L is For?
Introducing L-Pop and the Mapping of Popular Music Heritage in Limerick.
Martin Power, Eoin Devereux and Aileen Dillane
Popular Music and Popular Culture Research Cluster, University of Limerick
The post-industrial city of Limerick, Ireland, is currently ‘undergoing’ a state- sponsored programme of urban regeneration following decades of challenges (Hourigan 2011). This top down Regeneration project appears more focused on the bricks and mortar of new buildings (commercial development) rather than on building and improving social relations. Members of the Popular Music & Popular Culture Research Cluster at the University of Limerick sought to stimulate creative collaboration and the construction of social networks amongst Limerick’s citizens through a soundscapes project. LimerickSoundscapes adopted a citizen-led, bottom up approach to social regeneration and integration by adapting traditional sound mapping practices from acoustic ecology (Schafer 1977; Traux 1978). The model was very much influenced by sociological understandings of the cultural restructuring of urban spaces (Fainstein and Campbell 2011; LeGates 2011) and by the ways in which cities can be musically/sonically mapped and understood (Cohen 2012), with identity configured by and through sound and place-making (Tuan 2004), especially in urban centres.
Earlier this year L-Pop, a new research project was initiated by PMPC and aims to research, map, document, curate and (re)present popular music activities, past and present, in the City of Limerick. Together with archival research, interviewing musicians/fans/venue owners/promoters, and curating memorabilia, there are multiple possibilities for physically and virtually mapping, illustrating, and preserving Limerick's rich heritage. The cluster hopes that community groups and other non-for-profit organisations across the city recognise that by partnering with each other, there is the potential to ensure this project does not merely become something which academics can write about. It needs to be owned by the people of the city, for the city; and ideally it is the city’s residents who will shape L-Pop for years to come. This presentation provides details of the first tentative stages of the projects development.