Curating Popular Music Heritage: Reasoning on Making Museum Studies and Music Studies Know Each Other

Popular music is deeply embedded in the dynamics of the contemporary world bymeans of its capacity to engender modes of privacy and publicness, to communicateemotion, and to enable us to create connections and so to work as a whole. Museumshave traditionally addressed art music through the exhibition of musical instrumentsbut now that the exhibition of popular music has presented new challenges andopportunities worldwide, the examination of popular music discourses in museums isof the utmost importance for it to be meaningfully celebrated as heritage.This paper expands on the representation of Popular Music in museums in Portugal atthe beginning of the 21st century by discussing a case study, that of the exhibition NoTempo do Gira-Discos: um percurso pela produção fonográfica portuguesa. Twodomains are at stake here: observation of the curators' mental configuration by bothethnographic interviewing and analysis of the exhibition, mostly by means ofdiscourse analysis instruments, and specifically genre and register. Although thecurators had themselves previously developed insightful and innovative concepts withregard to popular music, discourse analysis reveals how in this instance museumpractices mainly inherited from past traditions had thus failed to convey the meaningspreviously envisioned by the curators. The discussion lead us to the assumption thatmusic is deeply embedded in the dynamics of the contemporary world and so toengage people in music museum exhibitions requires both music studies and museumstudies professionals to assure its dynamics to be present and meaningful.