Chercher à reconstruire les musiques du passé et leur histoire est une préoccupation ancienne. Depuis le XIXe siècle, l’imaginaire orientaliste a considérablement alimenté l’idée de l’existence de musiques «originelles », qu’elles soient « pharaonique », « arabe » ou « hindoue ». Le présent volume s’attache aux manières de dire et de raconter le passé au cours du XXe jusqu’au début du XXIe siècles. En réunissant anthropologues et historiens, il invite à porter une attention particulière, non plus aux seules représentations du passé mais également aux processus concrets de sa mise en récit. Il s’intéresse aux élaborations émanant des disciplines scientifiques, comme la musicologie et l’archéologie musicale, ou encore à celles qui se jouent dans la création artistique, deux domaines qui s’inscrivent également dans des enjeux politiques forts. The attempt to reconstruct the music of the past and its history has been a longstanding concern. Since the 19th century, the orientalist imagination nourished the notion of the existence of "original" music, whether "Pharaonic", "Arab" or "Hindu". This volume more specifically focuses on ways of talking about and recounting the past throughout the 20th and into the early 21st century. Bringing together anthropologists and historians, the aim is to pay particular attention not solely to representations of the past but also to concrete processes of narrative production. The book explores themes from the perspectives of musicology and music archaeology, as well as from those arising from artistic creation, both fi elds being strongly tied to political issues.

Despite a plethora of publications and periodicals devoted to church bells, a major turn in the history of bells has yet to be truly documented: their automation. In Europe, bell towers were mechanised over fifty years ago, with a correlating decline in bell-ringers. In contrast, this process only began in the early twenty-first century in India. What implications do these two transitions have on contemporary sounding techniques? How does the old knowledge of the bell-ringer articulate with the contemporary knowledge of engineers? To what extent does automation transform the acoustic community to which these sound messages were hitherto destined? To address these questions, I will focus on the Indian company Pulsator, a pioneer in the field that is headed by a local leader in electronics. I will present the history of its activities, and then explore how its founder intends to forge new connections between historical, kinetic, and liturgical knowledge at various steps in his work.

This article offers an introduction to the edited book "Singing the Past. Music and the Politics of Memory (20th-21st centuries)". It focuses on three main theoretical issues entitled : 1. The origins of music through the scientist’s lens. 2. Music as memory. 3. Connecting to the past through musical media

Présenté et traduit en français par Julien Jugand