The musical instrument as a cultural asset

Museum collections preserve fragments of reused documents, often glued into many string instruments from the 16th to 18th centuries, serving as structural reinforcements. Originating from older documents, these fragments of parchment or paper bear writings. Drawing on recent developments in fragmentology, this program proposes to catalog instruments containing fragments, as well as the fragments themselves, in order to make them accessible to text historians, in collaboration with the CRCC team for the contribution of spectro-imaging.

Like ethnographic museums or those focused on world cultures, music museums are experiencing a renewed interest in the future of non-Western collections, sparked by contemporary debates on restitution, cultural representation, and cultural appropriation. The redesign of the “World Music” galleries at the Musée de la Musique, scheduled for May 2025, will be accompanied by a conference aimed at discussing the specific challenges of museography for these collections and highlighting recent projects developed by museums in Europe and other regions of the world around sound heritage.