I intend to tell you about a great man of music in Belgium. This man is a mischievous composer, he has the cat smile in Alice in Wonderland and is one of the most impressive teachers I know. He will retire this year, after thirty-four years of teaching, and as he is completely irreplaceable, I am glad that I am not the one looking for his successor. This is Claude Ledoux.
Claude Ledoux whose smile precedes every encounter: he is still only a hundred meters away from you when you already see his teeth, before distinguishing a silhouette which, very quickly, transforms into an enthusiastic paroxysm.
Claude Ledoux is a composer, he is the author of music that is not easy to define, which certainly makes it his first quality: it is music intensely open to the rest of the world, and certainly to what we call the Orient, from the Balinese gamelans to the mysteries of Japan. With the know-how of a sorcerer, he writes mischievous, surprising music that loves ruptures and is interested in the body: Claude Ledoux’s music often seems skin-deep, or sometimes visceral. She likes to suggest sensations rather than feelings. She hums, she caresses like a butterfly, she becomes sensual, she becomes erotic.
But above all, the music of Claude Ledoux resembles Claude Ledoux, this man passionate about a thousand things, curious about the next thousand, yearning for every new idea like a child finds a new toy. Claude Ledoux is a sponge. Claude Ledoux is Claude the Sponge.
This big child is the ideal teacher because he is always amazed. He laughs, he roars when he loves. Claude Ledoux, he sees music as rhizomes, both connected but completely separate: his students are a family, who are not alike.
You just need to meet his students, listen to their music, to understand that Claude Ledoux is a great teacher. No dogma, no coercive school. What matters is the student’s project. Claude Ledoux is not there to impose an aesthetic, but to question the student about his approach, and to bring out the artist in him. Claude Ledoux asks questions but does not give answers.
“Write me a five-minute piece with just one note!” Here it is, Claude Ledoux’s first lesson. To encounter the writing of others and what they still hide under their shy pen. “Imagine your project as a cube,” he said again. “We only see one side of it. We will try to uncover the others.”
You really have to listen to the music of Claude Ledoux’s students: Apolline Jesupret, Pierre Slinckx, Gwenaël Grisi, Noé Gillerot, Alice Hebborn, Max Charue, and so many others: none of this music is alike. Here, I’m talking to you about the youngest of his students, but a thousand people have revealed themselves in his class over the last thirty years.
As in his own music, Claude Ledoux seeks to bring out the unheard in that of his students. There is, in all explorations, a treasure to be revealed.
Be careful, the professor remains demanding: “this thing is completely unsuccessful, it doesn’t work.” This is what he can tell you… But the laughter that follows invites you to look further. Because the ideal teacher is also one who continues to be a student, a researcher himself. So you search with him.
Claude Ledoux, Claude the Sponge and his huge smile, Claude is a researcher, but he also remains a modest man, listening to others and the world, and as he is modest, he is truly a wonderful guy.
This April 24 at 8 p.m., a new work of his composition will be created in his school, at Arts in Mons, before bowing out, as a farewell gift. It will be a work for voice and orchestra, erotic songs for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, with mezzo-soprano Aveline Monnoyer, and the Arts² orchestra under the direction of Nicolas Kruger.
So, on April 24, we are all in Mons.
