Talk

Listening: an intimate approach to music

Saturday 27 May 2023 from 4:30pm to 5:30pm

Free entry

Talk in french

Journalist Joseph Ghosn, musicologist Esteban Buch and researcher Sarah Teraha discuss musical listening.

From the experiences and research angles of each, they explore the sensitive and technological evolution of music, what music is today, what it is no longer, what everyone thinks it is, and what it is no longer.
Joseph Ghosn is a journalist, he is deputy editorial director of Madame Figaro, after having directed those of Les Inrockuptibles, Vanity Fair France, Grazia and been editor-in-chief of Le Nouvel Observateur. Previously, he led the digital editorial teams of the Conde Nast group.

He started out writing about music, notably at Inrockuptibles, where he covered just about every genre. Since then, music has always accompanied his work, but also his Instagram, which he dedicates to personal reviews of records from his collection. He has a collection of Arabic 78s that he must listen to as soon as possible, i.e. as soon as he finds the right gramophone. He is also the author of essays on Sun Ra, La Monte Young, the Velvet Underground, which intersect with his articles on music, sound and records...

Esteban Buch is professor of music history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

A specialist in the relationship between music and politics, he is the author of la Marche funèbre. L'Orchestre de Paris dans l'Argentine de la dictature  (Seuil, 2016), Le cas Schönberg. Naissance de l'avant-garde musicale  (Gallimard, 2006) et  la Neuvième de Beethoven. A Political History  (The University of Chicago Press, 2003), among other books. He is also co-editor of Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth Century Dictatorships (Routledge, 2016) and Finding Democracy in Music (Routledge, 2020).

Sarah Teraha is a PhD candidate at EHESS.

After a master's thesis on the artist and musician Laurie Anderson, she has been conducting a doctoral research project since October 2021 that aims to reassess the position of sound in the New York art scene between the early 1970s and the late 1980s.

Two artists - Vito Acconci and Laurie Anderson - and then a rock band - Sonic Youth - allow her to exemplify the boundaries of a historical and aesthetic network within which performance and rock influence and infiltrate each other to reveal, at their intersection, sound as an autonomous and active category in the New York art scene.

Each of these artists, standing at the threshold of plural practices, produces a filiation in which sound asserts itself as mobile and protean, revealing links between literature, art and music. By extension, they allow us to examine sound in the arts as the engine of a simultaneous permeability between avant-garde and popular culture.