Alumni of the Cefedem Auvergne Rhône-Alpes, part of SMAC 109, a French label for music venues and coordinator of the pop music department at the Conservatory of Montluçon, France. Interview by Sandrine Desmurs and Jacques Moreau (Cefedem Auvergne Rhône-Alpes), 02.04.2021.
Gabriel Rouet, member of SMAC 109 and coordinator of the pop music department at the Conservatoire de Montluçon in France, discusses the importance of creating artistic communities across practices, the need to maintain a critical mind in an age of easily accessible knowledge, the power of the arts to promote diverse worldviews and the development of technology as a new territory for artistic experimentation.
Alright, I am in charge of artistic accompaniment of practices in a SMAC which is called the 109 at Montlucon which accompanies amateurs, mostly semi-professionals. I am also coordinator of popular music department at the Conservatory of Montlucon. I teach electronic music there too. Next to that, I have an electronic music collective with which we were organizing parties before the Covid period, and we release tapes and vinyls, mostly from local artists from Lyon. I also partly work on cultural mediation, especially with the GRAME, Contemporary Music Center in Lyon.
First, I was a student of the Cefedem. Today, I have a professional relationship with them, and my goal is mostly to bring in students from the conservatory who want to continue by professionalizing themselves. Therefore, I put the students in touch with these institutions.
Apart from that, I don’t have much more connections with these institutes within my other jobs, I think.
For me, it changed many things because originally, I was at the University of Bourgogne in musicology, at the conservatory of Chalon in amplified music, at the conservatory of Dijon in Jazz Guitar. Therefore, I was specialized in electronic music and I did not know the higher education institutions of music very well. I did not know if practices, such as electronic music, were accepted. It’s by integrating a Master degree, where I did a lot of social sciences with Francois RIBAC that I learned about the Cefedem Auvergne Rhone Alpes. (The only example I had was the ESM in Dijon – Ecole Superieure de Musique, which did not seem to be much up to date regarding digital practices and new artistic practices). I was, therefore, advised to go to the Cefedem also because I was playing in a band with a former student of the Cefedem.
This school seduced me because of its proximity to the world of research, particularly with the social sciences, and its proximity to the world of education. As a result, as a teacher, it allowed me to really develop and prepare everything I do now in teaching, particularly through observations, memoirs and group reflections. Artistically, what was great was the highly transversal training, thanks to which I discovered traditional music that I did not know at all. I’ve always liked to mix a lot of things in my art practice, so this allowed me to do that.
FAST45
A place of discovery and openness?
Gabriel Rouet
Exactly. What I liked was that there was both: I had never had an experience like that of active pedagogy as a student as strong as there, so it influenced me a lot on how I teach now too; and at the same time, a sense of community, in the class, together with the scientific basis which I like, and which still influences me now. It made me develop this proximity with the critical spirit and the scientific world which helps me a lot in teaching today.
Today, for instance, I have some students who want to professionalize themselves, as artists or teachers and therefore I share the experiences I had at the Cefedem. Also, I worked quite a lot with the musicians of the ESM in Dijon so I could see a bit the differences, although I was not a student there, we had common lessons with the university. I try to tell my students of the diversity there is in the higher education institutes, as much as there is in the conservatories. I find it precious because so far, at least for amplified music there are still no big institutions as the CNSM that have taken over this genre. That’s why, there is a richness of thoughts and pedagogic culture that I find very interesting, in the experiences I had.
It is a big question… Pretty complicated…
FAST45
Indeed. So today and maybe tomorrow, what should we aim for?
Gabriel Rouet
It is a large question. Maybe nowadays artists are creating elements of culture, and therefore communities and therefore …. it’s so vast, there are so many things…
There is already the fact that there are new environments. Typically, if I draw on what I’ve done in research, especially at university, there are new environments that come along.
For instance, the internet. I studied a program called Vaporwave, which is an exclusively online and exclusively amateur program. What I observed, one of the important roles of art, is that when there are new environments that are created, people who are faced with new tools, new objects, will reinvent the way of making music and therefore reinvent new codes and new communities. It’s going to help organizing people around that, to discover new aesthetic experiences that speak to them more, in relation to their daily life. What’s interesting, also, is that this daily life is going to be enhanced by this aesthetics, by people who don’t know anything about it.
