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Local Music Collections: Exploring Ideas of Space, Place, Connection, and Community
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- Author(s) / Creator(s)
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The connectedness of music—to specific places and spaces—is compelling. Forms of cultural production ranging from books, films, television, and the news media, use the associations wemake between musical genres, moods, and sounds to specific geographies, to evoke ideas and perceptions about these locations. These associations between music, space, and place have significant staying power, as they can serve as signifiers of the cultures of a specific geography. Take, for example, the use of music in a film to signify a large, bustling city, versus a pastoral, rural locale. Local music collections in libraries, archives, and documentation centres are examples of musical artifacts that embody ideas about music and its relationship to local, national, and global cultures, and ideas of space and place. This presentation explores the idea of “local” as it relates to music collections in cultural heritage institutions, and considers their relationship to space and place from a theoretical perspective. Drawing on literature from cultural studies, the sociology of music, and cultural geography, we explore how local music collections can be understood in the context of the shifting boundaries between concepts of the local, national, and global in music, and how ideas of connection and community are meaningful to both local music collectors and users. We also draw on preliminary findings from interviews with local music collectors in Canadian cultural heritage institutions conducted in 2018 as part of Sounds of Home, a multi-year study on local music collections and collecting practices, to bring in perspectives from collectors themselves. Local music, and by extension, local music collections and their collectors are rich sources of information that help us address important questions about the local, national, and global in music, and more broadly, ideas of community and connection.
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- Date created
- 2019-07-01
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- Type of Item
- Conference/Workshop Presentation