Do Doulce Mémoire's Musicians Perform French Renaissance Music as Natives and Italian Renaissance Music as Tourists?
Les musiciens de Doulce Mémoire interprètent-ils la musique française de la Renaissance en autochtones et la musique italienne de la Renaissance en touristes ?
Résumé
Unlike baroque music ensembles, Western European ensembles devoted to Renaissance music rarely
recruit their musicians beyond national boundaries. Thus, the professional networks that result are
almost exclusively intra-national and self-sufficient, such that one regularly finds the same musicians in
all the major ensembles: in France, Jacques Moderne (1973), Clément Janequin (1978), Doulce
Mémoire (1989), Les Witches (ca. 1990), Musica Nova (1993), etc. This observation also holds for the
United Kingdom, Flanders, and Italy, and we might consider it a priori to lend itself to creating national
performance traditions. However, two phenomena modify this presupposition: firstly, given the lack of
opportunities to learn Renaissance period performance practice in France, a significant number of
French musicians studied abroad at the master’s level (in Basel, Geneva, the Hague, not to mention
summer courses); secondly, recordings and festivals clearly constitute channels of mutual influence
beyond national boundaries.
Considering the fact that these aforementioned networks are relatively new and reduced in scope, do
national recurrences of performance styles allow us to speak of ‘national’ traditions? This adjective
risks essentializing performance practices: we would explain them in light of secular cultural – or even
‘ethnic’ – traditions; namely, by comparing a musical practice with ‘national’ folklore, which exists only
in nationalist paradigms. Nevertheless, our necessary awareness of this doesn't keep us from
questioning the ideological value of these words, spoken by Doulce Mémoire's director: “There is a real
continuity between what was sung in XVI th century in a craftman's shop or at home and what we
continue to sing at home nowadays. There is something very French in this art of chanson” . Does
Doulce Mémoire really see its performance of Renaissance chansons as part of a long French tradition
of this genre – which would facilitate the task for musicians having grown up in that culture – or is this
simply a stance taken for the press?1
By performing almost exclusively French and Italian music of the XVI th century, Doulce Mémoire is a
perfect case for questioning the ‘national’ basis of its performances. We can indeed compare these
performances to those of other French and foreign ensembles, and also compare Doulce Mémoire’s
work on French music and its interpretations of scores from Italy, a peninsula where none of the
musicians were born or have lived. Thereby, we will be able to reveal how the musicians' nationality
influences their performances, in particular by clarifying the fundamental role of clichés.
1Denis Raisin Dadre on the radio program Le Magasine, France Musique, 2014/02/12, our translation.