Introduction

Johannes Brusila, Bruce Johnson and John Richardson

Cultural researchers over the past couple of decades have increasingly grappled with the conundrum of how sound, and music in particular, becomes meaningful, regardless of background and disciplinary affiliation. The answer for many has been to situate sounds and their corresponding social and cultural activities within the contexts of space and memory. This triangular relationship has become a key issue in many fields of music research, promising to open up neglected areas of inquiry as well as creating linkages between interests that might previously have been regarded as unconnected; for example, acoustics, film music studies, soundscape studies, sociological theories of space, heritage and memory studies.

Technological developments have made formerly temporally and spatially distant sonic phenomena a part of our present culture in unforeseen ways, many of which are explored in this collection. Technology impinges on our subject in other ways, too. Not only are digital technologies transforming the landscape of our everyday social interactions when it comes to sound and music (Castells 1996; Bull 2000; Richardson and Gorbman 2013; Vernallis, Herzog and Richardson 2013), but they also offer increasingly sophisticated tools for understanding how sound, far from being easily separable from the surrounding physical and discursive world, is closely interconnected with it. There is no such thing as a neutral acoustic environment – one that is not conditioned in some way by an enveloping physical space, which in turn exists by dint of social actions and interactions. How we listen to sounds, with reference to the framing environment or bracketing it out, is thus a matter of choice – one made either unwittingly or with conscious reference to the social norms and conventions that inform the actions and responses we consider appropriate and meaningful. Once we couple sounds and their intrinsic situation-dependency with the memories of those who produce, perceive and respond to them, the plot thickens considerably. These relationships are the ones we choose to navigate, with a view to offering, in the totality of this collection, new insights on a range of topics related to these core themes.

In this book we present a multidisciplinary approach to studying how sound becomes meaningful in relation to time and place. Collectively, the essays endeavour to show how sounds, most frequently their musical forms, are located in actual and symbolic auditory spaces and how they are encoded as part of our cultural and social memory. We highlight relevant theoretical and empirical issues with a particular focus on cultural and social memory, space and place. Drawing on musicology and ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural history, media and cultural studies and other relevant approaches, the themes are explored through analyses of a wide range of examples, including performances, audiovisual material and the Internet. This enquiry in relation to both space and memory produces a synthesis of the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of cultural analysis.

Memory

According to an old axiom attributed to the influential Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, 'all history is contemporary history'. This is certainly true when it comes to cultural studies of memory over the past few decades, during which there has been a growing historiographical and sociological interest in how the past is understood. Memories are not only individual, but collective, cultural and social (Halbwachs 1992; Assmann 1995, 2011). The past is present in various sites of memory, where cultural memories are crystallized (Boym 2001; Nora 1989). From a musicological perspective, it is interesting to study how our personal musical memories and culturally institutionalized memories construct our ideas of the past. After all, music has a unique power in acts of memory, to bring to consciousness events we had forgotten, to reclaim the past, to activate collective memory, and in doing so regenerate the most powerful sense of community and to laminate more firmly the present over the past.

Research on memory accomplishes much the same thing by sidelining the fictionalizing or reconstructive narratives of traditional histories in favour of the alternative, often more close-up-oriented stories that have emerged in writing on historiography, Foucault's archaeological and genealogical approaches to discourses, microhistory (e.g. Ginzburg 1980, 1983), critical studies of social groups (including the history of women and postcolonial history), research on autobiography, material culture and 'the social life of things' (e.g. Appadurai 1988) and archaeology in the traditional sense (as in Assmann's writing). Writing on collective memory and cultural memory has more in common with all of the above areas of inquiry than traditional historical research. While a common misapprehension is that memories are fleeting and inconsequential, in contrast to the assumed hard facts of historical textbooks, research in these fields provides compelling evidence that the reverse might be the case: the first-hand accounts of cultural actors – which we find in documents, recollections and personal reflections – often convey more direct and reliable information about experiences across and of history than official accounts. Memories are often, moreover, closely bound up to the world of material objects and social spaces. These are not peripheral by-products of history but affectively loaded crystallizations that offer windows onto the past and the present.

Memory is implicated also with a wide range of contemporary practices where music is circulated in material and immaterial forms. For a long period of time, music was understood to be an abstract art and the material dimensions of music were largely neglected; but during the past couple of decades, musicologists have also become interested in the relationship between the material culture of music and its cultural meanings (e.g. Brusila 2009). Equally important insights into music have been gained by viewing it as a creative activity, so new research is...