« Bien sûr, les personnes âgées doivent en règle générale être interrogées en priorité. »
“Of course, as a general rule, older people should be interviewed first”. This methodological precept, taken from a document published by the French National Archives in 1990, simply prolongs the romantic presuppositions which saw the elderly as the ultimate custodians of a memory in imminent danger...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | fra |
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Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication
2024-12-01
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| Series: | In Situ |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/insitu/42757 |
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| Summary: | “Of course, as a general rule, older people should be interviewed first”. This methodological precept, taken from a document published by the French National Archives in 1990, simply prolongs the romantic presuppositions which saw the elderly as the ultimate custodians of a memory in imminent danger of disappearing. In France, since the 1840s, efforts have been made to collect only the musical memories of the oldest members of the “peasant civilization”, thus establishing a dual form of isolation, socio-cultural and generational. The collectors of the nineteenth century and part of the following century did not set out to “reconstitute the complete repertoire of a village”, as Brăiloiu put it, and even less to study the overall musical practice of an era, across all generations and social backgrounds. They were not interested in recent, imported or fashionable repertoires. The only ones that counted were those marked by the seal of autochthony and antiquity. In reality, the archives thus constituted bear witness only to a certain form of musical culture of the oldest category of the population. Under no circumstances should they be considered representative of a culture as a whole at a given period. Ethnomusicologists and historians, as well as musicians and cultural players, must therefore be extremely cautious when making scientific or artistic use of these sources. |
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| ISSN: | 1630-7305 |