This is a repository copy of A critical survey of museum collections of popular music in the
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Article:
Leonard, M orcid.org/0000-0001-9229-0508 and Knifton, R (2017) A critical survey of
museum collections of popular music in the United Kingdom. Popular Music History, 10 (2).
pp. 171-191. ISSN 1740-7133
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.33288
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1
A Critical Survey of Museum Collections of Popular Music in the United
Kingdom
Marion Leonard and Robert Knifton
Popular music has increasingly been identified, celebrated, exploited and
preserved as cultural heritage by a variety of agents including heritage
institutions, commercial concerns and community groups (Cohen et al 2015;
Baker 2015).
Museums are one of the actors who have been significant within
this process through the establishment of music collections, high profile
exhibitions and dedicated music museums. This marks a distinct shift in
practice for museums which, twenty years ago, had not tended to feature
popular culture (Moore, 1997).The shift toward understanding popular music
in this way is indicative of changing cultural attitudes which have, in some
areas at least, begun to dismantle formerly rigid demarcations between
‘legitimate’, ‘middle-brow’ and ‘popular’ taste delineated by Bourdieu
(Bourdieu, 2010: 8). Such distinctions arguably lack cogency in the 21
st
century cultural context, where supply of culture has dramatically diversified
through processes of globalisation whilst democratisation of culture has been
facilitated by the availability of the Internet. Focussing on the UK this article
considers the nature of museum popular music collections, appraising their
scope and significance, and examining what the development of these
collections can reveal about how such institutions select and prioritise
material.
Scholarly attention to popular music collecting has tended to focus on the
motivations, practices, tastes and identities of individual collectors. While
some studies have taken account of collection practices related to material
such as posters, T-shirts and ephemera (Fiske 1992; Cavicchi 1998), much of
the work on collecting has attended to recorded sound collections, from
studies of record collecting (e.g. Plasketes 1992; Straw, 1997; Yochim and
Biddinger, 2008; Shuker, 2010) to bootleg collectors and tape traders
(Marshall 2003), through to examinations of how individuals collect and
organise digital music files (McCourt, 2005; Kibby, 2009; Magaudda, 2011).
Beyond this, as Shuker notes in his study of record collectors, there is a need
to investigate how institutional collections reconstruct and represent the
musical past (2010: 205-6). While there is a body of work relating to the
creation of popular music collections within libraries (e.g. Wells 1998; Chang,
2008; Luyk, 2013; Wanser, 2014), comparative work on museum collections
is scant (Edge, 2000; Leonard, 2007). There is a small but important amount
of work on the holdings, collection management and approaches of specific
music centres and specialist popular music museums (Sarpong, 2004;
Maguire, Motson, Wilson & Wolfe, 2005; Henke, 2009; Moody 2012; Pirrie
2
Adams, 2016) as well as a developing literature on community archives and
museums (Baker, 2015; Baker and Collins, 2015) but a notable absence of
broader reviews of collections of popular music by what might be considered
to be the formal museum sector.
This discussion is based upon findings from the first review of popular music
collections in UK museums. Over twenty years ago it was found that while
‘modern pop music should be one of the easiest and most obvious areas to
collect’ it was largely absent from museum collections (Arnold-Forster and La
Rue, 1993: 20). Much has changed since then and in revealing the results of
our research we will discuss the nature of existing holdings and the rationale
behind their collection and will also evaluate how popular music is being
defined and preserved as cultural heritage. As institutions which collect and
display the audio-visual and material culture which attends to popular music,
museums are active in preserving, presenting and articulating the cultural
worth of popular music and in representing it as cultural heritage. The cultural
status of museums is critical to this work as the collecting policies and
practices of these institutions, more than many other repositories, shape
public understanding about cultural worth, by removing objects from
circulation and framing them in aesthetic and cultural terms. As Duncan noted
about the character of the gallery environment: ‘through the aesthetizing lens
of museum space’ everyday objects ‘may become art’ (Duncan, 1995: 20)
Similarly, it could be argued that the very act of collection and curation shifts
the symbolic meaning of popular music materials. Of course the cultural worth
of music is articulated, evaluated, and argued over in many other places than
collecting organisations. The meaning and importance of music is asserted,
rehearsed and debated within websites, magazines, television, film, and radio,
as well as being promoted though re-issues and award ceremonies. However,
we must not overlook the important role that museums have in defining,
recording and representing our social and cultural activities for future
generations. As Pearce has argued, when objects are collected by museums
they are effectively removed from circulation as commodities and invested
with new social meaning (Pearce, 1992: 33). In Bourdieu’s terms, the
accumulation of economic capital merges with an increased accumulation of
symbolic capital. (Bourdieu, 2010: 285) Through a focus on museum
collections we will discuss how these institutions contribute to an ongoing
dialogue about the cultural importance of the popular past and shifting notions
of the value of popular music in the public sphere. Moreover, as collections of
popular music have only been established within museums relatively recently,
the rationale for inclusion can shed light on changing attitudes toward popular
culture and approaches to institutional collecting. Drawing on primary
evidence gathered through surveys and first-person interviews conducted with
museum professionals we will discuss the types of material found within
museum collections, the processes through which these collections have
3
been assembled, and the multifarious ways that institutions regard and deploy
their popular music collections.
