Excerpt from The Holy Mass, yesterday, today and tomorrow , quotation from Mr. Dominique Ponnau, director of the Ecole du Louvre, Conference given in Le Mans, September 19, 1998.
"I remember. This memory is for me a cultural and human reference almost every day. It was in June 1985, in Pont-à-Mousson, at the end of the symposium “Music in the Church today”. Maurice Fleuret — in peace be his soul — the magnificent director of music and dance to Minister Jack Lang, friend of Pierre Mauroy, leftist, promoter as enlightened as he was determined of contemporary music, took the speech. Word of fire. Of supplication; one can say so, since he himself begged. I will quote him ad sensum , but this word I have never forgotten: it is his. Evoking what Western music, from its origins to the present day, owed to the Church, to the liturgy of the Church, what owed to the music of the Church the music of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart , Beethoven, Stravinsky, Messiaen: everything . To the liturgical music of the Church, Western music owed everything, he said. And himself, Maurice Fleuret, in his own life as a musician, to the music of the Church, what did he owe? Everything . He owed her everything, he said. And this Western music which owed everything to the Church, to the liturgy of the Church, what did it owe to Gregorian chant? Everything , he said. To Gregorian chant, all Western music, he said, owed everything . But the Spirit of Gregorian chant, he said, this spirit which he could not imagine ceasing to breathe, where was it breathed? In the liturgy, he says. And that's when he begged the Church…: I beg you, he exclaimed, for the benefit of the ecclesiastics present, don't leave the monopoly of Gregorian chant to the State. It is made for the liturgy. And it is in the liturgy that it must be practiced.”
During 1987, I thought my time had come. My life was falling apart. Life never falls apart, it will take me a few years to figure it out; either it stops, or it is transformed. My life was therefore transformed, violently, intensely, it offered me the enantiodromos as the Greeks say. The enantiodromos is this road which splits, which separates, which becomes two, and confronts us with a choice. The enantiodromos allowed me to understand what freedom was. It was an unprecedented situation, I was about to realize it. This crossing where life takes a completely unexpected turn marks the passage from childhood to adulthood. This moment has no age. I mean you can experience it at any age. What you shouldn't do is not live it. Not understanding what differentiates the freedom experienced in childhood from the freedom chosen in adulthood. Because the choice made, we become another; the experience reveals to us and gives a framework and foundations to the personality.