It takes a healthy dose of optimism to stay the course on artistic creation in this time of extreme doubt. With the virtual rally Where are we going?the Résonances team, which is the agent of the traditional music group É.T.É, has decided to turn uncertainty into a kind of game.
E.T.E is for Elisabeth, Thierry and Elisabeth, the three members of the group. Where are we going?it’s a roadtrip video where we accompany them to discover the place of their next show, which takes place on January 26th.
The story begins when the band members misplace the notebook where they noted the destinations of their tour. While waiting to find him, they invite us to get to know them better through a maze of video capsules. And, along the way, they present to us, why not, the places where they played, the teachers who marked them, the instruments they love, the influences that crossed them.
Coming from very different musical worlds from each other, they came together in trad, but a trad that resembles them and that they put in their hands. Thierry Clouette had a penchant for metal, before opting for the Irish bouzouki, which he plays with É.T.É, Élisabeth Giroux has a training from the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal in classical cello and Élisabeth Moquin, perhaps the hard core trad of the group, learned to jig at the Village québécois d’antan, in addition to playing the violin since childhood.
A trad revisited
For Élisabeth Rioux, the sting of trad came long after her classical training, when she began to frequent james and the Vice-Versa bar. She, who already liked to play music by ear, vibrated groove trad and has found its place there. While mainstream music is booming among young people, “there’s still a whole segment of the population that still thinks it’s just New Year’s music,” she says.
For Élisabeth Rioux, commonly known as Lili, Élisabeth Moquin is the group’s “suggestion box”.
“It’s the one that comes most directly from trad,” she says. She spent a lot of time in the Village québécois d’antan. And also, at CEGEP, with Thierry, they learned to dig into the archives of Laval University. »
The É.T.É repertoire comes from these archives, but also from exchanges, from pieces gleaned over the james. Pieces whose origins we seek to adapt them again. But É.T.É also plays compositions, notably on texts by Élisabeth Moquin, who writes inspired by a traditional aesthetic. To listen to the words of the brave, signed Élisabeth Moquin, you wouldn’t think you’d hear a song from the 21stand century. And yet…
The idea of the rally Where are we going? comes from the Résonances entertainment agency, which brings together three girls from the world of traditional music, Yaëlle Azoulay, Marjorie Deschamps, and Noémie Azoulay. “They wanted to create a new way of participating in a digital show,” says Lili.
In fact, the January 26 show wasn’t originally going to be digital. “At the beginning, we had to play in front of a room of 50%, then it had to be 100%. And finally, it will be in digital version, ”says Élisabeth Rioux. The show will be free anyway.
And along the way, we will have discovered a few music venues in Quebec, the Zaricot, in Saint-Hyacinthe, the first place where the group played, the Cégep de Joliette, where Thierry Clouette and Élisabeth Moquin cut their teeth. At the Vie et Cie grocery store in Saint-Jean-de-Matha, we learn the story of Thierry Clouette’s bouzouki, an instrument of Greek origin then adapted in Ireland.
Waiting for all this to happen in real life.