Music and Heritage

New Perspectives on Place-making and Sonic Identity

Liam Maloney, John Schofield, Liam Maloney, John Schofield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367359836
• eBook ISBN: 9781000363302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Music and Heritage provides new thinking about the diverse ways people engage with heritage. By exploring the relationships that exist between music, place and identity, the book illustrates how people form attachments to place and how such attachments are represented by sound and music-making.

Presenting case studies and perspectives from across a range of genres, the volume argues that combining music with heritage provides an alternative and productive opportunity to think about heritage values and place attachment. Contributions to this edited collection use a diversity of methods, perspectives, cues and genres to reflect critically on issues related to these and other interconnections in ways that encourage new thinking about the character, meaning and purpose of cultural heritage, and the various ways in which people can interact with it through sound – thus re-encountering the supposedly familiar world around them.

Taking heritage studies, musicology and place-making research in new directions, Music and Heritage will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of heritage, history, music, geography and anthropology. It will also be relevant to those with an interest in how music relates to place-making and place attachment, as well as to practitioners and policymakers working in the planning, design and creative sectors.

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Sonic identity and the making of heritage

‘This must be the place’

Liam Maloney and John Schofield

An apocryphal story concerns the inventor of radio Guglielmo Marconi. The story goes that in 1937, a few weeks before his death, Marconi conceived that sound never truly dies, it simply travels outwards from its source, emanating in all directions, reflecting off every surface, spreading ever onwards for eternity, eventually becoming too quiet for the human ear to perceive. Marconi believed that, were a suitably sensitive microphone to be invented, we could hear Jesus’ sermon on the mount echoing around us still. Whilst this idea of an acoustic half-life is fine in theory, the delicate dance of physics means that, eventually, sound becomes indistinguishable from its surroundings, entirely obliterated by the random vibrations of particles as it loses its original energy.

Fifteen years ago, music analyst the late Adam Krims (2007, ix) noted in the introduction to his seminal Music and Urban Geography how ‘most music scholars seemed … little, if at all, interested in how the character of … cities may be shaping how we hear and think about music’. Heritage scholarship has started to address this question (and specifically within the context of what is referred to as Critical Heritage Studies), focused often on how music relates to place and identity (e.g. Baker 2015; Cohen et al. 2015; Istvandity et al. 2019; Lashua et al. 2014). Yet, significant gaps remain and Krims’ observations on where they lie remain relevant today: in the character of place, how character is consumed and constructed through music, and how character shapes identity through creative practice. This book is an attempt to close these gaps and to do so in what we consider the most effective way: through cross-disciplinary collaborative research, by bringing together practitioners and musicians with researchers across related disciplines including musicology, anthropology, archaeology, history and geography amongst others. Musicology is a key component and the single ingredient that makes this collection distinctive. This is partly because of musicology’s tendency to think of music as intangible and momentary whilst ignoring or overlooking the physical dimension. This is the opposite of those other disciplines more traditionally concerned with heritage and which often focus on the physical at the expense of the intangible. It is also due to the rarity with which musicking (after Small 1998) has featured in critical heritage discourse.

In curating this collection, our starting position has three related dimensions. First, is a definition of heritage as being diverse not uniform, inclusive not exclusive, concerning the everyday as much as the iconic – heritage as something conceived and constructed from the ground up, not imposed from the top down, following Lekakis (2019: 177) for example, and his use of the term ‘mnemeiotic’, referring to ‘bottom up memorialisation’. Second, is a recognition that few things are as everyday as the multiple and diverse ways that people embrace and engage with music. And third, the nature of music and the focus of scholars on its intangible and momentary nature provides an opportunity to explore in depth, the relationships between tangible and intangible heritage and between theory and practice.

Arguably more than other aspects of heritage, music challenges any prevalence of the distinction between its tangible and intangible forms, highlighting through composition, recording and performance how one cannot exist without the other. This approach to defining and understanding heritage is challenging in its complexity and almost impossible to ‘manage’, if that is the intention. A parallel exists in the concept of an ecosystem in which everything relates to everything else. The chapters presented in this book constitute a number of approaches and principles that support these various points. With this in mind, we summarise this book as being: a characterisation of the current field of music heritage research; a demonstration of music’s vitality and cultural significance; the presentation of a suite of methodologies and perspectives derived from more conventional ideas on place and heritage; and a manifesto of sorts, promoting music heritage at a time when the culture sector (and including venues, etc.) is under increasing threat. We have used the term ‘sonic identity’ to capture the essence of this interface between music and heritage.

Heritage in the mix

A DJ mix or set provides an apt analogy to the idea of heritage-making. A DJ brings musical ideas together as a playlist or a particular mix that draws influences that somehow align and cohere. The mix a DJ constructs is grown from momentary kairotic factors such as the crowd’s response, the venue’s sound system, the length of set required, current trends in music, the location and the time of day. Even factors such as weather could play a part in proceedings. However, the references encoded into a DJ’s set are also highly longitudinal, emanating from personal narratives, historic associations, contextual and location-based resonances, and an appreciation of the web of interconnectedness that popular music represents (Brewster and Broughton 2006: 17). As such, a DJ set is created both in the moment and from lifetimes of heritage and place-making narratives.

Just as a mix is a product of both kairotic and chronological influences, so the internal trajectory of a mix is also influenced. The next track played is highly contingent on the one that preceded it, and the skills of the DJ to deftly transition between the two; paving over the gaps with new information; erasing the past to allow sonic space for the future. However, the influences of previous tracks curtail and steer the mix in a certain musical direction, leaving inferences or shadows of themselves, just as sonic identity can be found in the traces of musical activity (Attias 2013).

Thus, a particular ‘future’ is generated out of influences from the past, through a connection made between two almost indistinguishable tracks. Drawing a parallel in the built environment might involve an entirely new building, designed to mirror or represent the historic example next door, or through a bold new addition to the historic building that remains.

Sonic identity

Sonic identity is perhaps best introduced by the qualities that the concept does not express. The prototypical jazz aficionado can identify the screech of a trumpet or a certain improvisatory melody line with its const...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Sonic identity and the making of heritage: ‘This must be the place’
• Part I: Parklife: (New) town and (old) country
• Part II: On and on: Cities/industry/infrastructure
• Part III: Interzone: Comparative notes on a northern town
• Part IV: No future: Remembrance
• Index