The "world after" is written here and now. It can be experienced and heard in June during the IRCAM festival and academy. A manifesto for the young generation freed from the authority of its elders; a manifesto for electronics emancipated from its instrumental tutelage; a manifesto for orchestral and ensemble music, revealed and metamorphosed by technology; a manifesto for the concert without forcing it to "make a spectacle" at all costs and at minimum cost.
On the bill for the 2021 edition, music in the mirror of the image, in the mirror of fiction, music in its own mirror when it reflects a distant ancestry. Brice Pauset reassembles and dismantles Alfred Hitchkock's Vertigo in dialogue with the installation Infinite Screen by Arotin & Serghei, Yan Maresz examines Paris qui dort by René Clair and Mayu Hirano deciphers Une page folle by filmmaker Teinosuke Kinugasa. IRCAM's curriculum is in tune with that of the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris for the first Supersonic Chair: students who were previously unaware of each other invent a common workshop, shared techniques, the power to say "we", to listen and see.
The mirror is also the device by which musical creation, which has become a repertoire, acquires a genealogy: the memory of the polyphony of Ars Nova in Philippe Leroux's work, the memory of Palestrina's canons in Bernhard Lang's Mirror Stage, which was inspired by Lacan, and the baroque and responsorial folds of the Renaissance for Pierre Boulez's Répons. At the close of ManiFeste, this work retains the force of a first time. "Here are the soloists, here is the space, here is the electronics, here is the spiral. "No other rhetoric beyond the musical gesture that sets the entire concert hall ablaze.
If the image is a screen, the musique-fictions renew the genre of the radio play, listened to collectively! To the text all the intelligibility; to the music, a space of its own. With Florence Baschet and Lydie Salvayre's novel, Gérard Pesson and Marie Ndiaye, Daniele Ghisi and Maylis de Kerangal, the studio has become a tool for shared writing, where fiction, musical creation, and immersive listening are combined.
The Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. To this famous trinity of psychoanalysis, ManiFeste-2021 answers, in mirror: the power of the image, the certain power of the language, the unassignable real that is the music.
Frank Madlener, IRCAM director