What if Museums Had Really Great Theme Music?
Sarah S. Brophy

In The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida writes "In virtually every industry…the winners in the long run are those who can create and keep creating." A car commercial put it a bit more succinctly – "Lead, Follow or be Roadkill."

To stay current with the public's interests and spending habits (in time and money) museums must build roads to the American mainstream by using consumer interests to keep relevant. We will do it alongside our continuous mission-driven programs, and following mission-guided principles, but we have to do it.

Think for a moment about how connected museums are, or aren't, to the mainstream of American life: how prevalent are iPods and music in our museums? Do people exchange museum gift cards? Do they recognize our theme music? Do they check the papers to see what happens next? Do they talk about us over coffee? Do they see us or our work in the movies or on TV? If they do, do they know it’s us?

The problem is that museums do a bit of outreach then sit back and congratulate ourselves. We hatch a great new idea and share it with each other at conferences, and leave it there: in its original form, not much evolution, some implementation…and no momentum. There is an endless supply of popular methods for mainstreaming museums and we can make it part of our daily work if we just learn to think like Americans, not like museums.

How many of us have music in our museums? Not the bathroom, or on the phone line, but in our exhibits? Do you have anything other than a sampling of how the guitar sounded when played in 1802? When we host an exhibit on Jazz we do; London's Imperial War Museum exhibit WWII House rigged it through a vintage radio in the corner; but think how much more we can do than provide occasional period references. Think what theme music does for television, movies, and sports teams…what if museums had really great theme music?

How many of us encourage iPods or MP3 players in our museums? Do you know the estimates are 6 million people have downloaded a podcast? Think of all the folks who have iPods who haven’t downloaded-lots of potential. How of many of us provide podcasts more scintillating than the Met's narration of its prints collection? Mr. de Montebello is lovely to listen to, but he's talking to a niche market. We need to expand the podcast repertoire. Imagine Liam Neeson narrating Irish history; or Sade. We can offer male and female versions for the same exhibit so anyone can listen to their favorite voice – no assumptions made.
Basically, in true museum-field fashion, we’re all so busy day-to-day with core work and basic survival, that only a few of us can play around with new ideas. For all our education, thinking, training, and exploring, we, the museum profession, are not early-adopters at work.

Remember when "broadening" our audience meant reaching out to school groups – making in-school presentations, providing traveling exhibits or hands-on trunks, and then we matured to aligning ourselves with curriculum guidelines? We partnered with the Scouts for badges for boys and girls, and began summer camp programs; we adopted the motto of lifelong-learning to combat the assumption that any museum that is not an art museum is just for kids. We got the curators to talk to the educators; and we shifted our shops and products to “educational” or collections-related. We have left the ivory tower stage and passed mostly through the elite-institution phase; we've wrestled with "shared authority" and become cultural centers when appropriate. We’ve definitely made progress.

And these were all good and useful moves but they, too, came too slowly. The world moves at a far faster pace than our single initiatives can satisfy, so mainstreaming must be a united front. Our job is to get folks talking and thinking, and enjoying that talking and thinking, about museums . We have to create a buzz, and we do it by being in their lives much more frequently, not by being a place they bring themselves to with effort.

Look at museums and public broadcasting. The PBS shows on Jazz, Baseball, the Civil War and have been hugely successful in popular terms. The History Channel and Antiques Roadshow, plus regional and local programs, have good followings, but we need more, and deeper, impact. IMLS is trying to help through a partnership with CPB to encourage collaboration among the two types of institutions – content providers and public access providers. It's excellent, excellent, and that type of quasi-R & D work is critical to our field and just what IMLS should be doing.

Here's an example: WGBH Boston, Boston Children's Museum, Boston Public Library, Children's Hospital Boston, and the Boston Public Health Commission are doing a project on asthma. They're starting with WGBH's "Arthur" series – hugely popular books and television program, based on a TV episode dealing with asthma. The goal is to help black and Latino children learn to manage asthma. There are booklets and reading lists, a play based on the episode that will be performed in libraries, the Children's Museum, and community centers; plus community outreach that includes health seminars and community-wide events. It winds up with a media campaign during Asthma Awareness Month (May) and into the summer when "asthma episodes peak." There you go – museums linked to TV, books, libraries, media, events and public health.

The IMLS/CPB is a good model, but VERY slow. Let's just guess that it took a year to develop the concept and agree to proceed; nine months to create the guidelines and secure the funding. Then IMLS had to give the public six months to create collaborations and prepare proposals; nine months to review, endorse and announce the blessed things; then 12 – 24 months to implement. That’s 48 months, minimum! Absolutely glacial.

So, alongside the careful public approach, we need to do our own entrepreneurial beta testing. If, for the next year we do, or work on, one mainstreaming "thing" each week for our institutions, then next year do two each week; and the year after we mainstream daily, we could have museums mainstreamed in 36 months, less than the time it takes the IMLS/CPB to get 15 programs out to the public.

Where do we start? On all fronts at once, but let me suggest music. How many of us recognize the theme from ER when we hear it? What about NFL sports or NPR radio? How about the music from the PBS series on the Civil War? You may not know the name, but you know the music. That one from the Civil War series "Ashokan Farewell." Wouldn't it be a fabulous theme song for history museums?

Perhaps John Williams would consider creating a theme song for science museums; one that doesn't sound like Star Wars but gets the same reaction (he can get the royalties; we get the airtime). The right, familiar, theme music can trigger positive memories and responses in an audience, instantly and universally, if you developed it. Who doesn't think of the ski-jumper when you hear the Wide World of Sports theme, or imagine heroics when you hear Olympic music?

We could use the themes appropriate to our genre in any TV, radio and Internet ads or PSA's; offer it for sale in our gift shops, and for iPod download at the main entry terminal. We can play it in the entry areas to our facilities and the openings for events. The theme music connects images, experiences, feelings, memories AND all the people who hear it – wherever they are at the time.

How many of us compile and sell music themed to our exhibits? There must be a music college somewhere who would collaborate. Their students play music, write music, and think music 24 hours a day. Wouldn't some want to come up with a few themes songs for museum exhibits that would get air time, be sold at the gift shop while improving the visitor experience at the museum? We could have theme music for science, art, children's and history museums – any museum…though "Jaws" won't do it for aquariums; or "Jurassic Park" for natural history. Surely the schools have the recording equipment; the faculty and alumni at Boston's Berklee College of Music already offers music lessons for free on-line with the help of Creative Commons. The school could offer a class writing an exhibit theme song and, upon acceptance by the museum, the school will get a percentage of the proceeds thereafter.

MFA Boston offers four tracks on every audio tour that are just music for viewing the exhibit. The New England Aquarium's "Jellies" exhibit of gorgeous, thoughtfully-lit, floating jellies (the organism formerly known as jellyfish) could really have used theme music. Museums can offer the music for sale on DVD in the shop, or free download at a lobby terminal through iTunes. With a podcast you can offer listeners a choice for the particular exhibits they're seeing.

There are definitely options.

We definitely need great theme music.

1 The Rise of the Creative Class and how its Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, Richard Florida, Basic Books, 2002.

Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk About Your Stuff, Mark Hughes, Portfolio, 2005.

Serious Grants Development for Museums
Copyright © 2006 bMuse, Sarah S. Brophy