Symposium "30 years of cantology? #balancetavoix"

To mark the thirty years of cantology, a discipline that has, since 1992, integrated the world of academic research, the LARSH laboratory DeScripto Department of UPHF is organizing an international colloquium that follows the Charles Trenet colloquium organized in November 2018, and other colloquia on song organized in or since Valenciennes from the first, founding, " La Chanson en lumière " in April 1996. 

This symposium intends to offer, in two parts, first, an assessment of the work carried out since 1992, both in terms of academic research, publishing, SHS disciplines and different theoretical approaches devoted to the study of the song object, but also by taking stock of the theses defended and in progress on the subject for the past thirty years.

In particular, we will be listening to this fundamental movement that is running through society today in the liberation of women's speech, from Metoo to the success, precisely in song, of a formula like " balance ton... "

Hence the subtitle, purposely primed with the epochal acronym # : the expression " balance ta voix " plays on both the musical and societal polysemy of the imperative " balance ", whose echo resonates as much with the duet of France Gall and Michel Berger as with the hit of the Brussels-based Angèle. Thematic liberation and feminist positions are to be heard and analyzed with regard to an artistic liberation and the invention of a poetic of the song created by and for women, against the recurrent processes of the pathos of a century ago, where men wrote for women's voices under the conformist shelter of the topoi of the song known as realist.
Today forms are invented in song, codes are jostled, the phrasing and the scansion of the rap irrigate the refrains in vogue, the electronics allows sound games in the demultiplied potentialities, and even the masculine and the feminine testify of traditional lines often very blurred.


By inviting the communicants in their turn to balance their voice, this colloquium tended between assessment and prospects intends thus as well to stress the polyphony of the ways of the current research on the song, as well as, from a more specific and original perspective, to highlight the polyphony of voices in song: at the level of interpretation (duets, collegiate, collective, chorus, choir...) ; at the enunciative, stylistic and narrative levels (style of discourse, theatricality, identity of the singer/s, transtextuality...) ; at the level of music (melodic polyphony, dialogue and crossbreeding of musical styles, effects of the assemblies of voices or instruments, transphonography...)  at the historical level ; or at the temporal level (intergenerational dialogue, presence of the voices of yesteryear in the here and now and their modalities of inscription in the present)...

Under the double banner, vocal, of polyphony ; and performative but balanced, this promise of balance ; this anniversary colloquium therefore aims to exceed its retrospective dimension, indispensable, by a projective dimension ;: to bring together a maximum of illumination and innovative horizons  on the song object, today and tomorrow.