Popular music as cultural heritage: scoping out the field of practice

Abstract

This paper sets out to deepen our understanding of the relationship between popular music and cultural heritage and to delineate the practices of popular music as cultural heritage. The paper illustrates how the term has been mobilised by a variety of actors, from the public to the private sector, to highlight the value of particular popular music manifestations and justify or encourage their preservation and diffusion for posterity. We focus on Austria, England, France and the Netherlands – countries with diverse popular music histories and with varying national and international reach. Popular music heritage is present in national and local public sector heritage institutions and practices in a number of ways. These range from the preservation and exhibition of the material culture of heritage in museums and archives, to a variety of ‘bottom-up’ initiatives, delineating a rich landscape of emblematic places, valued for their attachment to particular musicians or music scenes. The paper points to an underlying tension between the adoption and replication of conventional heritage practices to the preservation and remembrance of the popular music and its celebration as an expression of the dynamism of contemporary popular culture.

Keywords:

• popular music
• cultural heritage practices
• music tourism
• museums and archives

Acknowledgements

This research has been supported as part of the Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity (POPID) project by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info) which is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, DASTI, ETF, FNR, FWF, HAZU, IRCHSS, MHEST, NWO, RANNIS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007-2013, under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities programme.

Notes

1. For a list of localities and tourist websites, see Appendix 1.

2. Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies; Biographisch Woordenboek van Nederland; Dictionnaire de la biographie francaise; Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon (although this runs only up to 1950).