La diffusion de la musique chorale en France après 1890: Les voies de la décentralisation selon Charles Bordes

Abstract

Charles Bordes, forerunner of the early music revival, was a tireless actor of the decentralization of French musical life. As early as 1892, he promoted the diffusion of the solesmian gregorian chant and of the Palestrinian a capella polyphonies through the liturgical and concert performances given by his Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais, in the hope to give a new impetus to religious music. To develop the movement he had created in Paris, he took his choir and musicians on repeated tours in French provinces, he supported the creation of numerous Scholae for the performance of choral masterpieces, which was then limited by the absence of mixed societies, and he started series of conferences on the 17th and 18th-century oratorios and operas he wanted to bring back to life. The periodical he had founded to promote his ideas, La Tribune de Saint-Gervais, soon became a means of disseminating musicological knowledge, complementing his modern publications of early music for choirs. Establishing the idea of interstate gatherings, bypassing political and aesthetical borders, he played, until he died in 1909, a central role in the shaping of French musical taste.