Interview with Jacques Cloarec conducted by Linda Cimardi, via Zoom on 05/08/2021
Interview with Jacques Cloarec by Linda Cimardi, via Zoom on 5/8/2021.
Linda Cimardi looks back on the adventure of the two institutes in Berlin and Venice founded by Daniélou, with the collaboration of Jacques Cloarec, interviewed here.
The full set of radio interviews can be viewed at archive site.
TRANSCRIPTION
Linda Cimardi: So the first question is about, the beginning. How did you get to know Alain Daniélou and, afterwards, how did you start working at the Institute in Berlin?
Jacques Cloarec: So, it’s very simple. I was a teacher in France, in Paris, first in Brittany and then in Paris, then I went to fight in the Algerian war as a soldier. And when I came back to Paris, I didn’t like the teaching environment at all, and that’s when I met Alain Daniélou who was setting up the Berlin Institute, because it was in ’63 and that’s the year the Institute was created. And he immediately said to me: “If you don’t like being a teacher, come and work with me at the Berlin Institute”. I arrived there in ’64, and it was very difficult at first, because I was really young and had no training. I didn’t have a university education and, above all, I had language difficulties. I practically only spoke French. So it was very, very difficult for me at the very beginning. But little by little, I became part of the fabric of the Institute. Everything had to be done. There was a choice of work to be done. First of all, I took an interest, which was easy enough, in archiving in French Raymond Burnier’s archives, his photographs of India, which are the very important background that we have here of the temples of India as they were in the 40s, which have now changed a great deal. We have all these negatives here. And then, little by little, Daniélou entrusted me with the technical production of the record collections he was already making before the Institut. He had made the first records before he founded the institute. And I set about doing that, which was a big, big job for several years, right up to the end, until I left the institute in 1980 or thereabouts. We made over 120 records of music from all over the world, and we also travelled a lot to get recordings in lots of countries: Azerbaijan, Greece, Ivory Coast. We traveled a lot at the time. At the same time, I was in charge of organizing the big musicology congresses we held in Berlin at the time.
At that point, I got a taste for work again, because I specialized and started to speak English and Italian better. I also learned Italian at that time. So that changed my life a little bit. And Berlin was an absolutely fascinating city at the time. All the West Germans came to Berlin for the weekend to have fun. It was a city full of spies, war widows and students who didn’t do military service if they were in Berlin. So I really enjoyed it, and we worked really well on the Institute. And I think that, especially Daniélou of course, who was the ideologue of this affair, he played a major role in getting Asian art music recognized as great music. He’s considered to be on the same level as Mozart or Beethoven.
Linda Cimardi: So already, you’ve told us a lot about your observations of the city of Berlin. You said it was very exciting in other ways. But what was it like to live in Berlin in the 60s, when the (0:04:27) encircled the city? Movement wasn’t easy, I imagine. Working and traveling weren’t easy either.
Jacques Cloarec: In general, things went pretty well. You had to cross this communist zone to get out of Berlin, which was always pretty impressive because there were Russian VOPOs and German guards, well all these people who only spoke German or Russian and who would take away your passport. You wondered if you weren’t going to end up in prison. But I was absolutely naive and had no sense of danger. I’m surprised now that I’ve become a bit more reflective and that I went there with such ease, because even West Germans didn’t want to live in Berlin, it was too dangerous. The Cold War was very strong at the time. That didn’t bother me much. There were times when you could only get out by plane because Customs was blocked. And the atmosphere was very, very free in West Berlin. At that time, there was a kind of… perhaps the fact of danger creates an emulation, an excitement that made the city very lively. So I really enjoyed staying in Berlin at that time, but I don’t recognize it anymore since the fall of the Wall. It’s completely different.
Linda Cimardi: You also mentioned that Berlin was a city of spies. And speaking of spies, what role did Nicolas Nabokov play in the creation of the Institute in Berlin and then the Institute in Venice? What was the friendship between Nabokov and Daniélou?
Jacques Cloarec: So that’s very, very interesting and that’s what made me realize it, but much later, not right away. At the time, I thought we were interested in music and that was that. But in fact, the creation of this Institute was purely a political action on the part of the Americans, who were determined to keep West Berlin alive and show the Russians that we were there and intended to stay. So that’s when they created the Institute, they also created the artists-in-residence and they helped a lot with the reconstruction of the Opera House, so that West Berlin would also have an opera house, even though there was already one in the East. And we wanted to make our mark, and Nabokov was very, very, very involved in this, all the more so as it was he who had created this association for the freedom of culture, which was obviously subsidized by the Americans and which was also a nest of spies. But Nabokov, being Russian, had contacts in Berlin with the Russian ambassador in East Berlin, so he was able to do all this. He was the very, very important element.
