is also commonly used in popular music museums. Star objects are not necessarily artefacts connected to the most well-known performers, but rather are artefacts imbued with the power to stand in for a wider array of ephemera and memorabilia, to capture visitors’ attention and convey the essence of the story being told. For a respondent from the Rock Hall, star objects are decided upon based on two factors: Part of it is [highlighting] things that we think are really valuable parts of our collection and then part of it is to try and reach out to different people’s taste. (Respondent 12)



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At the Experience Music Project, the decision to use star objects evolved after watching people go through [the museum when it first opened and] they couldn’t tell what’s important. If it’s that great of a piece, why can’t it just be out there where I can see it in a way that I understand, ‘ok, this is significant’? And [so now] it’s displayed like that. (Respondent 5)

A discussion about Kylie: An Exhibition at Arts Centre Melbourne revealed a powerful example of the significance of such auratic objects: The object that people were most fascinated by were the gold hot pants, and the public developed this whole mythology around them, none of which was true in a way. … Some of the myths were ‘well, they’re displayed behind bulletproof glass’, ‘they’re worth $10 million.’ … Then the mystery for the audiences were around ‘well, we don’t know who designed them’, ‘well, she just looks bloody good in them’, and then everything in between. … People are just fascinated by [the hot pants], not only by the facts, but by the invented stories around them as well. (Respondent 14)

By standing out within an exhibition, star objects attract the attention of the visitors as much as they facilitate the creation of myths. Fairchild (2018: 488) describes how popular music museums ‘construct a life history or “object biography” for the musical instruments or articles of clothing they display by linking them to some special moment from the past that is meant to still be with us’. In the case of Kylie Minogue’s hot pants, it is evident that visitors also participate in this construction, further elevating the hot pants’ status as star object and cementing their place as a signature piece for the collection. As Fairchild (2018: 488) states, the objects displayed by popular music museums ‘must be imbued with some sense of a larger history and biography to enable the spectator’ to connect the object with the broader social context in which the object was embedded and to understand and experience its meanings. Though the hot pants emerged as the star object of the Kylie exhibition, their aura was bound to the other objects on display which work to support the production of the hot pants as representing a key moment in popular music history. The hot pants, as with star objects in other exhibitions, ‘can only offer immediate material legitimation for the claims the rest of the exhibit make around them’ (Fairchild 2018: 488). The auratic object has been discussed at length by Leonard in her account of the installation of a timber stage that is part of the Beatles story in the Museum of Liverpool. Drawing on interviews with museum staff, Leonard

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aims to understand how the exhibition of a particular moment in popular music history has been constructed to convey a sense of authenticity to visitors. The stage is displayed in such a way as ‘to intensify the emotional connection that visitors might feel’, with the star object status reinforced in isolating it from other displays, highlighting it as part of an audiovisual presentation, encouraging visitors to photograph themselves with the stage (Leonard 2014: 367). In these ways, the curators produce what Fairchild (2018: 488) describes as ‘a referred sense of agency’ with which they ‘infuse’ the object in order to link it to an important event in popular music history. The stage, which might otherwise have been considered a mundane object, ‘comes to embody and stand in for momentous social and cultural changes either sought or reflected through the traditions of musical practice’ on display (Fairchild 2018: 488). A star object can be used to communicate a plethora of social and cultural narratives depending on its placement within a museum. For example, when discussing the future curation of galleries in the National Museum of African American Music, Respondent 13 explained the following: There might be an item, an object that is located in one gallery that shows this story, and then you might come back [to the museum at a later date] and [that same object]’s over here, but it’s talking about a completely different area [of music history]. So while that same article may have been—you might remember it, but you don’t know the story around it from this angle. (Respondent 13)

Ideally then, star objects can represent a point in popular music history that can be explored from a range of perspectives. The versatility of an object no doubt plays a role in the decision to purchase or loan items that can be reused within different exhibitions, yet retain the pulling power needed to attract visitors. Not all exhibitions or museums will be able to accumulate in their collections star objects that have high impact when compared with items in larger or more established collections. Micromuseums in particular are unlikely to have the purchasing power to amass such objects; however, star objects may still arise within the hierarchy of objects within a collection, where the most impressive item or display reveals itself over time. Nonetheless, many popular music museum curators and directors strive to collect auratic objects because of their significance in formulating and arranging exhibitions of popular music.



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The ‘noise’ of objects The visual display of music’s material culture is central to the museal narration of popular music’s history (Leonard 2010). The problem with the vast array of objects that make up popular music culture is that their effusive display can create a form of ‘noise’ – or overabundance – which potentially reduces the impact of material culture on the viewer. The British Music Experience, for example, produced what might be described as a ‘bombardment of artefacts’ in all its display cases. The curator described the approach to these ‘showcases’ as follows: With all the objects, with all the showcases, what we tried to do is mix stuff, so that, we have, ah, a Johnny Rotten bondage suit, but then we have a record that a fan is gonna have owned … all the iconic stuff. And the displays are going to help with interpretation [pointing to a display in the 1970s gallery]. There’s a slight anarchy to this piece. Things dangle and they’re angled. … There’s a smashed guitar. (Respondent 4)

There was a somewhat designed anarchy evident in all the display cases across the museum, and when this was combined with multiple sources of audio used in the open-plan space (see Chapter 9), the result is an overwhelming sensual cacophony. The noise of material culture at the British Music Experience was commented on by two interviewees from other institutions. As one described it, the British Music Experience adopted a curatorial approach that left ‘no negative space, there’s posters on the back wall, and then things on top of that’ (Respondent 5), and so, as another noted, the encounter the British Music Experience professed to offer ‘just becomes almost a little bit flattened’ (Respondent 8). This noisy mode of display, based on a curatorial belief that ‘more is more’ (Respondent 5), was also observed at the Rock Hall, where display cases were full and formulaic, in that each case had a certain degree of repetition so that, though focused on different artists, eras, locales or genres, they were filled with very similar objects. This exchange with the curator at the Experience Music Project captured the sense of exhaustion this can create: Respondent 5: … the Rock Hall. You’ve been there, right? To me, the grand hall, it never feels like you’re in an actual exhibit, just like a continuation of the exhibit. It’s just like case after case after case. Interviewer: It’s quite—exhausting, actually.

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The ‘more is more’ approach to display can induce a feeling of ‘sensory overload’ in visitors: It’s like every rock artist emptied their attic into the Rock Hall, it’s overwhelming. Not my cup of tea, overwhelming. (Respondent 10)

The sense of being overwhelmed by material culture was also acknowledged at Experience Music Project, with the curator stating, ‘I always describe EMP as the ultimate ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder] museum’ (Respondent 5). This curator notes that producing an ‘ADD museum’ was never the intention, but is the outcome of a curatorial strategy of ‘want[ing] a lot going on’: So you’re bombarded with video, you’re bombarded with objects, you’re bombarded with text, there’s just so much going on … it’s like going to a warehouse grocery store. I don’t know about you, but I usually want to take a nap. And I think when we first opened, the exhibits were even more that way. It was like the more material you could put out, the better. (Respondent 5)

The Experience Music Project had a permanent exhibition, the Guitar Gallery, which provided respite from the ‘bombardment’ effect induced elsewhere in the museum because ‘for people who need calmness’ the museum can be ‘overwhelming’ (Respondent 5). For this curator, the Guitar Gallery, promotes a feeling of being relaxed because it tells the story of ‘the evolution of the guitar’ without relying on instruments ‘tied to specific people’. However, while some respondents found noisy displays to be a problem, others argued that sensory overload meets visitor demand. For example, Respondent 10, while finding the more is more approach to be personally overwhelming, also recognized that for museums like the Rock Hall which are a site of pilgrimage, this approach might ‘be meeting the expectations of their audience’, because ‘a fan who comes from Phoenix, Arizona, who loves rock and roll, that’s what they want to see’ (Respondent 10). Moreover, while the more is more approach may



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produce ‘a sensory overload’, on the flip side, ‘if you are a hard-core fan you don’t need it to be contextualized because you know that history’ (Respondent 10). While some curators noted that a popular music museum or exhibition ‘can’t include everything’, they also observe the need to feature a ‘critical mass of content’ so that people leave the exhibition feeling ‘exhausted’ due to being satisfied that a complex subject has been presented with breadth and depth (Respondent 6). The approach of the Powerhouse Museum’s curator was to try to cram [in] as much content as I possibly can … and it is always a battle, to have this critical mass of content in exhibitions in order, I think, to satisfy. Visitors have a thirst for this stuff, they love it. They don’t mind if there’s a whole lot of objects. (Respondent 6)

In the example of The 80s Are Back exhibition, the curator noted, ‘It was just so content dense that we got very few examples of feedback saying “Why did you leave this band out?” So a lot of bands, they mightn’t have had a big display about them but they kind of get a mention somewhere, whether it was on a video clip or something’ (Respondent 6). Consequently, it can be concluded that the method of object noise can be used to negate the delivery of negative feedback from visitors which derives from certain aspects of popular music’s past not being told in an exhibition. Not all curators found this to be a convincing argument, with one drawing comparison to sporting halls of fame: How many baseball bats and baseball gloves and balls can I see and still absorb and still be moved by it, before I get to Babe Ruth’s bat, which is way at the end. I’m so callous by then. Or if you have every single guitar that Jimi Hendrix ever played, it’s just—to me in the twenty-first century, it’s too much. (Respondent 10)

At the Grammy Museum and also the Experience Music Project, a different approach was championed that emphasized object constraint. This shift has occurred based on the curators’ observations of how visitors move through popular music museums and what they might be taking away from the experience. As the curator at the Experience Music Project explained, As we’ve replaced galleries, we’ve tried to use more restraint. In part, so that we don’t overwhelm the visitor, but also to give them a hierarchy of information, so they realize ‘this is significant’, it’s not lost among fifty other things on the same wall. … Because there’s a lot of ephemera that—it’s good background material, but you don’t need to flooded with it. (Respondent 5)

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The strategy at this site becomes one of simplicity, where ‘less is more’ (Respondent 10). And so, at the Grammy Museum, the majority of artefacts remain in storage with only key pieces on display: If I have twelve Jimi Hendrix guitars, I’m going to put eleven in the back and only show you the one I think is most important to the story. … And then hopefully you’re going to say ‘Hmm’, and check it out, and then remember it. That’s what I want. (Respondent 10)

These comments demonstrate popular music museum curators’ ongoing reflexive navigation of exhibition design and curatorial practice in the attempt to achieve a workable balance between having enough objects to tell a good story, and too many that a visitor becomes overwhelmed. It is not that ephemera is ‘not what’s essential’, as Simon Reynolds (2011: 3) puts it, but rather that clever selection of content can say more than a critical mass of objects. Material culture is the dominant visual aspect through which the significance of certain forms of popular music can be symbolized and presented to museum visitors, in response to the intangibility of music itself which makes direct representation difficult. Throughout this chapter, we have investigated the ways in which material culture is presented within popular music exhibitions in relation to traditional models of display usually found in art museums. Through discussions with curators, we have highlighted the significance of utilizing material culture in popular music exhibitions as a way to inform current popular music canons through retrospective cultural consecration and to further legitimize the discourses of popular music heritage. We look to the concept of star objects as another method of structuring exhibitions built on material culture, where objects that are either highly popular or hold historical significance (or both) become the lynchpin for exhibitions, or even whole institutions. Material objects also present issues for curators in terms of the extent of a museum’s collection. If curators have the benefit of choosing from a great deal of objects, they may also choose to display many of these at any one time, which can have the detrimental effect of overwhelming the visitor. At the same time, curators and museum directors must contend with visitor feedback that points to too few items being on display, or that crucial objects were missing. As such, curatorial strategies based on the treatment of popular music’s material culture function to both engage and educate visitors, but also to further authorize and legitimize popular music heritage collections.

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Telling Stories: Narratives of Popular Music’s Past

I got into this business by happenstance. My background was as a music journalist … as a freelancer. [Respondent 12] contacted me and said … ‘Would you be interested in being a consultant [for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum]?’ … [Respondent 12] didn’t know anything about doing exhibits either, and we just went and we did it. And then I got so interested in it, I loved it. And the reason why I loved it was because I saw that it was a very easy transition for me to be going from a journalist to a curator, because in both cases, in essence you’re telling stories. (Respondent 10, Grammy Museum, emphasis added) The contemporary profusion of popular music museums all over the world, and the subsequent range of popular music exhibitions curated, designed and hosted by these institutions, draws largely on the device of ‘narrative’ to organize, curate and communicate histories of popular music heritage to museum visitors. By ‘narrative’, we refer to the overarching stories that can shape exhibitions and guide visitors’ interpretation of presented materials. In arranging the heritage of popular music in this way, curators have the opportunity to direct the ways in which history is told. In some instances, curators tell new stories to suit their materials, or to highlight a marginalized story; however, in many cases, exhibitions reinforce some of the dominant discourses of music history (see Chapter 2). As Respondent 10 observed in the above interview extract, constructing narratives is the ‘essence’ of the curator’s role. The work of the curator is compared to the work of a journalist, with this respondent having served as a journalist before joining the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (Rock Hall hereafter):

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Hence, telling stories within and through an exhibition is a central component of curatorial practice in popular music museums, and occurs in ways that frequently overlap with the array of structuring concepts of curatorial practice presented in this book. In engaging visitors with popular music through the telling of particular stories, curators acknowledge that the meaning of popular culture is not fixed, but rather, changes over time, and, even more importantly, is mediated by its very presence in the museum space. There was a recognition by the respondents in our study that communicating the histories of popular music culture is challenging due to the multiplicities of experience with and understandings of popular music’s past and the need for curators to produce a popular music heritage that is meaningful for visitors in the present. To deal with such challenges, curators often draw on the autobiographical, from the perspective of both the subject and the visitor, thereby ‘transforming bystanders and later generations into “secondary witnesses”’ of popular music’s history (Andermann and Arnold-de Simine 2012: 7). Narratives are key to maintaining visitor attention throughout the experience of the exhibition. As ‘new museums’ (see Chapter 1; Bruce 2006), popular music museums have largely moved away from ‘authorized’ historical narratives as given by experts, preferring instead to emphasize vernacular narratives, with curators highlighting that stories told in popular music exhibitions emanate within a dialogue between museum professionals and their audiences (see Andermann and Arnold-de Simine 2012). Often, these narratives are influenced by curator subjectivity (see Chapter 7), which sees key events of cultural history compiled into a stylized yet compelling version of popular music heritage. Over time, the strongest of these narratives emerge as ‘discourses’, reflecting popular versions of historical events. Through the use of narrative, curators engage with popular music’s historical discourses to facilitate an affective connection between museum content and visitors’ personal experiences and memories of popular music culture. It is through this connection that curators can facilitate visitors’ learning (Bedford 2001) by harnessing interest and attention on particular aspects of popular music history. In considering narrative as a structuring concept of curatorial practice, this chapter examines the incorporation of narrative within popular music exhibition design and the challenges this may pose for curators.



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Moments in time: Chronology in popular music exhibitions The concept of narrative often corresponds with historically and chronologically based storytelling, where audiences recognize a sequence of events in a logical order based on the classic storytelling components of beginning, middle and end. The work of Alcina Cortez (2015) highlights the popularity of chronology for structuring popular music exhibitions in Portugal. Although she notes discrepancies across the exhibitions of her study, Cortez (2015: 315) argues that the propensity for ‘chronological sequence’ in exhibitions of popular music emerges from a reliance on conventional traditions of museum display. The accounts from curators in our study reveals a diversity of approaches towards chronological rationales, depending on the institution and its mission statement, the curators’ subjectivities (see Chapter 7), the stories they aim to narrate and the object of the exhibition. In some cases, the design of exhibitions changed over time to become more or less chronological. For example, the initial design of galleries in the Rock Hall did not set out to purposefully chart the chronological development of rock and roll music, but the museum has since attempted to make a shift to an overarching chronological narrative: We always had the entire story from the roots of rock and roll, except basically up to the present, but it was not in particular chronological order. So at the end of last summer we started working on this redesign, and we were upgrading all of the audio and video and interactive [elements] and we also started moving the exhibits around, so that it told the story in a more chronological order … the idea was to put in a little bit more of a chronological order and all that to tell the story. (Respondent 12)

As an associate curator at the Rock Hall told Ulrich Adelt (2017: 211), the redesign undertaken in 2011 made an attempt to ‘put things in a more logical timeline so that you could go through the museum in a specific path and follow the history of the music’. Chronological narratives are often embraced by curators inasmuch as they provide a logical, or ‘go-to’, frame of reference for the visitor. This is apparent in the example from the Rock Hall, but was an idea also expressed by curators of the micromuseums of our study. Below, for example, the founder of the Ramones Museum in Berlin described the value of chronological order to structure the museum experience: I knew I needed some sort of structure, you can’t just throw everything [in]—I mean, I see a lot of people do that. They just have—let’s say they have twelve

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Figure 6.1 shows the one wall in the Ramones Museum where the chronological approach was made explicit, with the curator using signage to draw attention to activities of the band in the mid-1970s. Although Respondent 24 noted that chronology was not made overt in the current iteration of the museum, the exhibition was nonetheless designed around chapters of the band’s history, and these provided a ‘chronological order’ which could guide the visitor experience. The chronological approach undertaken in both the redesigned galleries of the Rock Hall and the Ramones Museum enabled temporal connections to be made between various elements of the story of historical development in popular music histories. Other museums, such as the British Music Experience, also adopted a favourable approach to chronological storytelling, dividing the history of popular music by decades or specific year spans. The British Music Experience was arranged by ‘zones’ which encompassed different year ranges, with the number of years covered by a zone corresponding to a sense of how important certain years were to the development of popular music history in Britain: Well, with the zone over there, the Beatles one, only covered 4 years, but the first zone covered 17 years. So it depends on how much you’ve got to tell. The ’60s to ’66 is big; ’66 to ’76 is huge as well. (Respondent 4)

The galleries’ zones were arranged chronologically and the showcases within the galleries were ‘mainly genre driven’ (Respondent 4). For the curator, this structure was seen to aid the visitor experience, particularly for the ‘casual observer – they’ll probably look at the year they were born: “Oh, I wonder if Live



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Figure 6.1  Chronological narrative at the Ramones Museum. Photograph by Sarah Baker.

