Meeting, discussion, dissemination

Around the theme ‘music and the sacred', Ambronay acts as a meeting place, offering academics and researchers the opportunity to set their research and methodologies side-by-side with the realities of practical music-making - and vice versa. Research at Ambronay thus aims to contribute to the discussion by means of a multidisciplinary approach which brings together core research undertaken in national and international institutions, to complement and build upon this knowledge, and to create an atmosphere of lively and flexible cross-disciplinary debate. In certain domains it is possible to initiate a specific area of research where as yet unexplored themes are necessary to the development of an enquiry, when the issue has a local or regional dimension. The dissemination of the results of this study, around the theme of music and the sacred, is the aim of Ambronay's publications.

Research project

Ambronay's Cultural Encounter Centre, traditionally known for its festival of early music, has chosen to look deeper into the links between music and the sacred. At a time when we seem to be approaching the limits of current ideologies and debates and of technical rationality, the challenge is to take hold of an enigmatic and multi-faceted notion, that of ‘the sacred', and to deconstruct it through the application of modes of analysis and reflection which are common to the social and human sciences, without merely reducing it to its religious connotations.

The axes of research

- The voice and the sacred in the baroque era
- The representation of the tragic
- ‘Trance, rapture, ecstasy..'
- The sacred / sanctification