Grammy Museum sets opening date

The first week of December has been circled for the grand opening of the Grammy Museum in downtown Los Angeles. Rock and blues historian Bob Santelli has been named executive director of the four-story, 30,000-square-foot interactive exhibit space.

Instead of jamming its relatively limited floor space with guitars and memorabilia, the museum is conceived as a hub for lectures, live music and traveling exhibits, the first of which will be a survey of political music entitled “Songs of Conscience, Sounds of Freedom.”

Santelli is a former chief executive officer of the Experience Music Project in Seattle and, before that, was vice president of education and public programs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. He has written or edited more than a dozen books, among them “The Big Book of Blues” and “The Bob Dylan Scrapbook.”