The very choice of the expression musical awakening to designate the new direction in musical pedagogy from the seventies, was revealing of a different apprehension of the musical phenomenon and its passage from one generation to another.
The musical awakening was born from the conjunction of an evolution of compositional schemes due, among other things, to a new instrumental equipment, to a questioning of the role of the composer in the musical fact, to a better knowledge of extra-cultural music European standards and a request from a public that has long remained distant from musical practice and for whom these new compositional means (thought and instrumentarium) facilitate access to musical creation.
Through the media, the Western ear is confronted with all kinds of musical forms. What is the essential, the "musical" made of? Musical awakening experiences try in their own way and through their practice to answer this question.
Indeed, parallel to traditional teaching, which is based on work on the note defined by its pitch and its duration, we see the multiplication of approaches having as their starting point the primary and universal material, the living and real sound, perceived by the ear in its complexity.
Instead of entering the music through an abstract system linked to a precise but intermediate notation between the ear and the sound, the musical awakening proposes, through the personal experience of the direct play with the sound, to make perceptible the fundamental constituents of music. Finding the first musical gesture through contemporary forms and materials is the essence of musical awakening. The participants do not repeat a pre-established alphabet but grapple with the sounds, experimenting with them, playing them, organizing them or structuring them in time and space. Exploring and bringing the music to life in them, they learn the essential notions for understanding it: listening, memory, sense of time, landmarks in musical space. From the concrete (playing with the voice or with the instruments), they bring out the abstract, a musical structure.
Musical awakening helps to detect what is potentially musical in us and in our environment, to discover the latent musicality that most phenomena carry within them. This pedagogy, if it aims to raise awareness of "music", through the practice of playing with sound, can only do so by already working at the compositional level. It is up to each person, concretely, to make choices to relate stamps and sound movements in a precise way, to decide on the structure of a game, the sound color of an improvisation. exploring duration through the sonority played by one's own gesture, apprehending the phenomenon of musical organization from these foundations in concrete experience allows not only to better understand the works of the past but also to access musical creation proper.
Two main trends seem to share the territory of musical awakening.
One mainly calls on new technologies; this is the case of awakening pedagogies directly centered on the use of electroacoustic materials (magnetic tapes) and digital sources (the use of the musical computer).
The other is rather linked to a renewed conception of musical perception and its impact on the learning of music. In music, the individual primarily perceives movement: succession of notes or sound dynamics at multiple heights. For example, of a series of five notes struck in crescendo, a child will retain the dynamic evolution (the crescendo) and not the number of notes played.
In the repertoire of sounds from multiple sources (concrete noises, instrumental sounds, sound pauses, electronic sounds), the musician selects, compares, by ear, the qualities and components of these sounds. Thanks to certain devices such as filters, the composer-musician can modify the appearance of these sounds by giving them profiles and timbres of his choice. In the original electroacoustic studio, it was lonely work.
With the GMEBOGOSSE(<click) of contemporary synthesizers and synthesizers in an educational context, we could get along with others. This equipment specially designed for musical awakening (by the Experimental Music Group of Bourges), made available to each "player" a recorder, a synthesizer and a system of filters. The gmebogosse allowed all kinds of musical games of listening, memory, structuring from recorded sounds.
Today, technology has raised the popularization of Gmébogosse in a spectacular way.
With computers too, the apprentice-musician is asked to do compositional work. Whether the sound comes from the outline of the gesture as in the device of the UPIC
The musical awakening will therefore relate above all to the sonority and the arrangement of the sound dynamics from which musical structures may arise. From the listening games, it will be a question of identifying in the different components of the sound, those that we want to highlight (work on the heights, durations, intensities, timbres, grains, masses, etc.) . At the same time, from improvisation devices, we will bring into play musical ideas. Thus the "players" will be directly confronted with the relationship between the structure and the fabric forming this structure. The device being in fact only a diagram, they will have to, to make it alive and musical, fill it with sounds (voices, instrumental sounds, electronics, noises, etc.) which will make it exist. On this occasion, the "players" will be able to test their sense of musical time in their choice of mixtures and sound sequences.
This practice of awakening is generally done in groups: the number allows inventions of masses and sound volumes impossible to achieve individually; Above all, it is an opportunity for immediate reactions to each other's proposals, encouraging an important work of listening and musical choices. The musical awakening, thus implemented, opens not only to invention but also to a knowledge of the musical fact as a whole.© Claire RENARD
Voir: Propos sur l'éveil musical (p. 108-109 ) Dans: Guide de l' exposition : L'oreille oubliée (1982, Centre Pompidou).
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