Music Museums take Center Stage
Make that "center page." Music critic Jon Pareles took stock of the emergence of music museums in a high-profile article in the New York Times, asking "What have the new museums done to music?"

"Over the past decade, popular music has decisively joined visual art and science as a subject for museum treatment," he writes. And although "nobody jokes about music museums anymore," Pareles himself remains skeptical of the institutions and their treatment of music itself.

In his view, music museums offer an "irresistible package deal: a pilgrimage, a party and some painless education." However, people can get the music everywhere; they come to the museums for everything else: "the fashion, the detritus, the technology, the business, the biographies, the buzz. They're great places to soak up trivia and gawk at guitars. But as they try to nail the essence of popular music into exhibits and architecture, it eludes them again and again."

The article was the subject of much discussion at the recent annual meeting of the Music Museum Alliance, a loose group of over 60 institutions dedicated to music and culture. The consensus of the group, which convened in Kansas City in late March, seemed to be that Pareles had approached the assignment as a critic not a journalist, i.e. with an established point of view already in mind, and that the visitors to these museums managed to find the "essence" of the music just fine.

A sidebar article (by Douglas McLennan) entitled "A Rough Experience in Seattle" focused on the Experience Music Project, which opened in 2000. The article noted "waves of layoffs" and management changes, and implied that the museum was adrift and struggling. At the annual Music Museum Alliance meeting, EMP Director Bob Santelli clarified for his peers that the museum was actually enjoying a healthy rebound in attendance after the twin blows of the 9/11 decline in tourism and the general economic downturn in Seattle. The layoffs, he explained, have simply been a matter of finding the right level of staffing required for a one-of-a-kind museum such as EMP, which opened with an unsustainable level of staffing largely to ensure that things would start smoothly. Things are still rocking at EMP.

Read the New York Times article by Jon Pareles [fee required]

Visit some of the museums mentioned in the article:

• Cleveland - Rock Hall of Fame
• Seattle - Experience Music Project
• Detroit - Motown Historical Museum
• Detroit - Gospel Music Hall of Fame
• Clarksdale (MS) - Delta Blues Museum
• Kansas City - American Jazz Museum
• Memphis - Graceland
• Memphis - Sun Studio
• Memphis - Stax Museum
• Memphis - Rock’n’Soul Museum
• Nashville - Country Music Hall of Fame
• Lubbock (TX) - Buddy Holly Center
• Davenport (IA) - River Music Experience
• New York - Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame (at Lincoln Center)
• New York - National Jazz Museum in Harlem
• Washington (DC) - National Music Center

Visit the Music Museum Alliance site, which contains links and contact information for its 60-odd member museums and related institutions.