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 ? En Fr

Résumé En

Unlike baroque music ensembles, Western European ensembles devoted to Renaissance music rarelyrecruit their musicians beyond national boundaries. Thus, the professional networks that result arealmost exclusively intra-national and self-sufficient, such that one regularly finds the same musicians inall the major ensembles: in France, Jacques Moderne (1973), Clément Janequin (1978), DoulceMémoire (1989), Les Witches (ca. 1990), Musica Nova (1993), etc. This observation also holds for theUnited Kingdom, Flanders, and Italy, and we might consider it a priori to lend itself to creating nationalperformance traditions. However, two phenomena modify this presupposition: firstly, given the lack ofopportunities to learn Renaissance period performance practice in France, a significant number ofFrench musicians studied abroad at the master’s level (in Basel, Geneva, the Hague, not to mentionsummer courses); secondly, recordings and festivals clearly constitute channels of mutual influencebeyond national boundaries.Considering the fact that these aforementioned networks are relatively new and reduced in scope, donational recurrences of performance styles allow us to speak of ‘national’ traditions? This adjectiverisks 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 onlyin nationalist paradigms. Nevertheless, our necessary awareness of this doesn't keep us fromquestioning the ideological value of these words, spoken by Doulce Mémoire's director: “There is a realcontinuity between what was sung in XVI th century in a craftman's shop or at home and what wecontinue to sing at home nowadays. There is something very French in this art of chanson” . DoesDoulce Mémoire really see its performance of Renaissance chansons as part of a long French traditionof this genre – which would facilitate the task for musicians having grown up in that culture – or is thissimply a stance taken for the press?1By performing almost exclusively French and Italian music of the XVI th century, Doulce Mémoire is aperfect case for questioning the ‘national’ basis of its performances. We can indeed compare theseperformances to those of other French and foreign ensembles, and also compare Doulce Mémoire’swork on French music and its interpretations of scores from Italy, a peninsula where none of themusicians were born or have lived. Thereby, we will be able to reveal how the musicians' nationalityinfluences 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.