Methodology
The foundation for this article are the results of a questionnaire based survey
of UK museums and series of follow-up interviews undertaken with UK
museum professionals. The survey was distributed to 198 UK museums of
varied size, geographical and typological character. These included national
museums, university museums, council-funded institutions, and private sector
enterprises. The geographical spread of the institutions contacted was wide,
representing all four main constituent nations within the UK, as well as the
Isles of Wight and Man. The surveyed institutions included social history
museums, art museums, specialist music museums, and institutions of a
mixed format. Depending on the size of the museum, in some cases we
contacted several different members of staff responsible for different
functional roles, such as conservation and collections management, so as to
maximise the opportunities for responses, gather more data and thus gain a
fuller picture of the museum’s operation in the field of popular music.
From 198 contacted sites, responses were received from 83 unique
participants, with 47 providing detailed information on their collections and
exhibitions, and 65 agreeing to schedule follow up interviews. Specific
collections data was gathered from across 43 separate UK museums and,
together with follow-up interviews, overall 62 different UK cultural and heritage
institutions were directly consulted or contributed information to the research
project – with multiple respondents from some of these sites. The
geographical split of those either interviewed or surveyed saw the largest
concentration of respondents located in the north west, where the research
team was based and we had most pre-existing links with the museum sector.
This area constituted 34% of our survey. The other areas more prominently
represented in the survey are the south east and London (25%), the midlands
(13%), the north east (9%) and Wales (8%). Invariably, those institutions that
possessed significant music collections, had hosted exhibitions addressing
the topic, or had an interest in developing collections and/or exhibitions in the
future responded more readily, meaning there is a case of positive
identification and reinforcement in the survey results.
The 65 interviews conducted for the research took place between September
2010 and July 2011, with the majority being conducted face-to-face in the
respective museum. On average, discussions lasted for approximately one
hour, although some interviews were over two hours in duration. A small
number of telephone interviews were conducted on occasions where it was
not possible to meet in person. Museum professionals from a range of roles
within the sector were consulted, including curators, educators, conservators,
4
and museum management. The discussions initiated were broad-ranging,
encompassing all aspects of museum engagement with popular music. In
conducting these conversations, we found that many of the issues raised by
museum professionals relating to popular music could equally apply to the
curation of other popular culture material. Therefore, we should keep an
awareness of the potential of popular music as a conduit for discussion of
contemporary issues in the museum.
The typology of museums that responded to our survey equally gives a useful
snapshot of the sector: 42.5% were local authority museums; 20%
independent museums; 10% nationals; 10% university museums; 7.5% were
responses from archival collections with some museum displays; 5%
specialist music museums; and 5% other. Within each of these broad
categories there is considerable diversity also, and we should note for
instance that a university museum which specialises in contemporary art may
have more in common with independent museums of this genre than with
fellow university sites. Nevertheless, the spread indicates roughly the depth of
institutions addressing popular music through their programmes.
Definition of Terms
The issue of how ‘popular music’ might be defined and indeed how (and why)
it should be demarcated from the broader category of ‘music’ has been an
ongoing debate within the field. This issue of definition is felt in very real terms
by archivists and curators of popular music as they wrestle with decisions
over what to include in or exclude from their collections (Nannyonga
Tamusuz, 2006). The term popular music, Fabbri argues, ‘is an expression
that covers a very wide semantic space’ but is useful ‘for distinguishing very
broad musical tastes or interests, as opposed to ‘classical music’,
‘traditional/folk music’, ‘jazz’ (though anyone knows how tricky such
distinctions become at the multidimensional borders of those cultural units)’
(Fabbri, 2013: 16). Wicke has cautioned against trying to ‘fix… [the term] in a
generic way’, arguing that while not all music is popular music, nevertheless,
‘there is not much left which couldn’t become popular music given the present
alliance of social and cultural forces, technological and commercial
structures.’ (Wicke in Frith et al., 2005:143). Moving away from genre
categories, Frith has offered a more open way of defining the term, arguing for
its use in identifying ‘Music made commercially, in a particular kind of legal
(copyright) and economic (market) system; music made using an ever-
changing technology of sound storage; music significantly experienced as
mass mediated; music primarily made for social and bodily pleasure; music
which is formally hybrid.’ (Frith et al., 2005: 134). Yet despite this useful and
broad definition, even these parameters may seem restrictive, excluding some
music which could also be placed within the category of ‘popular music’.