And Daniélou had known Nabokov in his youth around Stravinsky, Cocteau, all those people who were in Paris where Nabokov had taken refuge as a White Russian, and they had lost touch completely. When Nabokov organized a huge festival in Madras, India, he found Daniélou there. Afterwards, he said to him: “You still want to do your recognition of oriental music? Come and do it in Berlin”. And Daniélou, who was as impetuous and unserious as ever, said: “Yes, yes”. Instead of taking a job at the Sorbonne, which he was offered, he said: “No, I’m going to Berlin in the middle of the Cold War to set up this Institute”. This gave him an enormous amount of work, but also meant that we played a very decisive role at the time. So, in the city, there was this mix of only the military, the three (0:09:21) in West Berlin: the Americans, the British and the French. There were these sectors. So, you could go from one to the other easily, but you couldn’t go into the sector where it was obviously occupied by the middle. And the Berliner insists.
So at the time, we did everything we could to give this Institute a brilliant shape by bringing in musicologists from all over the world. But then we realized that, to be completely international, we couldn’t work with musicologists and people from Communist countries, because they couldn’t come to West Berlin. The Russians wouldn’t let them leave their countries, and neither would the Vietnamese. So we decided we had to have another headquarters, and that’s when Daniélou was able to get the Ford Foundation to donate from there too, but much less money and much less time to set up this Institute in Berlin than in Venice, which is still going strong, still operating out of the Cini Foundation. And that was another adventure, because at the time, we were able to attract musicologists from the Russian world. And Daniélou often attended congresses, even in Moscow, where the situation was very amusing, because at the congresses, he would attack the Russians’ musical policy, who didn’t want to hear about the music of Eastern countries such as Azerbaijan and Georgia. They wanted everything to be Russified, they didn’t want to talk about it at all. So Daniélou told them they were colonialists.
In fact, when we were over there in those countries, people were talking about the Russians being the colonizers for the Azerbaijanis. Even back then, I remember a story. We found a traditional musician there who played the târ, Bahrâm Mansurov, who was a wonderful guy, a wonderful musician, and Daniélou said to him: “We’re going to invite you to Berlin”. And he said: “Yes, that’s very kind of you, but I’d break my leg two days after arrival”. Because he knew the Russians wouldn’t let him out. Whereas in Venice, he could have come, for example. But Venice didn’t exist at the time. So Venice came later and gave us more space to continue, and above all we have more access to teaching than in Berlin to promotion, concerts and all that. Venice was mainly. And we had some great… we had Ravi Shankar in Venice as a teacher. We’ve had great musicians from every country in the East.
Linda Cimardi: You said that in the beginning, the job was very difficult because you didn’t have any specific training. You started with the classification of Raymond Burnier’s photos, but after that you worked on the recordings and the preparation of the UNESCO discs. How did that work out? What I’d like to ask you is that at the beginning, what I looked for and found in the two archives in Venice and Berlin, the first part of the recordings was made by the collectors, including people traveling in Asia or Africa who made the field recordings. After that, the recordings were prepared for release. But then you also made the recordings yourself, and the photos too. How is your professionalism in these developed songs?
Jacques Cloarec: First of all, when we arrived in Berlin, Daniélou brought with him 12 discs from the UNESCO collections that were already ready: Tibet, (0:14:21), Cambodia, Afghanistan. So the material was already there. And for most of these discs, Daniélou himself had made the recordings. He had close ties with Kudelski, who had invented the Nagra, the best portable device in existence at the time. So, this whole period was very… I learned from Daniélou, it was he who taught me how to make the recordings. After that, we started to make our own recordings of musicians who came to Berlin, and we also went to Georgia, Azerbaijan, and everywhere else to get better equipment. Christian Poret and Yoren Vincelles (0:15:11) went to Syria and Iraq to make recordings, as did many other people, especially Africans, since Daniélou was not at all a specialist in African music.
