INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION OF ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC AND SONIC ART
The Competition has been founded in 1973 by Françoise Barrière and Christian Clozier, directors of IMEB. It has discovered, revealed and recognized so many composers of quality from so many countries that its history is now inextricably bound up with that of electroacoustic music of the past twenty years. But going beyond this recent history and the interest that the Competition awards bring to the Prizewinners (a totally legitimate individual interest because it is a result of the quality of their creation), the awards stimulate reflection on three levels of common interest of a general nature :
• The number and the competence of those prizewinning composers, their mastery of the instruments of creation of today, their research and the ways that they develop, the obstination and assiduity of their work are guarantees of the present and of the future of electroacoustic music on a world scale.
• The quality and the diversity of the prizewinning works have incurred the interest of numerous organisms, committed and faithful partners of the Competition, thus creating a vast diffusion network of international solidarity, of promotion and of assistance to creation. This solidarity benefits the public as much as composers, since it provides wide access to the compositions. It also shows that this music is for everyone, and that listening to others is a source of mutual richness.
• A Competition such as that of Bourges is a specific organism, possessing its own complex life, arising from the relationship that it maintains with composers, which society and with music itself in constant evolution. It has to adapt and anticipate. It cannot merely observe and bear witness, but must also be fundamentally dynamic and prospective. To some degree, the Competition also demonstrates the recognition that society owes its creative artists, a preoccupation which is shared by all of its partners.
Thus, the Bourges Competition has striven to evolve regularly, attentively picking up hitherto unexplored ways, and all factors of newness that carry the seeds of the future. Sections and Categories have evolved upon the basis of past experience of the evolution of musical styles and tendencies.
Today, the whole aesthetic diversities developed in Electroacoustic Music and Sonic Art are regrouped in the Trivium categories. In these categories we find: " Studio Electroacoustic Music without instrument", "Studio Electroacoustic Music with instruments", "Electroacoustic Sonic Art work".
These last years, the emphasis was also on more recent expressions associated to the traditional base categories represented in the Competition. It is about the musical works or sonic arts associated with the multimedia and the show : "Works for dance or theatre", "for the environment or the installation", "for video, video-dance and the CDRom".