Sites of Popular Music Heritage

This volume examines the location of memories and histories of popular music and its multiple pasts, exploring the different ‘places’ in which popular music can be situated, including the local physical site, the museum storeroom and exhibition space, and the digitized archive and display space made possible by the internet. Contributors from a broad range of disciplines such as archive studies, popular music studies, media and cultural studies, leisure and tourism, sociology, museum studies, communication studies, cultural geography, and social anthropology visit the specialized locus of popular music histories and heritage, offering diverse set of approaches. Popular music studies has increasingly engaged with popular music histories, exploring memory processes and considering identity, collective and cultural memory, and notions of popular culture’s heritage values, yet few accounts have spatially located such trends to focus on the spaces and places where we encounter and engender our relationship with popular music’s history and legacies. This book offers a timely re-evaluation of such sites, reinserting them into the narratives of popular music and offering new perspectives on their function and significance within the production of popular music heritage. Bringing together recent research based on extensive fieldwork from scholars of popular music studies, cultural sociology, and museum studies, alongside the new insights of practice-based considerations of current practitioners within the field of popular music heritage, this is the first collection to address the interdisciplinary interest in situating popular music histories, heritages, and pasts. The book will therefore appeal to a wide and growing academic readership focused on issues of heritage, cultural memory, and popular music, and provide a timely intervention in a field of study that is engaging scholars from across a broad spectrum of disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical perspectives.

"All in all, Sites of Popular Music Heritage purveys a many-sided profile of musical heritage work and its operational environment. As is the case with all edited volumes, some of the chapters are more analytical and some more descriptive, but I found even the most casual ones in the collection entertaining." - Antti-Ville Kärjä, Music Archive Finland

Sara Cohen is Professor in the School of Music at the University of Liverpool, UK and Director of the Institute of Popular Music.Robert Knifton is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Visual and Material Culture Research Centre, Kingston University, UK.Marion Leonard is Senior Lecturer in the School of Music at the University of Liverpool, UK and a member of the Institute of Popular Music.Les Roberts is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool, UK.