Aid was 1985”, or something’ (Respondent 4). In this instance, the assumption made by the curator was that a visitor born in the 1970s, for example, might focus more of their time in the gallery devoted to that decade. An important aspect of the chronological rationale lies in the direct connection that visitors can experience in combination with an array of ephemera that touches on both common and rare items. On the other hand, chronological narratives are often critiqued by scholars for presenting a ‘strong linear narrative’, which is seen as ‘unambiguously plac[ing the visitor] as a receiver of knowledge … rather than in an interactive relationship to the objects being displayed’ (Witcomb 2012: 580). Many curators in our sample indicated a sense of discontent with the chronological rationale, even if it proves challenging to completely disregard chronology in telling the story of popular music history. For instance, in the following interview extract about the development of a hall of fame in the UK, chronology was being considered only as a means to highlight the musical ‘development’ of a city: We don’t want to break it into just like 1950, 1960. We want to frame moments in time so that they kind of blend together more seamlessly, because, you know, it’s like you’re still the same, but you’re growing and developing. (Respondent 8)

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Respondent 8 expressed an aspiration to move beyond chronology as a structuring concept for new music halls of fame, but acknowledged that a complete shift away from a temporal narrative is difficult. Another more telling example about such discontent is provided by Gaëlle Crenn’s (2015) depiction of the differing approaches taken by curators of two versions of the ABBAWORLD exhibition in Australia. The initial exhibition, held in Melbourne’s Federation Square, took a chronological approach to telling the story of the Swedish pop group. The Powerhouse Museum, on the other hand, opted for a thematic narrative for the ABBA exhibition, eschewing a linear approach. Sometimes, the concept for an exhibition begins with an orientation to chronology, but subsequently evolves into a more thematic approach, as the following example from Iceland demonstrated: It started out as an idea about musicians born in the era, but it evolved in a way, maybe because we found it interesting to see how some aspects like teenage bands coming up for the first time, some songs that were banned on the national radio. So these are two points that we thought were very interesting. And the third aspect is … of course, the American base and its influence. There were … clubs there that introduced rock and roll to Icelanders and the young teenage bands that started out there, and later on maybe imitated the Beatles … and so that was, maybe, the most important thing. But there were also some, like, the first rock stars, and how … some of them at least from that era were influenced … by the radio station in Keflavik. (Respondent 23)

Although strongly anchored in particular chronologies, popular music histories relate to political, economic and cultural components, which some curators seek to harness for a more impactful visitor experience than linear narratives may otherwise provide. Indeed, time itself does not suffice to explain popular music expressions, but rather only acts as a frame of reference upon which other aspects of the exhibition’s narratives can be based. Some approaches to chronological narratives combine other elements of organization that help contextualize or embellish the passage of time, sometimes in ways that can be experienced kinaesthetically by visitors (Leahy 2012). In the following instance, the Georgia Music Hall of Fame drew on historic themes of space and place to create a narrative that wove together disparate music styles: The [exhibits] were [thematic], and I think that was probably the challenge in the beginning – ‘Ok, how do we take all these very different music genres and pull them together in twelve to fifteen thousand square feet?’ – and so



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working with Museum Arts in Dallas, they came up with the concept of a sort of Georgia music village where you would stroll through at twilight and there was a little jazz and swing club, sort of reminiscent of something on River Street in Savannah, there was the rhythm and blues review, maybe a Macon cinder block joint, and then there was an actual gospel chapel, and there was a little backstage area, and country, it was the Skillet Licker Café. … So they were like little venues you would walk through. … You’re absolutely right, it was thematic. And within those was—not necessarily chronological, but just telling the different stories of Georgians in those areas. (Respondent 1)

By going beyond chronological organization, the approach taken by the curator at the Georgia Music Hall of Fame sought to feature the factors behind the emergence, vibrancy and cultural and geographical context of the different music genres and scenes that could be found in Georgia. The narrative was underpinned by an exhibition layout that promoted an embodied experience of Georgian music heritage for the visitor. The chronological rationales were present within the exhibition, but greatly intertwined with other factors that are used to more creatively curate the history of these music genres. A similar approach was detailed by a freelance exhibition designer in Iceland, who described the importance of creating experiences that immerse visitors with the culture of a certain era by mixing chronological rationales with other contextualizing elements: For a period, you go into picture research to visualize what was the style and what was the period fashion. Or what colours were rooms painted and this thing, you know, to create an atmosphere. That’s more of what I do. … I check things are from the period style. You know, to find out, to create a room, maybe what kind of furniture shall it have and whatever, so we did that in the ’70s thing. We built our little hippie style, commune style room and then you had the record player and then everything from the period and part of an outdoor festival with a little stage, and the tent. … So to make it interesting to look at visually. (Respondent 11)

What this process of exhibition curation and design suggests is that chronological rationales can represent a starting point to communicate particular semiotics about cultural formations and styles. Years and decades anchor popular music’s stylistic features, but they are coupled with a set of visual and sonic elements on display to create an ‘atmosphere’, animating for visitors a sense of that period of time in society more widely. A freelance curator from Iceland similarly

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described the importance of telling stories about popular music’s past in ways that enlivened linear narratives by way of embodied experiences: We dressed it up a bit like a street from the 1980s. The idea was to make half of the house a punk scene, with the record store and the room of a punk teenager. And there you could hear from a cassette some of the songs. But at the other side of the house, there was a discotheque called Hollywood, or, like, the grammar of Hollywood was copied; we used their names and a floor with lights and you could listen to disco music and dance in disco feeling. And records from that time, a lot of posters and pictures both from the disco genre and the punk genre. It was divided so punk was to the left side and disco to the right. So it was like you were standing on a street and you could decide to be punk and go left or disco and go right. (Respondent 23)

The turn to narratives in popular music exhibitions is not synonymous with a clear embrace of chronological rationales as a structuring principle for these narratives, though this approach may be evident in some exhibitions. Certainly, there are different methods of employing chronological rationales in narratives of popular music exhibitions. The dominant perspective consists of using chronological rationales as a frame of reference for the emergence and development of popular music genres, but also to combine them with other components upon which narratives are constructed, such as the thematic and embodied examples above.

Managing the narrative approach: Three core strategies Our interviews with popular music museum curators from around the world suggested that there are various ways of implementing the concept of narratives besides the most obvious choice of chronology. These approaches can be organized in a framework, which we characterize as being based on a story, a concept or an object or set collection. Such narratives, which are the result of curatorial decisions, are underpinned by particular concepts that serve as defining themes for popular music exhibitions. Narrative-led exhibition designs are complex and multilayered; they must be cohesive to effectively communicate popular music’s past in dynamic yet clear ways. Nevertheless, curators tend to highlight one particular aspect upon which the narrative will be based, becoming a ‘hook’ that will mediate the kind of experience visitors will have. In what follows, we detail the three different approaches to the narratives of popular music exhibitions.



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Story-based approach Story-based narratives refer to a type of popular music exhibition that places a particular story at its core. In other words, the guiding narrative of the display is fundamental to exhibition design. Curators undertake a detailed mapping of the story/ies that are to be played out within the exhibition, followed by the collection of relevant artefacts that will illustrate the story. The story-based approach to exhibition design is often borne out of necessity due to a museum not having a pre-existing collection of artefacts from which to base design choices upon. The National Museum of African American Music, for example, is undertaking exhibition design before developing a collection: We’re designing our exhibits, and then worry about the collection. So we’re designing our storyline, if you will, first. And then we’ll incorporate our artefacts and things of that nature. (Respondent 13)

Similarly, the curator at the Powerhouse Museum emphasized a two-step process that begins with mapping the story and ends with a consideration of artefacts: The content you choose [for an exhibition] is dictated by the stories you want to tell … you decide on the themes and ideas, and that’s the number one [priority], it’s where you have to start if you’re going to have a coherent and interesting story to tell. … [It is] a matter of principle, I think it’s really important to decide what you want to say first and then decide what material you’re going to use to illustrate it, rather than saying, ‘we’ve got this collection here, let’s build this exhibition around it’. (Respondent 6)

As such, in this approach to narrative, artefacts are secondary in exhibition design, inasmuch as they are considered the means through which to tell a story. The story-based approach was evident in the design of Real Wild Child! Australian Rock Music Then and Now, an exhibition held at the Powerhouse Museum in 2004: We had no collection at all, really, of rock music stuff, so it was pretty much starting from scratch. Before we went looking for any objects, we identified our themes and telling the story of Australian rock music over thirty years as it was then. (Respondent 6)

In this particular example, themes were first identified and finalized and only then were objects sourced to fit the chosen narrative. The curator highlighted the vernacular nature of the narrative by going on to emphasize that ‘you or I

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or anybody who’s familiar with the subject could come up with a narrative that would be as valid as the one we ended up with’ (Respondent 6). The curator was aware this was only one of many possible narratives that could have been used to tell the story of Australia’s rock music history, acknowledging the power of the institution to confer legitimacy from the top down when creating exhibition narratives. Later in the interview, this curator suggested that such an approach runs the risk of neglecting narratives that might better connect with the recollections or experiences of museum visitors.

Concept-based approach As with the story-based approach, artefacts are also secondary in the design of concept-based exhibitions. However, whereas the story-based approach constructs a grand narrative of popular music history, the concept-based approach centres on a niche theme that underpins the stories to be told in the exhibition. Once the underlying concept is identified and developed, artefacts are then sought to illustrate the various aspects that comprise it. One Israeli freelance curator summarized the process as follows: You begin [with] a concept … you make up [the exhibition] according to the concept … [and] reveal and assemble artefacts. (Respondent 15)

The concept-based approach has the ability to corral potentially disparate stories about musicians, genres or locales into one cohesive exhibition. In the case of a notable Israeli exhibition, collectors and visual artists contributed artefacts including photographs, posters, record sleeves, art and audiovisual media to present a visual fragment of popular music’s past in Israel, as an alternative to a complete history of Israeli rock music (see also Chapter 5). This approach is further highlighted in the development of Nick Cave: The Exhibition at the Arts Centre Melbourne, for which songwriting was the core concept that drove exhibition design: Look, when I thought about that exhibition, I was thinking about how [Nick Cave’s] story really needed to be told through his songs, because I found that fascinating. As someone who knew of Nick Cave’s music and with my curator’s hat on, though, I was thinking, ‘this is really interesting. People are going to be fascinated by it. It’s a very mysterious process for people.’ When I started reading about, oh, ‘I go to an office and I write’ and so on, I knew that was the idea. I also did a lot of work on the whole idea of Cabinet of Curiosities



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because that’s sort of what I wanted to create a bit with that show. When I spoke to Nick Cave about that idea, that really won him over, because for him the songwriting is the essence of really what he’s about and the writing and so on. Therefore, in the exhibition I deliberately didn’t include any images of him performing and looking at him as a performer. … So therefore, I was interested in also telling his story through where he lived and how he worked and how that’s changed and evolved from starting off with a typewriter, then going to notebooks, and using a computer and getting really frustrated by that, and back to his notebooks. Also about how the creative process totally—there was no separation between his normal life and his creative life in Berlin, for example. So, it was 24-hour crazy, writing [his] novel, and so on. I think he realized that wasn’t sustainable and became much more disciplined. I’ve been to the office and, yeah, it’s got the books, got the piano, got the desk, and that’s his discipline, that’s his work. I mean, I suspect that he doesn’t ever really turn off, but he’s had to get a bit more disciplined. I just thought—and then he was just so open about it all too, because he gave us diaries and notebooks and so on, and spoke about his various passions and phobias and so on. I wanted to tease some of that out too. (Respondent 14)

Working in collaboration with the artist, the curator of this exhibition was able to procure relevant artefacts relating to the concept of ‘songwriting’. The narrative eventually established in the exhibition was what Respondent 14 called ‘a physical manifestation’ of the journey through designing and gathering artefacts for an exhibition based upon a concept. In the case of museums with substantial pre-existing collections, the conceptbased approach may be used to manage the curation of a large volume of artefacts through a discrete narrative. However, in such cases, the collections are usually considered in conjunction with the decision of which concept will guide the narrative. For micromuseums like Museum RockArt in the Netherlands, this approach was deemed essential given the size of the collection relative to the floor space of the museum: Because we have this limited space, we change [the exhibition] every three or four months. We change our exhibition with themes. … At this point, [themes are] our only way that we can show what we have [in our collection]. (Respondent 2)

In museums with large collections but minimal floor space, the concept-based approach to exhibitions enables the effective communication of narratives of popular music’s past despite spatial challenges.

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Object-based approach The object-based approach to developing popular music exhibitions consists of creating a narrative that highlights the historical, biographical and cultural significance of objects. As Lisa Roberts (1997: 147) notes, in the new museum, ‘Objects may now be understood to derive their meaning and value from narratives constructed and imposed from without. No longer are objects ends in and of themselves so much as vehicles for the expression of ideas.’ Placed on display in a museum, a guitar once played by a famous musician can become a symbol of that musician’s talent. Typically, curators seek to create a guiding narrative that brings objects in their existing collection together in a cohesive way. The object-based approach allows curators to create exhibitions that educate visitors on the history of the object itself, rather than its use by a certain artist or prevalence in a genre. The Guitar Gallery at the Experience Music Project offers an example of an object-based approach to narrative: [The curators] just really felt they wanted to tell the story of the guitar without it being tied to specific people. So they were really looking to tell what was the evolution of the guitar becoming electric and solo. (Respondent 5)

Here, the curators drew on the symbolic and material features of artefacts that are put on display. Although some guitars once had famous owners such as Eddie van Halen and Roger McGuinn, they were not always showcased as such and sat alongside guitars that were provided as examples of the electric evolution of the instrument, but which were not associated with a particular artist. As Respondent 5 pointed out, this approach ‘made for a better story’ and one that was ‘easier to tell’ due to it being ‘easier’ to procure guitars that are not directly associated with specific artists. One key principle in the object-based approach to narrative is that the artefacts selected for display should possess a pre-existing biography (see Gosden and Marshall 1999), which speaks to the cultural significance of the object. An emphasis on object biography was readily observed at the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame, where the curator, a volunteer, was keenly focused on the stories attached to objects: How do I begin that process [of selecting objects]? Well, actually, I’m going to be doing that soon. I already have a list of a few things that I want to put in, but I make sure that I’ve got them, and where they are. I make sure the stories attached



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to them of how they came about, who owned it, where it was made, and all this kind of stuff, and then I just sort of [go], ‘okay, I’ve got this, I’ve got that, I’ve got the photo, ah, and I’ve got the story, and I’ve got the article’, so, then I think, ‘okay, well, where am I going to put it’, and just go out there [into the museum space] and look. (Respondent 19, emphasis added)

The curator provided a specific example of the object-based approach being used for an exhibition to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Golden Guitar country music awards: Joy McKean’s outfit we’ve got – that she wore to the very first awards presentation. She won the very first one ever presented, so we’ve got that outfit. … Whether we’ll get Joy’s guitar, because it’s probably up at [the Slim Dusty museum in] Kempsey now, but that doesn’t matter—we can still have the story and the dress and make it a very special fortieth anniversary of the Golden Guitars. (Respondent 19)

By displaying an object like McKean’s dress and guitar, the curator contributed to the cultivation of the biographies of these objects. The Australian Country Music Hall of Fame, then, does not just display objects with a history/biography and whose meaning has changed over time, but, by way of narrative-based exhibition design, is also an active participant in defining objects’ materiality and meaning.

The challenge of narrative-led approaches to popular music exhibitions To this point, we have dealt with narrative as something that is delivered by curators within a popular music exhibition. However, it is more accurate to understand this structuring concept as an interplay between communication from curators and the reception of narrative by visitors. Though curators may design an exhibition to tell a specific story, the selected narrative must be matched with both the existing knowledge of the visitor and their interpretation of material to fit with the desired meaning. Curators who ignore the connections between visitors’ memories and exhibited objects, connections that are generated through the different approaches to narrative-led design, are essentially overlooking the direct impact that popular culture has had on both individual lives and broader societal developments in recent history. As Tara Brabazon and

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Stephen Mallinder (2006: 104) point out, when designing an exhibition based on popular culture, a ‘curator is not only mobilizing aloof facts and cold objects, but the throbbing life and joy of fans’ lives’. As a hall of fame developer puts it, What kind of story can we tell and how can we frame that story in terms of creating an experience that’s incredibly engaging, fully immersing? Which means as you come into the hall of fame you should have a spine tingling expectation because we’re tapping into something … that feeling music gives you. … A song was played at a certain time and it becomes a soundtrack of your life. The words of musicians and singer-songwriters, you know, they’re poets and artists in their own right, can have a profound impact on people’s lives in a whole host of ways. In some cases, it influenced them doing something. We’re not creating something that’s like a very dull and disinteresting curated museum experience. (Respondent 8)

What this respondent was highlighting is the challenge of creating narrativeled exhibitions that go beyond the traditional museum experience and which engage visitors in ways that are immersive and affective. While the use of dominant stories within exhibitions acknowledges the impact of popular music on sociocultural histories, the reliance on narrative also raises challenges for curators in terms of how to tackle the creation of stories (object-supported or object-led) that will effectively and affectively communicate popular music’s past. Further issues arise for curators when the period of time, artists, genres or trends with which they are dealing continue to develop in the present. Unlike traditional museums where content relates to distinct or complete epochs of antiquity, popular music has a comparatively young history, the roots of which are still active, relevant and unfolding. This was highlighted particularly in relation to the narrative-led approach to exhibition design: There’s particular challenges working with contemporary performers in this environment, and that’s mainly because, on one hand, performers love the kudos of being recognized by a public institution. But on the other hand, a sense of ‘what is all this about? I’m still [making music]. I’m not [ready to be] in a museum. That’s not the end of the story.’ So, the other curatorial approach is around how you make a story—how you present a story like a window in time, that has no beginning or has no end, that is a moment in time and in the future there will be many other versions of the story told by other people. (Respondent 14)

The essence of storytelling as noted at the beginning of this chapter becomes problematized when, as this curator said, there is no beginning nor an end in



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sight for the overarching ‘story’ of popular music history. For instance, at the British Music Experience, the chronological approach heightened this challenge in the questions it raised around how to tell the history of the current era of music. The extent to which the final gallery was an ‘afterthought’, a critique levelled by Simon Reynolds (2011) in the book Retromania, was posed to the curator: Yeah, hello, it was. It was the most difficult room to curate! Because the stories aren’t there. Britpop is there as a story, and boy and girl bands, but where are the big stories? Here [in Edge Zone 3: 1966–1970, where we are standing now], people have had thirty years to reflect to see what’s important and the story’s kind of written. But in there it was a real bastard to do. It was a real challenge. (Respondent 4, emphasis added)

The temporal distance from the time the music was first released to the present can certainly assist curators in their approach to narratives, whereas music that is more contemporary has yet to be canonized and becomes problematic. In turn, it is perhaps in these exhibitions and galleries focused on the very recent past that the formation of canons of popular music can be most readily observed being mutually produced and reinforced by the narratives of the cultural and heritage industries.

Visitors as amateur experts The challenge for curators in designing popular music exhibitions around narratives is to ensure ‘it provides a bridge between the visitor’s own life experiences and the objects that represent another time and place’ (Burnette Stogner 2011: 119). Although the use of narrative is viewed by curators as a strategy to engage visitors, having exhibitions that are so heavily invested in evoking memories or experiences can be risky. The broad nature of popular music consumption globally increases the likelihood that visitors to a popular music museum may be ‘amateur experts’ – that is, fans or enthusiasts who possess vernacular knowledge that may conflict with the narratives being presented within exhibitions (Baym and Burnett 2009). For Antoine Hennion (2007), who argues that music listeners develop knowledge and expertise in music through the activity of ‘tasting’, the democratization of access to music that followed the introduction of the CD format enabled amateurs to become attached to certain musical forms (see also Hennion, Maisonneuve and Gomart

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2000). While there are other material and immaterial elements that come into play to explain individuals’ attachments to music, Hennion’s discussion of the ‘amateur’ helps account for the ways in which listeners, or consumers of music, have substantial knowledge of the musical forms they like, to the extent that, as Brabazon and Mallinder (2006: 104) note, ‘in most popular culture, fans know more than academics, journalists and museum curators’. This point is echoed by Respondent 6, quoted above, about how ‘anybody’ could develop a valid narrative about popular music histories. Curators acknowledge the expertise of visitors, and in the participatory spirit of the new museum, some exhibitions even seek to offer visitors an opportunity to record and make accessible their stories as a component of the exhibition. As a curator at Experience Music Project stated, ‘So many people come here with some sort of expertise, and they want to – when they’re with their friends, they want to share that expertise’ (Respondent 5). We argue that this is especially the case for baby boomers, often the primary age group targeted by popular music exhibitions, and whose role in the cultural histories of popular music produces visitors highly invested in the stories being told (Bennett 2009). Respondents observed that curators are in a precarious position in regard to delivering popular music history in a way that resonates with the vernacular knowledge and subjective experiences of knowledgeable visitors: In the old days of museums, curators had the kind of arcane knowledge of whatever they were curator of, whether it’s porcelain or silver or science. Most people who come into the [Powerhouse Museum] wouldn’t consider themselves experts in porcelain or silver or possibly even science, but I think the majority of the people that came into Real Wild Child!, for example, thought: ‘Hey, I know this stuff, this is me, this is my life.’ So it becomes a really big responsibility to tell the story in a way that people are going to find convincing and sufficiently comprehensive and touch on the themes and ideas that are dear to their heart, because people kind of own this stuff and that’s a good thing, but it’s scary if you’re the curator because if you make a mistake, you’ll find out pretty quickly, you’ll get notified [by visitors]. (Respondent 6)

This curator suggested that relevance of the amateur expert is what makes popular music museums and exhibitions epistemologically different from exhibitions outside popular culture. It also highlights the shift from the traditional museum as provider of expert knowledge to that of the new museum which acknowledges visitors’ authority. Undoubtedly, most visitors of music exhibitions are likely to be amateur experts in some aspect of the stories being told, and therefore to



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be critical of narrative elements that make up displays. The sense of authority that comes with being an amateur expert means visitors are forthcoming in bringing to the attention of museum staff any shortcomings they perceive exist in displays. At the Powerhouse Museum, for example, the curator noted, ‘We get feedback from visitors and we have to reply to it. If you get those sorts of complaints, and we don’t get very many, I don’t argue them, I acknowledge them as valuable criticisms’ (Respondent 6). This relationship between amateur expert and curator is a dialogic one, which Jens Andermann and Silke Arnold-de Simine (2012: 6) state is ‘generated through constant feedback loops in which narrative authority is passed back and forth between museum professionals and their audience’. Curators in our study acknowledged the depth and breadth of amateur experts’ vernacular knowledge as providing a further challenge in their exhibition design. At the Rock Hall, for example, care had been taken to provide broad definitions and histories so as to encompass as many visitors’ understandings as possible: When you walk in the main exhibit hall, there’s that little text piece … and it talks about our definition of rock and roll and how rock and roll came out of the blues … because … I think most of our visitors (a) consider themselves an expert on rock and roll and no matter how much they know about it, and then (b) they all have their own definition of rock and roll … so we try and define it pretty broadly. (Respondent 12)

In these ways, museums cater to amateur experts in the audience, while also aiming to provide for visitors who have a developing interest in popular music, where a common aim in these museums is to ensure that even amateur experts leave an exhibition with new knowledge. As a curator at the British Music Experience puts it, ‘We want to make sure that even [the most knowledgeable visitors] will find stuff out that they didn’t know’ (Respondent 4).