And in order to make these 120 records, I also started taking photos, and then I developed a passion for photography. I was lucky enough to be friends with Maurice Bejart, who let me photograph him whenever and wherever I wanted. So I have documentation. I’m not a very good photographer, but I have a great deal of documentation on his work in the 80s, and also from Sylvano Bussotti, the composer who did the same thing; he also let me photograph all the shows he did in all the opera houses in Italy and even in France. So I have two large collections of photos here now. But that’s not at all relevant to what I did at the institute.
The problem, as always, is not to have been able to keep the institute as it was, because what I often repeat is that we were above all artistic, not scientific. In other words, we didn’t want to study Asian music, we wanted to promote it, so that it could be heard as music in the same way as Western classical music. Afterwards, the people in charge of the institute didn’t understand this and they became ethnomusicological institutes which, at the time, were already completely out of fashion, because you study with C – D – E – F – A – B – C, with the Western tempered system, music that has nothing to do with it. The results are nil, no one’s interested. So we absolutely had to preserve the institute’s originality, the fact that it was the only one in the world to do this. To really have this artistic policy. We were interested in the beauty of the music, not in knowing how many eighth notes and half eighth notes there were in a piece, in a song.
It worked very well when we were both there. Then it completely disappeared. That’s why the Berlin Institute was closed.
Linda Cimardi: Yes, it was also because there were economic problems. It ran out of money from the city senate and so they had to close. But that’s another story.
Jacques Cloarec: I don’t think it… The Berlin government and Senate would have been very interested if we’d stayed on this very, very international artistic level. It was obvious that they weren’t going to pay for another musicological institute when there was already one in Berlin and 3 or 4 others in Germany. That’s why they stopped paying. We could have found the money, but they didn’t want to. Myself, I couldn’t understand why they would have continued to pay for something that no longer really served what it was made for.
Linda Cimardi: I understand, yes. Maybe I do. I wasn’t there and I didn’t.
Jacques Cloarec: No, me neither.
Linda Cimardi: Speaking of these recordings for UNESCO discs, you mentioned three different stages of venues. The first was the field recordings made by Daniélou himself in India and Southeast Asia, in Cambodia or Laos too. Secondly, there were the recordings of the concerts you organized here in Berlin, including the famous Dagar Brothers concert. And then there were the recordings that you, Daniélou and others had made in the field, with collectors traveling and making these recordings. What do you remember of the concerts… it was indeed a Dagar Brothers tour of Europe, because they were in Paris too, in Berlin?
Jacques Cloarec: A triumphant tour of Europe when they came, which interested all the great composers and musicians of contemporary music particularly because, precisely, it was a form of music that nobody knew. And our work has been so fruitful that now, I’m fighting against this form of music called dhrupad, because everyone wants to sing dhrupad, but nobody talks about other forms. In other words, it’s all about dhrupad. Now everyone wants to sing this form. I’m all for it, since we’re the ones who revived it and gave it back its rightful place, but there are other forms that are just as interesting, and they’re totally forgotten so that we can only talk about dhrupad. For me, this is something I don’t understand, because thumri is a very beautiful style, and khyal is a very beautiful style. But then, no, dhrupad, dhrupad, dhrupad. All the Western singers who study Indian music only want dhrupad. I don’t think that’s right at all. And besides, it was normally a music sung by men. Whereas thumris are mostly sung by women. Why not keep the traditional function? That’s not really a problem, but it’s a bit unreasonable to have based everything on the dhrupad now.
Linda Cimardi: Daniélou also writes in the music and its communication that it was exactly this tour and these concerts in Europe that gave the opportunity to valorize the dhrupad and there of the Dagar Brothers in India, and therefore to revitalize the genres. And that was the aim of the Institute, to really… not only make this music known throughout the world, but also to have an effect in the countries of origin.
Jacques Cloarec: A return to the countries of origin of course, because at the time, the countries of origin didn’t think their learned music had a future, they wanted to do everything the Western way. When Daniélou arrived in Iran, we made two records of Iran. He had friends at court, so he met the Shah, he met the personalities there who were saying: “there’s no more learned classical music, nobody listens to this and that”. And when Daniélou got there, he was very clever about it, he immediately found …me, I didn’t exist, I wasn’t yet in the city. He found excellent musicians who sang the extremely pure music of the Iranian tradition, and he made his records. And all of a sudden, the court realized that before they could have an orchestra like the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, it would take a lot of guts and a lot of work, whereas the West was much more interested in hearing the Teheran Symphony Orchestra. So they changed their policy completely, thanks to Daniélou. Not alone, in fact, because there have been other great musicologists who have done the same, Trank Banquet (0:24:06) for example, the Vietnamese who has brought back the music of his country in a very magnificent way, so that people don’t forget these wonderful forms of song, which are a very, very important world heritage. In fact, UNESCO is very supportive of this world, which is not a copy of the West.
