After a five-year hiatus caused by the pandemic, nearly 70 students in 4e and 5e from the Joseph-François-Perrault school resumed their symphony orchestra’s tour in several cities in France this summer. Good news, while the shadow of the construction of a concert hall still hangs over the years.
“The success rate of 84% is extraordinary thanks to music, when these are young people who come from more disadvantaged backgrounds,” says Lou Arteau, president of the Joseph-François-Perrault foundation, which finances a little more than half of the trip. The public school is located in the Saint-Michel district, in Montreal, and offers one of the best classical music training in the province through its arts-studies program. Every two years, a tour is organized in France.
The students notably performed works by Schubert, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven during six concerts. In Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, a “very small town”, the young people performed in a large church, with only their lectern lights as lighting, in front of 300 people from the town, an impressive moment. They were also able to sneak into the programming of the Madeleine church in Paris, which holds concerts every Sunday at 4 p.m. “It’s very difficult to get into their program,” says Lou Arteau.
These trips are always a great moment for the students. “Several of them had never flown,” she slips. We went one afternoon to the seaside, and many had never seen the sea.
The costs of the tour, however, have exploded in this inflationary era, which worries the president for the future. “We had 69 instruments to send to Europe, and the price tripled compared to 2028,” she says.
Tours also allow students to immerse themselves in different sound environments and “hear” their instrument. “As at the Joseph-François-Perrault school, we don’t have a concert hall, we walk around in a few rooms. And going to play in these places, it reveals all the musicality. What the students are working on and everything they are told during their training, they feel and understand, underlines Lou Arteau. It requires rigor and discipline. And also a sense of community life, because we are hosted by families for half of the trip”
Rejection letter
This concert hall has been in demand for years. But the Department of Education says Duty having sent a letter of refusal of funding in June to the Center de services scolaire de Montréal (CSSDM), because the project submitted was not retained within the framework of the 2023-2033 Quebec Infrastructure Plan.
The CSSDM specifies to the Duty that this is a large-scale project, which includes the improvement of educational, sports and cultural facilities as well as the addition of space for a “cultural teaching room”.
This refusal does not discourage the establishment, which is working on the drafting of a strategic file, which will be submitted next fall. “Discussions are always open with the partners. The whole project as well as the requests are maintained. Discussions will resume in August, writes CSSDM spokesperson Quentin Parisis. Nothing is questioned and the objective is to move this project forward. Preparatory studies are also underway.
Already in 2018, The duty reported that the current facilities are too small and ill-suited for the school’s musical vocation. The sound is not of good quality, which makes it difficult to work on the finesse of the game. A complete file for the construction of a new concert hall had also been received on February 28 by the office of the Minister of Education at the time, Sébastien Proulx.
Ron Fitzsimmons, a citizen who has campaigned for years for a concert hall at the Joseph-François-Perrault school, is jaded by the current situation, which he compares to an eternal restart and whose outcome remains uncertain. “They’re reinventing the wheel,” he says. I have already heard everything, I have already had all these pretexts. »
He reports that a big meeting took place this year with the people involved in favor of the project, with a PowerPoint presentation.
“They will continue to see me”, drops the one who is a regular at meetings of the Board of Directors of the CSSDM and who has been asking questions regularly on this subject for years.