For example, in Vaporwave, as it is a community that was built on the internet, with a very strong anonymous culture, they took tracks from software, they slowed them down, they renamed them, they released them without quoting the authors. There is an extreme and audacious position on copyright. They proposed a new way of making music based on recontextualization of the tracks, by slowing them down, putting effects on them, renaming them, and putting a different visual.
This is one of the roles that I like of amateur practices, that I find great and very rich, which is that it will redefine the way we create music in relation to the people’s environment. I really have the impression that when there are new environments like this, new communities that organize themselves around this, people recreate new ways of making music and this is great. The world outside of this community realizes it as well and it is often a good gateway to how people live. This is one aspect.
What’s also interesting is that art can transmit ideas and for instance, in relation to gender equality, racism, they are often contextualized in artistic objects. Art can allow you to have these different visions of the world if you look at different art forms, especially those that tell stories like cinema. That’s one of the roles of artistic works.
In the broadest sense, it would to be to discover a lot of ways of thinking, a lot of trends and ways of living. At least for me, I’ve had these experiences: by discovering a music, you discover a whole culture behind it. This is interesting.
Regarding the role of artists, also based on what I saw in the questionnaire which mentioned: should the artist develop strong relations to the scientific world and critical thought? It’s a personal position but I think it’s great if artists engage in the whole world of research so that more people hear about these ideas and understand them. However, this dynamic can also apply with anti-scientific or backward-looking theories, where art can largely, notably with cinema, transmit sexism, racism or class contempt as well…
FAST45
Once again, we promote the ideas we want to promote this is what you are saying.
Gabriel Rouet
Indeed. But we do not do it on purpose, I think. It is just that we create a strong aesthetic experience and we use the tools and thoughts we have in order to do it. People will not have in mind to create a sexist artwork but will only think to play with some ideas for instance to say something funny, I am thinking notably of cinema, which will however promote the wrong social relation.
FAST45
And that is open to interpretation.
Gabriel Rouet
Exactly.
FAST45
We were talking about society, where you evoke a logic of community. Art allows us to be part of society, to build knowledge and a critical mind, but not necessarily always in a positive way, as you clearly said.
Art and economy, I am not a specialist but what I can see is that all the big arts companies, whether festivals, cinemas, etc. are always linked to private investors who put a lot of money into an event. It creates a lot of money at the local level where things are happening and often has also strong external economic impacts due to bringing people from outside who were consuming elsewhere.
In addition, there is a very strong market for attention. Anyone can create it, which can cause problems, especially for journalists who must capture people’s attention. One of the abilities of art, at least for artists who are totems, is to be able to capture people’s attention very well. As a result, the private sector will buy that attention. You can see the bank Credit Mutuel and all the money they put in to get their spot in festivals. It has repercussions, it is practically only the private sector who gives money, with some subsidies in addition. Art has a role in the attention market, which is quite strong and I’m not saying it’s good but that’s how it is.
FAST45
In any case, the economic actors are not mistaken. But just on that point, do you think that artists as such are also aware of it and economically value this attention? Without it being taken over by other actors, which is what you are pointing to here? Do actors and creation have a role to play on that?
Gabriel Rouet
It’s a question of how you position yourself as an artist. There are some who completely embrace this business side and exacerbate it. It’s just a system that is like that and people will get into it to have a better status and make a living from their art. This is called music industry. Even in sectors that are quite subsidized by public money, in the SMAC network in particular, there are very standardized learnings about how to sell yourself well, how to look good, how to be well identified.
Then there is also the opposite side, and here I go back to the richness of amateur practices, that are completely outside this economic system. They do not take part in it and on the contrary want to propose artistic diversity and experimental artistic research. I think of places like Grrrnd 0 in Lyon or the Collectif La Meandre in Chalon, which propose things that are really local, try to federate people on a common project and therefore do not involve themselves in these rather business-like economic logics.
There are really a lot of different artist profiles, and that’s kind of the two poles that I identify.
