| Summary: | This essay looks into the notion of “human heritage”, exploring the elusive boundaries between material and immaterial, written and oral heritage, with particular regard to music and the relationship between research work and museums, archives, public and private collections. The historical, ethnographic and aesthetic categories that help define and delimit the various ‘human heritages’ are partial and relative. And they are clearly not shared by the whole of humanity. This is a problematic situation, and reveals the paradox that is at the core of the idea of culture we have produced, defended and tirelessly – and at times contradictorily - fought for. A reflection on this, starting from music and the objects of music, serves to expose the contractions that both influence and feed our ideas about culture.
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