The Role of Governement in the Dissemination Process of Contemporary Music in the France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States

The thesis originates from a previous paper dealing with the Ensemble InterContemporain, the chamber orchestra founded by Pierre Boulez in 1976 in order to make contemporary music accessible to a broader public.

Because of my academic background, a master's degree in business administration from Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Lyon (France) and Universität des Saarlandes (Germany) as well as studies in musicology, I started an analysis of the EIC when I entered IRCAM's doctoral program of music and musicolgogy of the 20th century. In this paper I examined the artistic policy of this orchestra, which is exclusively devoted to contemporary music : the repertoire, the finances, the audience and the programming.

Hugues Dufourt and Jean-Baptiste Barrière encouraged me to continue with a Ph. D. thesis which would deal with a similar subject on a larger scale. We found an additional thesis advisor, Bernard Bovier Lapierre, director of the Institut d'Economie de la Culture, Pôle Universitaire Léonard de Vinci, whose primary focus is the economics of art and culture.

Because of the many possible relations between artistic policy and financial constraints, it was important to find a suitable example. The situation of contemporary music in a country, like the US, where public support is less available than in Europe, appeared to be an interesting subject. With a Lavoisier grant by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs I started to analyze the situation of contemporary music in the US at UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT).

The main idea is that in addition to differences in musical tradition, different economic environments also have a measurable effect on the dissemination process of contemporary music : with ensembles more exposed to market rules, the artistic flexibility might be more limited. By analyzing repertoires and studying financial resources of ensembles in Europe and the US, I hope to demonstrate this. This kind of approach implies economic and musical aspects so that the more musicologically oriented reader can be deterred by the economic content and vice versa.