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 conference "Music in the Church of today". Maurice Fleuret - in peace is his soul -, the magnificent director of music and dance of Minister Jack Lang, the friend of Pierre Mauroy, the man on the left, the promoter as enlightened as determined of contemporary music, took Word. Word of fire. Supplication; We can say it, since he himself begged. I will quote it ad Sensum , but that word I have never forgotten it: it is from him. Referring to what Western music, from the origins to the present day, owed to the Church, to the liturgy of the Church, what the music of the Church of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart was due to the Music of the Church. , from Beethoven, Stravinski, Messiaen: everything . To the liturgical music of the Church, Western music had everything, he said. And himself, Maurice Fleuret, in his own musician life, to the music of the Church, what should he have? All . He owed him everything, he said. And this Western music which owed everything to the Church, at the liturgy of the Church, what should it have in Gregorian singing? Everything , he said. In the Gregorian chant, all Western music, he said, owed everything . But the spirit of the Gregorian chant, he says, this spirit which he could not imagine that he stopped blowing, where did he breathe? In the liturgy, he said. And it was at this moment that he begged the Church ...: I beg you, he exclaimed, for the ecclesiastics present, do not leave the state the monopoly of the Gregorian chant. 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.