The subject took up almost a full page of the Monde of Tuesday, June 22, 1982, dated Wednesday, June 23, with the exception of two short inserts of brief information. No photography, no drawing, it was not the custom at the time, and six articles in small print recounted the first Music Festival, organized on the evening of Monday, June 21. “Enthusiasms and Silences”summed up the title of a global report, a tour of France of the big cities having responded to the invitation made to French women and men to take to the streets to present their musical know-how.
The operation had been thought up a few weeks earlier during a meeting between the Minister of Culture at the time, Jack Lang, the director of music at the ministry Maurice Fleuret and the architect Christian Dupavillon, who had been in charge of the ceremony of May 21, 1981, at the Pantheon, marking the coming to power of Socialist President François Mitterrand. “We wanted it to be the celebration of all music and to make sure that the public is the creator of its own event”recalls Jack Lang.
This first “Party (make) music!” “, as it is printed on the posters plastered two weeks before June 21, 1982, must begin at 8:30 p.m. For half an hour, it is requested that all those who can play an instrument, sing, the amateur to the virtuoso, make themselves heard. Then spontaneity can flourish later in the evening.
“A Parisian idea”
On our page, it is mentioned a few choirs in Lyon, a single concert in a museum in Agen, but that in Montpellier or Laval people were “very many at their windows or in the street”and that Strasbourg had indeed participated, unlike Nice.
Aix-en-Provence, where the Festival was attended by Paul Chovelon, Bordeaux, entrusted to Pierre Cherruau and Cherves, to the “limit of Vienne and Deux-Sèvres”, indicates Bernard Hilbert, are entitled to detailed articles. With mentions that this event is good “a Parisian idea” and that we had not waited for the ministerial injunction for amateur practices to flourish here and there for ages.
In Paris, Jean-Michel Durand-Souffland goes from one district to another. The Music of the Peacekeepers is at Parc Montsouris, an amateur classical ensemble at Austerlitz station, Boulevard Beaumarchais is deserted when Place de La Bastille hosts a large stage with rock groups and the site is full, as a place of the Republic. Around 11:30 p.m., Saint-Germain-des-Prés is “black people”but Montparnasse “more than quiet”. In his analysis, titled “Virtues and limits of the organization”, begun in “one”, the critic and specialist in classical music Jacques Lonchampt, rather favorable to the initiative, however regrets that the “individual attempts were generally drowned in the mass of demonstrations organized by professionals”.
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