Performatively Driven: A Genre for Signifying in Popular Music Exhibitions

Abstract

This article explores a relatively novel field of practice, or genre, emerging in the context of museums and exhibitions of popular music and what I will refer to as performatively driven, here discussed and illustrated with examples drawn from particular international exhibitions that I have visited. This genre is comprised of a myriad of strategies used by curators to give substance to their exhibiting narratives that tends to cluster into four essential types – (i) exhibiting sound and music; (ii) dramatic strategies (for current purposes, the example of contrast is considered); (iii) enveloping strategies, and (iv) sound epistemologies – and all of which draw on combinations of multifarious exhibits (material and immaterial). In terms of their signifying potential, my analysis points to these strategies, each of them focused on imparting meaning in an experiential rather than a purely rational sense, as achieving the following ends: conveying notions of popular music as object and artifact; eliciting emotional responses and prompting engagement; valuing museumgoers’ individualities, while also locating them as part of a community (e.g., of music fans, of followers of a particular musical artist, of a particular generation); providing re‐enactment (both by reconstructing scenarios from the past or from live concerts and by activating memories offered of popular music); and conveying knowledge. As these signifying strategies dissolve into the aforementioned meanings in an experiential rather than in a more rational sense, I would suggest they are correspondingly rooted in the concept of performance and therefore propose adding this concept to the typology of concepts presented by Baker et al. (2018).

Collecting and Exhibiting Traditional and Popular Alpine Folk Music in Austria—A Case Study

“…This research perspective incorporated the mentioned aspects into a global history of museums (Visscher, 2018). Moreover, museum studies has focused on the history of popular music and its heritage by examining its social, cultural, political, and economic value (Baker, 2018; on museum studies, see Cortez, 2017; Cortez, 2019).…”

“…Further theoretical reflections have dealt with materialized sound (Holton, 2002; Schaeffer, 2008). Specific aspects of structuring music exhibition concepts have been addressed, too (Cortez, 2019). From the perspective of museology, the time‐independent core museum tasks of collecting, preserving, and curating music and sound are central (Knifton, 2012).…”

“…The range of material objects is broad and includes, for example, playback media and devices, ticket stubs, concert T‐shirts, posters, autographed photographs, brochures, fanzines, badges, and patches, besides having immaterial value (on “displaying musical sound as a sonic artefact,” see Cortez, 2017, p. 374; Passos Sachs, 2015). Sound helps to mediate the context, the message and the telling of a specific story by stimulating the sense of hearing (Baker, Doyle, et al., 2016; Baker et al., 2016a; Both, 2019; Botts & Palmer, 2019; Cortez, 2019; Heimlich et al., 2015; Venso, 2019).…”

“…Discussions on the exhibition of music and consequently on strategies of display have been mainly conducted in the framework of museum studies with reference to selected displays of popular music (Cortez, 2019; Fairchild, 2017; Fryberger, 2019; Renel, 2019). Such work has focused primarily on forms of presenting and experiencing sound in museum exhibitions (Both, 2019; Botts & Palmer, 2019; Leonard, 2010; Venso, 2019).…”

Museum as a Sensory Space: A Discussion of Communication Effect of Multi-Senses in Taizhou Museum

“…With the 'sensory shift', modern museums have begun to reconsider their limitations to the sensory use of objects, and they are starting to explore the potential of multi-sensory solutions to improve knowledge transfer in museums and increase engagement with visitors by connecting them with the sensory properties of historic objects, their contexts and the stories behind, also providing emotionally enriched experiences. With increasing numbers of studies indicating that interacting with sensory objects have social, cognitive and even therapeutic value, especially for people with disabilities [46][47][48][49][50][51][52], museums are enhancing their valuation on 'touch' which is regarded as a therapy tool and a cultural communication platform [53][54][55][56], 'sound' which creates a sense of spatial experience [57,58] and 'smell' which triggers personal memories, imagination and emotion [59][60][61].…”