Music is everywhere

From Pliny the Elder to Jacques Attali, via Rousseau and Nietsche, everything André Manoukian has retained from his reading has to do with music. Music is everywhere, whether it's earthly nature, the cosmos, people, animals, mathematics or life in society. If there are "feel good movies", On the road to music is a feel-good book that surprises on every page and makes you smile about our times. The rap MC is said to be the shaman of early societies. Music schools are said to have been invented by the legendary Zyriab of Baghdad, a gifted pupil who surpassed his master but narrowly escaped the latter's cruel jealousy, only to break the too-personal "master-pupil" relationship by inventing group lessons. As for improvisation, the following anecdote reconciles two worlds: while his audition by a bored Mozart turned out to be a failure, Beethoven played an aria on which he improvised brilliantly, convincing Wolfgang Amadeus of his soon-to-be universally recognized genius.

"André Manoukian is a songwriter, arranger, pianist and columnist. We might add "passionate about improvisation", so much does this aspect of music underpin the subject of these forty or so chronicles. Moving from his piano keyboard to that of his computer, Manoukian acts like a jazzman when he writes, using his knowledge of music to juggle places, times and worlds, tinting the whole with a sense of humor derived from striking shortcuts. For example, to illustrate the gulf between Eastern and Western approaches, he evokes a musician who left for India to learn the sitar in Benares during his three weeks' paid leave, only to return eleven years later, freed from the Western notion of limited time!

You can also listen to these columns as podcasts on France Inter, complete with sound illustrations.

André Manoukian: Sur les routes de la musique, 192 p., Harper & Collins France, 2021, ISBN 979-1-033-90932-3