Telling tales, constructing meaning Cortez (2015: 318) notes that in order to be viewed as successful, narratives presented in popular music museums ‘need to be based on prior visitor experiences, interests and knowledge’. But it is also the case that, as Leonard (2010: 177) points out, ‘visitors bring their own narratives, histories and stores of knowledge which enable them to draw more complex understandings from

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the exhibits than might originally be envisioned by museum staff ’. Narrative is therefore very much bound up with living memory and lived experience – that of museum staff and of the visitor. What must remain in view when considering the stories told in popular music exhibitions is that the aim of narrative-based exhibition design is ‘to establish not truth but meaning’, and hence is an approach that ‘accommodates the various meaning-making activities engaged by curators and visitors as they interpret and order the world’ (Roberts 1997: 134, 137). Critiques of popular music museums often point to the shortcomings of the stories being presented in exhibitions. But as this and other chapters in this book demonstrate, curators are very conscious that the stories they are assembling about popular music’s recent past are ‘incomplete and unfinished’, and many emphasized that they are not attempting to create complete histories or ‘exhibitions that appear to present the single and final word on a subject’ (Roberts 1997: 143). Rather, curators stressed the limitations in creating narrative displays and the ways in which visitors, as amateur experts, bring to the museum-going experience their own memories and vernacular knowledge that can sometimes challenge the stories assembled in the exhibition. In acknowledging visitors as amateur experts, curators create exhibitions that tell stories that echo visitors’ experiences and inscribe their affective responses and experiences into parts of the canons of popular music. As forms of the new museum, ‘instead of presenting the version’ of music’s history, popular music museums should be ‘understood to be presenting a version’ (Roberts 1997: 145, original emphasis). As such, curators anticipate visitors will assess the gaps in the stories that have been constructed and will readily provide feedback on what they perceive to be missing from or misrepresented by the narrative. This openly subjective approach of storytelling can also contain a collaborative element, and emphasizes the necessity to break down popular music canons as culturally significant from a variety of viewpoints rather than just from the perspectives of professional experts in the field. The definition of cultural significance then gains a more inclusive and democratic element.

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Curator Subjectivity: Influence and Bias in Popular Music Exhibitions

The sort of music I loved is sort of pop music from the late ’60s and into the ’70s and Bob Dylan and all that stuff. … I’ve never done an exhibition without somehow including Bob Dylan. Even snuck him into the On the Box: Great Moments in Australian Television 1956–2006 exhibition somehow. He’s in The Wiggles Exhibition. … And of course Spinning Around: 50 Years of Festival Records, well he recorded at Festival Studios. … That’s just like putting a tiny little thing in an exhibition, it’s not creating a major section. That [would be] an indulgence. (Respondent 6, Powerhouse Museum) ‘Personal taste’ is recognized as one of the many elements on which curators of museum exhibitions ‘base their decisions’ (King 2006: 239). Where curators also have a personal connection and passion for popular music, besides a penchant for history and heritage, it can be difficult to separate subjective and objective ideas about the selection of both objects and stories to be used in an exhibition. Alcina Cortez (2015: 315) argues that ‘curator subjectivity’ plays a critical role in the curation of popular music’s past. Our discussions with curators from museums around the world attest to the prevalence of curator subjectivity as an issue for the exhibition of popular music. The interview extract with which we begin this chapter was in response to a question posed to a curator from Australia’s Powerhouse Museum about ‘moral imperatives’ or ‘imperatives of the heart’ in curatorial practice. The curator’s inclusion of Bob Dylan in every exhibition, including those not focused directly on music, is framed as being ‘a tiny little thing’ as opposed to what would be the ‘indulgence’ of having major sections on Bob Dylan in the exhibitions mentioned. However, the cumulative effect of these small inclusions across the museum’s exhibitions is that a canonical rendering of popular music history is

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represented (see Chapter 2). Through repetition and reiteration of an artist that this curator considered to be particularly worthy of remembering, Respondent 6 not only expressed their music preferences but also reinforced the cultural significance of this artist (Baker and Huber 2013a). In the context of the Delta Blues Museum, Stephen King (2006: 239) draws on writers from museum studies including Steven Lavine and Ivan Karp (1991) and Gaynor Kavanagh (1996) to highlight that curatorial practice is constituted by the act of ‘reconstructing and reconstituting the past’ and this act is informed by both the curator’s professional and personal identity. Exhibitions are potentially laden with the curator’s values, as evidenced by the opening extract, and as such, are political spaces in which a ‘particular understanding of the past’ is produced (King 2006: 239–40). For example, in a discussion of French museum practices towards popular music heritage, Philippe Le Guern (2015: 168) observed a degree of ‘ignorance and denial’ by the curators of his study ‘of music and audiences that did not belong to their cultural sphere, and the staging of a prevailing narrative that corresponds to their conception of aesthetics and social affairs’. Le Guern’s observations are in line with the research of Catherine Strong (2011, 2014) and Tracy McMullen (2014) about the misrepresentation, or even the absence of representation, of women in the popular music canon. He further argues, ‘Every exhibition on rock history should lead us to wonder how this history would be re-written if it was produced from a female, black or gay perspective’ (Le Guern 2015: 168). The notion of ‘cultural significance’, which informs the curation of popular music exhibitions, tends to obscure the role and influence of women and ethnic and social minorities in popular music history (see Holt 2007; Stratton 2014). The subjectivity of curators in charge of curating and designing these exhibitions can reinforce such biases. Picking up from the discussion we have developed in Chapter 2 about issues of representation and misrepresentation of certain artists, and in relation to the popular music canon, in this chapter we specifically assess how curators’ subjectivity may influence the curation of exhibitions which demonstrate bias towards certain aspects of popular music’s history.

Popular music, identity and the work of the curator The influence of a curator’s subjectivity on the conception and creation of an exhibition is not unique to popular music museums. However, many of our



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respondents implied a significant level of self-realization through their curatorial practice by highlighting the connection between their work in museums and their background as active participants in music cultures. One respondent recounted how closely connected the identity of music fan and museum curator can be: I was one of those music fans that … I can’t ever remember a time when music wasn’t something that was so important in my life, just critical in my life. Knowing my mother, I know she—I mean there was always a radio on in the house, so I know while she was pregnant we were listening to the music. … I could recognize music that came up before I was born, and have that kind of just visceral connection to it, and I was always a very rabid fan and always kind of a researcher, too. I wasn’t just content to see them on television, I wanted to buy the magazine and read all about [them] … I wanted to know who they were and what made them tick, and my studies in college were all sort of anthropology of popular culture, cultural anthropology related sorts of things and it just never occurred to me that there would be a job that I could do like this … it just, it seemed like destiny. … It made sense for me. (Respondent 9)

Similarly, another respondent spoke of how personal experiences in the Israeli rock scene influenced the curation of an exhibition which sought to represent parts of that scene: Respondent 20: When I was a child and in my youth I was—and all the time, I was listening to rock music. Respondent 15: [Respondent 20 is] a rock person. … Respondent 20: It was, for me personally, a way to go back to my own history, my own biography, because I used to frequent a lot of rock concerts, I was there growing up with the music, so I knew—especially in the ’80s—so it was a way to reconstruct personal memory as well.

These examples describe a sense of personal connection with curatorial work through a passion for music. When curatorial practice is a source of selfrealization or self-satisfaction, a high degree of personal investment often follows. As is the case in other areas of creative labour involving popular music, these kinds of jobs are often articulated as an extension of one’s identity as a ‘music person’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011). Henke (2009), for instance, highlights how many of the employees at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (Rock Hall hereafter) have a background in music journalism. It is their interest and expertise in music in general, and popular music in particular,

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that explains how curators and other museum employees develop an interest for the preservation, curation and narration of popular music in the first place. Curators must therefore balance their personal taste, expertise and knowledge of music, all of which inform their ‘musical identity’, with the potentiality that such experiences may introduce varying levels of bias in the exhibitions they produce. Although we recognize that personal tastes and interests may be bound up in the work of curators working in museums focused on a range of other topics – such as war, natural history and transport histories, among others – there may very well be something unique in how music and identity coalesce in the museums of our study. We argue that the powerful relationship between the two may inform curatorial practice in the popular music museum in particular ways. Mark Slobin (1993: 41), for example, notes that ‘music seems to have an odd quality that even passionate activities like gardening or dog-raising lack: the simultaneous projecting and dissolving of the self in performance’. For Simon Frith (1996: 121, 124), a scholar who has written at length on the relationship between popular music and identity, The experience of pop music is an experience of identity: in responding to a song, we are drawn, haphazardly, into emotional alliances with the performers and with the performers’ other fans. Because of its qualities of abstractness, music is, by nature, an individualizing form. We absorb songs into our own lives and rhythm into our own bodies; they have a looseness of reference that makes them immediately accessible. … Music constructs our sense of identity through the direct experiences it offers of the body, time and sociability, experiences which enable us to place ourselves in imaginative cultural narratives. Such a fusion of imaginative fantasy and bodily practice marks also the integration of aesthetics and ethics.

It is because music is a resource for everyday action (DeNora 2000) – through, for example, the construction and management of personal identity (DeNora 1999) or personal memories and narratives (Istvandity 2014; Nowak 2015) – that the subjectivity of curators necessarily impacts upon their approach to popular music exhibitions. Aesthetics and ethics are here intertwined, where Frith (1996) correlates the thought ‘this sounds good’ with the evaluation ‘this is good’, something which can quickly become the basis for curatorial decisions. The identity of the curator of popular music’s material past and the curator’s aesthetic and ethical judgements are revealed in their decisions of what to



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include and exclude in the exhibitions of their making. The above interview extracts with Respondents 6, 9 and 20 clearly suggest that their background as music fans is a dominant factor in their careers as curators, a role which extends their personal biography as ‘music people’. The influence of personal taste may also affect the development of museum collections (Leonard 2007; Rhys 2011). Marion Leonard and Robert Knifton (2015a: 182–3) note that the collection of ‘geographically demarcated popular music objects’ in UK museums ‘often heavily relied on the personal connections fostered by museum professionals, meaning that their own interests could be over-represented in some instances’. This is perhaps particularly the case for the micromuseums of our study which emerge from the vision of one person. KD’s Elvis Presley Museum, for example, predominantly reflects the period of Elvis’s life which coincides with the founder’s peak fandom. At the time of the interview, he had been collecting Elvis memorabilia for fifty-two years: I started when I was thirteen, fourteen. … I love—it’s not Elvis in the white jump suit, because I am not a 100 per cent Elvis fan. I am [a fan of] the era. … I grew up a teenager in the ’50s and ’60s. … [My first item in the collection] was a gift in 1959, [a record] and that’s how it all kicked off. (Respondent 22)

The museum celebrated the early and mid-career stages of Elvis Presley because these periods resonated strongly with the founder’s engagement with the rock and roll scene in New Zealand – prior to Elvis’s later work in the 1970s. This example demonstrates not only the importance of vernacular knowledge in the preservation of popular music heritage (Baker 2017) but also the sometimes partial representations of history that can result. Over-representation of an individual’s interest was also evident in the collections of much larger museums. In these institutions, curators had access to a more substantial collection of objects, and therefore potential themes and structuring points to choose from, perhaps even further enabling biases to creep in. The curator from the Powerhouse Museum, whose words began this chapter, also mentioned how personal tastes can influence collecting practice: I remain utterly fascinated by Lee Gordon and the Sydney Stadium, and there’s not much left from those events other than the concert programmes, and we have a collection and I’m determined to make that as complete as possible, and that’s probably more due to my personal obsession than to their overall significance; however, I think they are highly significant. (Respondent 6)

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‘Personal obsession’ was perhaps most evident at the Experience Music Project, the founding of which was driven by one individual, Paul Allen. As a curator from the museum observed, So the genesis for EMP was Paul Allen. [He] grew up in Seattle, was a huge Jimi Hendrix fan, [and] when he started to make a little bit of money, he bought a number of things that belonged to Jimi Hendrix. He bought a jacket and a hat from Christie’s Auction. When they came to him, he got really excited and thought, ‘wouldn’t it be great if there was a Jimi Hendrix museum?’ He saw Jimi Hendrix as one of the most creative and innovative artists of all time. So the original idea was going to be a 10,000 square foot museum in an existing building, just focusing on Hendrix. … And it was one of these things where he had this vision of what he wanted to do, and there was a fairly small team that was helping carry out that vision. (Respondent 5)

Over time, the Experience Music Project developed a broader mission to exhibit all forms of popular culture, to the point that it changed its name in 2016 to Museum of Pop Culture. However, Allen’s obsession with Jimi Hendrix continued to be felt in the museum’s collection and displays, as well as in the original architecture of the building in which it is housed (see Adelt 2017; Bruce 2006; Reising 2001). The contribution of Hendrix to the development of popular music is permanently represented within changing exhibitions focused on different aspects of the musician’s life and career. His ongoing presence in the museum is made possible by a collection of over 6,000 Hendrix-related artefacts – a collection that also represents the identity of Paul Allen as a fan and collector. Though curator subjectivity may be borne of personal predilections that prefaced a career in the cultural sector, their impact on exhibitions can remain problematic due to the needs of both the museum and its visitors. Certainly, the idea of curating is to arrange objects or stories in a particular manner; however, curators should consider carefully the impact of their own subjectivities on the stories within exhibitions. At the same time, and as we will explore further, visitors have expectations of the museum, in terms of both factual narratives and use of forms of contemporary engagement. It would seem curators in our interviews were aware of the ways their personal taste had shaped their work in the past, though perhaps were not concerned with the effects of such processes in the broader scheme of popular music history. Nevertheless, curators attempted to contain their own subjectivity, and how it impacts upon the shape and/or message of popular music exhibitions.



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Managing bias: Keeping curatorial subjectivity in check Cortez (2015) argues that curatorial subjectivity is problematic in the ways that it can come to influence the structure of popular music exhibitions. When the aesthetic and ethic judgements of the curator as music fan come into play, collections and resulting exhibitions provide ‘only a partial understanding of popular music’ which reflects the curator’s personal taste and self-identity (Cortez 2015: 317). Additionally, Cortez (2017: 382) argues elsewhere that the ‘danger’ in such practice is that the way in which curatorial subjectivity informs exhibitions of popular music is hidden from visitors. Such dangers can be evidenced in some descriptions of curatorial processes – for example, when Respondent 9 said, ‘To be frank, if it’s something that I like, would like to have in the museum, then I’ll ask for it’. The personal taste behind curatorial decisions is masked by what Mieke Bal (2011: 530) describes as the ‘grammatical figure of the third person’. Exhibition catalogues and interpretive text panels written in third person present a definitive narrative of popular music history for the visitor, effectively disguising ‘who’ is telling this story and the decisions that led to the use of a particular narrative. To this end, Cortez (2017: 382) states that ‘the “side-effect” of the curator’s masking of personal taste is that museum-goers are confined in their assessment of an exhibition … to a particular ideological and canonical stance, one grounded in the subjectivity of the curator but never acknowledged as being so’. She calls for renewed protocols to ease the tension she perceives between curator and ‘truth’: I would also advocate the view that guardians of specific canons must wilfully [sic] disclose themselves by means of applying the grammatical figure of the first person, alongside an explanation of their own criteria for museumgoers to freely adopt or refute the respective perspective. Otherwise, exhibitions end up as monological discourses revolving around the visitor’s reverence of the curator’s set of ‘truths’ – and this falls out of line with contemporary museum purposes and assumptions. (Cortez 2017: 386)

At the very least, Cortez (2015: 317) seeks for those working in popular music museums to ‘manage their curatorial reflections and gestures’ and observes that overcoming the influence of curatorial subjectivity ‘represents the most sensitive challenge and significant commitment’ popular music museums need to undertake.

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Curators in our sample deployed a variety of strategies to curb the influence of their own subjectivity on exhibition content. For instance, the curator of the Experience Music Project told us they managed the potential effects of curatorial subjectivity on visitors through the incorporation of oral histories within exhibitions. Referring specifically to the Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibition, a curator noted the following: Part of what we’ve always tried to do with the oral history is seek to have multiple voices telling the story. So it doesn’t just feel like there’s a curator who’s telling you this is how grunge happened. It’s—these are people who were on the scene, whether they were touring or they were musicians or they were promoters, so you can hear first-hand from them how they think it developed. And that’s really been something we try and do in pretty much every exhibit. (Respondent 5)

Providing visitors with opportunities to hear various agents recount the history of a scene was understood by this curator as limiting the authority of the curatorial voice. Curators’ subjectivity may still be present; however, it is superseded by the inclusion of other elements in the narrative of the exhibition, which provide visitors with different viewpoints. Of course, oral histories, in the form of full or partial recordings, are themselves selected and curated. Nonetheless, the inclusion of oral histories indicated an awareness on the part of this curator of the need to lessen any bias that might inadvertently creep into exhibitions due to curatorial subjectivity. Indeed, many of our respondents were highly reflective on how curatorial subjectivity influenced their practice and the potential bias it introduced into the exhibitions they curated. For example, Respondent 6 may have incorporated some Bob Dylan-related content in all exhibitions, but they were also cognizant that the extent to which curatorial subjectivity played a role in their work had shifted over time: So in terms of how [a love of Bob Dylan, David Bowie and T-Rex and pop music from the late ’60s and into the ’70s] impacts on my curatorial practice is—I’d say in the Real Wild Child! days there was so much that was centred on those periods that I had experience of, that I guess I had certain knowledge of it. But I would hope that in more recent times I’m professional enough not to let those kind of biases dictate what I do or how I do it. So we did this exhibition The 80s Are Back. Now, youth culture in the ’80s was an anathema to me, I just despised it. I took no part in dance parties; I didn’t take cocaine or ecstasy. I had my own likes and I liked pub rock – that died out. So we’ve put together this exhibition



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about the youth culture of the ’80s and it’s not me, it’s nothing to do with me and it was the subject of study that I learnt about. I had no experience of rap parties, I just had to go and learn about it as you would research any kind of historical subject that’s not part of your life. (Respondent 6)

Likewise, another respondent observed that a curator must be open to the inclusion of a broad spectrum of artists, ‘stylistically speaking’: I may not like artist X but if he or she is selling millions of records and packing stadiums then it’s incumbent upon me to ask what are they doing that is getting through to people. (Respondent 7)

Though subjective viewpoints of curators can creep into exhibitions through the selection of discourses and objects, there are a range of other circumstantial factors that can mitigate both this activity itself and the degree to which it is comprehended by visitors.

