Research and composition. The Pays de Montbéliard regional conservatoire gives a prominent place to electroacoustic teaching, led by composer Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, author of a theory of composition by interactive models. Interview. La Lettre du Musicien, no. 399, first half of March 2011.
What distinguishes this teaching from other musical disciplines?
In Montbéliard, where I head the composition department with six teachers, I have developed an approach that makes no distinction between writing a score and creating a Max/MSP patch or Pro Tools session. The specificity of composition teaching, including electroacoustic composition, lies in the most recent developments. One must teach writing two melodic lines in contemporary counterpoint alongside studio wiring or sound diffusion using Wii remotes. Teaching electroacoustics today primarily means updating the composer’s craft with technologies renewed every year. The advantage is extreme freedom of choice.
The disadvantage is having to invent a different pedagogy each time. Students wanting to learn counterpoint or harmony have relatively uniform prerequisites. In eleven years at Montbéliard I have received students from every background: so-called contemporary music, electronic music, the musique-concrète school of electroacoustics, electro-pop and performance. I even had three students from fine-arts schools!
My advice to young composers: write music you want to listen to!
How has the discipline evolved recently?
When I began, expressive possibilities were already considerable; today they are enormous. The conservatoire’s management, far ahead of other institutions I have known, always invested heavily in computing and sound equipment. This enabled dozens of students to confront mixed, synthesised and interactive creation.
Developments in machines, methods, software and techniques are continually on the agenda. It is not merely greater computing power but changing creative paradigms. Currently a third of students make mixed compositions, interactive or otherwise; another third interactive installations with moving images, audience-gesture capture or autonomous AI systems; and the final third performances linking music with dance or theatre. All within one composition department.
The greatest development has therefore been changing course content to fit today’s research or art music, or simply students’ expectations.
How do you personally approach teaching composition in Montbéliard today?
Through individual lessons, collective practical workshops, lectures and intensive weekends. We are six teachers, all PRISMA research-group members, with different complementary profiles. The most interesting formula is probably intensive weekends. Students sometimes travel far—this year from Rotterdam, Brussels, Bordeaux, Paris, Italy and Switzerland—so we concentrate teaching from Thursday to Sunday. Outside these six to eight annual intensive periods, we teach on two consecutive days fortnightly. We usually organise three concerts annually so students can realise their works.
Could you describe new careers available to young composers?
Being a composer does not immediately open doors. Among our former students, some have become teachers of computer music or computer-assisted music education. Two have made a good start as composers of art or research music on the international festival circuit. Two others earn a living through commissions for film music, live film accompaniment or theatre. For the rest it is an obstacle course: first and second master’s degrees and doctoral theses, alongside our course. The conservatoire’s management is also committed to helping them enter employment.
What suggestions or proposals would you make?
My suggestions? Join forces and work together to redefine the artist’s profession in general. We must stop expecting everything from the state as saviour.
I am Italian, although I have lived in France since 1993 and have two French children. Look at what is happening in Italy. The state as protector of culture no longer exists there. Unfortunately, for once Italy is ahead of France, which is following the same trend—not to mention other European countries. The artist’s status has changed radically, and not just because of digital technologies.
We must have the courage to set our artistic ambitions much higher than they are today. I currently witness artist selection processes whose content, when there is any, is too often highly questionable. A lack of ideas, a lack of techniques, and too often a lack of critical capacity. Many institutions feed this artistic mediocrity, since they need enough enrolments to fill the institutions themselves.
I tell young composers not to give up. To be wary of institutions that keep them too long. To travel as much as possible and seek the broadest possible intellectual independence. To join together in groups, rather than associations. To set out to discover contemporary society and distinguish dated teaching from pragmatic, current knowledge. To read and read again—not only texts, but musical scores! To visit art galleries, exhibitions, performances and scientific research groups. But my main suggestion is to write music they themselves want to hear!
Interview by Anne-Cécile Worms.
Technical information
Status: regional conservatoire. Founded: 1979. Director: Thierry Perrout. Students: 1,580. Teachers: 98. Administrative and technical staff: 13. Actual 2010 budget: €4,536,439, including 1% from the département, 5% from the regional cultural affairs directorate, €5,000 from the region for projects, and 86% from the agglomeration community. Address: 4 cour du Château, 25200 Montbéliard. Telephone: 03 81 94 77 80. Website: agglo-montbeliard.fr.
For electroacoustic teaching in French conservatoires, see also interviews with Lucie Prod’homme in Marseille (LM 379), Gino Favotti in Paris’s twentieth arrondissement (LM 372) and Christine Groult in Pantin (LM 368).
Five dates
1971: born in Milan.
1989: joins Walter Prati’s MM&T studio in Milan.
1994: graduates from Milan’s Civica Scuola di Musica, having studied with Ivan Fedele; studies at IRCAM.
1999: appointed professor at Montbéliard Conservatoire.
2007: publishes La Musique hyper-systémique, Mix Éditions.