Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

The emergence of Bristol as one of the UKs most notable “music cities” around the turn of the century has been a key element in the rising profile of the largest city in the south-west of England. The rise of the so-called “Bristol Sound” has been key to the articulation of the city’s musical identity and branding. Such attempts to define a regional music culture in this way are extremely contentious but have also been increasingly operationalized by official narratives and institutions to help promote Bristol’s image as a “creative city.” The curation of the “Bristol Music” exhibition at the city’s MShed museum to be held during the summer of 2018 can be seen as the latest iteration of this narrative of local creativity based around the distinctiveness and edginess of Bristol’s urban culture. As content developer on this project, the author explores how notions of everyday culture can be used to explore and disrupt existing mythologies around the distinct “branding” of music and locality. By focusing on the everyday experience of music culture, the exhibition will emphasise the importance of first-hand accounts of audiences and residents in the city in order to revisit and interrogate existing “official” narratives about the Bristol Sound. By reflecting on this emphasis on everyday experience, this paper explores how a focus on how self-expression and spatial exploration can help reveal the diverse and heterogeneous musical culture of the city.