Team-based approaches and multiple personal principles Some popular music museums favour a team-based approach to the curation of exhibitions. In contrast to the directive of a sole curator, a team-based approach to exhibition development, design and curation ensures that multiple ‘personal principles’ (or multiple opinions) are brought to bear in the display of popular music’s past. Numerous interviewees emphasized that in the curation of exhibitions in their institution, multiple museum worker subjectivities came to be represented. At the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, for example, museum professionals ‘all work together on exhibits. Early on there would typically be some meetings involving what the exhibit themes ought to be, how should it be or could it be organized’ (Respondent 7). A similar process of collaboration was described by Respondent 8 in regard to a hall of fame that was in development at the time of the interview: The first phase is, beyond the concept of idea, once we put funding in place, we then put on our team and we go through a vision planning phase and we go ‘okay, this is what the idea is, how now do we try and tell the story?’ (Respondent 8)

Although, as indicated in Chapter 2, it was the dogged determination of one curator that instigated an exhibition about female artists showcased in the Rock Hall, the Women Who Rock exhibition subsequently involved a highly consultative process that engaged a range of staff:

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Beginning with Women Who Rock, this was the first time that [the curatorial department] actually sat down with other departments. … We sat down with someone from development, from marketing, from education, especially education, to figure out what, how we’re going to do this as a museum as opposed to the curatorial department saying ‘here’s your exhibit, you sell it, you make classes about it’… I think it’s still to our advantage to involve the other departments—I think it makes for a better exhibit. (Respondent 9)

In these ways, the curator’s subjectivity becomes the curators’ subjectivities, or even the collective of museum professionals’ subjectivities. The curation of exhibitions is a complex process involving multiple people, principles and perspectives. While many may share similar aesthetic and ethic judgements, it is also likely that differing personal tastes and obsessions will introduce robust debates as to which stories should be included and how those stories should be told. The respondent from the Rock Hall described the collaborative decision making undertaken for Women Who Rock as producing ‘one voice’: Respondent 9: Because, I mean, on one hand, it’s difficult for us because we’ve never really done it that way before and it’s hard to concede power, and there’s a certain aspect of too many cooks sometimes … in some ways it’d be so much easier just [to have the curatorial team making the decisions] because we know how to work together, and we know—I know when to back down … and maybe somebody from the education department is like, ‘no, I want—can you do it this way’. But even with all that, I think it’s still to our advantage to involve the other departments, I think it makes for a better exhibit. I think, and as I said before, it’s like speaking with one voice instead of us sort of driving the bus and everybody sort of running behind us. Interviewer: The others playing ‘catch up’. Do you think this is a model that will go forward? Respondent 9: I hope so, it’s hard to say. A lot of it has to do with ego and conceding power, which is hard. But I think now that the door has been opened, I don’t think [you] can get the genie back in the bottle.

The team-based approach to the curation and design of popular music exhibition suggests that different angles can be represented, and different subjectivities can be covered, even in a single narrative. Despite the challenges it presents in terms of people’s ego and issues of power, drawing on inputs from a team ensures that curatorial choices can be tested in relation to different subjectivities.



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The team-based approach to exhibitions was also evident in the micromuseums of the study, in which volunteers had received no professional training in curation or museum management, and who often worked across different tasks collaboratively. At the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame, for example, the volunteer who held the title of ‘Curator’ described the importance of drawing on the input of other people involved in the organization: I do discuss [exhibitions] particularly with the lady who does a lot of the collection … so we’ve got to take a look to see where we can get a nice story from [objects] to put together [a display] … I do discuss it with the board members and with the other volunteers, because it’s not something you can do by yourself, you have to have help when you’re doing it. (Respondent 19)

Another volunteer, this time with the title ‘Archivist’, followed Respondent 19’s comment by explaining that volunteers’ ‘duties are not only in [the] area’ related to their label of, for example, curator or archivist. So while ‘larger museums’ have a team of curators, ‘the practical side’ of the do-it-yourself heritage institution is that, regardless of one’s title being ‘a curator in charge of exhibitions’, they will also need to attend to other aspects of the institution that would not conventionally be part of a curator’s duties (Respondent 18). A collaborative approach was also evident at PopMuseum, with a team of volunteers contributing to decisions around exhibitions: Respondent 25: Me and [two other volunteers], we are thinking about exhibitions in this pop museum and make it, make the exhibitions, new exhibitions. And this is our work. Respondent 26: So they are the main brains for establishing exhibitions. When we do plan, we usually are together and we are thinking what subjects will be first, what second and so on. But the particular set up of the exhibition is usually [the two other volunteers and Respondent 25].

Though the personal principles of curators might inform the starting point for the stories told in an exhibition, the challenges faced by curators in bringing together the elements needed to tell those stories will necessarily result in any guiding personal principles being negotiated and contested through engagement with others. Of course, this does not always mean that other ways of telling stories or constructing narratives will be incorporated. Another volunteer at the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame made a distinction between the value of exhibition ideas presented by volunteers who were active fans of country music, and those who did not have a strong connection to the genre:

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Well [Respondent 18 and 19] know all the [artists] … they know them and their music, so there’s that strong, you know, sort of link. Whereas I don’t. I mean I—I’d like us to have an exhibition out there about guitars—and the way I see it—I’d like to see that sponsored by Fender or somebody, you know, that’s totally different to what you’ve got out there at the moment, and it’s just a different perspective, and I think it’s because I don’t—you know, I’ve met some of the [country music artists], they’re lovely, but I don’t—two of the loveliest people I’ve met are Smoky Dawson and his wife—absolutely wonderful, and that’s good – but to me they were people. Because I wasn’t just—you know, they were performers and people, but for, say [Respondent 18 and 19]—but I saw them primarily as people. (Respondent 20)

The range of different subjectivities constructing the narrative of an exhibition helps control the quality of storytelling, and ensures there is a sufficient amount of musical expertise. The issue of relying on the subjectivity of ‘music people’ to develop exhibitions also has its advantages, where those who may be close to music artists can draw upon specific knowledge and even provide artist or industry contacts. Teams work within institutional bounds so as to keep curatorial subjectivities and creative freedom in check. As the curator from the Powerhouse Museum explained, authorities within museum management must be convinced that the team of designers and curators have a solid idea before an exhibition can go ahead: Interviewer: So where do the themes and ideas come from? Respondent 6: Well, I guess that’s where a curator gets to have an element of creative freedom, and when I say freedom—if you’re working in an institution as I am, it has the drawback that you’re bound by the institution, so you don’t have freedom in that sense, but the advantage is you have all these resources at your disposal. Once you convince the powers that be that your idea and your approach to that idea is going to be okay and you get the go ahead, then you’ve got these incredible resources to do it.

Checks and balances occur throughout the curatorial process, adding varying perspective on the way stories get told in an exhibition. For example, the respondent from the Powerhouse Museum went on to provide substantial detail about the creation of the written labels that accompany exhibits. The first copy is written by the curator, but the display labels are then edited by other museum professionals to produce something that will resonate with visitors:



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So the labels are drafted by me and edited, and this is where, as I said, we’ve got this luxury of having these people on the team, but the stuff I write gets edited. … We’ve got fantastic editors because, as you would know, a visitor to an exhibition has only a certain amount of time to read stuff and it’s a particular discipline to tell your story in as few words as possible. … And to me it’s the most fun part of the whole exhibition development process, because it happens fairly late in the day, usually about two or three months before opening, and by that time you’ve just done so much research. You’ve got all this information around you, if you’ve done your research properly you’ve got a wealth of resource to pull together when you’re writing that label about whatever it is—you just—‘Oh I’ve got that and I’ve got that’, bang, bang, bang and you just distil it and it’s very satisfying. Then the editor kind of tweaks it. Often stuff gets cut that you wouldn’t have wanted cut but you have to be realistic about it and the editors have a really good sense of the visitor. They’re kind of advocates for the visitor really, and I really am very grateful for what they do to the stuff I write. (Respondent 6)

Labels are a significant component that guides visitors’ interpretation of individual objects or displays and the overall discourse of the exhibition. As suggested earlier, however, the use of third person in labels can disguise the narrator (Bal 2011) while maintaining an authority which could be problematic. Here, though, Respondent 6 outlined the moderation processes within a team that worked to ensure the needs of typical visitors were met by this textual aspect.

Reflecting upon and including visitors’ subjectivities in exhibitions Another strategy adopted by curators to limit the impact of their own subjectivity, as well as to increase the interest of popular music exhibitions to visitors, is to draw on the input of visitors’ memories and experiences of popular music. When our interviewees discussed the problem of subjectivity in their practice, it was in relation to the potential of the aesthetic judgements of the curator leading to narratives that may not resonate with visitors. A number of the curators emphasized that the stories told in popular music museums must connect with the recollections of visitors and so, by necessity, curatorial subjectivity often needs to be set aside: If I tell you this is the story, you’re going to say, ‘no, that’s not the story. That’s not how I remember it. That’s not how I connected to it.’ So we have to make sure we’re cognizant of that. (Respondent 13)

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That is not to say that curator subjectivities and personal principles are not part of these stories, but rather that these come to be represented in ways that have collective resonance. As Respondent 14 stated, ‘I think that’s very important for a public institution to be able to make that sort of offer.’ Some curators from our sample were very active in the way they included visitors’ subjectivity in the curation and design of popular music exhibitions. For example, at Georgia Music Hall of Fame, the curator sought to collect the feedback of visitors: Interviewer: So how were decisions made about the special exhibitions? Were they more artist-based, or …? Respondent 1: Most of the time they were artist-based, sometimes they were genre-based. And a lot of times we tried to connect them to a milestone. Twenty-five Years of Athens Music, or Let Freedom Sing, which was a look at music in the civil rights movement, and then we did a Gram Parsons exhibit. So it was a little bit of both, and generally came about with discussion between the director and curator and the staff, and often audience input: ‘We would love to see you do an exhibit [on]’, or you get to know what parts of the museum that visitors gravitate to and that you might want to tell a little bit deeper version of that story. Interviewer: And so does some of that come through, like the book that visitors write in at the end of their visit, is that where some of that audience kind of input was coming from? Respondent 1: Well, that and also we always have wonderful front desk staff, so we tried to be really in tune with what the audience responded to.

Here, the feedback from visitors made its way back to curatorial staff, informing future exhibition themes and accentuating the effective nature of informal feedback facilities for visitors. Other institutions deployed strategies that directly incorporated the personal experiences of the visitor into exhibitions by using technologies that recorded and archived their stories, as in the example of the Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibition at the Experience Music Project: Interviewer: In that Nirvana exhibit, you’ve got the wall where people can write to add to the kind of family tree of Seattle music, and then there’s also the booth you can go in to talk about. … So yeah, you’ve got the wall, where you can add to that. Respondent 5: Seattle Band Map. Interviewer: Seattle Band Map. And then there’s the booth you can go in and give your own Nirvana story. Is that unique to the Nirvana exhibit? Or have you used those sorts of tools before?



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Respondent 5: Yeah, we tried to refine it. So the first time, we used it in the back of Sound and Vision, we have what’s called the personal history booth, and it’s really that idea – we were pretty inspired by StoryCorps, which I don’t know if you know about, but National Public Radio’s the thing, and I just – it’s so powerful, and I realized there’s a reason that works and ours doesn’t, but the idea was to do something like that where visitors could, after hearing all these other people tell stories, could go in and share their own stories. And the idea was, they could do it, it would be played. And then when we were talking about Nirvana we were saying we really want to get other people’s stories, the fans, or people who aren’t included in the exhibit, to have them tell. … So we tried to refine it. And we did. It works better. So the idea is that you can come in and tell your story, it immediately plays. It stays in the queue for, I think, a day or two. And then it gets pushed out as more come in. And it really felt like it was important to get the fans’ point of view. And that’s what we were trying to do. It’s tricky, because it’s in a space that’s not easy to find, so guiding people in there [is key].

Rather than incorporating feedback on the exhibition itself, this process worked to reveal the experiences and reflections of visitors on the topic at hand. In so doing, the curators were inciting and then drawing upon the collective memory of those for whom Nirvana was particularly important. This element was crucial in enhancing the relatability of the exhibition to the everyday life of visitors – by using the descriptions, but also the voices, of visitors, curators enabled a neardirect sharing of thoughts and feelings between visitors. Considering the emphasis on narratives in popular music exhibitions (see Chapter 6) and the importance of bringing people through the museums’ doors (see Chapter 3), the trend of using visitor memories in situ is likely to further develop across heritage institutions. Continuing with the example of Respondent 5, the main challenge that they faced to implement such a strategy lay in the technologies required to record visitor stories: Respondent 5: We’ve been talking about this too, as curators – just so many people come here with some sort of expertise, and they want to – when they’re with their friends, they want to share that expertise. And how do you capture that information? How do you feel like you can share, and it’s not just talking, but you can say, ‘I’m adding to something’. And honestly, we haven’t found a great way to do it yet. And the thing I realized about StoryCorps that works so well, is you have to make an appointment, and you have to go with somebody else. So, it’s like, I want to ask my grandma these questions, and I’ve got a date with her, and it’s going to be recorded, we both get a copy, but I want to have

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good questions, because if we’re going to go through all this trouble, I want to be ready. And when you talk to a camera, it just naturally makes you selfconscious unless you’re a TV broadcaster. So it’s not a normal way of telling a story. And then you get no feedback. You sent it into the ether, and then you’re self-conscious about do I look okay, and [am] I looking at the camera the right way, so we still haven’t found a good solution for it. I like the idea of it. But I’m not sure it works that well yet. Interviewer: So the—what gets recorded by the fans who go into these booths, is that then being kept, is that added to some collection? Respondent 5: Well, originally in the personal history booth, yes. And then we met with [the] technology [people] about it, and the thing we struggled with was each video at two minutes was something like 20 megs and to save it was just like, we don’t have enough storage space. And that’s where we made this tough decision of, okay, it’s going to be ephemeral, it’s going to be up there for a day and a half. But having said that, that’s what we thought, that’s what was happening, and then it turned out they were being saved, so we actually had an intern who worked on the project go through them and cull out the best ones so we could save those. And they can be sort of the evergreen ones that can run intermittently.

Involving the subjectivities of museum visitors increases the diversity of stories that are told about popular music histories and mitigates some of the issues associated with curatorial subjectivity, especially those outlined by Cortez. Moreover, by involving visitors into the curation of popular music exhibitions’ narratives, there is an acknowledgement that visitors are themselves ‘music people’, or even ‘amateur experts’ (Baym and Burnett 2009; see Chapter 6), and who possess a knowledge and expertise in the music that is put on display. Visitors are therefore invited to participate in the preservation of popular music heritage through the collecting and sharing of their cultural memory.

Concluding thoughts As we have explored in this chapter, the personal opinions and subjectivities of curators can influence the structure of an exhibition and likewise affect the way popular music histories might be perceived by visitors. Though some scholars, such as Cortez, have argued for the complete removal of curatorial subjectivity, we have highlighted that how curatorial subjectivity operates in the context of popular music exhibitions is far from straightforward. Certainly,



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curators and museum authorities are highly aware of the impact of curatorial subjectivity on exhibitions and in many institutions have taken steps to ensure a variety of perspectives and communication strategies are used to mitigate bias. Furthermore, with increasing access to technology, some museums, such as Experience Music Project, are able to intertwine curatorial and visitor standpoints within exhibitions. Adding to the complexity of the matter is the nature of popular music and its heritage. With strong ties to the activities of everyday life, it is highly likely that curators have formed personal opinions about the dominant stories of popular music history and may also have personal tastes that align closely with their values and self-identity. These factors, combined with the contexts of working with heritage material that could be personally meaningful, can make the elimination of bias that results from curatorial subjectivity somewhat difficult. Certainly, some sense of what ‘belongs’ and what does not can be enhanced by accumulated music history knowledge, which can in turn produce a much richer and dynamic exhibition. To this end, we suggest that curatorial subjectivity is observed as an existing structuring concept in music museums, but one which should be treated with care and tempered in appropriate ways within institutional boundaries such as team-based approaches to curation and providing space within exhibitions for the voices of amateur experts.

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And people look at it and say ‘Oh gosh!’—it might’ve been an old Gene Autry or a Roy Rogers—and say ‘I had that when I was a kid’. It jogs a lot of people’s memories when they see these things. (Respondent 27, Hector Country Music Heritage Museum) The concept of nostalgia is used widely to describe a feeling of longing for the past. As such, it is connected to memory in that it involves the recollection of the past, and to affect in the feelings evoked by remembrance. The above extract from the curator of a micromuseum in New Zealand indicates that nostalgia (‘I had that when I was a kid’), memory (‘It jogs a lot of people’s memories’) and affect (‘Oh gosh’) may shape the curation of popular music exhibitions. As a structuring concept, nostalgia might even be understood as the engine that drives the narrative approach to the display of popular music’s past. As Sean Street (2015: 80) notes in relation to the memory of sound, ‘Nostalgia is a fundamental part of what makes us want to remember and is linked to the desire to retain and tell our stories.’ In the context of the museum, nostalgia serves to not only bring visitors through the doors but also ensure that these visitors will find personal connections with objects on display. At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (Rock Hall hereafter), for example, it is recognized that many visitors are motivated by nostalgia because they have ‘lived the music and loved it’ and therefore consider themselves to be ‘a vital part of this history’ on display, a ‘“living-history” extension’ of the exhibitions which connect to, and ‘validate’, their past (Santelli 1999: 241). Nostalgia is a distinct form of memory work that has a long history of alternative understandings. Drawing on the writing of Raymond Williams (1977), Stuart Tannock (1995: 454) sees nostalgia as a ‘structure of feelings’ that ‘invokes a positively evaluated past world in response to a deficient present’. We might then understand nostalgia to be a structuring

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concept that works to animate practices of popular music heritage by ‘allowing visitors to actively relate their own biographical experiences’ to exhibitions (van der Hoeven 2018: 215). In the field of heritage studies, nostalgia has traditionally been understood as a troublesome concept. Gary Campbell, Laurajane Smith and Margaret Wetherell (2017: 609) write that nostalgia has often been ‘denounced for facilitating a reactionary heritage politics’ and has also been avoided as a way to frame heritage due to it being considered ‘inaccurate when curated as a portrayal of the past and unhelpful and sentimental as an emotion’. In the context of small historical museums, for example, Amy Levin (2007: 93) argues that ‘nostalgia may be considered a kind of epistemology’. It ‘structures the way knowledge is imparted by museum narratives’ with curators endowing ‘certain positive aspects of the past … with importance as truths’ while denying or ignoring aspects of the past that ‘do not fit into this worldview’ (Levin 2007: 93–4). Nostalgia has been regarded as problematic in that it can romanticize the past. In the case of popular music, for example, cultural critic Simon Reynolds (2011: xxiii) views nostalgia as ‘the bittersweet longing pop feels for its own lost golden age’, with the music industry’s propensity for what he calls ‘retromania’ rendering popular music’s present fixated on its past. Curators in popular music museums sometimes make a concerted attempt to remove the extent to which nostalgia can be experienced in an exhibition. This distancing is evident in Bob Santelli’s (1999: 242) account of the early days of the Rock Hall: ‘One of the Rock Hall’s initial exhibition strategies not only challenged the intrusion of nostalgia but sought to deconstruct notions of identity that might lead to nostalgic diversions at the expense of the significance of the artifacts on display.’ For Santelli (1999: 243), nostalgia was something to be kept ‘in check’ in curatorial practice. This is consistent with Campbell, Smith and Wetherell’s (2017: 609) observation that ‘museum professionals have traditionally avoided invoking or engaging with “nostalgic” emotions’ in exhibitionary practice. On the other hand, Andreas Huyssen (1995: 88) boldly declares the negative connotations of nostalgia can be set aside, that ‘we do not need to abide by that judgement’. Scholars writing about music and popular music museums have argued for a readjustment in the reading of nostalgia. Marion Leonard and Robert Knifton (2015b: 161), for example, note nostalgia can be ‘an important curatorial tool’ which fosters visitors’ ‘historical understanding’ and ‘appreciation for the social dimensions’ of popular music’s past. Similarly, Christian Hviid Mortensen and Jacob Westergaard Madsen (2015: 251) posit



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nostalgia as ‘an interpretive strategy for exhibiting pop/rock heritage’ concerned with ‘designing a “space for the revisit of time”’. They argue that, as a ‘positive and longing disposition towards the past’, nostalgia acts as an ‘affective trigger’ in the display of popular music’s past and can provide ‘a common emotional ground’ for the reception of exhibitions (Mortensen and Madsen 2015: 251–2, 260). These scholars acknowledge that the ‘romanticising effect of nostalgia on the past’ can be problematic, but argue that a more nuanced understanding of nostalgia can salvage its potential as a structuring concept of curatorial practice in popular music museums (Mortensen and Madsen 2015: 251). The purpose of this chapter is to highlight how curators draw upon nostalgia as a tool of curatorial practice which can activate visitor memories and affective responses to the material culture on display.