What I aspire to most – but it’s very personal – as in charge of artistic accompaniment and as an artist, is precisely all these ideas of amateur practices targeting local issues and cultural democracies. As opposed to visions going for more cultural democratization, where we bring artworks to the public and figure that this is how the public will be cultivated. In any case, we need to rediscover a dignity in amateur practices that are often quite despised and build spaces so that people can practice art. That’s what I love to do, it’s to bring people towards artistic practices. We should also accompany the local people who are sensitive to these issues and try not to contribute to a private market that in any case does not need artist[s] to exist.
The digital world and the Internet have brought a lot of changes in how we access information. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword because knowledge is highly available and so is artistic knowledge.
In art education, it’s very important for me to be aware of that because it will change a lot of things in teaching. It is double-edged because despite the available knowledge, we know that we are all locked in bubbles on the Internet and if there is no media education, especially on critical thinking, we will lock [onto] ourselves even more. There is also a supply of seductive and conspiratorial information that is easily available. Digital is a big trend and it is changing all our human relationships. It will continue to do so.
At the same time, it is becoming more and more restricted and we are losing rights every year. I follow a bit Quadrature du Net which is very attentive to this.
This is the first trend, the arrival of digital and the change in the way we consume music. Grand Bureau made a study on cultural practices of French people. This study is made every ten years for the past fifty years and looks at the cultural practices of people and how they evolve. We can see that people listen to more and more music, which I found pretty good.
In addition to digital and access to information, another current challenge is the ecological issue, climate change, and how it will impact society. The digital world is intimately linked to this because it is starting to pollute a lot and is bound to pollute even more. It is very hard to predict what will happen in the next thirty years. With mass migration issues especially, everything will change, and we will have to adapt.
On artistic teaching, at least in the music conservatories, I’m quite happy with the way things are going. I have the impression that we are moving towards more artistic and cultural education. More interventions by the teaching artist where he works, more respect for each other’s culture. That’s what I like about amplified music in its teaching, is that it gathers such a great aesthetical and cultural diversity that if you want to respect it you have to teach differently. The traditional teacher-student relationship is changing, especially in view of the internet and the hyper availability of knowledge. This brings me back to active pedagogies, media education and critical thinking: within music classes when looking at the social and historical aspects of movements, I also ask the students how they found information on Internet. It is interesting because it is evolving all the time and even the students have very different ways of learning. There was one who had discovered electronic music on a Discord software and who had learned everything there thanks to the idea of communities of practices.
These changes in the relationship to knowledge with the internet is a big challenge for me and teachers need to get involved. When I hear people who don’t want to share their course worksheet even though there is a better one on the internet… it shows a change of paradigm, of way of thinking which is quite strong and also linked to the idea of intellectual property on the internet.
I’m quite critical about that: both about the robots that get the samples, take away the monetization of your music or even your channel, and about the institutions that must manage it. Especially the SACEM in France which doesn’t seem to adapt itself very quickly. So much so that I was doing a workshop three weeks ago because I was only opening a filter on an audio track and the video I made was demonetized since they thought it was music. .
FAST45
And that is sounded like something already in existence….
Gabriel Rouet
Yes… it sounded like something, so it questions whether we are still allowed to open a filter on an audio track on the internet. Especially on electronic practices where we only use samples and it is ironic because you know artists do not do it for the money. In any case, their way of doing music is illegal and non-monetizable. This is interesting.
Regarding the ecological crisis and climate change, I find it hard to project myself because it is difficult to know what will happen, how our professions will evolve and what place art will have in institutions at that time. On the other hand, it’s nice to discuss it with the artists we train. These are ideas that are part of a scientific consensus and it is important to share them.
FAST45
In any case, even though you don’t have a vision or even an idea of how to deal with it now, it is important that these questions are at the center of the concerns of the artistic community.
Gabriel Rouet
Exactly.
I think that our proximity with the research world is already good. We have elaborated tools to evaluate the accuracy of knowledge and give us a basis to think. We know that one study on its own isn’t necessarily worth much but if it’s reproducible and there are meta-analyses of it, then it is safer to believe it. And in any case, rather more than an isolated researcher or something said on the internet. This helps us convince ourselves that climate change is real, because it is not the case of all artists or even all people.
