Music and the Memory Spectrum

Music and the Memory Spectrum
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This is a past event

Memory, Music and Movement
An AHRC-North Atlantic Fiddle Convention (NAFCo) Networking Project

The Elphinstone Institute of the University of Aberdeen in partnership with Cape Breton University.

Music is a potent component of remembering.  It works either as an unchosen catalyst, stirring up unbidden memories as a tune is fortuitously heard, or as a chosen vehicle serving as an intentional carrier of people’s remembered experience of significant moments or occasions in their lives, as for instance in the widespread ascription of ‘our song’ in intimate relationships.  This talk will map out the major ways in which music figures in registering and referencing the past, both in autobiographical memory and in vernacular memory.  It will also outline and discuss the fieldwork-based research that has provided the main body of data drawn on in the trilogy The Mnemonic Imagination, Photography, Music and Memory, and Memory and the Management of Change, co-written with Emily Keightley.  The main concept in this work is the mnemonic imagination, and this too will be brought into the talk and its value explained.

Michael Pickering is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University.  He has published in the areas of social and cultural history, the sociology of art and culture, and media and communication studies. His recent books include Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value, 2004 (with Keith Negus); Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour, 2005/2009 (with Sharon Lockyer); Researching Communications, 1999/2007/2018 (with David Deacon, Peter Golding and Graham Murdock); Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain, 2008/2016; Research Methods for Cultural Studies (2008); Popular Culture, a four-volume edited collection (2010); The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice, 2012 (with Emily Keightley); Rhythms of Labour:Music at Work in Britain, 2013 (with Marek Korczynski and Emma Robertson); Research Methods for Memory Studies, 2013 (with Emily Keightley); Colonial Advertising and Commodity Racism, 2013 (with Wulf D. Hund and Anandi Ramamurthy), and Photography, Music and Memory (with Emily Keightley). His major research project with Emily Keightley on media and memory was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Speaker
Michael Pickering
Hosted by
Elphinstone Institute
Venue
A21, Taylor Building, University of Aberdeen
Contact

No Booking required.

Free event.