Marcel Pérès and Ensemble Organum: restoring the voice of the Middle Ages (1/2)

For more than forty years, Marcel Pérès has occupied a singular place in the world of early music. He founded the ensemble Organum in 1982, as well as CIRMA (Centre Itinérant de Recherche sur les Musiques Anciennes), which has been based since 2001 at the former abbey of Moissac in southwestern France. A researcher, teacher, and tireless explorer of Mediterranean vocal traditions, he has profoundly reshaped perceptions of medieval chant and early sacred repertoires. Where others have sought to reconstruct works from manuscripts, he has attempted to recover the gestures, timbres, and practices that once brought them to life. From the churches of Corsica to the monasteries of the East, his investigations have opened new perspectives on the origins of European music. Admired as much for his boldness as for his intellectual rigour, Marcel Pérès remains today one of the most distinctive and influential figures of the early music movement. He spoke at length with Total Baroque Magazine.

You were born in Oran to a family of Spanish origin and grew up in Nice. How did this dual identity awaken in you a sensitivity to the interplay between cultures, the multiplicity of memories, and the politics that sometimes tear our worlds apart?

Marcel Pérès: Indeed, I was born in Algeria and I bear a Spanish surname. My father came from southern Spain, near Alicante. But on my mother’s side, I also have Czech, Austrian, and Alsatian ancestors. I must say that from the outset, I have considered myself a migrant. Because, in fact, after the massacres of Oran in July 1961, arriving in France—for us French people from North Africa—it felt somewhat like a foreign country. I had to learn to discover this country, its codes of communication, its way of life. Very early on, I also discovered the Anglican world. At the age of fourteen, I entered the Anglican church in Nice as an organist. That led me to England, to the Royal School of Church Music, where I remained for four years. At the time, that world was practically unknown to the French, especially then. There, I learned an enormous amount. Then, from England, I went to study in Canada, where I stayed for three years. I returned to France to complete my military service, but I managed to obtain an exemption. Imagine: I spent a year on a historic organ—the very instrument on which Michel Chapuis (1930–2017) had learned to play, in Dole. It was at that moment that I began asking myself: how did organs arrive in churches? When and how? This research consumed me. It led me to the Middle Ages through the organ treatises of that period.

With a friend, Michel Cabourdin, an organ builder who had restored the organ of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, we worked on these questions. Learning about the end of the 10th century forced me to ask what one could play on these organs, because there is no organ repertoire before the end of the 15th century. This led me to take an interest in codices, and I realized that entire continents of music remained unexplored. In 1982, I discovered their sounds. I decided to explore these unknown lands and bring this music back to life. Basically, things moved along pretty quickly: I met my producers and friends, Eva and Bernard Coutaz, the founders of Harmonia Mundi, and that allowed us to launch a record-release program—about thirty albums, at a rate of two to three per year. Thanks to this, we introduced the public to repertoires and artists who were unknown at the time, such as immigrant musicians. And through this recording strategy, we succeeded in shaping a collective imagination.

The Teaching of Bernard Lagacé

You studied with Bernard Lagacé, who was an important organist in the rediscovery of early music and who passed away in February 2025. Could you tell us about him?

M. P.: In fact, I discovered him in England, at the Royal School of Church Music. I had met a Canadian student, Christopher Jackson (who died in 2015), who co-founded the Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal. This was in the early 1970s. When I heard him play the organ, I was astonished: I had never seen or heard anyone play in that way. There was a suppleness in the fingering, the phrasing, a way of breathing that fascinated me. I came from Nice, where I had studied with René Saorgin and Pierre Cochereau—it was an entirely different school. I was eighteen or nineteen years old. I asked him what I should do, and he said, “Go study in Montreal.” So I went to Montreal on a three-month tourist visa. I stayed for three years, undocumented and without papers.

