Présences du passé : le renouveau des musiques « anciennes »

The revival of ancient music gave rise to an interesting pas de deux, an original game of stacked temporalities. Indeed, in order to play « the old way », one has to start with being modern, and to understand the past as being past. It is not as much about playing « as we used to do » as it is commonly written on disk sleeves. On the contrary, it’s all about understanding how far we are from bygone days, dealing with that loss, and measuring all we have to do to rebuild the past. This is a practical lesson on history writing, that music brings to life on a sensitive mode (changing tastes) as well as on a material mode (playing again other instruments). This paper starts from several examples, as Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s study of the taste for Roman statues, or how a theatre company reopened a « game » from the Middle Ages, in order to follow Michel de Certeau on the issues that history of art and sociology have to face in their own relationship to the repertories and works they inherited from the past