L'APPRENTISSAGE DU VIOLON À LA CROISÉE DE L'ÉCOLE RATIONALISTE FRANÇAISE ET DE L'ÉCOLE PRAGMATISTE SUZUKI

The thesis, a volume of 466 pages, including a dozen pages of bibliography is organized in three parts spread over eight chapters, with an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction describes a path at the intersection of music and philosophy, on one side with graduate training in violin, the other in the encounter with phenomenology through the thought of Antonio Banfi in Italy. This dual experience motivates the theoretical impulse of all, leading to build in the first part of an empirical phenomenology which, in the field of art, would be attentive to the execution of works and instrumental technique. This requirement extends, in the thesis, a precise and concrete way through the confrontation of two methods of learning the violin, which are opposite to each other at all levels: on one hand the method of Pierre Baillot and the other that of Shinichi Suzuki. The first outcome of the sphere of the Paris Conservatoire just before the mid-nineteenth century, values the professionalism and selection, written music and playing the score; the other, carried by ancestral values of spirituality, belongs to Japan after the Second World War and advocates music for all, in its ability to transform the lives of everyone. Similar to the mother tongue, with the emotions that this implies, the music is so learned in any other way that where, as in Baillot, an analytical design and discipline prevails: listening, oral and beautiful sound are, in Suzuki, the main springs of the method. The interest of the thesis is however not to stay in generalities about it and getting into sharpened descriptions of all aspects of learning: stages of progression, body postures, taking account of singing and voice are all elements that contribute to the construction of the vis-à-vis between the two methods, in important chapters IV to VI. A huge number of examples is used as a document from the literature of treaties and revived in the light of experience.