Festival Agora 2007: Utopia-Exotica

In the journey in the confines of the possible that is utopia, the musical imaginary once again travels beyond homelands. The year the Centre Pompidou celebrates its 30th birthday, at the heart of a broadened shared space, IRCAM places the musical future in utopia combined with the exotic. Edgard Varèse cut off his ties with Europe to experience modernism in the United States, Karlheinz Stockhausen encountered the East, Jonathan Harvey invented the lyric setting where Buddha and Wagner meet... These unique adventures are all fueled by the faraway. The journey removes the weight of legacies. Elsewhere founds the "nowhere" of utopia.

Akin to the utopian spirit, the experimental attitude treats reality as a constant invention. It carries out tests or studies that eventually become works. What would happen if... ? This infectious question, the question of IRCAM, belongs to the creation that does not intend to "double" the world. It creates spaces entirely different and separate (Emmanuel Nunes), spaces that are entirely other. More fertile than the petrified nostalgia for the great bygone, devastated utopias, these imaginary journeys sketch an interval or a nearby garden. Another meridian.

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