Haiti's written record of mizik klasik survives largely in family houses, and Dirksen builds her case from the people who happen to be holding it. Georges Celcis went looking for wind band repertoire for a radio programme and found the Saint-Louis de Gonzague music library about to be thrown out. Scores by Occide Jeanty nearly disappeared amid friction between two military units. Termites consumed much of Werner Jaegerhuber's handwritten sketching. Édmond Saintonge's manuscripts, unseen for ninety years, reached a Montreal archive in 1998 through a descendant of the composer. These keepers are volunteers with no funding, guidance or training from any institution, which leaves preservation to luck. Behind the losses sits an unsettled question the author declines to answer on Haitians' behalf: whether such material counts as national patrimony at all, when urgent troubles crowd out talk of C sharps and B flats. Opening that debate, she argues, is inseparable from how the country values itself.