Nostalgia as affect In a discussion of the recreated space of Studio A at the Stax Museum of American Soul, Charles Fairchild (2018: 486, emphasis added) describes the evocative display of five instruments connected to Booker T. and the MGs: They are all tucked snugly in their own vitrines. … When you look closely at the instruments, you can see the occasional telltale signs of wear and tear on some of them. The polish on Wayne Jackson’s trumpet is slightly worn and there are still hints of dust and rust inside Booker T. Jones’ Hammond M-3 organ. Despite crisp new heads on Al Jackson Jr’s drum kit, these instruments collectively add a sense of lived experience to the nostalgic vibrancy of the studio.

While Fairchild does not elaborate on the notion of ‘nostalgic vibrancy’, the term neatly captures the affective atmosphere of so many popular music museums. For Ben Anderson (2009: 78), ‘atmospheres are the shared ground from which subjective states and their attendant feelings and emotions emerge’, with affect ‘a consequence of the interactions that occur between bodies, objects and materials’ in place (Conradson and Latham 2007: 235). The extent to which the atmosphere of a popular music museum might be experienced as affective depends on the visitor’s angle of arrival (Ahmed 2010), which is expected to some degree due to the affect-laden nature of popular music (Bourdieu 1993). In the context of a museum, the affective qualities of popular music culture offer ‘a way to imagine what is going on between the material world of objects and

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the physical and emotional world of people’ (Baker 2015: 47) – one such affect is that of nostalgia. Affect is more than emotion, more than feeling. Affect ‘broadly refers to states of being’ (Hemmings 2005: 551) and can be conceptualized as practice. For Margaret Wetherell (2012: 4), ‘Affective practice focuses on the emotional as it appears in social life and tries to follow what participants do.’ Nostalgia can be understood ‘as an “active” affective practice, where sentiments and feelings are recruited and mobilized in the present to do “work” for personal, social, cultural and political reasons’ (Campbell, Smith and Wetherell 2017: 609). Nostalgia is ‘a way of being moved’, a motivating affect which prompts thinking and feeling about the past (Campbell, Smith and Wetherell 2017: 609). Affect is also relational, and so nostalgia as an affective practice finds resonance in ‘social relations, personal histories, and ways of life’ in the very moment that bodily responses to an encounter with an object or objects on display ‘get patterned together with feelings and thoughts, interaction patterns and relationships, narratives and interpretive repertoires’ (Wetherell 2012: 13–14). As such, when considering nostalgia as a structuring concept of curatorial practice, it should not be regarded as ‘a “thing” imbedded in or on material objects’ assembled by curators in an exhibition (Sather-Wagstaff 2015: 195). Rather, the objects selected by curators to illustrate popular music’s past act as the ‘material traces’ (Sather-Wagstaff 2015: 195) that trigger nostalgia and activate affective practice. Take, for example, the following comment from the curator at the Powerhouse Museum: If you display an object like Russell Morris’s gold record for ‘The Real Thing’, inherently in its own empirical existence it can’t speak to you and it has no objective significance. Its significance is what the visitors’ project onto it from their memory. So the kind of museum experience or any kind of knowledge that’s gained is a result of the visitor interacting with the object, not just the object sitting there with a little label that the curator’s written. People bring their own memories and project their own emotions onto the content and come away with something far richer than anything that’s inherent to the empirical quality of the object. So we’re keepers of memories, but we’re also triggers of memories that people bring along. (Respondent 6)

The objects that are selected for display in the exhibitions about popular music at the Powerhouse Museum are viewed as having affective rather than objective significance. The object triggers memories which work to produce the exhibition as affective. This affect may not always be linked to nostalgia by our respondents,



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but was often spoken about in ways that might be captured by an understanding of nostalgic affect as it has been laid out so far in this chapter. For Göran Bolin (2016: 251), nostalgia operates as ‘a specific form of passion, directed towards past passionate moments, or at least past moments of significance in a person’s life course’. The consumption of popular music, its genres, technologies and performers, often involves a sense of being ‘passionately engaged’ through fandom (Bolin 2016: 251). Fandom involves what Lawrence Grossberg (1992: 85) might call ‘affective investment’: ‘An affective investment in certain practices always returns some interest through a variety of empowering relations: by producing further energy … ; by placing people in a position from which they feel they have a certain control over their (affective) life; or by reaffirming the feeling that one is still alive and that this matters.’ In the popular music museums of our study, visitors’ affective investments in music were harnessed through attempts to build nostalgic triggers into exhibitions. A number of curators described their desire to speak to the fan experience: The people who were in Macon and Atlanta in the 1970s and huge fans during the southern rock era, they’re still around, and they’re in their sixties, and then the people who were in Athens during REM and Pylon, B-52s era, they’re now in their late forties and fifties, so even though the audience ages, they still love music. And I think they’re … still nostalgic about those early bands. (Respondent 1) We’re looking at this almost from the standpoint of how does a fan experience music, because going back to that point, your personal experience is so passionate and so strong as a fan, most—mine is too. So is the next person, so is the next person. So we design exhibits to where it takes you back, it almost removes you from where you are today, and puts you back in that place. (Respondent 13)

Nostalgia is a powerful tool for curators in popular music museums because the strength of visitors’ collective feelings for aspects of popular music’s past – passions and affective investments which often extend into the present – can be so readily activated with the objects, sounds and stories of popular music cultures: So that’s always something I bear in mind, is the responsibility to the public who feel a strong sense of connection to these stories, songs, films, TV shows, whatever it is you’re talking about. People feel strongly about them, especially [because], as you know, people maintain a very strong affection for the culture of their youth and it stays with them all their life, that particular period when they’re in their teens and maybe early twenties. (Respondent 6)

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As an affective practice, nostalgia is much more than a feeling of longing. It is understood by curators as having the capacity to transport the visitor back to their youth by way of a ‘strong affection’ for, and investment in, music that continues to exist in the present. The past and the present intermingle, making nostalgia a highly nuanced structuring concept for the curation of popular music in the museum.

Nostalgia as memory work Nostalgia, as both affective practice and curatorial tool, involves memory work. For Christina Hodge (2011: 118, 120), nostalgia is ‘a key structuring logic of memory work at heritage sites’ because as ‘a material/emotional discourse, nostalgia is directly involved in memory-making and the values of heritage’. We draw here on Annette Kuhn’s (2000: 186) definition of memory work as a way to advance an understanding of how curators stage memory for their prospective visitors: ‘Memory work’: an active practice of remembering which takes an inquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re)construction through memory. Memory work undercuts assumptions about the transparency or the authenticity of what is remembered, treating it not as ‘truth’ but as evidence of a particular sort: material for interpretation, to be interrogated, mined for its meanings and its possibilities. Memory work is a conscious and purposeful staging of memory.

While Kuhn’s definition emerges from her own memory work undertaken while writing a book that drew on personal memories, her definition translates well to how curators produce exhibitions that will be conducive to the memory work of visitors. Charles Bergengren (1999: 549) observes of the Rock Hall that visitors are attracted to museums of popular music not because they want to be educated about the ‘historical innovation’ in music’s development, but rather to experience ‘the known’, to ‘“groove” together in recognition of the familiar, our shared tradition of the pulse, our memories’ – that is, to engage in memory work and to experience its related affects. Russell Reising (2001: 490) describes the exhibitionary approaches of the Rock Hall and Experience Music Project as offering opportunities for visitors to undertake memory work by way of an emphasis on remembrance and reminiscence: ‘The Rock Hall enables, requires



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actually, visitors to cast themselves imaginatively back into the world of rock and roll objects, while the EMP empowers its guests to enter into sustained dialogues, reminiscences, and debates with its own magnificent collection.’ As Leonard and Knifton (2015b: 171) argue, ‘What is at stake for the [popular music] museum is how to work with such emotion, memory and nostalgia in the presentation of historical materials so that cultural heritage is made meaningful in the present’ (see also Leonard 2010). By creating exhibitions which produce opportunities for remembrance and reminiscence, curators set the stage for nostalgic memory work. Being attuned to visitors’ prospective memories and a desire to help facilitate the recall of past experiences was a common theme in interviews with curators. Memory work was understood by curators to encompass both the personal and collective. The respondent from the National Museum of African American Music highlighted how visitors share very similar memories of engaging with music: As I talk to folks, especially throughout the South, I have found that people – regardless of their socio-economic background, religious background, race, gender, it doesn’t matter – they all tell me the same stories. They all have memories, especially if they’re within a certain age range. There was one radio station which broadcast over, I think it was twenty different countries, and all the southern states and all the Caribbean nations. And people always tell me the same stories, they remember laying in their bed, listening to this music. (Respondent 13)

For the curator from Arts Centre Melbourne, a guiding principle in the construction of popular music exhibitions was the privileging of narratives that will encourage visitors’ personal engagement with stories that are based on or resonate with common experiences: Everybody has an experience of going to a concert, buying a record, and because of that, those exhibitions have a lot of meaning for people who come and see them. I think that’s very important for a public institution to be able to make that sort of offer. … One visitor said, ‘Oh, look, I remember that concert at the Bowl. I have never forgotten it. It changed my life.’ People, when you do public programmes, really engage with you on that level and for me that’s really what it’s all about, hearing their stories. You realize what memories those performing arts experiences hold for people. ‘I’ve never forgotten it’, she said, ‘never’. (Respondent 14)

To create these kinds of experiences within exhibitions, where visitors become affected by nostalgic vibrancy, declaring ‘Oh look, I remember that concert’

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(Respondent 14) or ‘Oh gosh, I had that when I was a kid’ (Respondent 27), involves not only thinking about nostalgia as a curatorial tool, but also as a strategy for collecting practices ‘as museums look for material which will speak to visitors’ (Leonard and Knifton 2015a: 171).

Curating for nostalgic vibrancy at Museum RockArt To illustrate how nostalgia operates as a structuring concept for popular music museums, we now turn to the example of Museum RockArt, a micromuseum in the Netherlands which is run by a volunteer workforce. Museum RockArt displays the old studios of Radio Veronica, an offshore radio station that broadcast from 1960 to 1974 when it ceased operation in response to the introduction of Dutch anti-pirate legislation. For people who grew up listening to Radio Veronica, the studios are a drawcard for the museum. As one volunteer explained, We have the studios here, and that is a big … a lot of people come to see them, because this Radio Veronica has been very important in history, not only for popular radio but for the music industry in general, because every band wanted their new record to be played on Veronica because it was listened to by the most people. (Respondent 2)

This respondent explained the impact Radio Veronica had on the music industry and the success of artists due to it having a listenership beyond the Netherlands. With the audience of Radio Veronica spread across so many countries – Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy were all mentioned by this volunteer – the studios are an attraction for international visitors: Our little country, but very—for all Europe very important for the—for music to become popular. And so that’s why we get people from England, from Belgium, from Germany, who just come to see those studios. (Respondent 2)

Museum RockArt hosts an annual ‘radio day’ to celebrate Radio Veronica. This is held on 31 August in commemoration of the last day of broadcast in 1974 and involves having ‘the old people from Veronica’ do a live broadcast in the preserved studios at the museum. The Radio Day was described as an important activity for the museum because when ‘the plug was removed’ and Radio Veronica stopped broadcasting, ‘that, on a lot of people, had a lot of impact’ (Respondent 2). When the volunteer from Museum RockArt described Radio Veronica and the importance of the old studios for the museum, it was in reference to nostalgia



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as affective practice and its attendant memory work. Rather than using the term ‘nostalgia’, the respondent instead spoke of ‘the party of recognition’ experienced by visitors: When they look around, they see all this stuff. … If you see something—‘oh yeah, I had that when I was younger’, like this old stuff that’s sitting there. For them, yeah, it’s a trip down memory lane. (Respondent 2)

This respondent described the ‘party of recognition’ that they themselves felt when visiting the museum for the first time and experiencing the Radio Veronica exhibition: I came here as a visitor, then we had this Veronica exhibition and yeah, a lot of things reminded me of earlier days. So I had that same experience—‘oh, look at that, I had that too’ and how great that it is being saved. (Respondent 2)

The respondent’s affective reaction to their initial encounter with the old studio of Radio Veronica revealed itself during our interview: I was only ten years old then [when Radio Veronica stopped broadcasting], nine years old, yeah … nine years old, and I can still remember, because they were very sad when they had to do it, and they sent out some beeps – beep, beep, beep – which marked the end of this time, and even when I’m telling [this story now] I get chicken skin, goosebumps, because that was such a moment. (Respondent 2)

The ‘nostalgic vibrancy’ of the museum led this respondent to become a volunteer, to actively contribute to the efforts of the museum to preserve, display and celebrate popular music culture of the Netherlands. For Respondent 2, memory work and its affects were directly related to a personal experience connected with the objects that had been brought together for an exhibition of Radio Veronica and the permanent display of the old studios. But curating for nostalgia is also geared towards the engagement of visitors without personal experiences of the things represented by the tangible displays. For example, our respondent at Museum RockArt spoke of the importance of volunteers in bringing to life displays through the sharing of memories: That’s the most fun part for me, because I like to talk about music and everybody who comes here is a music lover. … So yeah, that’s very important that in a museum like this that people can tell something, because a lot of people who come here know quite [a bit] about music too, but they like to hear the stories. … Yeah, we can tell them something. (Respondent 2)

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Through storytelling, volunteers offer nostalgic recollections of popular music’s past to younger visitors who do not have personal memories of the popular music represented by the museum. When combined with a curatorial approach that draws on nostalgia as a way to frame the visitor experience, these stories can produce in younger visitors ‘a state of “induced” nostalgia, where equivalent feelings are evoked by proxy (Goulding 1999) or retroactive association (Ooi 2002)’ (Leaver and Schmidt 2010: 116). This kind of ‘vicarious’ nostalgia (Goulding 2001) does not depend on volunteer stories – it can emerge from the display alone – but these stories add another layer to the affective experience generated by curated displays for those visitors who have not ‘experienced the conditions in which the object was initially spatially and temporally situated’ (Leonard and Knifton 2015b: 164). At Museum RockArt, a visitor does not need to have listened to Radio Veronica in the 1960s and 1970s to be moved by the old studios and associated items on display. Nostalgia’s power as a structuring concept is that it does not require visitors to have pre-existing connections with the objects on display or the stories being told in the exhibition. As Leonard and Knifton (2015b: 164) assert, ‘The representation of popular music present in the museum exhibition passes beyond the personal level of nostalgic reverie into a collective memory framework, where the nostalgia “affect” is not contingent upon direct experience.’ This multidimensional aspect of nostalgia can also make it a challenging tool in the curation of popular music exhibitions. Objects need to be curated in such a way that they ‘simultaneously resonate at a communal level while remaining attached to and available for personal narratives of recollection’ (Leonard and Knifton 2015b: 165).

Nostalgia and ‘itchy heritage’: The institutionalization of anti-establishment music To end this chapter, we turn to a consideration of how nostalgia’s presence in the toolkit of popular music museum curators can lead to what Lucy Robinson (2018: 313) describes as an ‘itchy sort of heritage, where the participant/ viewer acknowledges that they are represented in the stories presented by heritage projects, but that story just feels wrong’. With nostalgia, in all the various understandings of the term, propelling the creation of popular music as heritage, museums find themselves engaging in the institutionalization of genres that were once considered anti-establishment. Critiques of popular



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music museums often point to a tension between the anti-establishment ideals held by many popular music cultures and the institutionalizing processes of museums that seek to curate and contain these cultures. Reynolds (2011: 3), for example, expresses a particular concern about the presence of punk in music exhibitions: ‘My big worry, with rock museums, is always punk: that rift in rock time that consigned the Old Wave to History’s dustbin. Can such an apocalyptic rupture be contained within the filing system of an archive and still retain its essence, the truth of its ruthlessness?’ He later notes that ‘punk seems hostile to museumification on account of its iconoclastic contempt for the past’ (Reynolds 2011: 16), part of a broader argument that music has no place in the museum (see discussion in Baker, Istvandity and Nowak 2016a). While we would not go so far as to suggest that popular music museums are institutions that are part of the establishment, critics argue that to place popular music, including punk, in the confines of the museum runs counter to its anti-establishment ethos (Kam 2004: 176), creating an ‘itchy sort of heritage’ in Robinson’s terms. Caught up within such rhetoric is a claim that by placing popular music in the museum, its authenticity is eroded and its creative essence reduced to ‘a series of mechanical prompts’ that cannot adequately account for the ways in which popular music is produced and consumed (Brabazon and Mallinder 2006: 102). Punk, in particular, has been recently singled out as being at odds with museal impulses. The fortieth anniversary of punk was heralded by a number of exhibitions and events held in London and across England in 2016, including at the Museum of London and British Library. Robinson (2018: 310) has produced a comprehensive review of these activities, noting that the exhibitions celebrating forty years of punk offer a means ‘to explore questions of emotional ownership and investment in the past and a heritage that both represents and alienates parts of its audience’. Punk nostalgia can be experienced as itchy because ‘Punk values of “credibility” and “authenticity” invite an uncomfortable relationship between punks and their cultural representation’ (Robinson 2018: 309). For Robinson (2018: 313), an exhibition like Punk London can reveal ‘what happens when popular cultures are used to tell bigger stories, and when something that was never meant to last ends up in a museum’. In cases like the museumification of punk, but even with the display of popular music more generally, the deployment of nostalgia by curators as a framework for visitors’ understanding of exhibitions can lead to the charge that museums are sanitizing culture (see, for example, Juchartz and Rishoi 1997). There was only one instance in our study where the display of popular music’s material past

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was described by a curator as generating the kind of itchy heritage described by Robinson, and that was in relation to the Experience Music Project exhibition Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses. Nirvana was a Seattle-based grunge band whose anti-establishment music promoted ‘a mistrust of authority, and a deep cynicism towards big corporations’ (Strong 2011: 19) but which went on to enter the rock canon and, not surprisingly, became the subject of a blockbuster exhibition. We say ‘not surprisingly’, but the curators spent years convincing the powers that be in the museum, as well as the media, that a Nirvana exhibition would be a valuable initiative for the Experience Music Project to undertake: It seems so obvious, and I’m glad it worked out the way it did, but [another curator] and I have fought for that exhibit for a number of years, and somehow it always got put off, got put off, and we had a different CEO, and she’d be like, ‘no, and no’, and then it just finally, it clicked, and I think one thing that helped was we were finally able to say, ‘it’s the twentieth anniversary’ [of the release of Nevermind in 1991]. … In September, as the twentieth anniversary approached, was this huge second wave [of media attention] where people started to look back, and doing retrospectives [of Nirvana]. And that totally helped us. Because [before that] they were constantly calling [the curators] and saying ‘well, explain it, why does it matter?’ (Respondent 5)

The retrospective pieces on Nirvana, where journalists and other media commentators engaged in the nostalgic looking back at the band’s past and its influences on music culture, supported the curator’s arguments that Nirvana was part of popular music heritage and should be celebrated in an exhibition. The challenge is deciding the best way to bring an anti-establishment band into a space that represents the establishment. The setting of the museum was given considerable thought by the exhibition curators, who were aware that Seattle musicians ‘viewed [the Experience Music Project] with suspicion’, associating it with ‘the man’ when the whole ethos of the Seattle music scene was ‘to stick it to the man’ (Respondent 5). When the Experience Music Project first opened, something the museum ‘struggled with’ was a hostile local music scene which considered the museum to be ‘trying to suck the life out of rock and roll, and put it on display and hermetically seal it’ (Respondent 5). Creating an exhibition about the most canonic of Seattle bands in a way that would be accepted by members of the Seattle music community and wider grunge fan base was therefore of great concern for the curators: With the Nirvana exhibit, [my colleague] and I talked about that a lot. And [my colleague] really felt more pressure doing that exhibit than any other, because



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[they] felt, ‘I got to get it right, and I’ve got to have multiple voices so people feel like “I’m representative of that”’. And I think it really did that, and it was great, when we had the opening, we invited as many musicians as we could find that were in the exhibit to just come share the moment [and recognize] ‘that’s our history’. (Respondent 5)

It might be argued that the Experience Music Project exhibition simply represents yet another example of the capitalist nature of the music and recording industries and that nostalgia as a demonized form of memory and affect is always already implicated in the institutionalization of otherwise antiauthoritarian popular music forms. However, the plurality of voices contained within the Nirvana exhibition helped create a rich telling of Seattle’s musical history which carefully balanced the anti-establishment sentiments of the Seattle scene with the institutionalization of grunge that occurred over the course of the band’s career. As Kathleen Pirrie Adams (2015: 133) has demonstrated, Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses did not just result in musicians coming away from the exhibition recognizing ‘that’s our history’, but rather the exhibition provided ‘the audience with the opportunity to identify with the specific past that it traces’ and provided visitors with ‘the opportunity to identify with acts of imagination that made [grunge] possible’. So although nostalgia is implicated in heritage experiences feeling itchy, as observed in commentary around the anniversary exhibitions of punk in the UK (see Robinson 2018), the example of Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses suggests that curators can work with nostalgia in such a way as to mitigate the extent to which popular music heritage in the museum is experienced as itchy. Rather than being something to be avoided in the curation of popular music heritage, nostalgia is a component of the curatorial toolkit that helps produce highly affective museum experiences.

