Troubling Inheritances: Memory, Music, and Aging

This book provides an interdisciplinary focus on music, memory, and ageing by examining how they intersect outside of a formal therapeutic context or framework and by offering a counter-narrative to age as decline. It contributes to the development of qualitative research methodologies by utilizing and reflecting on methods for studying music, memory, and ageing across diverse and interconnected contexts. Using the notion of inheritance to trouble its core themes of music, memory, ageing, and methodology, it examines different ways in which the concept of inheritance is understood but also how it commonly refers to the practice of passing on, and the connections this establishes across time and space. It confronts the ageist discourses that associate popular music predominantly with youth and that focus narrowly, and almost exclusively, on music’s therapeutic function for older adults. By presenting research which examines various intersections of music and ageing outside of a therapeutic context or framework, the book brings a much-needed intervention.

Sara Cohen is James and Constance Alsop Chair in Music and Director of the Institute of Popular Music at Liverpool University, UK. She has a DPhil in Social Anthropology from Oxford University and is author of Rock Culture in Liverpool (1991) and Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture (2007), co-author of Harmonious Relations (1994) and Liverpool's Musical Landscapes (2018), and co-editor of Sites of Popular Music Heritage (2014). She has specialised in interdisciplinary research on popular music, with a particular interest in ethnographic approaches and research on place, heritage, memory and ageing.

Line Grenier is Associate Professor at the Département de communication at Université de Montréal in Montréal, Québec, Canada, where she teaches predominantly in the areas of media theory, memory and media, and popular culture. Her work on the history and politics of local music and music industries, the Céline Dion phenomenon and the figures of fame it embodies, as well as the business and politics of live music, has been published in several journals, including Popular Music, Cultural Studies, Recherches féministes, Ethnomusicology, Recherches sociographiques, and Musicultures. More recently, in the context of the research partnership ACT (Ageing Communication Technology) funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and of which she is one of the cofounders, her research focuses on intersections of ageing and music. Her current project focuses on Deaf cultures of ageing, and deaf musics.

Ros Jennings is Professor in Cultural Studies, Director of the Centre for Women Ageing and Media (WAM) and Head of Postgraduate Research at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. She is a founder member of the European Network in Ageing Studies (ENAS), author of the WAM Manifesto (2012) and contributor to the UK Charter against Ageism and Sexism in the Media (launched 3rd October 2013). She is co-editor with Abigail Gardner (2012) of Rock On: Women, Ageing and Popular Music (Ashgate) and leader of the annual WAM International Summer School. Her research interests are older women and popular culture (in particular, popular music, television and film).