Confronting the Past: Quebec Composers and the Attraction of the Orchestra
The article looks at how orchestral writing has become a natural choice for Quebec composers born at the end of the 1960s and after, with the orchestra as a favoured tool of expression in the new millennium. This choice elicits questions about Quebec composers’ relationship with the musical past. It examines how their range of experience and expectation relates to aspects of historicity in which they now operate and create, aspects constrained by the present difficulty of living by one’s art, of performing and enduring, which its temporal imperative. The article references, among many others, composers like Simon Bertrand, Nicole Lizée, Julien Bilodeau and Éric Champagne, and explores how the relation to time has now been freed from a caricature of the métier through a determinist recounting of the musical past.