Documenting distant instrumental cultures in the late 19th-early 20th centuries: a preliminary report based on Victor-Charles Mahillon’s archives (MIM, Brussels)

Since its very beginning in 1877, the former Musée instrumental du Conservatoire in Brussels has been known for giving strong emphasis on extra-European instruments. This situation is obviously due to external factors (among which the famous donation by Rajah Tagore in 1876), but also to the particular attention Victor-Charles Mahillon (the museum’s first curator) paid to the worldwide diversity of sound producing devices. Indeed, as an instrument maker and acoustician, his interest in extra-European instruments went far beyond exotic curiosity: building a collection that records both local and distant instrumental cultures was above all a means to develop his scientific work. Yet, whether it comes to the acquisition processes (that often involve several intermediaries), to the intellectual classifications and representations that underlay the collections (often unconsciously), or to the attempts to understand the instruments, any instrumental collection proves to be a historically situated construction. Keeping in mind the statement by Georges-Henri Rivière according to whom “any presentation program is nothing but the ideological framework of the exhibition itself”, this paper takes advantage of the important archival documentation kept at the MIM in order to explore the conditions and issues of such a construction