Linda Cimardi: And then in the 70s, you often went on missions with Alain Daniélou and made recordings in Greece, Venice, Saint-Lazaire in Armenia, Corsica. What can you tell us about these missions and the records that came out of these recordings?
Jacques Cloarec: Daniélou was always in the habit, when he was in a country, of taking an interest in that country and not necessarily… That’s why, little by little, when he came back to the West, he wasn’t so interested in India any more, because he wasn’t in India any more, and so he became much more philosophically interested in the pagan religions of Europe: Mithraism, Dionysism. He immediately immersed himself in this, and so he became interested in the music found in the West, which was also disappearing, particularly Corsican polytonies, the religious songs of the San Lazaro Armenians and then, as you said, Greece too. I myself made recordings in Brittany, at Moratos, where there’s a lot of material. Not everything was used because there were problems, not enough quality and poor recording conditions. It wasn’t all published, but we did a lot of work.
Linda Cimardi: Over time, a recording, these tapes accumulated and a collection was formed that became an archive in fact. So here, at the Berlin Institute, there’s this important collection of recordings from the first copies, from Alain Daniélou’s first recordings to the end of the 70s in the big tapes.
Jacques Cloarec: It was I who made all these archives, indeed.
Linda Cimardi: Exactly. On one side, we have the tapes, the recordings. On the other side, we have index cards, papers that, very, very precisely and analytically, put information on titles, genres, words in the song or musical instruments, duration, information on continuos and at the same time also on the technical aspects of the recording. And it was you who did all this, who classified the tapes.
Jacques Cloarec: I was the one who invented the files. But unfortunately, it was almost too complex. There are too many things to fill in, so it took an enormous amount of time to fill them in, and the work was never finished. A job I’d started, I put in place, but it would have taken a lot more staff to get the forms complete. Now, there are a lot that haven’t been finished, but they’re there. And that’s what’s important now. And in Venice too, at the Venice Institute, they’ve done a lot of work to digitize this music, which is even more important. Now, we preserve them in digital form rather than on magnetic tapes, which are a little… in a short while, it will be difficult to use them.
Linda Cimardi: And was the role of the archive here in Berlin just to preserve these recordings, or did you also keep the archive for other places?
Jacques Cloarec: Personally, I think that’s precisely why… you know we donated, when not so long ago, the archives that were left at the Barcelona Institute. To the Casarzia in Barcelona. There’s practically nothing there. There’s very, very little music. There are 2 or 3 Indian artists perhaps, but the recordings I made in Brittany and everything else, that’s what we didn’t find good and that’s just bits of songs, things that weren’t finished that aren’t of any particular interest. I think it’s a donation which is really, to say the least, where we had made donations, but it was the Director who was in charge of it who had this funny idea to look like he was making gifts to his country, since he was Spanish. But I don’t think that’s really interesting archival art, because we tried to use everything we could when we were there, and whenever there were good pieces, they were immediately published. We were really careful to use it as much as possible.
But it’s a bit like my photos now. As you know, photos are useless if they’re not digitized. So before you keep these photos, yes, it’s the originals, all these slides that are losing their color by the way. Don’t you want to do something with them, because if you’re looking for a photo now, you’re going to look for one on the Internet, aren’t you going to ask for a negative? So it’s no longer a concern. What’s more, we can’t find anyone willing to accept photo archives anymore, and museums are overwhelmed with people wanting to give them their archives. We don’t know what to do with them if there are too many. And millions of photos have been taken all over the world. And for recordings, it’s a bit the same. Once they’ve been digitized, it’s just a matter of spending money to preserve them. And even then, they sometimes have to be re-recorded, because even tapes get destroyed.
Linda Cimardi: If they haven’t been digitized, there are conservation risks. I asked you if the archive on the musical parts also had other purposes because I saw that many tapes also had a little card attached like library cards. So I wondered: was anyone using these recordings for other purposes that weren’t UNESCO discs or conference presentations?
Jacques Cloarec: Of course it’s always of interest to musicology researchers to have access to these archives, obviously. Especially those that don’t exist in digitized form, at which point you have to go to the originals of course. But as I say, everything we’ve been able to do is already on discs, 33 rpm records. So that’s fine. They’re well preserved, and there are several collections of them all over the place. So that’s already a great source for musicologists. And now I see that you can also find tracks that people put on the Internet.
