Haiti's tradition of European-style art music runs from the opera houses of colonial Cap-Français through Christophe's court, Geffrard's national music school, a long salon culture, and the conservatory founded under Magloire. Very little of the resulting paper survives in institutions. Dirksen's subject is the private collections — scores, manuscripts, correspondence — kept in individual homes, and the people who happen to be keeping them.

Drawing on years of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, she works through cases in which the only surviving music of composers such as Occide Jeanty, Werner Jaegerhuber and Justin Élie was lost, nearly lost, or salvaged by accident. The obstacles she catalogues are both practical and structural: climate, disaster, money, and contested claims of ownership. Behind them sits a harder question about whether this repertoire is understood locally as national heritage at all, and therefore whether anyone will judge it worth preserving.