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At the Strasbourg Conservatory, students and ensembles defend creation loud and clear.
Daniel D'Adamo, Argentinean composer and composition teacher, encourages exchanges and porosity between his students and the many Strasbourg ensembles specialising in contemporary music. They come from Italy, Spain, England and South America to study composition in Strasbourg. The Conservatory and the Haute école des arts du Rhin - Hear - share the same buildings in the city centre.
How do you view the creative process on the banks of the Rhine?
The density of initiatives is very impressive. If you take a ratio of population to activity in contemporary music, it is exemplary! The city of Strasbourg accompanies this development with a dynamic cultural policy. There is an audience, a shared interest in creation and contemporary music. Musicians - performers and composers - of a very high standard have been trained at the Rhine School of Arts for several generations. Several ensembles specialising in contemporary repertoires were born there, such as L'Imaginaire, Hanatsu Miroir,lovemusic... The Percussions de Strasbourg were the pioneers, the spearhead of a whole series of ensembles which today proudly defend creative music. The pool of young composers in my class attracts the attention and the ears of all these Strasbourg ensembles. One can say that in Strasbourg there is a community of interest in the service of creation, a unique ecosystem. Each one digs its own furrow, but there is a real porosity between the ensembles. In contemporary music, the individual career worked for a while, it was even set up as a model, but this model is now obsolete, we have to think collectively. But that's an important reflex in France: we immediately set someone up as a hero, a star, to the detriment of building a community. If there are great figures, they must emerge from a shared activity, a collective activity.
Precisely, how does the work between your class and the Strasbourg ensembles go?
I have 14 students in my class, ranging from 17 to just over 30. As soon as I arrived in 2017, I immediately involved the local ensembles - we mainly work with five of them - in the work of the composition class. They have an indispensable know-how that I can explain as a composer, but that I cannot bring to the students: I do not play all the instruments, nor all the scores. Every year, two ensembles work with the class and it rotates. The work culminates in a concert by each ensemble, which plays the students' pieces. If one ensemble is more interested in a scenic question, we integrate the scenography class. If another ensemble is more interested in instrumental technique, we will organise meetings to encourage the transmission of the technical capacities of the instrument to the performer. It is fundamental that the ensembles be varied to stimulate different facets of the students' inspiration. Working with performers who are specialists in contemporary repertoires makes composition more concrete. When you compose, you write with a performer nearby. The performer must be involved in the writing process. All the scores we compose in my class are scores that we play in public.
To be able to work with different ensembles... This is not the case in all conservatories...
This is a great opportunity for the students and all the composition classes should have the possibility to carry out these regular exchanges. The CNSMD in Paris is working very hard with theEnsemble Intercontemporain and we can assume that this will soon be the case in Lyon with the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain. In addition to working with outside ensembles, we also encourage a great deal of in-house collaboration. At the beginning of each year, we organise a "speed dating" day with composers and student musicians! A lot of friendships and musical collaborations are created at that time. The young student performers have a passion for contemporary music, they want to take risks during their exams. For a performer, the interest and commitment to contemporary music rarely comes out of nowhere, it is built at the conservatory. It is fundamental.
Despite the health crisis, Daniel D'Adamo has released two CDs: one on Nomadmusic combines pages of Schubert with a new piece, Sur Vestiges, for cello and string quartet, performed by Noémi Boutin and the Béla Quartet
And the conservatory has other projects on the go!
At the beginning of the academic year, we are opening the first Franco-German doctorate in composition. It is being piloted by four institutions: the conservatory, of course, the University of Strasbourg and the Rhine University of the Arts, as well as the university and the famous Musikhochschule in Freiburg, where my colleague Johannes Schollhorn teaches. Our two border towns are only 100 kilometres apart. The course lasts three years. The aim is for the students to benefit from the dual nationality of the diploma and for the French students to spend a few semesters in Germany and vice versa. The doctorate is open to composers who wish to develop a research project in the context of writing a piece. The prerequisite for the In France, the only way to obtain a master's degree in composition is through the two conservatories in Paris and Lyon, or through the Haute école des arts du Rhin in Strasbourg. All the major structures are working to create spaces for the transmission and training of composers: Ircam has its own academy, the Gmem in Marseille is developing its own with the Métaboles, the Tana Quartet, the Multilateral Ensemble and the Mozarteum in Salzburg: Arco *.
I hope that there will be a new project along these lines in Strasbourg, which would occupy the space left vacant by Philippe Manoury's composition academy, which no longer exists. Interest in his academies is growing, even from the general public!
The second CD is on ECM Records, The Lips Cycle, for Isabel Soccoja's voice, flute, viola, harp and electronics.
France Musique The Lips cycle at the 2018 Musica Festival : https://www.francemusique.fr/emissions/le-concert-du-soir/lips-cycle-daniel-d-adamo-65337
Interview by Suzanne Gervais
