Poster
The first steps of cultural animation in Montreal and the electro music of Jean Sauvageau: When the counter-cultural egregore mutates into a playful device for social integration
« Je me rappelle que [Serge] Lemoyne […] avait mis des grandes toiles jusque par terre et […] il passait en go-kart et pssssh [imite un jet d’aérosol] [..] Là-dessus, je mettais toujours de la musique »
The musical participation of Jean Sauvageau in the 1960s on the avant-garde scene presents essential elements for understanding the first impulses of cultural animation in Quebec, a still embryonic public practice which developed in the wind of the recent slumber of post-Duplessist liberal cultural policies. Sauvageau’s explorations piqued the interest of the greatest, from Hubert Aquin to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who attended during his visit to Montreal in 1964, the free jazz concerts of Sauvageau, Dominique Macchiagodena and Hubert Lacasse, alongside Maryvonne Kendergi and Pierre Mercure.
Inspired by American practices, the very first happenings organized by the Montreal bohemian “interloper” and libertarian of the Red Light District at the Bar des Arts and at the Spanish Casa). Soon attract the attention of the government. Eyeing towards the populist and unifying side of these collaborative shows, Jean Lesage’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs and the Jean Drapeau administration provide generous subsidies to these inter-art shows of (Expo ’67). Thought out as a collective game, these shows drew impressive crowds to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Québec (MBAM) [1965] and to the young Musée d’art Contemporain (MAC) [1966].
This iconoclastic aesthetic current with “ti-pop” accents culminates in the work of the avant-garde collectives l’Horloge (1964-1965) and Zirmate (1965-1967). Founded by Serge Lemoyne and Claude Péloquin and Sauvageau, these groups intend to deconstipate the milieu of “scholarly” creation through “popular” art. Such support, if not totally disinterested, represents a historical diametrical change of attitude on the part of the Quebec authorities compared to the previous generation with regard to avant-garde art (the ostracism of the leader of the Paul-Émile Borduas automatists). Against all expectations, the horizon of values of the artistic underground converged during the 1960s with the objectives of social integration of the State in terms of cultural democracy. In this movement, we are witnessing the beginnings of the era of cultural activities in Quebec (De Carvalho 2013).
And yet, the name Sauvageau shines by its absence in the history books of Quebec music. How then to explain such invisibility? What can it teach us about how to write the history of music in Quebec?
Biography
Jordan Meunier is a doctoral student in historical musicology at the University of Montreal under the supervision of Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis. He is also a student member of the Canada Research Chair in Music. Anchored in a multidisciplinary approach located at the crossroads of the socio-cultural history of music and aesthetic philosophy, his master’s thesis Obscene laughter, grotesque aesthetics and carnivalized imaginaries among the first French musical avant-gardes addressed the influences of the music industry. Belle Époque show on the approach of the composer Erik Satie. His research has benefited on several occasions from the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (CRSH) and the Interdisciplinary Observatory for Creation and Research in Music (OICRM, Team “Music in France in the 19th and 20th centuries”).
His recent work explores, from a comparative perspective, the aesthetic issues raised by the historical shift from censorship to the public co-option of avant-garde musical expressions by official cultural policies, by relating the French and Quebec contexts of the Second World War. world in the late 1960s.