Georges Brassens, Music-Hall Antihero? When performance hides in the music of the songs
Fargeton, Pierre
Georges Brassens, Music-Hall Antihero? When performance hides in the music of the songs - 2025.
52
Alone on stage or with a double-bassist in the semi-darkness, frozen in front of the microphone, without a word or any greeting to the audience: the common image of Brassens portrays a figure not only at odds with the usual codes of music-hall, but also far removed from the elementary habits of the singing tour or song recital. How, then, can we explain Brassens’ success on the music-hall stage? The hypothesis is that the theatrical and spectacular dimension of Brassens’s songs has shifted inward in two ways: firstly, in the lyrics, where Brassens’s poetic world functions as its own little theater, whose codes no longer need to be externalized; and secondly, in the music, where each public appearance by Brassens is a performance in which the musician, far from replicating as closely as possible the records for which the audience has come to hear him, surprisingly re-enacts his own songs.
Georges Brassens, Music-Hall Antihero? When performance hides in the music of the songs - 2025.
52
Alone on stage or with a double-bassist in the semi-darkness, frozen in front of the microphone, without a word or any greeting to the audience: the common image of Brassens portrays a figure not only at odds with the usual codes of music-hall, but also far removed from the elementary habits of the singing tour or song recital. How, then, can we explain Brassens’ success on the music-hall stage? The hypothesis is that the theatrical and spectacular dimension of Brassens’s songs has shifted inward in two ways: firstly, in the lyrics, where Brassens’s poetic world functions as its own little theater, whose codes no longer need to be externalized; and secondly, in the music, where each public appearance by Brassens is a performance in which the musician, far from replicating as closely as possible the records for which the audience has come to hear him, surprisingly re-enacts his own songs.
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