How Portuguese museum curators attempted to honour popular music heritage

Popular music plays an integral role in contemporary life. It shapes how people experience privacy and publicness, communicates emotion, and helps forge social connections, thereby functioning as a cohesive force. While museums have traditionally concentrated on art music, typically displaying musical instruments, the rise of popular music exhibitions worldwide brings new challenges and opportunities. Understanding how popular music discourses operate inside museums has become essential if this repertoire is to be celebrated as meaningful heritage.

A case study helps illuminate the situation in Portugal in the early twenty-first century. The exhibition No Tempo do Gira-Discos: um percurso pela produção fonográfica portuguesa provides the focal point. Two spheres of inquiry intersect: the curators' mental frameworks, studied through ethnographic interviews and discourse analysis of both the exhibition text and design, and the tools of genre and register from linguistics. Although those producing the exhibition had developed groundbreaking, perceptive ideas about popular music, discourse analysis shows how inherited museum practices ultimately failed to transmit the meanings the curators originally intended.

This examination leads to the conclusion that music is so woven into the fabric of the contemporary world that effectively engaging museum visitors with it demands collaboration between professionals trained in music studies and those from museum studies. Only such cooperation can ensure that the dynamic qualities of music remain alive and legible in the gallery space.