Exhibitions were, undoubtedly, paeans to modernity. They were unapologetically forward-looking, and intended to demonstrate a model of industrial and artistic ‘progress’ that would –their official rhetoric argued – lead the world towards peace and prosperity. All the exhibitions in this study followed this narrative to some extent, but London 1885 and Edinburgh 1890 were the most unequivocally intended to ‘exhibit’ modernity. London was entitled an Exhibition of ‘Inventions’, while Edinburgh was one of ‘Electrical Engineering, General Inventions, and Industries’. Yet both these exhibitions – in their music sections at least – were also the two events that engaged most vividly with the past. In contrast to exhibits of the newest musical instruments and technologies, both included striking museum displays of ‘ancient’ musical objects. These collections of instruments, manuscripts, scores, and miscellanea were intended to show music across time and around the world. In London, this contrast was extended into performed music too, with a series of concerts of ‘ancient’ music, given in the Music Room and the Royal Albert Hall.

Such a blatant juxtaposition of ‘ancient’ and modern musical objects at these exhibitions reveals a conceptual breach between past and present, demonstrating the late-nineteenth-century's ambivalent relationship with the past. Presented at a time where the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution were becoming increasingly apparent, ‘ancient’ musical objects were the subject of conflicting interpretations. One reading saw these displays through a developmentalist paradigm, believing them to demonstrate progress over time to the increasingly ‘perfect’ instruments of the present. In contrast, a Romantic interpretation considered historical instruments to represent an idealised past, imbuing them with a heightened sense of cultural significance that was considered lacking in the displays of new instruments. The temporal disconnect articulated in the displays of instruments illuminates ‘a powerful act of dissociation’ that scholars including Frederic Jameson and Anthony Giddens have described as essentially symptomatic of modernity. The contrast created by these exhibits, then, regardless of the opposing interpretative poles appearing in their reception, powerfully emphasised the modernity of the exhibitions, and thus the present itself.

Both of these exhibitions used the term ‘ancient’ in addition to ‘historic’ to describe their displays. This first term, however, was loosely defined, and stretched common understandings of the term. ‘Ancientness’ as a concept and the notion of the present existing in dialogue with the past, developed over the nineteenth century, becoming ‘integral features of intellectual and cultural life’.