Additional Information
The Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ) presents here the fall portion of its 2025-2026 season and maintains the course set by the current artistic direction embodied by composer Simon Bertrand since Walter Boudreau retired to his land to devote himself exclusively to composition and composer Ana Sokolovic spent a brief time there. Led by Simon Bertrand’s artistic direction, the very conclusive experience of the Montréal/Nouvelles Musiques 2025 festival has breathed new life into the SMCQ, which is proposing a 25-26 season focused on intergenerational dialogue, the renewal and growth of its audience, as well as the embracing of its American identity.
PAN M 360: The intergenerational perspective on creative music is the central theme of the 60th season of the SMCQ. What justifies this choice?
Simon Bertrand: Normally, since we are coming off a year of the M/NM festival, we should be in a tribute season. However, this usually revolves around a single composer. However, since it is the 60th anniversary of the founding of the SMCQ, I preferred to pay tribute to all the composers who have left their mark on the SMCQ, but also to those who are the guarantors of its future. So, it is also about the composers of today and tomorrow, hence this idea of an intergenerational dialogue between several generations of creators, a sort of bridge between the generations which, in my opinion, is essential and which we have often cruelly lacked.
PAN M 360: How is this applied? Retrospective approach?
Simon Bertrand: What I wanted to avoid, precisely, was a retrospective approach with a heavy dose of self-congratulation for a glorious past, or an overly historical approach.
My goal is rather to create a dialogue between the works, and to create a dialogue between their musical and human testimonies. As Varèse said, “to be modern is to be natural, to be an interpreter of the spirit of one’s time.” It’s as “simple” as that! (smiles)
PAN M 360: How then to interweave the repertoires of six decades?
Simon Bertrand: For the October 30th concert, a highlight entitled “au chœur du Québec”, the common thread is of course writing for choir, but with extremely different aesthetic approaches.
In the case of the first Montreal concert on November 15 at the Claude-Champagne Hall, it is a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the SMCQ, but also the 75th anniversary of the Faculty of Music of the UdM. However, it turns out that several composers who played an important role in the SMCQ also did so for the Faculty of Music of the University of Montreal. This is how we find Garant, Tremblay, Sokolovic, Boudreau and a creation commissioned by the SMCQ from the young composer Maxime Daigneault in this program.
The concerts for the second half of the season after Christmas will be announced later. We will try to meet the challenge of bringing together several generations and aesthetic approaches. The full program will be announced soon, but I can already tell you that we will have as guests the Éclat ensemble, the Orchestre de l’Agora, the Ensemble de la SMCQ, and also a piano concert of Quebec music with Philippe Prudhomme and Louise Bessette, and that the season will be interspersed with numerous creations commissioned by the SMCQ especially for its 60th anniversary. It is essential to continue to place commissions with composers so that they can give us a precious musical testimony of our time, and that is my hobbyhorse at the SMCQ: to make composers work, and to serve them as best as possible.
PAN M 360: How can we create an intergenerational dialogue between composers, knowing that today’s aesthetics are distancing themselves from contemporary music as it was heard in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s?
Simon Bertrand: Dialogue doesn’t mean putting together works that say the same thing, and in the same way. Otherwise it would be too monochrome.
There is no longer a major aesthetic movement, or dominant school of thought as there was from the 1960s to the 1990s: composers no longer feel the need to affiliate themselves with a specific musical system or language and aspire to integration, fusion and synthesis, and they have very singular approaches.
So I’m not trying to create any links of filiation; contemporary music today is a marvelous Tower of Babel with an abundance of different languages and approaches. Composers are, more than ever, wonderful polyglots!
PAN M 360: Until recently, the audience for contemporary music was aging year by year, without growing. This leads to the question: is creative music truly intergenerational, beyond the interest of young composers and other music students?
Simon Bertrand: Above all, and more than ever, they are multidisciplinary. And that’s where the opportunity lies for developing the audience, that is, by reaching out to audiences interested in visual arts, cinema, etc. In short, finding an audience interested in other art forms and their encounter with creative music. Also, as the boundary between instrumental music and electroacoustic music or written and improvised music is increasingly thin, or even non-existent, this also opens the door to new audiences.
PAN M 360: And here is a first sign of success for this vision: particularly in the context of M/NM 2025, a shift has been made, with the main result being an increase in your audience. Who is your new audience?
Simon Bertrand: It is obvious that a large part of our audience and our community but also by ramifications other artistic communities, but we must not underestimate the need and desire of the public to discover totally unusual and new things and to explore new sound worlds: during M/NM 2025, we saw people at the concerts that we had never seen before, and I think that the collaboration with the visual arts community helped a lot.
PAN M 360: The SMCQ has just presented works by Canadian female composers in Colombia, in Manizales, where the CiMa International Music Festival is being held. Are you now looking for Americanness?
Simon Bertrand: We always thought that the solution was to repeat the European model in Quebec, and to emulate what is done there, for example in Darmstadt, at Domaine Musical, at IRCAM, etc. For my part, I have always had doubts about this approach. I think that contemporary European music is a rather colonialist invention, I don’t think that the future of creative music necessarily passes only through Europe but also through other continents. And that is the impression that this extraordinary trip to Colombia left me with. I think that we must begin by questioning what we ourselves have to say with our own ways of expressing ourselves, that is to say that we need a kind of introspection.
PAN M 360: Are you then seeking to distance yourself from the dominant influence of Europe in contemporary music, on which Quebec composers of the first two generations were largely dependent?
Simon Bertrand: There’s no need to distance ourselves from it; this influence has naturally faded over time. Of course, composers know the music of Stockhausen, Messiaen, Ligeti, and other big names of the 20th century. And sometimes they even assimilate them into their own language, but without feeling the need for a direct connection with a school of thought or a national school. But isn’t this a perfect reflection of the world we live in? It’s not insignificant to see that creators are more than ever seeking singularity in a world where we have such easy access to all information.
PAN M 360: What will be the main vector of your future development?
Simon Bertrand: M/NM 2027 will be dedicated to the music of the Americas, whether it comes from southern Patagonia to the North Pole. It will be an opportunity to question what the music of the Americas and Americanness are, despite the orange monster that is currently raging south of our borders. So, it will be a good time to develop our connections in South America, Central America, the United States (still!) and Canada, and also to give a place to indigenous artists.
