The past is not mere history. In the creative imagination it is, indeed, a fractious and disruptive place where the atemporal logics of anachronism govern, and strict chronological narratives peculiar to the modern period become suspended. More than a bygone space there to just learn from, the past has a life of its own, in turn refracting and transforming our present and colouring and informing (perhaps, even, delaying) the future.

The fourth conference of the Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen (REMOSS) study group, this event seeks to widen its perspective, bringing its interest in the popular (re-)representations of early music in the present into dialogue with a set of broader questions about how music operates in a (New) media landscape where the past figures prominently and in transformational way.