ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes that, if their way of listening has undergone such profound changes, because it has deeply modified the identity of the object of the listening: that extraordinary confluence of sounds, meanings and values which, in spite of everything, people continue to call music. Technical reproducibility has multiplied the types of works in their musical universe, and has at the same time weakened the meaning of the notion of the work and made its confines more unstable. When examining how musical cultures organize themselves, it is appropriate to highlight the diversity of the means used to conserve the trace: in oral cultures the memory of musicians and listeners; in written cultures the score; in phonographic cultures the technological data storage devices discs, tapes and memories, whether magnetic or based on semiconductors. In principle, human memory can cope with the transmission of a piece of music, as is evident in oral cultures.
