This article examines how popular music has been represented within museum exhibitions and considers the specificities of collection and display relating to popular music artefacts. Using a number of recent exhibitions as examples, it considers how very particular versions of popular music history are constructed through the display of material culture. In effect, the institutional logics of museums and art galleries mean that the conceptual underpinning of popular music exhibitions tends to take the form of either canonic representations, the contextualization of popular music artefacts as art or the presentation of popular music as social or local history. The article argues that these types of approach represent a problem for the researcher/curator attempting to reconstruct a truly social history of popular music as they tend to replicate dominant hegemonic versions of history. The article then suggests ways in which the popular music curator can actively learn from private collectors in order to give a more balanced representation of a variety of popular music practices. Drawing on interviews with private collectors it considers how the material culture of popular music can offer an avenue through which to explore personal and social histories, memory, affect and identity in the exhibition context.
This article will examine how British-born second-and third-generation Irish people use Irish music and dance in the production of an Irish cultural identity. The article draws on research undertaken with members of the Irish communities in the English cities of Coventry and Liverpool. The research was conducted with music and dance practitioners in Liverpool who strongly identify as Irish and also with schoolchildren in Coventry whose parents or grandparents were born in Ireland. The paper first explores the comments of the Liverpool respondents and points to how music and dance can offer a space in which different generations can mark out their affiliation or embody their Irishness. Secondly, the paper considers interview work with schoolchildren in Coventry, concentrating on their responses as listeners to Irish traditional music. Their comments point to the capacity of this music to resonate with multiple, even conflicting, productions of Irishness. The comments of all the respondents raise key debates about authenticity and the construction of identity.
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