Marc Texier's 'Moments passés – Musique présente' Blends Diary and Aesthetic Critique

Marc Texier, known for his radio program 'Repères contemporains' on France Musique and his concert notes for the Voix Nouvelles festival at Royaumont, has published 'Moments passés – Musique présente' with Van Dieren Éditeur. A former member of the lettrist group in the late 1970s, Texier has consistently written from a literary perspective. His journal, kept between 1989 and 1996, reveals a vital need to create with words while addressing the art of sound. The book includes vivid portraits of composers such as Brian Ferneyhough, described as a 'Gothic scribe lost far from Canterbury,' and Klaus Huber, called a 'definitively reincarnated Christ who has aged.' Its main interest lies in analyzing contemporary aesthetic questions, particularly postmodernity, which Texier finds authentic only in those who express, through pain or detachment, the double impossibility of regression and progression. This characterization hints at a personal confession, as the author does not shy away from revealing himself, not out of journalistic necessity but to make the musical echoes he records perfectly accessible. Texier asks, 'How to explain this resonance if one does not give a little understanding of the brain in which it resonates?' The book belongs on poets' shelves rather than musicologists'.