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A few years ago I went to the British Music Experience in London. I was a bit disappointed because I was used to [Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid’s use of full audio tracks from the archive] and it was all snippets, like thirty second audio clips. (Respondent 16, Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid) With the increasing integration of popular music’s material past into museums, the presence of sound has emerged at the centre of debates and discussions. Sound presents a critical challenge for curators in their design of popular music exhibitions. Although the primary feature of music is how it sounds, the preservation of its heritage in a museum context requires a rethinking on how to incorporate and mediate the sound of music in exhibitions. Besides the conceptual question as to whether the sound of music belongs within the museum space, curators have to navigate through a range of practices in which the sound of music can be appropriately attached to popular music exhibitions and their different components. Even when sound is incorporated in a popular music museum, its use can confound or disconcert. Due to the curators of Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid having access to an extensive audio and audiovisual archive complete with copyright agreement, visitors to the museum’s POPstudio exhibition can hear songs in their entirety. As the opening interview extract suggests, the very different sound experience offered by the British Music Experience, where copyright restrictions result in rapid bursts of music tracks offered in quick succession, comes as a surprise and a disappointment to the Dutch respondent. Sound is a structuring concept for curatorial practice in popular music museums, but is not usually spoken of as such in the existing literature. Instead, the issue of sound in the museum is discussed in relation to the apparent

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contradiction that exists between sound, particularly that of popular music, on the one hand, and the museum as an institution on the other hand. The concept of sound is certainly not absent in popular music museum scholarship, but it is most often discussed in regard to an anxiety about whether popular music belongs in the museum, or the questionable quality of sonic encounters popular music museums can offer visitors. In his book Retromania, Simon Reynolds (2011) expresses significant reservations about the museum’s ability to adequately account for popular music’s past. Key to Reynolds’s scepticism is that the primary aspect of music – the experience of personal aural encounter – is challenging to recreate in the museal space. Our respondents were well aware of the challenge posed by the integration of sound within an exhibition. Nevertheless, many of them choose to go beyond the apparent dichotomy to find appropriate ways to feature music alongside visual material culture. The respondent at the Experience Music Project, for example, indicated that the incorporation of sound in exhibitions was given considerable thought in the early stages of planning: When [the curator] curated that [gallery, they] chose to have a film, one film, and that would be the music source for the entire exhibit, so that when you walked into the exhibit, you’d be immediately hearing Hendrix the whole time. … It just deepens your engagement with it, and also your understanding of what we’re talking about. (Respondent 5)

In this chapter, we first engage with debates that question the very relationship between sound and museums, and we then account for the range of curatorial practices that bring sound into popular music museums.

Does sound belong in the museum? A critical debate Sound is often used to cohere the display of material objects by providing a sonic feature that contextualizes the visual elements for visitors. It can be understood as a sensory element that challenges ‘museums’ privileging of the visual with the aim to increase a visitor’s sense of familiarity and connection with objects on display (Dudley 2010: 9). For Kimberly DaCosta Holton (2002: 111), sound as a structuring concept ‘functions as both a narrative cohesive and dramatizing agent’. In other words, though ‘sound is a difficult phenomenon to contain in an exhibition environment’ (Mortensen and Madsen 2015: 251), it is also ‘part of



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an expanded toolkit’ (Knifton 2012: 23) for the display of popular music’s past. However, ‘sound’ and ‘museum’ are considered by many to be unable to coexist. This view is guided by the parameters of the traditional museum, which has a strict edict on silence. Kevin Edge (2000: para. 13) explains that ‘didactic museum displays demand an absence of distracting sound so that a dominant, preferred perspective may be more clearly apprehended. … Like a library, the museum is regarded as a site for quiet contemplation. Sound or more particularly “noise” … disrupts scholarly concentration.’ Edge (2000: para. 14) questions why it is that sound, and in particular popular music, is so unwelcome in the museum, proposing a conflict between the energy of popular music and the demure nature of the traditional museum: Pop’s pulse often demands a physical, toe-tapping, sociable response; a pulse which is often thought to excite or connote the presence of libidinal energies that reflect and shape mainstream and oppositional social formations. As we contemplate and reflect on music and its production, we become less spontaneous and more civilised. Is this dichotomy of mind and body fostered in the museum (a quiet, bourgeois space), with thought being privileged over action, impulse and associated pleasures?

The more resounding sceptical voice in this debate is that of Reynolds (2011), who has produced the most cited opinion on the dis/connection between popular music heritage and institutional preservation at present. He argues that there is an epistemic contradiction between the two. Like Edge, Reynolds (2011: 3) regards museums as places of ‘hush and decorum … primarily visual, oriented around display, designed for the contemplative gaze’. Reynolds’s account is one of a cultural critic, not a curator, and his observations on the sound of music’s absence in popular music museums are not grounded in any empirical research. Rather, it is, he says, a ‘gut feeling … that pop and the museum just don’t go together’ (Reynolds 2011: 3). Clearly, Reynolds is not alone in expressing such reservations, as is evident in the work of Edge (2000) and Russell Reising (2001), an original member of the Educational Advisory Board at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (Rock Hall hereafter). Even scholarly critiques tend to have little empirical basis, instead hinting at a series of issues that prove difficult in the conceptualization of popular music’s historical past in public forms of remembering. Such critics contend that, ripped from their original context and transported to the logic of the museum, the inaudible, non-musical artefacts that remain as traces of music’s (in)audible past

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are deficient representations of, or points of access to, that past. For Reynolds, this means that all that can be displayed are the extraneous elements of popular music consumption and production; material objects that have lost any use value they had; artefacts that can only hint at the authenticity of experience offered by the sonic encounter. At the same time as disparaging the inclusion of popular music in the museum, Reynolds (2011) contends that the key affective connection between listeners and music – that is, a sonic one – is almost always missing in the museum, or at best, is largely compromised. He contends that music needs to be heard, experienced, felt as affect so it can be understood as it was in history, to put it in its place and time. From this perspective, central to the museum experience should be the presence of the sound of music, live or recorded, but for Reynolds (2011: 3), music museums instead ‘contain the ancillary stuff (instruments and stage costumes, posters and packaging) but not the main thing itself. Ephemera, not what’s essential.’ The conflict that Reynolds senses between ‘sound’ and the ‘museum’ is rooted within two different temporalities. Sound is meant to be experienced in the present, whereas the role of the museum is to represent and preserve history through material culture. At its heart, Reynolds’s anxiety articulates the contradictions of preserving something immaterial (hearing music) in a material form (the museum). In critiques such as this, popular music museums are expected to be all things at once – a space for the display of objects and a site for the authentic experience of music. This appears to be an unrealistic expectation for the majority of popular music museums, whose curators are bound by budgetary, staffing, technical and spatial constraints that impact on what is possible for the display of popular music culture and its material and aural past. Although Reynolds’s perspective provides a lens through which to think about the relationship between sound and museums, he tends to romanticize the sonic experience of music listening. Moreover, he holds too rigid a view on the role of museums in contemporary society, particularly in relation to the preservation of popular culture and to the range of curatorial practices deployed within the ‘new museum’. There was general consensus among our respondents that music should have an aural presence in music museums and that displays should not be reduced to visual representations of popular music’s material culture. However, the sound of music itself is not seen as a fundamental component of exhibition design. Rather, curators aim to give it a complementary role to the display of objects, which is often the primary focus of curators’ approach to exhibitions. While



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acknowledging the necessity of having the sound of music present in exhibitions, the respondents also emphasized the central mode of museums as being visual. Visitors expect to look at objects on display, despite the subject matter itself – music – being a primarily aural medium. A balance must therefore be struck between playing music in an exhibition space with little visual stimulus and bombarding visitors with displays that have little aural context, where, as Knifton (2012: 23) states, ‘At its best, sound within museum spaces takes on a meta-textual element, interleaving sympathetically with the space and content of the museum.’ Hence, the curatorial approach to the integration of sound within museum galleries consists of finding means to cohere objects and sound, rather than separate them.

Curatorial approaches to sound within the museum space The curators of our study were very much aware of critiques, typified by that of Reynolds (2011), Edge (2000) and Reising (2001), regarding popular music museums. These critiques, as well as curators’ own reflections on exhibitions and displays in other institutions they had visited, influenced their own curatorial practice and understanding of the potential for popular music museums to fully engage with popular music’s past. While at least one curator outright rejected Reynolds’s arguments (‘I couldn’t care less about sound bleed’, Respondent 10), for the majority, capturing popular music and its cultures in the museum involved careful navigation; the incorporation of sound within a space that would traditionally be silent was viewed as a challenge that needed to be addressed. As Marion Leonard (2010: 174) describes, using sound alongside objects is in fact at the very core of the work of popular music museums: By offering a rich display of material culture in addition to the music itself, these exhibitions are recognizing that popular music is produced, presented and engaged with across a range of textual sites. Thus, displays of material culture related to popular music are not simply overcoming a curatorial difficulty by offering a visual representation in space of a cultural form which is temporal, intangible and which unfolds in time. They are instead presenting a range of textual sites through which music is experienced, engaged with and given meaning by musicians, fans and other parties.

Instead of considering sound as problematic for the museum, it can rather be viewed as integral to the portrayal of popular music stories, and one of many

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options to be used in structuring exhibitions. At the same time, there are limitations to the use of sound and objects, both together and alone. As Leonard (2007: 148) acknowledges, ‘The curation of popular music artefacts cannot stand in for, or be detached from, the sonic and bodily experience of music and the emotional and social ways in which it is experienced in time and space.’ Of course, it can also be argued that the curation of popular music’s sound cannot stand in for, or be detached from, the material experience of music culture and the individual, technological and social ways in which music’s material culture is experienced in time and space (Frith 1996; Hesmondhalgh 2013). This is reflected in the ways our respondents discussed the challenges of incorporating sound recordings in displays and the emphasis some placed on achieving balance between the tangible and intangible aspects of popular music culture. The issue of sound in the museum does not simply relate to playing recorded music in the museal space but also to what must be achieved through inclusion of the aural dimension of popular music culture into exhibition design. As a curator from Reykjanes Museum of Heritage posed, And music is not like any other history, it’s a very specific kind of thing. And how do you create music? How do you deal with music? I mean, you listen to it, but how do you make it visionary? How do you make it in a museum? For me [this] was a very, very big question. Because … you cannot have music playing loudly all the time … But that is how it should be. … I mean, popular music, you should play it loud, and you should have that full of energy. (Respondent 17)

Though this respondent emphasized that popular music should be played loud in order to fully translate its supposed energy, the intention is not for the museum to provide visitors with a listening experience that is similar to that of being at home with their own records and the volume turned up. At the Reykjanes Museum of Heritage, music exhibitions share an open-plan gallery space with displays on other aspects of cultural heritage unrelated to popular music, and the space also functions as ‘a cultural centre rather than just a museum of culture’ (Respondent 17). The layout of the space, combined with the different aspects of Icelandic history on display, meant that the ‘energy’ of popular music was missing from this museum. As Respondent 17 noted, ‘it was very silent’ in the museum’s popular music exhibitions. A lack of sound in popular music museums was described in interviews as ‘odd’, with respondents acknowledging that even if sound is secondary to visuals in exhibition design, it is important for those visuals to be accompanied



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by an aural experience. As the curator of the Experience Music Project puts it, exhibitions cannot just be about ‘the tools to make the art’: Because you can’t see the art. You can hear it, but you can’t see it. So you have these things that are basically the paintbrushes; it’s the guitar, it’s the bass, it’s the drums. That’s not the actual art, but that’s what you end up looking at, which sometimes I think is kind of odd. Like if you went to a Picasso exhibit, and you got to see his brushes and his shirt, but not … the actual painting. (Respondent 5)

For the curators at the Rock Hall, however, the role of the music museum was to show the ‘tools’ (the paintbrushes, so to speak) with which the art of music is made. Rather than being non-essential ephemera, the tools represented a way to ‘explain … the artists and the music’ (Respondent 12). This position holds that sound recordings are not the primary component of popular music museums because ‘music is the art and people have it at home or on their iPods’ (Respondent 12). The sound of music is, though, still essential to the popular music museum experience, with this same curator noting the following: When I first got hired, the people that were here had a standard museum approach or whatever and I’m like no, no, this can’t be quiet, this is a rock and roll museum, so there’s got to be music playing here. (Respondent 12)

Again, there is a tension evident in the integration of sound within the popular music exhibition. The display of a range of material culture aims to provide visitors with a strong sense of the development of popular music forms and enables visitors to make the link between material culture and the end result – the music. However, as Leonard (2010) was cited earlier as stating, it is difficult to have one (objects) without the other (sound/music). Despite the challenges posed by how the sound can feature in the museum space, its integration is increasingly important across different institutions.

Curatorial responses to ‘sound bleed’ One of the greatest issues for curators beyond conceptual arguments of music’s inclusion in exhibitions is the effective provision of sound within and between displays. Where music comes from multiple sources, such that there is more than one set of speakers and a variety of sounds coming into play at different exhibition sections, curators and visitors alike must grapple with sound ‘leaking’

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into areas where it is not wanted: this is sound bleed. The issue of sound bleed alone brings Reynolds (2011: 3) to argue that the presence of sound within the museum is necessarily ‘compromised’. Music is compromised due to sound bleed between galleries, and this can lead to, in Reising’s (2001: 494) words, a ‘bracing’ and ‘disconcerting’ experience of music history. Reynolds (2011: 3) paints sound bleed as a critical problem for popular music museums, arguing that ‘you can’t have sonic exhibits side by side; they interfere with each other’. He uses the example of the British Music Experience, in which there is a ‘mingling leakage of music from the seven chambers with the sound from various interactive displays in the central area. So you feel like you’re immersed not just in electronic light but in a trans-temporal mush of music’ (Reynolds 2011: 4). Incorporating sound in a popular music exhibition means curators must consider the museum space as a ‘sound environment’ (see Nowak and Bennett 2014). This means that curators have to work on the diffusion of music within a particular space, which, in museum galleries that are usually spacious, presents issues such as sound bleed and sound quality. Indeed, the architecture and interior design of many museums often presents challenges to installing and hearing audio due to large rooms, high ceilings and little in the way of noise cancellation. Consider the following example at Experience Music Project: Sound bleed from the beginning has been a huge issue [for] us, because of the architecture. Because [architect] Frank Gehry put in concrete tiled floors, he put in metal walls, there are galleries with no lids on them. So one gallery on the second floor will bleed down in the gallery below. So one of the things we’ve done as we’ve renovated galleries is we’ve put carpet in all the galleries just to absorb sound. (Respondent 5)

Curators are attuned to the types of soundscapes that can enhance visual displays, but note that some aspects of this soundscape can be unintended due to the issue of sound bleeding within and across gallery space. This issue is highlighted by Reising (2001: 494) in a critical review of the Rock Hall, writing that ‘music blares in the background … providing an almost oppressive soundtrack’, such that ‘you may find yourself gazing at a showcase of Neil Young artefacts while listening to Smokey Robinson’. Hence, curators using sound as a curatorial tool must consider how the listening experience of visitors can be isolated or contained within a popular music exhibition by way of various technologies. Sound has an important role to play as a structuring concept in popular music museums given that it is widely recognized that



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exhibitions which incorporate aural, visual and tactile elements represent the type of ‘immersive’ museum environments that are increasingly seen as attractive to today’s museum visitor (Sparacino 2004). Robert Knifton (2012: 22) posits that ‘developing several soundscapes within a single exhibition can lead to cacophonies if not carefully managed’, while Edge (2000: para. 11) argues that ‘sound “leaking”’ in music museums is a ‘very real problem’ with the capacity to ‘distract’ and ‘mislead’ visitors. The management of sound in museums has been enhanced by the development of ‘several technologies for simultaneously and accurately delivering multiple sound tracks in a gallery without noteworthy interference’ (Mortensen and Madsen 2015: 251). Our respondents emphasized three ways to isolate the listening experience within a music exhibition: through the creation of isolating sound booths and the deployment of technologies, namely directional speakers and headphones.

Sound booths Sound booths are rooms that visitors can enter and which are specifically dedicated to the playing of certain music. For instance, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum utilized sound booths to address the leaking of music throughout its gallery spaces. Visitors entered silos to access audio tracks from the museum’s archive; this is described by the Experience Music Project curator as a ‘really effective’ approach to addressing sound bleed, but one which cannot be adopted in any straightforward way at Experience Music Project (Respondent 5). At the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, these silos are permanent fixtures, but because Experience Music Project focuses largely on exhibitions that will travel across institutions, the curator explained that the museum has, out of necessity, ‘created miniature rooms; they’re traveling exhibits so they can actually be broken apart and shipped to the next museum, but they also work within the space itself ’ (Respondent 5). The curator of the Experience Music Project described these miniature rooms in the following way: Compartments where you can see into them, so when you go in there, you don’t bump into a stranger and go, oh, I’m not comfortable now, but have a room where you can listen to the music as loud as you want, have enough space to dance, and have it feel communal, and yet not have it bleed into something else. So the experience for you and several people is good. (Respondent 5)

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The sound booths of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and the compartments of the Experience Music Project both provided a listening experience for multiple people where they can ‘share what they’re listening to and talk about it’ (Respondent 5). Hence, this approach not only enables the integration of sound but also allows visitors to experience sound together. However, the curator of Experience Music Project noted this solution to sound bleed is ‘really expensive to do right’ (Respondent 5).

