Temporary History Lab
Knowledge transfer with Beat music!
Together with its citizens, Universität Hamburg is embarking on a search for clues in order to be able to write a new and more diverse history of music culture in Hamburg. To this end, a Temporary History Lab opened at the University Museum on 16 September. The lab combines research in real time with topical teaching and allows Hamburgers to become "knowledge creators".
Universität Hamburg as part of music history
From the early skiffle and jazz clubs of the post-war period to the "Hamburger gute Laune" and the beginning of the "Hamburg School": Hamburg's music history is diverse and partly world-famous. Students under the direction of Prof. Dr. Thorsten Logge from the Department of Public History at Universität Hamburg are currently researching the still young history of Hamburg's beats of the 1970s and 1980s.
But all historiography is based on sources – and these are precisely what is missing for many dimensions of Hamburg's history of music culture.
"Especially for the exploration of everyday musical life between practice room, music dealer, record shop and performance location, between making music and experiencing music, we suspect important traces and potential sources in attics, in photo albums or somewhere in the back corners of cabinets and drawers of the people of Hamburg.Here they are just waiting to finally be brought out and researched," says Prof. Dr. Thorsten Logge.
Logge, together with Dr. Antje Nagel, director of the University Museum, wants to bring such traces of Hamburg's music culture to light through a crowdsourcing campaign and thus offer citizens the opportunity to bring personal memorabilia to the university, where they may be digitized directly using a scanning station.
In the Temporary History Lab – a temporary, scientific workshop for the collection of historical sources from the population – the sources and objects brought along are fed directly into a constantly growing collection, the first topics and contents of which were created as part of the seminar on Hamburg music history.
The project is a cooperation with the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg (State and University Library) Carl von Ossietzky and the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte (Hamburg history).
The Audimax makes music history
From the 1970s to the 1990s, the University’s largest lecture hall, with 1,700 seats, was also a venue for international bands. AC/DC, Meat Loaf, Tom Waits, and many others drew music fans from near and far to the Von-Melle campus. This bootleg recording is from the March 1970 Pink Floyd concert. The bootleg recording is still being pressed today, most recently on Record Store Day in Italy in 2014.
