David Sanson

David Sanson
Period: 2013-2014
Profession: Art historian After 15 years as a journalist (editor-in-chief of the magazines Classica, then Mouvement, and mainly on France Musique), David Sanson, born in 1970, pursues a triple career as author, musician and artistic advisor (from the Santarcangelo dei Teatri festival in the past to the Collège des Bernardins in Paris today). In the Classica collection published by Actes Sud, he translated and prefaced the first book in French devoted to the composer Arvo Pärt, and published a biographical essay on Maurice Ravel; he also contributed to the collective works Tout Bach and Tout Mozart published by Robert Laffont, as well as the current reissue of Michka Assayas’s Dictionnaire du rock. He has written several texts, notably fiction, for artists’ catalogs (Marie-Jeanne Hoffner, Julien Sirjacq, Rainier Lericolais). At the same time, he pursues his activities as a musician with his That Summer project. In his research project for the Villa Médicis, David Sanson draws on his experience as a programmer and columnist, as well as on the controversy surrounding the admission of musicians Claire Diterzi and Magic Malik to the Villa Médicis in 2010, to examine the reasons for the current lack of interest in so-called “contemporary” music, particularly in France. This essay, which is more a literary chronicle than a musicological demonstration, aims to produce an observation – at the confluence of music history, aesthetics and the sociology of cultural institutions – in order to better reflect on the possibilities of overcoming it.