CCreated in 1974 by Pierre Boulez (1925-2016), at the instigation of President Georges Pompidou (1911-1974), the Institute for Acoustic/Music Research and Coordination, better known by the acronym Ircam, heralded an upheaval in French musical life.
This laboratory would very quickly produce results in the fields of scientific research, technological innovation and artistic creation. Two years later, the French conductor and composer founded the Ensemble intercontemporain, an elite formation dedicated to the creation and performance of the most demanding and innovative music of our time.
Because these two institutions were the work of a visionary and were thought of as complementary, they contributed to this cultural exception which is the glory of France. Still, this project had a cursed part: many pioneer composers of electroacoustics, such as Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995), Pierre Henry (1927-2017) and Bernard Parmegiani (1927-2013), whose only mistake was not to not please Pierre Boulez, were purely and simply ousted.
After studying piano and composition at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris, then at the National Conservatory of Music in Paris, I joined the composition and computer music course at Ircam. It was there, in the mid-2000s, that I developed the concept of « saturation instrumentale » – explained in the article entitled “The parameters of saturation”, available on the IRCAM website – which had a great impact.
Who is listening to us?
Almost twenty years later, however, I have the feeling that contemporary French music has disappeared from the radar. I wonder who is listening to us. The pulse is still beating, orders are placed, new works are created, proof that the artistic and political software created by Boulez is still operational. But the lack of public interest makes our industry seem brain dead.
The construction of the new Paris Conservatory and the Philharmonie de Paris, completing this magnificent City of Music for which Pierre Boulez campaigned, has enabled young composers to reveal themselves and impose themselves. Alas, prisoners of his influence, the “disciples” of Boulez, posted in the institutions, were not able to adapt! Result: a total immobilism of musical thought in the institutions supposed to encourage it.
When did these enlightened managers go from “boulezmania” to “boulezdoxa”? Historians will perhaps tell us one day. In the meantime, the model they have put in place, with Boulez as the absolute reference, has spread, suffocating any hint of invention and creativity. This model, pyramidal and centralized, the national centres, even on a smaller scale, the pedagogues and the composers have obediently complied with it, in a logic of “reproduction” of the system, in the sense understood by Pierre Bourdieu.
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