Directional speakers Directional speakers are another technological option that curators can use to reduce incidences of, or the severity of, sound bleed within popular music museums. The National Museum of African American Music (officially set to open in 2019), for instance, incorporated a consideration of sound bleed at the architectural design phase. At the time of the interview in November 2011, the emphasis was on the inclusion of directional speakers in which ‘there is a speaker right above you that has kind of a dome over it’ (Respondent 13). Rather than having visitors feel they have been isolated from the broader museum environment in a sound booth, the use of directional speakers was described as providing the visitor with a sense of being ‘in the moment’: So you’re in that environment at that moment, you’re in the moment. We want people to be present in what they’re experiencing, and not kind of distracted by all these other pieces. And understanding that someone might spend a lot of time in one particular area. (Respondent 13)

While directional speakers do not dispel sound bleed completely, they are a solution that involves less structural change to the museum than sound booths and are potentially more cost-effective. In this particular museum, curators recognized that the use of directional speakers will give visitors more temporal freedom in their browsing of exhibits, and this was seen as important in shaping visitors’ interactions with displays. At the Rock Hall, directional speakers were being installed in exhibition redesigns as a way to ‘work on’ sound bleed (Respondent 12).

Headphones Headphones were widely regarded as a straightforward solution to sound bleed in the music museums in this study, though they were rarely the only solution



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being applied. Headphones allow for the inclusion of multiple sound experiences within a single gallery. As one respondent noted, headphones enable exhibition designers to reduce possibilities of visitors disturbing one another’s museum experience: I got ten or twelve posters with the bits of history, but every poster you can listen to an MP3 player and hear music from that period. So it’s a—you’re conveying when you’re doing a music exhibition, there has to be music, so you have to put—breathe into the exhibition ways to listen to music. And you can do it with headphones and that doesn’t disturb anybody. (Respondent 11)

However, some curators found headphones bring additional challenges in regard to sound bleed. For example, the Experience Music Project’s Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibition featured numerous listening stations where visitors could access audio content (narration, oral history interviews, music) using headphones. What the curator found was that the social experience of museum-going was challenged by the wearing of headphones: You often get people shouting at each other, they’re listening to the same thing and trying to talk to one another. … It’s a huge issue. (Respondent 5)

Headphones isolate visitors from one another, enclosing them within a listening experience that is mediated by the range of visual elements in the gallery. However, they are then prevented from actually sharing their impressions while visiting the exhibition and listening to the music. Leonard (2010) provides an example of how noise generated by headphonewearing visitors was minimized at The Beat Goes On exhibition in Liverpool, United Kingdom, where ‘digital jukeboxes’ were stationed at various points in the gallery for visitors to listen to music. Two headphones were available at each listening station, but rather than ‘having the usual two listening cups supported on a steel headband, they instead consisted of a single cup which visitors could hold to their ear’ (Leonard 2010: 176). The single cup headphone ‘was designed not to isolate the visitor from the rest of the exhibition and could also allow two visitors to talk easily to one another while also listening along to a track’ (Leonard 2010: 176). One of the chief purposes of the museum is its capacity to be a place for sharing knowledge with others (Andermann and Arnold-de Simine 2012). The visitors at the Nirvana exhibition at Experience Music Project, on the other hand, were isolated by their headphones at a time when they wanted to engage with others about what they were seeing, hearing and experiencing.

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Is sound really a problem? The integration of the sound of music in popular music exhibitions within the space of new museums requires persistence and ingenuity from curators, and the development of perspectives that contrast with the much cited critique of Reynolds. His perspective largely draws on the idea that popular music has a particular meaning which is communicated to listeners through the sonic experience. What we show in this chapter is that curators not only differ in their approach to the integration of sound in exhibition but also find particular tactics to ensure that the presence of sound can assist in providing a ‘cohesive’ narrative for visitors (DaCosta Holton 2002). For these reasons, curators do not share Reynolds’s scepticism, but rather seek opportunities to feature sound in more effective ways in popular music exhibitions. In that regard, the biggest challenge that curators face is to contain the sound of music within relevant sections of the exhibition. Sound bleed continues to be a problem in some popular music museums, though these issues are addressed by technological options, such as sound booths, directional speakers and headphones, as best they can. However, contrary to what Reynolds (2011; see also Juchartz and Rishoi 1997) argues, the integration of sound within popular music exhibitions does not necessarily equate to an experience that cannot emulate those that listeners feel while interacting with popular music’s aural qualities. In reality, sound bleed is a feature of everyday life and arguably something museum visitors are adept at navigating in various listening environments – at home, in shopping malls, on the streets. The merging of sounds in exhibitions embodies this everyday experience of popular music. For example, Murray Forman’s (2002) review of the Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art highlights how music is not only experienced in isolated contexts but frequently heard in combination with other sounds: Near the midpoint of the exhibition gallery, for instance, the sound of a video documentary emitting from a monitor collided with the music and rhythms from an adjacent video collage assembled from music television clips, creating a sonic cacophony that was reminiscent of the thump of car stereos booming on a summer’s night on a congested city street. (Forman 2002: 110)

While sound bleed is certainly a consideration for our respondents and an issue many curators seek to address, it would be a mistake to take from the



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above interventions that it represents a significant issue for all curators. As our respondent from the Grammy Museum puts it, I couldn’t care less about sound bleed. First of all, no museum [can avoid it], not even Paul Allen[’s Experience Music Project]. … It’s too expensive for me to worry about sound bleed. Rock and roll particularly is about cacophony. I am not concerned that you’re having problems hearing. It is not a traditional museum experience, I do not care about that. If you want that, I have headphones, go on the headphones. But you will always hear—there are audiophiles, and people who complain about it, I get it. But that’s not a concern of mine … I’m not concerned about the overall quality of the aural experience; that is not what I do. (Respondent 10)

The lack of concern for sound bleed expressed by this curator also related to cost. Respondent 10 noted that museums can spend ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars on acoustics’ and still encounter sound leakage. Hence, ‘It’s too expensive for me to worry about sound bleed. … I don’t have the money to create the aural experience for you that’s going to knock you out’ (Respondent 10). However, observation on site suggested the Grammy Museum had very little sound bleed, something that ‘happened by happenstance’, according to this respondent, rather than through a motivation to ensure visitors encounter a pristine sound environment in the museum. Music is never heard in isolation, but constantly mediated by other sounds and elements that come to people’s perception (DeNora 2000; Nowak 2015). Think, for example, of accounts of Beatles’ concerts where music competed with the screams of fans (see Berman 2008; Duffett 2015). The sonic space is never the isolated entity that Reynolds and other critics make it out to be. Other than being a focus of ‘audiophiles’, as referred to by Respondent 10 above, the extent to which visitors of popular music museums concern themselves with sound bleed while moving through exhibition spaces is yet to be ascertained by empirical research. As far as the curator of the Grammy Museum was concerned, ‘The average person doesn’t care about that at all, that’s not the experience you’re coming for’ (Respondent 10). This suggests too that the meaning of popular music – to individual visitors and in the greater discourse of the genre – is not necessarily compromised by unrestrained sound. As a form of conclusion, we contend that although the presence of sound is becoming increasingly important for curators in exhibition design and although it is mediated by technological options in order to better the cohesion

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of narrative, it is critical to highlight that the role of sound is influenced by a range of different curatorial decisions that are made across different institutions. Sound matters in popular music exhibitions, but its status is negotiated between the narratives that are communicated throughout an exhibition, the physical and architectural space of the museum, and the actual forms of popular music, or genres, that are represented in the exhibition. Further, we see that despite the fact that many curators are working with the materials and knowledge at hand, that a love of music itself is their core business does not go overlooked. Instead, curators use sound not only to structure exhibitions but also to bring their objects to life.

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You have to feel the love and the passion, and everything that is connected with the collection of everything. It has to be done by people who care, not just because you see money, or you can have an income out of it, you need to care for the history, for the people, everybody. (Respondent 17, Reykjanes Museum of Heritage) Popular music has arguably found its place within heritage institutions. In museums around the world, exhibitions have showcased the various genres, artists and tools of the trade that contributed to the rise of popular music. The curatorial accounts we feature throughout this book are testimony to the successful integration of popular music within large and small-scale heritage institutions. Those responsible for the display and representation of popular music have a special relationship not only with music but with their work, as Respondent 17 describes in the opening interview extract. Through our research, we have revealed museum professionals’ great passion for the preservation of popular music, which is met and matched by the interest of visitors who want to know more about popular music’s past. Despite the scepticism of some museum critics over the last few decades as to popular music’s place in the museum (e.g. Juchartz and Rishoi 1997; Reynolds 2011), our research reveals the innovation of curatorial practices deployed within heritage institutions to help communicate the stories of popular music history, which in turn raises the profile of popular music as a significant part of broader cultural histories worthy of preservation. Aspects of ‘the everyday’, something which characterizes and is characterized by popular music, have become an important feature of contemporary museums. In the introduction to this book, we refer to Simon Frith’s (1991) discussion of the three types of attitudes deployed towards the aesthetics of popular music, namely, rejection, indifference or celebration. The turn to heritagization demonstrates that popular music has largely overcome the criticisms that focus

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on evaluating its textual qualities (see, for instance, Adorno 1941). The question of ‘attitudes’ towards the aesthetics of popular music, as discussed by Frith (1991), has become redundant. The issue no longer lies in whether popular music is aesthetically ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but rather, should something as comparatively ephemeral – so ‘everyday’ – be preserved? Therein, debates concede that the cultural effects of popular music are wide ranging, with its cultural significance further influenced by contexts of production, distribution and consumption. The question for curators of popular music museums, then, becomes how popular music can be preserved and celebrated. Even though critics like Simon Reynolds (2011) question the form of heritage preservation rather than the content, we believe this book has given credit to the range of creative practices through which museum professionals engage in the representation of popular music histories in the exhibitions at their institutions. The structuring concepts put forward in this book – namely, the celebration of dominant histories (Chapter 2), the selling of museum experiences to potential visitors (Chapter 3), the influence of place in exhibitions (Chapter 4), the role of material culture in visualizing popular music heritage (Chapter 5), the narratives of exhibitions (Chapter 6), the subjectivity of curators (Chapter 7), the use of nostalgia (Chapter 8) and the negotiation of the presence of sound (Chapter 9) – are all typically employed in popular music museums, which, as forms of the ‘new museum’ (see Bruce 2006), are increasingly responsive to contemporary allowances, such as technology, and the demands of audience engagement. These structuring concepts sit within a typology which underpins the curation and design of many, though not all, popular music exhibitions. In this concluding chapter, we reflect upon the features and ramifications of the typology of structuring concepts that guide curatorial practice in popular music museums in terms of what it means for popular music heritage and heritage studies. We end the book by addressing some of the future challenges faced within popular music preservation practices.

Creating a typology of structuring concepts: Considerations Our typology serves to both consolidate and extend upon previous approaches to understanding the curation of popular music history in the museum. We therefore acknowledge the critical research upon which we establish our analysis. Our research highlights the significance of popular music museum curation



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as an idiosyncratic practice unique to its subject matter. In drawing on and reconstituting categories from previous explorations and analyses of curation practices by the likes of Marion Leonard (2007) and Alcina Cortez (2015, 2017), we seek to provide a set of structuring concepts which can be used in the analysis of popular music exhibitions. Each structuring concept detailed at length in the chapters of this book corresponds to one particular approach to the curation of popular music exhibitions which was evidenced within interviews with museum professionals. These structuring concepts of curatorial practice are common across institutions and between countries, suggesting these are the predominant methods through which curators may choose to approach their exhibitions. Although there are several illuminating pre-existing studies of a number of the individual concepts that are brought together here in our typology, such as nostalgia (Leonard and Knifton 2015a; Mortensen and Madsen 2015), sound (DaCosta Holton 2002; Edge 2000), place (Pirrie Adams 2015; van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015) and narrative (Crenn 2015; King 2006), these studies do not consider in detail the ways in which those concepts may influence the construction of exhibitions from a curator’s point of view. Even in this book, we consider each concept separately, each given a chapter, but in practice these structuring concepts are rarely used in isolation in the curation of exhibitions, and often influence each other in crucial ways. Our typology is analytical, but also aims to be pragmatic. It has the potential to serve as a companion to theoretical and practice-based work, such that it explores how a popular form of culture can effectively be preserved and displayed to a range of audiences. However, as we have implied within this book, the application of structuring concepts in the curation of a popular music exhibition is mediated by the location, size and aims of each heritage institution. This means that the typology is not applied in the same fashion across different popular music museums; it also means that curators might only engage with select concepts as dictated by personal views or institutional restrictions. It is broadly acknowledged that the particular presentation of popular music histories within museums consists of a biased or incomplete approach, which is rooted within the curators’ subjectivities and how they aim to represent popular music histories to potential visitors (see Cortez 2015). It is impossible to remove such subjectivity, just as it is difficult to predict the types of knowledge that visitors will hold when visiting the museum. Contrasting versions of history, or the repetition of dominant stories at the exclusion of more factual or adequately representative narratives, lead to a tension that occasionally supports negative

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arguments for the place of popular music in the museum space. Contemporary approaches to the curation of popular music heritage still have much work to do in generating more nuanced and inclusive versions of history, a strategy which will also recognize the malleability of popular music’s meaning, roles and uses over time. In that regard, the curation of popular music heritage does not so much consist of preserving its original meaning – such a thing is altogether difficult to define and capture – but rather acts to translate and officiate the changing meaning of popular music in terms of its long-term relevance to popular culture and society. In unpacking each structuring concept, we have privileged the voices of curators we spoke to in order to demonstrate how their subjective experiences interact with the scholarly understanding of curatorial practice in popular music museums. We also sought to include a range of geographical locations when exploring each concept. In similar ways to other popular music museum literature, our reach is limited to the United States, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. It is highly likely that further research looking at the exhibition of popular music in museums in Africa, South America or Asia, for example, might embellish or dispute any perceived universality of the eight structuring concepts outlined in the typology put forward here. With that proviso in mind, we still argue that this typology of structuring concepts has the potential to be a useful tool to begin comparing curatorial practices and institutional processes in popular music museums globally. However, we also emphasize that the breakdown of each concept as presented here should by no means be understood as providing the definitive word on the subject. Certainly, each structuring concept in this emerging typology is worthy of more thorough, individualized study in order to draw out the complexities and nuances apparent in their real-life application and exhibition outcomes. Subsequently, we encourage a critical engagement with our typology across a range of sociocultural and national contexts, which could lead to the refining of the different concepts discussed here and the addition of further structuring concepts that did not emerge from our analysis.

The future of popular music heritage: Preserving traditions We hope to have demonstrated throughout the pages of this book the vitality of contemporary approaches to popular music heritage. As the issue of popular music heritage has somewhat become of greater cultural importance over the



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last few decades, to the point where it is described as an ‘obsession’ (Le Guern 2015), we now shift focus to the challenges it will face in the future, as articulated by curators within interviews. Herein, curators query not just how popular music museums will manage to sustain themselves and their craft, but also look to the changes in music, anticipating what the newest wave of popular music heritage will look like. For institutions, exhibition designers and curators working in any kind of heritage, the dominant concern is that of sustainability (Baker and Collins 2015, 2017; Baker, Doyle and Homan 2016), which includes the ability to continue to engage new visitors and generate cash flow and to retain knowledge and commit to knowledge transfer in the skilled workforce of both outward- and inward-facing museum staff. As we discussed in Chapter 3, the closure of several promising popular music museums in the last decade highlighted the need for a range of strategies to ensure sustainability, including funding, topic, audience knowledge and succession planning. Hence, sustainability is not just financial or conceptual but also relates to the people who can be trained for long periods of time in the curatorial practices unique to an institution. Below, a museum professional from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum describes the kind of work life that a popular music museum might offer: There is a real excitement and satisfaction about creating a living, breathing institution that’s serving a mission and has continually improved over the years. I mean just look at all the awards that we’ve won. There’s a sense that, okay, we did this, and we are continuing to be custodians over this institution and everything that it does. Maybe it’s not the best analogy but in a way it’s like La Cosa Nostra, the mafia, that means our thing. If it weren’t for the people who’ve established this and the people who’ve made it run and will continue to make it run, a lot of the things that we’ve done probably wouldn’t have gotten done, and that’s everything from preserving artefacts, whether it’s songbooks, sheet music, sound recordings, films, costumes, instruments, ephemera, diaries, recorded files, whatever it might be, or it’s creating a programme, or creating really exciting exhibits and creating programmes for school children as well as families and adults, having all sorts of musical performances happen here in this museum and be seen out in the world. It’s just so satisfying. You’re not just coming in and punching the clock. You’re not on an assembly line. You’re not just putting in time for a pay cheque. And that’s not to say that many, many other millions and hundreds of millions of people aren’t getting satisfaction from their jobs and doing useful things. It’s just this is a really special place because you’re preserving cultural heritage, and I knew that when I was trying to decide what

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to do with my life professionally, I wanted to preserve knowledge and expand what was known and pass it on to other people so that that would continue. (Respondent 7)

This respondent’s satisfaction with their work leads them to seek out opportunities for knowledge transfer. There is also a suggestion of a lineage of curatorship and preservation, where a successful curator will be able to look back and understand the work of those who have gone before them, but also to lead the institution to greater heights through their passion for the future of music heritage. The drive to embed knowledge transfer within popular music museums is described by Respondent 10, who suggests that giving greater responsibilities to staff at the early stages of their career ensures they are secured into the job of curation: I have a very young staff, [one’s] twenty-six, my curator’s twenty-five, they are all young, most not married, none with kids, fourteen hour days, and they just love the fact that they’re doing something which they perceive to be very important, they’re hanging with [Andrea] Bocelli tomorrow, they helped us with Lady Gaga. So the opportunities they get are nuts, just absolutely nuts. So they’re loyal to a fault, and if I say ‘We’re doing this, we’re going for it’, it’s like ‘Jump how high? We’re ready to do it.’ So that is a negative in some ways because they don’t have a lot of experience, obviously, it requires me to do a lot of it, but my goal is to teach them and grow them up in the culture, have them believe in the mission. And then when I step aside, this continues. … One of my saddest mistakes in this career … I was very deeply involved in [my former museum], and I left suddenly, and I did not have a succession plan, and it screwed them up. I even went back six, eight months after being at [my next museum] to do programmes there, just so that they wouldn’t lose their momentum. That was part of my contract that I went, that ‘I’m coming, but only if I can go back the next year and do what I have to do at [my former museum]’. So I don’t want that to happen here, I want to make sure that they grow into the system, and the contacts that I have I’m sharing with them, the belief in what we do. And not that they literally carry out [my] ideas, but they use that as a platform for their own invention and reinvention, take this place in a completely new space. (Respondent 10)

As with Respondent 7, this museum professional from the Grammy Museum articulates a want and a clear need to pass on knowledge and experience and to create experiences for inexperienced curators so they have the best start possible. The risk of not having succession planning in place also stands out in this extract – where skills and human resources are spread too thinly and must be shared by institutions.