FAST45
Therefore, continuing to diffuse research and provide tools for this diffusion.
Gabriel Rouet
At least education to critical thinking and to the research world, as well as all that cognitive psychology can teach us on our ways of learning and our cognitive biases. I had taken a Master’s course in cognitive psychology and implicit learning which also gave me a lot of guidance on how to teach now and how to think about the world.
For artistic and cultural education, this is what exists already at Cefedem thanks to the course “mediator artist in the city” (Cours EAMC: enseignant-artiste mediateur dans la cité). It makes the students think about this theme. I did an intervention in a media library and made the students write, made them think about these subjects.
FAST45
And document the reflection?
Gabriel Rouet
Yes, as well.
There are several things. First of all, at the level of the structure but it goes without saying, they need to have tools that allow them to really work on a wide variety of arts. The best thing is that they have access to these tools and spaces whenever they want.
FAST45
When you talk about tools, what kind of tools are you referring to?
Gabriel Rouet
It can be both instruments that allow them to do their art, in the broadest sense of the term, with all the resources they need, and tools to access knowledge, a library or computers. Also, there should be a space where they can use their own tools as well. I say this because typically there are schools where mobile phones are forbidden, also in art class, when in fact they have a library in their pocket which they can use in many ways.
In addition to the question of the accessibility of tools and spaces, is the question of teaching. My ideal spaces would be very much inspired by pedagogy by project, active pedagogy, where students are led to create their own projects while being accompanied. Instead of adopting a posture of direct transmission of knowledge, providing moments to discover each other’s work. In parallel, there should also be lectures on themes that students do not know. Indeed, the problem with not providing any resources is that the students stick to what they know so it is important to open them to diversity.
Also, specifically in music, I like to do a lot of improvisations together so that the students get to know each other. It is about bringing a cultural element. For example, I bring a piece of music, we analyse it, we realize that there is an asymmetrical rhythm somewhere, I see that 80% of people don’t know what an asymmetrical rhythm is, so we study it, we try to play it, we try to have an aesthetic experience of it, by improvising together.
Then, I don’t know if it’s the subject but more related to pedagogical ideas, this is one way of doing things based on experience. One of my bases in pedagogy is the aesthetic experience, I did my memoir on that at Cefedem. I believe that it’s the experience that the students have of the sound that will guide them in their learning. I create aesthetic experiences, through improvisations and listening. Then, I listen attentively to the students expressing their feelings, their needs and interrogations. I don’t hesitate to go into exercises that can be very technical, with the metronome for example, but for the students it can relate to sensations that they like and that they want to work on at that moment. They do it without any problem. This is in opposition to the idea that the teacher will bring knowledge and that the students have to incorporate it, as is seen in traditional teaching around the world. For me, given that knowledge is easily available and that we have plenty of pedagogical tools to play with, this is a better way to do it.
Not sure I completely answered your question.
FAST45
Yes, it is your answer, so it is obviously the good one.
What’s quite great about the digital tool in my practice is that I have a computer in front of me with which I can make music and at the same time order socks on the internet and do whatever I want. The tool is quite accessible. Although computers are becoming more expensive than before, everyone has them and there are also smartphones.
In addition, the system of pirated software is still quite present. When I was 15 years old, I had a family computer and actually had access to almost all digital software. However, it is not self-evident. It’s not because you have the possibility to do it, and even the desire, that it will be possible. There is the question of vocabulary to be able to find what you want to find. One of the answers is to educate people on what software exist, what are they called and what you can do with them. Convey this kind of information.
It’s not certain that in thirty years digital software will still be available. It is something that is changing a lot. For example, the economic system of pirated software was not at all the same ten years ago. You had to be pretty careful about what you illegally downloaded because your computer could really blow up, now it’s different.
My roommate is a data scientist, he looked at a lot of Ableton cracks on Windows and now there aren’t many where you risk burning your computer. On the other hand, a large majority of them are cryptocurrency miners and so when you use Ableton software you are mining cryptocurrency for people.
