| Themes
sets -
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05/2002 |
Two themes sets are until
now specific to the Académie Desprez'
programme of Musical Studies: musical machines and
the setting of texts to music.
Musical machines
During the XVIIIth century,
many (and various) musical machines have been build, ranging from machines
that produce sound, those being music instruments, to machines that react
to music, like stage machineries, and including machines that perform
music, automatons.
From 2000 to 2002, Des
Orages Programme
has been questioning the conception of storms in baroque operas.
From Text to Music
In the XVIIth
and XVIIIth centuries, the relations between Text and Music were very
different from those we nowadays ponder over. In
France, opera was called Tragédie en musique and it was the poet, not
the musician, who was considered to be the author of a Cantate française.
Thereby, describing and
implementing the French language were strong concerns, as well in political,
scientific and artistic fields. In order to homogenise it on a recently extended
territory, but still commanded by a unique sovereign, the French language was
theorised in many treatises (for pronunciation, and spoken declamation to
be applied to sung declamation), whilst the Tragédie en musique
developed proposing a noble, ideal and lasting notation of the language's
music. This very language that this process contributed to establish is still
ours.
We assume that the
structure of the language determined then the structure of the music, not the
opposite. Four different pieces will be studied, each one from a different point
of view, every time in search of the terms of this induction.
Rémy-Michel Trotier
May 2002
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