Publish at November 20 2023 Updated November 20 2023
"Music gives a soul to our hearts and wings to our thoughts."
Plato
In France, during the covid period, it was asserted that meetings around the arts, theater, concerts were "non-essential". Concerts and artistic gatherings were forbidden. It's a wound that remains, and yet music brings complementarity, difference and rich interaction. Music is less an end in itself than a pretext for human encounters. Music is a journey towards the human.
Education through art, and music in particular, plays a crucial role in an individual's overall development. From birth, music helps to awaken an infant's senses. It quickly nurtures children's emotional and intellectual capacities, contributing to creativity and open-mindedness .
Practiced collectively, music is an essential driver of social cohesion, diversity and sharing. It enables pupils to build up a rich and coherent personal culture throughout their school career. It also develops and reinforces their artistic practice.
Musical education teaches students to make the most of music. Using a variety of media, it trains their perception to build knowledge and arouse new emotions. In this way, music as an art form makes a significant contribution to education.
Conductor Philippe Fournier 's "research and development" in music aims to transform the way we look at music and musicians. He imagines singular approaches and, to this end, scours the streets for new talent. For example, he takes part in the Playing for change project , mixing live and digital sequences. He composes tableaux with musicians from all over the world and connects them with his symphony orchestra.
Using live footage of talented musicians filmed on the streets of the world, he synchronizes a symphony orchestra to create a sense of universality. Philippe Fournier also sets out to change the way people look at street musicians. He makes the paying public aware of the quality of the musician playing on the sidewalk. To this end, he invites a street musician to play not far from the concert hall. He films him, and during the concert, he invites the musician to play a duet with himself, with the filmed scene projected onto a large screen .
Audiences are surprised to find that they have sometimes passed by this talent without stopping. When they go out into the street again after the concert, the audience passes the artist again on the street corner, and this time they stop. A crowd forms. The way street musicians are viewed has changed. It's a second surprise.
Our education is focused on reasoning (analyzing, structuring, prioritizing) and neglects the senses. Teachers usually ask "what do you understand?", but never "what do you feel? The tactile, auditory and visual senses are left aside, and language is privileged. Implicitly, language compensates for our lack of bodily expression, so neglected in education.
Some autistic people use their own sensitivity. In "Je suis né un jour bleu" (I was born on a blue day ), an autistic man explains how he functions differently. This book illustrates synesthesia and the different ways of thinking and mobilizing the senses. Our brains are trained to reason, but less to use the different senses of listening, imagination and déjà vu.
What's the balance between what people understand and what they feel? Important decisions come from our senses rather than from our intellect alone. We decide more often by what we feel than by what we understand. For Fournier, the human being is energy and light, and moving towards our senses and our presence is an act of developing our charisma. All sensory energy is felt in the presence of one's own energy. Everyone is a transmitter and receiver of interactions. The point is to consider that we are simultaneously sender and receiver. Choral singing and participation in a group musical rhythm teach us this.
The conductor is a step ahead when he calls the beats. He's not above the others, but one step ahead. He's in front. He is the leader. He assembles sound matter by synchronizing it.
For Fournier, in our sensory communication, 80% of our gestures are intuitive and 20% learned. For a conductor, communicating means training oneself to express the maximum number of indications by mastering one's presence and the meaning and precision of one's gestures. Music invests emotion in interpretation, mobilizing sensitivity. Sensitivity is the conductor's main instrument.
For Philippe Fournier, "Music is not a human invention; we are music". What makes us alive is our heartbeat. This tempo influences our lives, and our lives influence this pulse. Instinctively, when we clap our hands, the number of beats matches the heartbeat.
The heartbeat depends on our state of health, stress and environment. The more we reduce the rate at which our hands clap, the more difficult it is for us to keep up the pace, as our body's reference frame fails us. We're comfortable keeping the tempo around our heartbeat. Human music is defined by our senses and what we have inside us. Since the dawn of time, music has given rhythm to our lives, from children's lullabies to war songs and funeral dirges.
Music can change human behavior, it guides us commercially, it associates with memories, it can touch our emotions, it imposes itself on our will and makes us act without our knowing it. It resonates within us.
Music galvanizes us, enabling us to find resources we never thought we had.
Music has several powers of action: resonance, harmony and listening:
The listening process involves three stages
Progression in listening modes occurs by following the energy that is there. These 3 rules are a rediscovery that comes from us. Progression in these levels of listening produces pleasure.
Learning comes with its share of risk: first we let ourselves go with our sensibility, then we establish rules, then we move towards our creativity. In music, it's a matter of playing, learning music theory and then freeing oneself from it.
Music teaches us to be both sender and receiver at the same time, enabling us to achieve unity. Mimicry is one of the key rules that brings us together, and feeling, receiving and creating ruptures produces an energetic uplift.
Music is the image of life, made up of rhythm, melodies, vibrations and silences.
Rhythm comes from the beating of the heart. It generates life, action, movement and commitment. Rhythm is vertical. It holds us.
Melody is breath, breathing, birth, connection, encounter. A baby "comes into the world" with its first cry. Melody is horizontal. It carries us.
The tempo, breathing rhythm and heartbeat, unite the whole.
The vibratory state in which we find ourselves brings the other into resonance and authorizes powerful communication.
Silence is full of meaning. It offers time for feedback, for listening and for opening up transmission and reception.
It's because life flows through us like music that it's so essential to live and practice it.
Sources
Philippe Fournier, conductor - OSC (orchestreconfluences.com)
https://www.orchestreconfluences.com/chef-dorchestre/
HEP - Testimony of Philippe Fournier - Orchestre Symphonique Confluences
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJfNB3id9eA
Philippe FOURNIER TEDx Conference - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32t82Ye3vbU&t=22s
Philippe Fournier - Music, communication and management - TILT Conference
https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpbfkAXuIY0
Music at school, benefits at school, benefits of collective musical practice
https:// eduscol.education.fr/document/31633/download
MEN Artistic and cultural education https://www.education.gouv.fr/l-education-artistique-et-culturelle-7496
Middle school programs Music education programs
https:// cache.media.education.gouv.fr/file/special_6/21/4/programme_musique_general_33214.pdf
Playing for change https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgtfhl_FR54
Wikipedia - I was born on a blue day https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Je_suis_né_un_jour_bleu
One Day by Matthew Paul Miller (Matisyahu) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPBjAfmgC-g
Philippe Fournier https://www.ecolenormalecortot.com/enseignants/fournier-philippe/
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