In twenty years, I don’t know what will happen, if we will still have access to these libraries of software and information which are for me extremely rich and accessible to everyone, which is incredible. When big download sites close down, some people say that it’s like a library that burns, resources that burn.
This education on the digital environment and all the debates around it, without filter, about what is legal or illegal, these are questions that must be asked. For example, the moral aspect of cracking is something that I discuss at least once with my students, what is a cracked software, what is behind it. In the United States, they like to have their license, it’s important for them, whereas in Russia there is a culture, that must come from the idea that they had of intellectual property in the communist regime, where on the contrary, they do not mind illegal downloading at all. When you download a software, it tells you to buy if you are going to use it for professional purposes but sometimes it only tells you to have fun with it. These are things that can make people capture this environment and therefore make the tools accessible.
Then, we need to educate the students to find information on internet, to compare sources, to know where it comes from, to know if a knowledge is good or not, to find what they want, to learn how to use a search engine. We need to create pedagogical projects where students are asked to think about this. I am convinced that there are many students who want to do things but are blocked because they don’t know enough about the digital environment and especially about software.
At the moment, and it was valid ten years ago but might not be in twenty years from now, knowing how to crack a music software was essential to be able to make electronic music. If I hadn’t done that when I was fifteen, now I bought my license, I might never have made music in my life, at least not like that and not professionally because the software cost 600 euros and at fifteen years old it’s hard to ask that from your parents.
FAST45
If I understand you, you are in favor of more accessibility, but accessibility does not make the knowledge and not necessarily the use.
Gabriel Rouet
Yes, that’s it. And accessibility changes over time.
Not easy, it depends on what you mean by technology.
FAST45
There is a lot of literature on artificial intelligence, for example.
Gabriel Rouet
This is a big debate. My roommate, who is a data scientist, works for insurances companies using artificial intelligence to calculate the probability of users’ sinistrality. Said like this, it does not sound very good. In Europe, we are protected by laws and people must give their agreement. In the beginning, artificial intelligences analyzed people’s Facebook profiles to deduce the percentage of chance of accident of a person.
Besides that, he does a lot of experience with AI and music. There are AIs to which you give a one-minute piece of music, and it gives you the rest, others to which you give an artist name and a genre name, and it puts together a new music in that genre.
It’s already quite impressive, and it’s evolving very fast. Two years ago, we didn’t know how to do this. It’s a field that is still evolving. Maybe in twenty years we’ll really be able to create pieces like we want. And if things change to the point where we don’t need to have humans behind it, the music industry may be able to do without humans altogether.
We may develop other ways of making music, especially through these tools, and other ways of judging the relevance of a music. The same thing happened when computers arrived. There was a huge change in the way of making music and in the way of evaluating it. That’s why when I did six months of Erasmus in Cyprus, the teacher I said that I was doing electronic music answer that this kind of music had no soul. For him, it had nothing to do with his perception of making music.
If AIs develop, which will surely be the case, artistic practices will also develop in relation to that, and they might be amateur artistic practices.
FAST45
Yes, I oriented you to this because it is a place where there is a lot of research being done today but there might be also many other technologies.
Gabriel Rouet
It goes very fast. We are also at a time when digital technology is beginning to see its limits because the processors are no longer able to go much faster, even if MAC has found another solution with their M1 processors.
We also reach a stage where physically, although I could be mistaken, processors are made of lithium and we have circuits that are the size of atoms so we can’t go beyond that. We are arriving in an era where the evolution of digital technology is not going to go as fast as it has done in the last 40 years. By the way, this can be seen in video game productions, which often testify to the evolution of computer power, today the power starts to struggle a bit.
I will start with the utopian version. It’s related to many things in society. In a utopian thinking we could say that the research will have allowed us to solve all the problems of climate, energy and resources and therefore we can get rid of all that. On top of that, we would have taken care of social problems, gender equality, the differences between social classes, a new economic system that would allow us to have much fewer social inequalities. We could take all this as a basis. Finally, there would be much more money to hire people for teaching, art and research.