You have to realize that when I did this, the Internet didn’t exist. Digitization didn’t exist. So that’s all we had as a medium. So, of course, we could make endless copies of the tapes, but we didn’t have the ease we have now of typing on our computer and finding a photo of musicians from Azerbaijan or an extract from Les Frères Dagar that we made into a record.
So things have changed completely since then, and certainly now, I couldn’t have done that at all, I’ve rushed to digitize where it’s also much easier to find forgotten information because when you have 10 – 20,000 recordings, on the Internet, you type them in. Over there, you have to put tapes on and listen to them. It’s never-ending. It’s all completely old-fashioned. That’s why all this archive work, which has given me so much work, is no longer relevant. That would be done in a totally different way.
Linda Cimardi: Yes. But on the other hand, it was a unique way of proceeding and documenting all the information on these recordings. If you hadn’t done that, today we wouldn’t have any tapes, we don’t know who’s playing or singing, there’s no information. It was a very, very big, important and fundamental job today. You also mentioned that on the other hand, there are only the tapes and you can make copies. You know, in the archive, almost all the tapes have copies. So you can see right away that there was a vision to preserve these recordings by making a copy right away. And also, we have partial copies or tapes that are already the edits for the record, and it was you who did this. So, you’ve really worked on the tapes from the original recordings, making a selection of tracks for publication. How did this practical work work from the field recordings to the discs?
Jacques Cloarec: In other words, we listened carefully to the music all the time. And what’s very curious is that thanks to Daniélou, I’ve learned a sensitivity. I’m not a musicologist, I didn’t know anything about this music, I didn’t know how it was interpreted, what was good music, what was bad? But I managed to be sensitive enough to say: “I don’t even need to let Daniélou listen to this, he’ll just waste his time”. So, I made a pre-selection, but afterwards, it was up to him to decide, because he had so much more experience as a musicologist that I wasn’t going to go for pieces that would be linked together to make a record. There was no question of that at all. But I could already make a first choice. Generally, if I had any doubts, I’d have him listen to it and say, “No way, we’re not going to put that on”. And we had big problems with musicologists because they didn’t have that artistic sense, that sense of the beauty of music. And at the time, it was the ethnomusicologist who said: “I recorded an old grandmother who had no voice, but she died the next day. So I’m the only one who has the recording”. Can you imagine? This was a completely impossible concept for Daniélou, impossible. He needed the best artist, the best interpretation and the best material to record it. All three were linked together.
As for the concerts, he didn’t want them to be performed in museums. Nowadays, this principle has changed too, because many museums now have very good concerts, but back then, playing in a museum attracted an uninteresting, non-young audience. The concerts were a bit pointless. And Daniélou insisted that the Dagars, for example, when they came to Paris, they were entitled to the great UNESCO meeting room, that huge hall where all the countries meet, and they gave their concert there. He didn’t want us to go to the Musée Guimet or any other museum in Paris. It always had to be like that. So in Berlin, no museum, just the Akademie der Künste, Charlottenburg. We worked a lot with the Akademie der Künste, and almost all our concerts were given there. It was very important to do them in this hall, because it’s a modern hall and at the same time, we had a very, very young audience. And we trained, for example, particularly for Indian music, we trained an audience in Berlin who were able to say: “Ah, that musician is very good at the sitar and that one is not. They already knew enough about the art to be able to judge a musician’s quality. And we were very careful not to let just anyone detract from the beauty of this music by being a bad performer. For Daniélou, that was always the best, the best, the best.
Linda Cimardi: And these concerts started out as concerts, and over time developed into week-long festivals, extra-European music weeks, or to designate to the music.
Jacques Cloarec: Like we’ve done here too now. At the end of June, we put on a sort of mini-festival to coincide with the Fête de la Musique. This year, there’s almost nothing because of Covid, but in previous years, we’ve even had Charles Razia (0:39:43) come. It’s a big concert in Rome’s great auditorium. It was a huge concert, with people coming from Belgium to hear it, to hear it in Rome. So that’s what we did. But we had a moment even in Berlin, first it was to promote the artists, the great artists from Asia, and then it was to prevent the bad ones from coming. We passed. And this group you’re interested in here, the GISC for shows and concerts, was just one example of what we managed to do, because we were only able to do it in Venice and not in Berlin, because in Berlin, we were once again blocked from festivals in Communist countries, and there are some very big festivals. We had the Zagreb festival with Stoyanovitch, we had different… well. Well, if we hadn’t had the center of this group in Venice, we wouldn’t have been able to get them. And once again, we were linked to politics precisely in order to have something truly international, independent of the regimes of different countries.
