Follow a multi-faceted journey by an improviser and a musicosopher, Eric Antoni, from the cobbled streets of Paris to the Far East. Musical Mosaic lays coherent excursus of the author’s thought-provoking collection of anecdotes. With the absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature, the book is full of compassionate truthful descriptions of persons and experiences and written with total objectivity, brevity, originality, and musical creativity as inspired by the sense of tonality, throughout the history of music in Europe, since Monteverdi, and all over the world nowadays. As a text that is "musico-sophical" instead of being "musico-logical," it is inspired by the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), and his philosophical seizure of consciousness. It discusses the author’s journey in the world of music and describes "musical consciousness" and the ways in which it moves and works within us. The book presents to the readers the author’s account of the composers he met along the way (Slamet Sjukur, Giacinto Scelsi) and the composers who are currently active (Jean-François Laporte, Pierre Michaud, Myriam Boucher, George Benjamin), along with historical narratives that center around Monteverdi, Bach, Ravel, Debussy, and Bartók. It underlines the interrogations held by today’s musicians in light of yesterday’s mutations. With this book, the author would like to reach out to composers, performers, and music lovers and contribute towards opening them to the scope of experimentation in music and in the world of sound, all of which keep on becoming more expansive and more intensely conscious.
Biography
Eric Antoni studied piano, improvisation, and musicology at Conservatoire de Pantin, France, from 1971 to 1976 and with renowned teachers such as Martine Joste (piano, Pantin) and Max Deutsch (musical analysis, 1979–1982, Paris). He is professor at Institut Télécom ParisTech, France, where he teaches piano, improvisation, and the history of opera. His texts have been published in musical reviews such as Silences (Paris, 1985–1988), Il Suono gli onde (Rome, 1990 and 2013) by the Isabella Scelsi Foundation, and Le Banian (Paris, 2012–2018). Prof. Antoni’s musicological writings have been translated into English, Italian, and Spanish (see http://ericantoni.com). Some of his publications at Institut Télécom ParisTech are Les fondements de la musicosophie (1996), De l’utilité de la musicosophie (1998), and 1607–1945, Une Odyssée Lyrique (2011).