My job would be a bit like the ideal school, there would be public areas where some people would focus on accompanying the populations to the artistic practice. If we imagine that cultural rights are better taken into account and that we respect all cultures, we would go towards an active pedagogy, a pedagogy of project, where we give the keys to the people to make things and we accompany them in artistic projects.
At the same time, we could also have people in higher education who have the time to propose very strong aesthetic experiences of recognized quality. Although I don’t always recognize myself in this because I come from popular music and it’s not because people have a lot of means that they will produce qualitative content. In any case, they are going to be both recognized by their peers and propose strong aesthetics experiences.
I have the impression that in music there are cultures and techniques that are created. There are people who work well, who are very good in what they do. We don’t really know why, it’s multifactorial. They also have the time and the means to do it and they manage to do great stuff. But it’s not necessarily due to exceptional teaching. I say this to demystify the myths of the geniuses who have marked history and participated in the evolution of music. I like to summarize that for example Mozart and Beethoven are just guys who worked well and are very good at what they do but they are not demigods. You must take away all the spiritual side behind it, understand that history has been reconstructed and that it is perhaps more a national fiction than a scientific evolution.
I don’t really know what else to say but yes, a lot of means, of resources, of tools, a lot of people to structure all of that and communities of practices at local level put into relation with things created at international level which is a huge chance we have thanks to the internet. It is actually something we probably do not do enough, creating connections with schools all over the world, which we could easily be done with internet only by learning a bit of English all of us or other Asian languages or by having automatic translating tools. I was very much surprised by Google translate, testing it recently in comparison to ten years ago.
It’s even more complicated to project because you don’t know how far things can go. There are obviously all the collapsology theories that are sometimes interesting, but sometimes we have to be careful because we don’t know at all what will happen. You have to be careful when people put themselves in a position of knowing about things that are so difficult to predict.
But still, if there is a strong climate change that modifies the ecosystems, so much so that we may not have oil anymore and progress has not been able to find new resources, if society cannot function as it does today, if it is difficult to find alternatives and if we witness mass migrations, it can go very far. Mass migration due to ecological disasters, mostly from poorer countries, will create mistrust, nationalism.
We could reach a stage where art education would be dedicated only to certain messages related to the fear of the other and nationalism. That we would be forced to do things. I am thinking of all the stories of Frederic Vidal and the “Islamo-Gauchisme”. Politicians take holds of these things, also for electoral reasons, because it is in the air. To me, the accusation of “islamo leftism” is a conspiracy theory, linked to a vision of nationalism, even if they are against what they call communitarianism. It will clearly be amplified by the radicalization in the poorer neighborhood and on the other side the fear of all that. I think that we have to be very careful with the guidelines that we can give, because as artists we have a lot of freedom in our work at the moment and I think that’s a great advantage and this is what creates this diversity that I was mentioning in the conservatories and the higher education institutions.
If the State starts to make too much interference, whether in research or in conservatories, it could become an issue. Although State intervention in the conservatories can be good because it makes it possible to train cultural artistic directors in amplified music, cultural rights, and often the resistance comes rather from the pedagogical tradition of the teachers. But the development of strong State directives would be problematic.
It’s super hard to project yourself later, there could be a lot of different dystopias. I give my naive vision, but I think that politicians are adopting dangerous speeches, in particular with regard to critical thinking and the research world. In teaching, we must also be wary of it.
FAST45
So, the dystopian vision that you describe would be linked to a tendency of imposing things, of curbing freedoms, and preventing the diversity you want to see in the utopian vision.
Gabriel Rouet
Yes, exactly.
For me the most important is to maintain your critical thinking, be careful about what you put into your head and the way you do it in a period where all kind of knowledge is easily available. How do you know what you know? These are among the most important things. Also in artistic teaching, what are we going to project, what does it mean, what are the consequences of our actions as artists and as teachers to try to bring more people to think about all this and be careful about all the dogmas behind.
Thank you very much, it is very interesting for me to do this kind of exercise because these are very complicated subjects.
FAST45
Do not worry, these are also very large questions and whether you have forty, twenty or five years of experiences the projection is never easy. We all have a way of understanding the world that is relevant. It was great from you to agree to participate. Thank you very much.
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