Linda Cimardi: So, today, the legacy of these two institutes, part here in Berlin, part in Venice, part in Zagarolo, part in Barcelona. Here in Berlin, you know very well, there are the recordings, the cards of these tapes and also the photos, some photos of the slides and also the photos in this very detailed system of cards with all the information. Was it you who also prepared the cards and all the photos?
Jacques Cloarec: I took care of the archives. Daniélou had a lot of other things to do. I had assistants; I had up to two assistants who obviously helped me with this work.
Linda Cimardi: Because sometimes for the photo cards, there’s information in German. I think the photo cards are bilingual, in French and German. So I imagined that it was also someone else besides you who was writing them.
Jacques Cloarec: The fact is that when we left in ’80, it continued. So it’s possible that at that time, a lot more was done in German, particularly because there was also Habiba Santouba (0:42:59) who spoke German very, very well, and it’s possible that he too completed the two cards, and then some of our collaborators who spoke German, who were Germans themselves, also made cards in German. But I didn’t see all that. I’d already left.
Linda Cimardi: But the photo collection isn’t as detailed as the record collection. What I mean is that, for example, if for a record, a UNESCO album, you can find the recordings that were the basis of the record. But finding the photos is difficult, especially when it was someone else who didn’t work at the institute who made the recordings and perhaps also the photos. I’m thinking, for example, of the photos on Cimarron’s albums (0:44:08). We have most of the recordings, but we don’t have any photos for those discs.
Jacques Cloarec: He doesn’t have any. He’s the one who didn’t keep it. He provided us with printed copies, but he kept the negatives or slides, which was normal because everyone retained ownership of their material of course. So we generally used copies.
Linda Cimardi: I understand. So it worked like this. If the person who had made the recordings and photos worked for the Institute, we had the original tapes and the original photos. But if he was a musicologist or I don’t know, like Cimarron, he only gave you the copies of the tapes and photos that were intended for the records.
Jacques Cloarec: To the production, of course. He didn’t give us anything. If we paid, as with Poret for example and Vincelles when they went to Syria and Iraq, paid by the institute, all the material they brought back went into the institute’s archives. But when we asked the Australian lady to make a record, she gave us what we needed for the record in the form of a copy of what she had and kept her originals, of course. That’s why for all the records, we didn’t… For some records, we kept very few things.
Linda Cimardi: And when you received these tape copies, normally, what was the normal procedure? Did you accept the selection, the beach order, or suggest changes?
Jacques Cloarec: No. Daniélou was the grand master. Daniélou was the grand master, and it was he who decided what he considered valid or not. We often had very strong discussions with authors who didn’t want to change anything even though it was stupid because they wanted to take things into account. But I said, “But it’s a work of art, it’s a work that has to please people.” Whether you put the funeral or the wedding in one order or another, that’s not what matters. When people listen to this music, they have to find pleasure in it right away, or else they put it aside, they don’t listen to it, even more so now that people are used to immediately zapping it if it doesn’t suit them. People are now very, very impatient. If you have a site on the Internet and it takes a long time to open, you immediately go elsewhere. So we had to take into account these principles, which are marketing principles in a way. And the scientific musicologists didn’t want to fight to get them to accept our changes very often. In the end, sometimes we were the ones who gave up because it was too complicated. Sometimes the arguments were good, but there were also flaws, and people had good reasons for their choice. But in the end, that’s the way it was, it was the normal work we had to do.
Linda Cimardi: With the equipment including the nagra recorder you have, can you do some sound localization operations, review noises?
Jacques Cloarec: I was very good at doing that. Once in a very, very short piece, the singer was coughing. And I did it for fun, there, it was for fun, I removed all the coughs and afterwards, I glued them back together because they had to be glued back together.
Linda Cimardi: It must have been cutting, cutting and then gluing.
Jacques Cloarec: That’s it. And I made another strip that was this big and you could hear [coughs]. It was just for fun, but we managed to do some interesting things. In general, when it was done on Nagra, you only have to listen to the recordings, the ¾ are still of very, very good quality.
