"When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them"
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A bruise disguised as a footnote in music history: Luc Ferrari remembers the moment the club formed, the canon crystallized, and he was standing outside the door. Domaine Musical wasnt just a concert series; in postwar Paris it functioned like a clearinghouse of legitimacy. If you werent inside Boulezs orbit, you werent simply missing gigs, you were missing the future as it was being officially narrated.
Ferrari names the power plainly: "major players", "broadcasting". That verb matters. Broadcasting isnt neutral; its a distribution of attention, a technology of reputation. The group could make "old and new composers" feel continuous, curated, inevitable. By contrast, Ferraris last sentence lands with a flat finality: "And I wasn't one of them". No melodrama, no grievance performance - just the quiet violence of exclusion, the kind that rewrites your biography before youve finished living it.
The subtext is also aesthetic. Ferrari would become associated with musique concrete and, later, a more personal, documentary-like approach to sound. Domaine Musical, steered by serial modernisms gatekeepers, tended to valorize rigor, systems, and a certain ideological purity. Ferraris aside reads like an early diagnosis: the scene wanted a type, and he wasnt it.
Theres an implied critique of how contemporary music markets itself as radical while behaving like any other elite institution: tight networks, curated lineups, reputations laundered through the right venues. Ferrari turns a small autobiographical fact into a cultural snapshot of how avant-gardes police their borders.
Ferrari names the power plainly: "major players", "broadcasting". That verb matters. Broadcasting isnt neutral; its a distribution of attention, a technology of reputation. The group could make "old and new composers" feel continuous, curated, inevitable. By contrast, Ferraris last sentence lands with a flat finality: "And I wasn't one of them". No melodrama, no grievance performance - just the quiet violence of exclusion, the kind that rewrites your biography before youve finished living it.
The subtext is also aesthetic. Ferrari would become associated with musique concrete and, later, a more personal, documentary-like approach to sound. Domaine Musical, steered by serial modernisms gatekeepers, tended to valorize rigor, systems, and a certain ideological purity. Ferraris aside reads like an early diagnosis: the scene wanted a type, and he wasnt it.
Theres an implied critique of how contemporary music markets itself as radical while behaving like any other elite institution: tight networks, curated lineups, reputations laundered through the right venues. Ferrari turns a small autobiographical fact into a cultural snapshot of how avant-gardes police their borders.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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