Music sciences without frontiers? Contribution to a sociology of the process of primitivisation ; Sciences de la musique sans frontières ? Contribution à une sociologie du processus de primitivisation

Abstract

In this dissertation, I analyse how, in the modern period, the different scientific domains dealing with music were divided, and how, at the same time, musical repertories were organised into a hierarchy. This research, focused on the French case, is based on a socio-historical enquiry and on several sources dating from the beginning of the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. Those sources are both manuscript andprinted, and range from administrative documents, scientific and museum archives, conference proceedings and other printed sources related to the Universal Exhibitions, to archives from the publishing sector and other pieces related to the collection and curating of musical instruments, songs and audio recordings. The following methods were mobilised : lexical analysis, textual sociology, databases and historicalethnography.The enquiry emphasizes a configuration of the process of making music a part of national heritage by the French State, which is also a long-term process of social differentiation through the music. Collecting and curating operations of musical objects were initiated by the Second Empire and consolidated by the Third Republic. These operations have contributed to make certain repertories anhistorical, and theserepertories, thus kept in a zone below history, were separated from a « modern » repertory, whose evolution was described first by comparative history of music and then by musicology. This separation is analysed as a symbolic domination system, which was enacted by several administrations (Public Instruction, Trading and Industry, Fine Arts, Colonies), produced and reproduced by different agents commissioned by the State (teachers and professors, academicians, curators, territorial leaders, etc.). The repertories which were « made primitive » during the second half of the nineteenth century were grouped under the generic appellation of « traditional musics » and constituted, in a second time, as objects of predilection for a particular discipline – ethnomusicology – born ...