Keynote-luentojen lyhennelmät / Summaries of keynote presentations

Ros Jennings: Popular Music, Inheritances and Ageing

What does it mean to live your life with a popular musical soundtrack? Since technology has evolved to record, broadcast, and now download and stream music, relationships with music have changed from discrete encounters to everyday possibilities. The very term ‘popular’ music stresses not only the pervasiveness of music in our lives but also that a shared status.

This presentation explores complex aspects of sharing popular music across the lifecourse and examines what this might say about ageing and identities. It draws on the ways that notions of music and memory are embedded within UK radio practices such as mainstream BBC radio formats such as: “The Tracks of My Years (BBC Radio2) and “Inheritance Tracks” (BBC Radio 4) and uses a broad (and developing) concept of ‘inheritances’ as its main theoretical tool to examine certain lived examples of ageing in relation to popular music. The examples that this research is based on focus on my own experiences in conjunction with a group of women research co-participants who are all (like me) aged over 50. Drawing on multiple qualitative methods that include autoethnography, anecdotes and group interviews, this presentation discusses how music becomes a ‘memory object’ to think about lifecourse and identity in the UK context and beyond and it thinks about what it is like to grow older with popular music in terms of ourrelationships to music and relationships to people.
 
Murray Forman: Every Day A Pioneer: Aging Artists and Hip-Hop Legacies

This presentation focuses on aging hip-hop artists as they assess their status as pioneers and veterans in hip-hop culture. The paper’s key focus involves the processes by which legacies are established and what it means for artists to sustain a career and maintain important allegiances to hip-hop music and culture as they reach and surpass middle age. As Public Enemy front man Chuck D explains, “you know, that’s rarefied air. There’s no other stratosphere higher than us doing what we do.”

Theoretically grounded in popular music and critical age studies, I will engage the ways in which past exploits and achievements inform longtime artists’ contemporary identities and reputations while illuminating the intertwined dynamics of aging and ageism in hip-hop.

The presentation is based on personal interviews with some of hip-hop’s most celebrated artists, individuals whose status and legacy is well known and who are particularly well-positioned to discuss the meanings and values associated with longevity in hip-hop (including Chuck D, Grandmaster Caz, Ice-T, LL Cool J, Pepa, YoYo, DJ GrandWizzard Theodore, and industry veteran Kevin Liles).

Line Grenier: Ageing in Public Through Music: Exploring Music Events Featuring Seniors in Québec

Expanding on Margaret Morganroth Gullette's argument that we are "aged by culture" (2004), this presentation explores some of the ways in which we might be aged by music. What does ageing in popular music mean in Québec? How does music-making mediate ageing? How is ageing "in public" performed in/through popular music in Quebec? How are discourses of 'active ageing' and 'successful ageing' designed to counter the 'negative' views of ageing as decline, intersect with music practices by seniors? The exploration focuses on the configurations of singing and ageing articulated at public events featuring seniors considered as moments of music in action (deNora, 2000). Based on ethnographic research conducted over the last 3 years, I discuss contrasting examples of (mostly secondary) performances involving different groups of seniors taking part in distinct sites of music-making: Étoile des aînés, a music 'talent' contest for people 65 and older, Jeunes de Choeur, a Québécois adaptation of the American Young@Heart chorus, and the Montreal-based community theater group RECAA - Respecting Elders: Communities Against Abuse. 

Sara Cohen: Where did you go? Where did you play? Memories of music and place in post-industrial England
 
This paper explores the relationship between music and ageing by examining the stories and trajectories of musicians. Drawing on conversations and encounters with amateur rock musicians in England aged fifty and over, the paper traces developments in their music-making practices since the 1970s and 1980s, and the places in which their music has been made and performed. It considers what the stories of these musicians suggest about the significance of music and place in autobiographical memory, and about music as a ‘pathway in urban living’ (Finnegan, 1989).