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The sustainability of popular music museums relies not only on how an institution is run but also on the kinds of music heritage that can be represented and the quality of stories that can be communicated. For much of this book, we have approached the topic of popular music museums by way of looking at the reconstruction of popular music’s past, with the assumption that the reader is in some way knowledgeable about the general discourses of pop and rock history. However, when looking to the future, it becomes more difficult to predict how popular music museums will function with the influx of the newer music trends we are experiencing in the present. This leads to the question, how does heritagization and institutionalization affect the way we think about popular music, and how might future trends disrupt this? Respondent 1 looked to the ways changing access to music and music consumption in the digital age (see among others Magaudda 2011; Nowak 2015; Spilker 2017) might have affected the way the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, which at the time of the interview had ceased operation (see Chapter 3), practised outreach: Interviewer: So what is that vision for the future? Would you like for there to be another bricks and mortar if money became available? Respondent 1: The key is sustainability. It’s up to the Georgia Music Hall of Fame Authority, it’s up to the state board, and I think the biggest concern is in this economy, and with technology making media so readily available, what can you do to keep audiences’ attention and ensure that you have an experience that you can keep fresh and vibrant, and that you can build the strong mix of contributed and earned revenue in order to keep yourself alive. Because I don’t think you’re doing anyone a service if—and so many museums are having to do that now, basically your doors are open, you have no money for new programmes, you have no money to change out, and with music, ten years ago if you wanted to see a rare James Brown video, you might have to come to a museum to see it, but now you just pick up your phone and go on YouTube, so I think that programming and creating experiences that really engage and compel audiences is so important. But there’s a huge price tag there. So I’m not sure what the future will bring, and if there are other ways, right now for the next few years, that we can bring people together and organize traveling exhibits that can go to institutions, and that we can tell stories online that students can engage with and can we take bits and pieces of exhibits out to students. It’s again, it always comes down to storytelling, and how can we get the best story out and make it sustainable.

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With such changes came the need to create new kinds of ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ for museum visitors, by making the museum space, or the museum collections, exclusive, offering a different experience with heritage items that can be encountered online. Increasing technologies mean museums may cease to be relevant, hence the need for more innovative strategies in exhibition design and storytelling. Alongside music consumption practices sits the concern for the ways in which the careers of newer artists may change how the stories of popular music history can be told. Respondent 12 believed contemporary artists have shorter careers, which changes the pattern of the rise and fall of stars and even whole genres: Interviewer: Final question: what are the biggest challenges for the museum at the moment and what do you foresee them being in the future? Respondent 12: I don’t know. Things are actually in pretty good shape and what I was going to say is that, like I said earlier, people didn’t really realize the value of these artefacts, but now between all the music museums and all that, some people can realize ‘oh, gee, I’ve got this jacket I wore on the stage, I can get a $100,000 for that’ or whatever. But that’s it; the artists still tend to cooperate with us and all that. Yeah, I think just to continue and well. … One of the challenges I think is that how the music business world has changed where it used to be these artists, whether it was Elvis Presley, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan or U2 or whatever, where they’d have these huge long careers, and now because the way things are, artists don’t seem to have these careers anymore for the most part, and it’s interesting because a few years back we did a concert series with MTV and gosh, that was probably early 2000s or something like that, and at the time the bands had played here, they were the hot bands of that period and we have a wall out back by our security entrance. … They generally sign it, and so one of my walk pasts and I’ll look and I’ll see some of these bands and like I say, at the time when they – MTV – was filming them here, they were pretty hot bands and now no one will know who they are. So that’s the one thing that I think—I like the idea of artists developing these long careers where they have a twenty, thirty year career and this huge body of work. I think that seems to be dying out, unfortunately. So I’d say that might be the biggest challenge.

Respondent 12 seems to refer particularly to the amount of heritage produced by long-lived artists, suggesting that music museums like the Rock Hall rely on collections that can be spread across and between institutions. If what this curator suggested is true, there may be a distinct shift in the ways popular music



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museums purchase or loan collection items, which may become highly prized and rarified. On balance, however, rock and pop genres have always churned out a fair amount of ‘one-hit wonders’ who did not write or perform their own songs, alongside artists with medium- to long-term careers. Though contemporary music genres, production and performance styles may be a stark contrast to those of decades previous, the length of artists’ careers overall is – arguably – a concern for the distant, rather than the near, future for popular music museums. Some curators, like our respondent at the Grammy Museum, aired their suspicions that the value of music, personally and socially, has changed, and that this will affect the attraction of the museum to potential visitors: I am concerned that the younger people today … . Well for whatever reason, my generation [who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s] defined itself by music. … And my kids, … they don’t really define themselves [by music]. I mean, I lived for the music, and everyone around me, it defined what we did almost every day. That doesn’t happen anymore. So I’m hoping that there’ll be enough of an emotional and historical commitment to the music that these kids are listening to now, so that when they grow up they’ll find value in the music museum, and bring their kids here for whatever reason, and feel like this is a repository of my culture, and the meaning that music has given it. Not the nostalgia stuff, because I don’t do that, but the meaning of music for them. And I hope—that’s a challenge. (Respondent 10)

At the core of this curator’s concern is the connection between youth culture and popular music (see Frith 1981). This long-established concept is perpetuated in the twenty-first century, but modes of distribution and consumption have transformed through the process of digitization (see Arditi 2018; Hesmondhalgh and Meier 2018), while taste for music tends to broaden and include more diverse genres (see Glevarec and Pinet 2012). At the same time, music that ages beyond living memory will likely become a distinct category of popular music heritage, just in the way that histories of other cultures become divided for ease of understanding. Such a distinction would certainly impact the ways popular music museums are devised and exhibitions curated, though perhaps for the better, through a broadening of topics and approaches and the expansion of curatorial strategies for the display of popular music’s past.

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Index The 80s Are Back exhibition  89, 116 2008 Global Financial Crisis  48, 52 ABBAWORLD exhibition  96 AC/DC  21, 42 AC/DC: Australia’s Family Jewels exhibition  42 Adelt, Ulrich  12, 25, 62, 93 aesthetics  1–2, 81, 110, 112, 115, 118, 121, 155–6 affect  15, 19, 92, 104, 108, 113, 127–36, 139, 144 Allen, Paul  114, 153 Allen, Peter  21 Allman Brothers Band  56 amateur experts  6, 105–8, 124–5 Americanization  67, 71 Amphlett, Chrissy  30 Andermann, Jens  107 Anderson, Ben  129 Arnold-de Simine, Silke  107 art  13–14, 25, 73–90, 100, 147 artistic legacies  59, 62–3 Arts Centre Melbourne  1, 9, 21, 29–31, 42, 85, 100, 133 Athens  131 Atlanta  131 atmosphere  46, 97, 129 aura  78, 84–6; see also star objects Australia  9, 17, 21, 23–4, 29, 65–71, 96, 99–100, 158 Australian Country Music Hall of Fame  9, 28–9, 43, 65, 102–3, 119 authenticity  5, 25, 58, 74, 86, 132, 137, 144 authorized heritage institutions  11, 63 Autry, Gene  127 B-52s  131 Bal, Mieke  115 Barbershop Harmony Society  47 Barna, Emilia  12

B.B. King Museum  50 The Beat Goes On exhibition  13, 151 the Beatles  20, 42, 85, 94, 96, 153, 162 Belgium  134 belonging  59, 62 Bennett, Andy  3, 60 Bergengren, Charles  26, 132 Berlin  10, 93, 101 bias  14, 28, 110, 112–13, 115–17, 125, 157 biography  58, 60, 72, 102–3 Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–1966 exhibition  73; see also Dylan, Bob Bolderman, Leonieke  12 Bolin, Göran  131 Booker T. and the MGs  129 Bowie, David  5, 56, 116 Brabazon, Tara  49, 103–4, 106–7 Brandellero, Amanda  12, 58 British Library  63, 137 British Music Experience  10, 38, 50, 64, 77, 87, 94, 105, 107, 141, 148 Britpop  105 Brooklyn Museum of Art  28, 79, 152 Brooks, Garth  22 Brown, James  43, 161 Bruce, Chris  5 Bubaris, Nikos  15 budgets  8, 35–7, 39, 43–8, 51–5, 59, 144, 161 Calloway, Cab  77 Campbell, Gary  128 canon  2–3, 13, 17–34, 36–7, 39, 54, 58, 62, 64, 67, 78–9, 82, 90, 105, 108–10, 115, 138 Capricorn Records  56 Cave, Nick  21, 100–1 celebrity  1 chaos  19, 81–2 Cincinnati  57 class  3, 39, 44

176 Index Cleveland  9, 36, 40, 50–1, 56–7, 60, 62, 72, 83 Cleveland Museum of Art  83 Clifton, Jane  30 clothing  45–6, 74–5, 77, 85, 88, 144, 159 Cohen, Sara  34, 60, 71; see also Roberts, Les collectors  13, 100, 114 colonialism  25 consumption  105, 131, 144, 156, 161–3 Cortez, Alcina  6, 12–15, 18, 36, 39, 48, 55, 78, 93, 107, 109, 115, 124, 157 country music  9, 12, 19–21, 28, 44–5, 47, 55, 63, 65–71, 103, 119–20 Country Music Capital  65, 68–71 Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum  9, 11, 19, 55, 57, 63, 71, 117, 149–50, 159 Crenn, Gaëlle  12, 96 cultural consecration  20–1, 79, 90 significance  2, 21, 59, 75, 102, 108, 110, 156

Experience Music Project  6, 9, 20, 24–5, 27, 40–1, 59, 73, 85, 87–9, 102, 106, 114, 116, 122, 125, 132, 138–9, 142, 147–51, 153 experiential learning  5–6

DaCosta Holton, Kimberly  142 David Bowie Is exhibition  5; see also Bowie, David Delta Blues Museum  26, 110 Denmark  63 Detroit  57–8, 62 digitization  163 directional speakers  149–50, 152 disco  98 DIY (do-it-yourself) heritage institutions  8–11, 15, 119 Dusty, Slim  103 Dylan, Bob  24, 73, 109–10, 116, 162; see also Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–1966 exhibition

gender  19, 25, 28–33, 44, 133 generations  2, 4, 92 baby boomers  3, 25, 39, 42–3, 106 intergenerational appeal  38, 42–4, 53 geography  18, 33, 41, 55, 57–61, 72, 78, 97, 113; see also place Georgia Music Hall of Fame  9, 51–3, 56–7, 61, 71, 96–7, 122, 161 Germany  53, 134 Gilmore, James  37 Godchaux, Donna  33 the Go Go’s  32 Gordon, Lee  113 Grammy Museum  10, 20, 26–7, 40–1, 43, 50, 89–91, 153, 160, 163 The Grateful Dead  33 Gray, Clive  4–5 Grossberg, Lawrence  131 Guitar Gallery exhibition  88, 102

Edge, Kevin  143, 145, 149 Edna, Dame  21 electronica  77 embodied experience  19, 97–8 emotion  61, 86, 112, 128–30, 132–3, 137, 146, 163; see also affect England  48, 94, 134, 137 experience economy  37–8, 43–4, 46, 53

Fairchild, Charles  5–6, 11–13, 18, 37, 56, 72, 78–9, 82, 85–6, 129 fans  36, 40, 42, 74, 87–9, 104–6, 111–15, 119, 121, 123–4, 131, 138, 145, 153 Farnham, John  17 Federation Square  96 film  65–70, 75, 131, 142, 159 Finnegan, Ruth  60 Flake  30 folk  30, 65 Forman, Murray  12, 28, 79, 152 France  110, 134 Frith, Simon  112 From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Springsteen exhibition  36 Fry, Robert  12

Harry, Debbie  28 headphones  149–53 Heart of Texas Country Music Museum  9, 44–7

Index Hector Country Music Heritage Museum  10–11, 21–3, 127 Hendrix, Jimi  59, 63, 89–90, 114, 142 Henke, Jim  58, 60, 111 Hennion, Antoine  105–6 heritagization  2–3, 155, 161 high culture  83; see also art Hill, Lauren  32 hip-hop  27–8, 77, 79 Hip-Hop: A Cultural Odyssey exhibition  27 Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes & Rage exhibition  28, 79, 152 historiography  20, 28 Hodge, Christina  132 Hunter, Ian  60 Huyssen, Andreas  128 Iceland  10, 61–2, 96–7, 146 identity cultural  57–8, 71–2 local  55, 57, 60–1 national  63–71 personal  26, 110–15, 125 induction  30, 32–3 instruments  1, 77–8, 85, 88, 102–3, 129, 144, 159 drums  77, 129 guitar  25, 33, 77, 87–90, 102–3, 120 piano  60, 101 Israel  80–2, 100, 111 Italy  132 itchy heritage  136–9 jazz  30, 61, 97 Johnson, Kathryn  5, 12 Jones, Carys Wyn  20 journalism  8, 20, 62, 91, 111 Juchartz, Larry  26, 28, 58 Kam, Jacqueline  48–9 KD’s Elvis Presley Museum  9, 75–6, 113 King, Stephen  12, 15, 26, 110 Knifton, Robert  19, 75, 113, 128, 133, 136, 145, 149 Kuhn, Annette  132 Kylie: An Exhibition  85; see also Minogue, Kylie

177

Laws, John  66 Leach, Andy  59 legitimation  1–2, 85 Le Guern, Philippe  2, 110 leisure  1, 5 Leonard, Marion  4, 12–14, 16, 18–19, 36, 48, 55, 57–8, 60, 63, 74–5, 77–8, 85, 107, 113, 128, 133, 136, 145–7, 151, 157 Levin, Amy  128 lifetime soundtrack  19 Little Richard  53, 56 Liverpool  10, 13, 58, 62, 85, 151 Lloyd, Carol  30 London  10, 58, 62, 137, 141 Los Angeles  10, 40–1, 62 Lynn, Loretta  45 lyrics  60–2, 74, 78, 88 McCall, Vikki  4–5 McKean, Joy  103 McMullen, Tracy  110 Macon  9, 51–3, 56–7, 97, 131 Madonna  28 Madsen, Jacob Westergaard  12, 128 Mallinder, Stephen  49, 103–4, 106–7 Marstine, Janet  5 Mason, Rhiannon  5 material culture  7–8, 13–15, 60, 73–90, 129, 142, 144–7, 156 Melbourne  9, 96; see also Arts Centre Melbourne memory cultural  2, 4, 124 living  3, 108, 163 work  127, 132–5 Memphis  57–8, 62 methodology  7–11 micromuseums  8, 15, 21, 24, 43–4, 75, 86, 93, 101, 113, 119, 127, 134 Minneapolis  73 Minogue, Kylie  21, 85 Morris, Russell  130 Mortensen, Christian Hviid  12, 128 Motown  58 MTV  162 multimedia  6, 11, 43 Museum at Bethel Woods  50

178 Index Museum of London  137 Museum of Pop Culture; see Experience Music Project Museum RockArt  10, 101, 134–6 music city  11, 47, 49, 55–7 myths  11, 25, 56, 62, 72, 85 narrative  91–108 chronological approach  14, 93–8, 105 concept-based approach  100–1 object-based approach  5, 102–3 story-based approach  99–100 thematic approach  96–8 Nashville  9–12, 47, 55, 63 National Centre for Popular Music (NCPM)  48–50 National Lottery  48 National Museum of African American Music  10, 47, 86, 99, 133, 150 National Museums Liverpool  13 Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid  10, 37, 141 the Netherlands  10, 101, 134–5 new museology  4–5; see also new museum new museum  4–6, 34, 37, 44, 92, 102, 106, 108, 144, 152, 156; see also new museology New York City  36, 39, 50–1, 53, 57–8 New Zealand  10–11, 75, 113, 127, 158 Nick Cave: The Exhibition  100 Night Train to Nashville: Music City Rhythm & Blues, 1945 to 1970 exhibition  63 Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibition  59, 73, 116, 122–3, 138–9, 151 noise of objects  87–90 Norway  63 nostalgia  14–15, 127–9, 136–9, 163 as affect  129–32 as memory work  132–4 nostalgic vibrancy  134–6 obsession  2, 113–14, 118, 159 On the Box: Great Moments in Australian Television 1956–2006 exhibition  109

oral history  116, 151 origin story  56, 62 Parton, Dolly  45 passion  6, 15–16, 109, 111–12, 131, 155, 160 Peterson, Richard  19 pilgrimage  40, 48, 88 Pine, Joseph  37 Pink Floyd  79 Pirrie Adams, Kathleen  6–7, 13, 139 place  14, 41, 55–72, 95–6, 129; see also geography pop  10, 23, 25, 30, 49, 96, 128, 109, 112, 116, 119, 143, 161, 163 PopMuseum  10, 119 pop-rock  17, 64, 129 POPstudio exhibition  141 Portugal  14, 18, 36, 55, 78, 93, 134 post-museum  5 Powerhouse Museum  9, 11, 17, 23, 89, 96, 99, 106–7, 109, 113, 120, 130 Prakash, Gyan  25 Presley, Elvis  9, 43, 56, 75, 113, 162; see also KD’s Elvis Presley Museum Prince  43 punk  58, 94, 98, 137, 139 Pylon  131 race  19, 25–8, 133 Radio Veronica  134 Ragnarock  63 Ramones Museum  10, 93–5 Rankin, Dusty  67 Real Wild Child! Australian Rock Music Then and Now exhibition  17, 99, 106, 116 Redding, Otis  52, 56 Reeves, Jim  45–6 Regev, Motti  11, 64 Reijinders, Stijn  12 Reising, Russell  132, 143, 145, 148 Reitsamer, Rosa  28–9 REM  131 retromania  105, 128, 142 Reykjanes Museum of Heritage  10–11, 146, 155 Reynolds, Simon  90, 105, 128, 137, 142–5, 148, 152–3, 156 rhythm and blues (R&B)  25, 63, 97

Index Ridgeway, Joan  68 Rishoi, Christy  26, 28, 58 RoadKnight, Margret  30 Roberts, Les  34, 71 Roberts, Lisa  102 Robinson, Lucy  136–8 rock  4, 9–10, 20, 24–5, 28, 30, 42, 56–8, 62, 75, 80–3, 88, 93, 96, 99–100, 107, 110, 111, 113, 116, 131, 133, 137–8, 147, 153, 161, 163 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (Rock Hall) 9, 20–1, 25–8, 33, 35, 37, 39, 40, 48, 56–60, 62, 71, 73, 77, 83–4, 87–8, 91, 93–4, 107, 111, 117–18, 127–8, 132, 143, 150, 157–8, 162 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex  50–2 Rock Chicks exhibition  21, 29–31 Rockheim  63 Rogers, Roy  127 Rolling Stones  39, 162 the Ronettes  32 Saddington, Wendy  30 Salt-N-Pepa  77 San Francisco  58, 62 Santelli, Bob  20, 128 Say it Loud: The Genius of James Brown exhibition  43 Schmutz, Vaughn  21, 79 Schneider Sisters  68 Seattle  9, 24, 58, 62, 114, 122, 138–9 sensory overload  88–9 Sheffield  48–9 Slavic language  23–4 Slobin, Mark  112 Smith, Laurajane  128 Smith, Patti  28 sound bleed  145, 147–53 booths  149–50, 152 environment  148, 153 Sound and Vision Experience  37, 123 Southern Contemporary Rock Assembly  30 Spain  134 spectacle  6 Spinning Around: 50 Years of Festival Records exhibition  109 Springfield, Dusty  33

179

Springsteen, Bruce  31, 36–7, 56 star objects  84–6, 90 Stax Museum of American Soul  129 StoryCorps  123 storytelling; see narrative Street, Sean  127 Strong, Catherine  110 structure of feelings  127 subjectivity of curators  14, 92, 109–21, 124–5, 157 of visitors  121–5 succession planning  159–60 sustainability  36, 47–9, 51, 53–4, 101, 159, 161 Tamworth  9, 19, 65, 67–71 Tannock, Stuart  127 taste  15, 38, 84, 109, 112–15, 118, 125, 163 team-based approach to curation  117–21 Tel Aviv  82 Thomas, Jennie  59 Thornton, Sarah  19 Tónlistarsafn Íslands  10 tourism  12, 36, 40–1, 47, 49–50, 52–3, 60 truth  108, 115, 128, 132 U2  162 United States  25, 44, 56, 59 urban music  77 van der Hoeven, Arno  12, 58 Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A)  5, 13 volunteers  8, 15, 119, 134–6 Walk a Country Mile exhibition  9, 65–71 Washington, Dinah  33 Weisman Art Museum  73 West, Kanye  27 Wetherell, Margaret  128, 130 Wiedlin, Jane  33 The Wiggles Exhibition  109 Williams, Raymond  127 Women Who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power exhibition  29–33, 36, 117–18

180