Linda Cimardi: So most of the operations, it was really manual, cut and paste for the beginning and end of the tracks, cut in this case in (0:50:14).
Jacques Cloarec: It depends, yes. In some cases, we did it. But in general, we tried to have the tracks in their entirety.
Linda Cimardi: But was it possible to carry out other operations against noise apart from cutting and gluing?
Jacques Cloarec: Back then, there were no filters.
Linda Cimardi: No filter and chronization of sound, lows, highs.
Jacques Cloarec: No, we weren’t equipped to do that kind of work. We’d have had to do it in real studios, and we didn’t have real studios. It was more like portable equipment. I had two Nagras to copy from one to the other, and all that.
Linda Cimardi: So, Beryl Righter, Philips, Emmy (0 :50 :04) weren’t doing anything except printing.
Jacques Cloarec : Maybe by making the discs, they had much better possibilities. They were used to it, since they were the ones producing the records, so it’s possible that they made equalizations and balances in the different instruments and all that. I don’t know about that.
Linda Cimardi: So, you said that in the 60s, as soon as Daniélou had the idea of reworking in Europe, (0:50:47) India either, he was interested in the European music and religious cultures around him. So his recordings in the 70s were also in the Mediterranean, in Corsica, Venice and Cyprus. But were you involved with Daniélou, or did you work on recordings with an assistant or another technician, without Alain Daniélou?
Jacques Cloarec: No. In general, we always did things together and I only did one mission because I knew this music very well because I had been very Celtic when I lived my youth in Brittany and I went to make recordings in Brittany alone. Because I knew the musicians, I had danced with them. I knew that very well. But that’s the only job I do on my own. Otherwise, no, I didn’t have the musicological background to be able to decide to… and go out on my own to make recordings. And there I was alone, I didn’t have an assistant when I went to Brittany.
Linda Cimardi: And were these recordings of Brittany linked, is there a disc with these recordings?
Jacques Cloarec : We didn’t make a record because I’m not sure why. Because I didn’t feel that… No, Daniélou felt that there wasn’t enough material to make a record that was up to the standard of what we had in our collections. So it stayed that way. And these recordings are in Barcelona, which is very interesting for musicologists.
Linda Cimardi: Just one final question. On the activities of the Fondation Alain Daniélou in Zagarolo, you are now the Honorary President. What are the activities and aims of this foundation, and what do you envisage for its future?
Jacques Cloarec: So, the foundation was founded in 1969 right away when Daniélou came into an inheritance from Burnier and he put some of the money he had received into making this foundation. It has changed name several times to become FIND (Fondation Inde-Europe de Nouveaux Dialogues). It’s about to change again, because we’re in the process of changing its name to Fondation Alain Daniélou. Next year, it will have changed its name again. And its statutes are the promotion and dissemination, the conservation of the work of Daniélou and Burnier, since he and Burnier were photographers, so there’s this enormous collection which is our treasure, by the way. These treasures here are all the photos he took of medieval Hindu temples. The Foundation now has a director of artistic dialogue, a brilliant Argentinian philosopher called Adrian Navigante, who is doing an enormous amount of work. And our orientation has just changed in the last 6 months or so, because we’ve decided to broaden our focus far beyond India and Europe, in the sense that we want to rediscover the wisdoms of the ancients, so we’re much more interested in pagan traditions. For Daniélou, it’s Shivaism and Dionysism, but we’re now also in contact with shamanism and voodoo in Africa and Brazil. So we have a much wider panel of countries to give our Foundation a function, and it’s doing very, very well. At the moment, we have three sites on the Internet, and we’re in the process of putting up lots of Daniélou’s archives. Two days ago, we had a videoconference to put on the site a number of Daniélou’s texts, meetings and principles. We have a transcultural dialogue, a newsletter that appears 4 times a year and is on the Internet. So, we’re in the process of taking a very decidedly ecosophical stance, i.e. the philosophical part of ecology, which is obviously very fashionable and even more so since the Covid affair, which shows how unreasonable man is and how much the wisdom of a population more respectful of the earth’s nature can help us regain a semblance of reason, because we have become the devourers of the earth in an extremely aggressive and extremely… So we’ve been focusing a lot more on this in recent months, and we’re looking forward to seminars and external collaborators who are great philosophers, people who are very interested in what we’re doing. Which is good support, because we can see that we’re in tune with the times.
Linda Cimardi: Very good. So that was the last question. I think I can stop now.