A foreword I am an improviser and a musicosopher. An improviser whose only score is a well-tempered keyboard, one same soul in one same body, the same ten fingers, and a certain trust in the unique instants music creates when it manages to em…

Monteverdi, Bach, Ravel The articles and texts collected in this book all speak of the creative power at the heart of music and of its evolution. Three essential phases in the history of music in Europe in the last four centuries are considere…

An enchanted Game-Land European music and Indonesian music existed, for a long time, without ever meeting. When the encounter finally occurred, each music was predictably judged by the other party as being strange and remote. This was true of …

According to Régis Debray (1940), mediology* consists in studying the connection between a message’s content and its transit paths (the medium). Medium and message: these two words were first popularized by Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), a Canadia…

Beneath the great official history of music lies a more discrete history – small internal revolutions that cross the barrier of words with difficulty. Musicians, who are the very heart and reason for these upheavals, rarely remember such occurren…

When reading Raden Adjeng Kartini’s letters, we can understand why she became a key figure in her country. Although her life was that of a young princess retained in the family palace and subject to her father’s law until her relatively late marr…

        In opera, in cinema, in real life As an art form, cinema is related to sound more than is generally perceived. Its speaking form emerged less than a century ago. Through talking cinema, the voice of e…

A reversed Witness ; Eclosions – The Flight of Spring ; Lessons in Love and Violence ; Inside your Bones. A Reversed Witness  I often attend contemporary music concerts with some second thought and, even, some fear. Ther…

“Epic”: before qualifying a certain style of poetic or musical expression, the word first described past legends in which heroes proved their worth. The hero at the center of the Musical Mosaic you have just read is the generic human, it is you a…