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

On January 16, 1935, at the Université des Annales, Paul Valéry delivered a lecture entitled Le bilan de l'intelligence. For the poet, the hour was grave, since, as he put it, "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 state of bearable equilibrium?" Among Paul Valéry's concerns, cultural efforts also come up against the loss of meaning that their accumulation risks producing. He writes: "With a view to artistic culture, we have 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 the spread of abstract erudition, with no positive effects."
Valéry's words are still a warning, since the question is so serious that even today, the majority of responses to it are irresponsible. There is a traditional vision of cultural mediation as a means, which reinforces the vision of works as an end, which would put us 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 issue, the ways to serve it were of no importance.

On the contrary, shouldn't musical mediation question its means as much as its ends? These are questions that Métaclassique shares with Hémisphère son, the independent music platform launched in spring 2021: David Sanson. To deepen the discussion, we also welcome Sylvie Pébrier : musicologist and music inspector for the DGCA, the French Ministry of Culture's General Directorate for Artistic Creation.

Musical excerpts :

Opus 25 n°2, Alexander Scriabin

The Magic Flute, Scheherazade, Maurice Ravel

A song, Peter Garland

Professor Ice CubeFrançois Sarhan

Sonata for viola, György Ligeti