Hémisphère son is featured this month on David Christoffel's Métaclassique programme. Under the title "Remedy", our contributor David Sanson discusses with Sylvie Pébrier the different ways of talking about music and transmitting it to the public(s).

On 16 January 1935, at the Annales University, Paul Valéry gave a lecture entitled Le bilan de l'intelligence. For the poet, the time is serious since, he says, "it is a question of knowing whether this prodigiously transformed world, but terribly upset by so much power applied with so much imprudence, can finally receive a rational status, can quickly return, or rather can quickly arrive at a bearable state of equilibrium? "Among Paul Valéry's concerns, cultural efforts also come up against the loss of meaning that their accumulation risks producing. He writes: "We have, with a view to artistic culture, developed our museums; we have introduced a kind of aesthetic education in our schools. But these are only specious measures, which can only result in spreading abstract erudition, without positive effects."
Valéry's words are still alarming, since: the question is so serious, that it still receives overwhelmingly irresponsible responses today. There is a traditional vision of cultural mediation as a means that reinforces the vision of works as an end, which would put in a Machiavellian logic: who says that the end justifies the means, says that all means are therefore good, as if, in the name of an essential stake, the ways to serve it did not matter.

On the contrary, should musical mediation not question its means as much as its ends? These are questions that Métaclassique shares with the independent music platform that appeared in the spring of 2021, Hémisphère son, whose representative we interviewed: David Sanson. To deepen the discussion, we also welcome Sylvie Pébrier : musicologist and music inspector of the DGCA, the General Directorate of Artistic Creation of the Ministry of Culture.

Musical excerpts :

Opus 25 No. 2, Alexander Scriabin

The Magic Flute, Scheherazade, Maurice Ravel

A song, Peter Garland

Professor IcicleFrançois Sarhan

Sonata for Viola, György Ligeti