Documents found
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AbstractIn this cordial portrait of Swedish-born composer Bengt Hambraeus by one of his former students, the principle stages in his education are reviewed : from organist to musicologist and composer, together with his active participation in Swedish musical life as a producer for state radio. The author then explains the reasons why, in 1972, Hambraeus immigrated to Canada, where he began a fruitful career in Montreal as a teacher at McGill University's Faculty of Music. There he co-directed the Electronic Music Studio with his colleague alcides lanza. He also taught composition and various seminars on composing, and on the avant-garde. His vast experience as a professional musician, his insatiable curiosity, his prodigious memory and his capacity to establish (starting from a given topic) a multiplicity of links to different disciplines and periods of music history are highlighted. These character traits provide for a better understanding of the compositions whose author students called a “walking encyclopedia.”
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The notion of “Union Sacrée” against Germany invoked by the French President Raymond Poincaré, August 4, 1914, reflects on art, because the war is also conducted on the cultural front. The journal La Musique pendant la guerre, whose editor-in-chief is the musician Francis Casadesus, is very close to the government, and, more precisely, enjoys the protection of Albert Dalimier, head of cultural war propaganda, who is heavily invested in helping musicians. The motto of La Musique pendant la guerre could be stated in these terms: patriotic music. The aesthetic project of the journal, devoted to “the movement of musical art”, is unquestionably French and unifying. Indeed, the mission is to focus on the movement of French musical art, to contain the interruption of French musical life and art in war and accelerate the revaluation of French music on a larger scale, temporal and spatial. We will show in this article that the offensive musical patriotism dictated by the circumstances is in fact linked to a more entrenched nationalist conception. Clearly argued, it has a program of action. First of all, we will see that this one is used to give back to French music, on the occasion of the war, its rights of promotion and diffusion considered as flouted for 40 years. It is a collective discourse with a structural content and not only a cyclical and isolated claim that would emanate from a minority of the Action française maurrassienne. Secondly, this program is committed to maintaining this state after the conflict and lays the foundation for a post-war aesthetic debate.
Keywords: Première Guerre mondiale, presse, esthétique, musique française, nationalisme, World War One, musical press, aesthetics, French music, nationalism
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114.More information
To understand electroacoustics simply as just another "genre" of contemporary music is to diminish the importance of the regeneration of our "understanding" of the audible world that electroacoustics in general terms (retention/memorization and diffusion of sound traces) has brought about since the middle of the 20th century.Finally a representation of the subjective audible world was possible, so long after the representations of the visual world made by our distant ancestors on the walls of caves, representations that can be understood as the persistence of an "ancient" present moment lived by the "tracer" of the period.Paradoxically, rather than situating itself within a larger phonocultural perspective and "playing with" daily sonic reality, which would appear to be a new adventure full of possible surprises, the most influential currents in electroacoustics rapidly attempted to rejoin instrumental music in what may be thought of as a re-presentation. Add to this tendency a distrust of "referential" sounds in favour of "original" sounds (synthesis, transmutation…) that facilitates a possible writing technique, a "language of traces" (and thus a body of knowledge), contrary to an "aural" approach where the memorization of traces (here mechanical) can create an im-mediate (without intermediary) connection between men and their audible world. Electroacoustics does not have to choose a path but must simply not forget its relevant originality.