A Sideways Anthropology: Ritual Singing in the late 18th-century France

International audienceBecause of a persistent focus on notated sources, French historical musicologists durably considered that “learned music” was their proper object while “popular music” was a matter for folklorists or ethnographers specialized in distant cultures. Therefore, it is away from the musicological discipline that lay people chanting started to attract anthropologists and liturgy historians during the 1970’. Among them, J. Cheyronnaud and J.-Y Hameline decisively showed that liturgical activity provided the basis for a musical habitus widely shared from the late Ancien Régime until the mid-20th century, and specially within French village communities. Through their works, plainchant, psalmody and canticles took part to a rich and innovative definition of “popular music”.This presentation will revisit the background of this line of research combining historical methodology with ethnographical sensibility. Then, some recent results about chant singing in the late 18th-century France will be evocated, with an emphasis on the epistemological conditions in which they are rooted