Communication

Scientific neutrality and artistic excellence, two axioms at the risk of mediation?

At the crossroads of artistic or musicological approaches and cultural and social engagement, both mediation practitioners and researchers sometimes find themselves confronted with identity tension, which manifests itself in professional status and representations as well as in training.

Two notions will be examined to shed light on this phenomenon: neutrality, as an axiom of musicological research, and excellence, as it underlies the learning and practice of performers. It will be a question of showing how mediation practices can come up against these two notions and how, conversely, they open up new horizons, both for the methodology of research and for the storytelling of artistic practices.

This communication will be based on various testimonies and works and will put in series several investigations. She will question the discursive and axiological legacies and their effects in terms of the positioning of researchers and artists regarding knowledge, emotions and actions.

Biography

Trained in musicology and political science, Sylvie Pébrier teaches at the National Conservatory of Music and Dance in Paris. As music inspector at the Ministry of Culture until 2021, she oversaw work on audiences for classical music (2015), mediation in labeled places (2017), training in mediation in London (2018) and in higher music establishments in France (2020), the evaluation of mediation (2020). She recently published an essay Re-inventing music, in its institutions, its policies, its stories. As a musicologist, she questions the relationship between the sensitive and the political, particularly in the listening experience, the study of interpretation and the reform of early music.