Bernard Lagacé himself had studied with André Marchal, organist of Saint-Eustache in Paris, and later in Germany with Helmut Walcha. Above all, he belonged to the first generation to play the harpsichord and clavichord. That changed many things. And he also possessed a personal intuition, a kind of genius: he understood the importance of the wrist in articulation. The movement of the wrist became the equivalent of a bow stroke for string instruments. This was the foundation of his teaching. In addition, he had Germanic organs built by Rudolf von Beckerath, the great German organ builder. It was in Montreal that I discovered these instruments, as well as authentic Greek cuisine in the small restaurants around the university. After a year, Bernard took me on as his assistant at his church because he found Sunday services tedious. It suited me perfectly: I played around ten services each weekend, and by Sunday evening I knew the sermon by heart—which also provided me with a modest theological education. With him, I revisited Bach. Then I began moving backward in time. Once you reach the barrier of the 16th century, there is very little left. Scores exist, but at that time there were no teachers to show you how to perform them. The people playing this music bored me; playing neatly in time is not enough. I understood that I had to go further, that I would have no master. The only choice left was to become a master myself!

Islam, the Qur’an, and the Three Pillars of Youth

How did you come to discover the Muslim religion?

M. P.: I attended school in Algeria with young Muslims. Later, I frequently returned to Oran to visit my grandmother, at least once a year. Between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, I began asking questions in order to understand this religion. I had many Muslim acquaintances and friends. Quite simply, I began studying the Qur’an. In fact, I simultaneously studied the Qur’an, the Book of the Dead of ancient Egypt, and Johann Sebastian Bach. Around the age of eighteen to twenty, these became the three pillars upon which I built my consciousness as a young adult. I even composed several works around these themes. In this way, I paid tribute to the Egyptian origins of the organ, because few people know that the organ was invented in 250 BC in Alexandria, Egypt. I connected this concrete origin to the post-serial musical language of the 1970s. I was twenty or twenty-one years old. I recorded it thirty-three years later and released it. There you have it.

With Islam, this work took shape in the form of an album recorded in 2019, twenty years after a project I led for the Year of Morocco in 1999. I had organized a project in which Moroccan Sufi singers performed 15th-century Arabic songs. We carried out extensive work on the musical similarities between Arabic sama and Latin chant from the same period, as well as on Sufi poetry and Latin texts. We had to wait twenty years to record the album. I work over the long term. This album is a kind of all-encompassing utopia, a touchstone to show that beyond dogmas and geopolitical conflicts, there are human beings striving to achieve their greatest and noblest potential. Instead of building missiles and anti-missile systems, we could really focus on developing these things—and everyone would be better off for it!

Sénanque Abbey: A Unique Cultural Laboratory

You founded the ensemble Organum in 1982 at Sénanque Abbey, a magical place with lavender fields stretching as far as the eye can see. Could you tell us about this place, its beauty, and the cultural activities that took place there?

M. P.: In 1968, only three or four elderly Cistercian monks remained at Sénanque. The abbey depended on Lérins Abbey. The original plan was to close the abbey and relocate the old monks. But in July 1968, Pierre Berliet—the CEO of Berliet trucks—was driving south with his son. There were traffic jams on the motorway. He took the first exit at random, got lost, and arrived at Sénanque, with which he immediately fell in love. Pierre Berliet was looking for a place to present an exhibition about the work he had carried out in the Sahara with his trucks, demonstrating that they could cross the desert in extreme heat. A great humanist and deeply Catholic man, he brought geologists and ethnologists with him. They carried out extraordinary work on Tuareg poetry, geology, and much more. But the Algerian War had intervened, and in France nobody wanted his exhibition. He thought to himself: “This abbey is falling into ruin; something needs to be done.” He took all the necessary steps with the historic preservation authorities and other officials, and began restoration work in January 1969. In six months, he brought in 200 workers, and they completely restored the place. He founded an association and purchased the entire valley and the surrounding mountains to preserve the site. Cultural activities began in July 1969. I believe this is a unique case.

He hired Emmanuel Muheim, a Savoyard who was both an arboriculturist and a poet, as director! Not the usual profile for the head of a cultural centre. Berliet’s only instruction was: “Every person who comes to Sénanque must leave transformed.” Emmanuel Muheim knew people: the medieval historian Georges Duby, the writer François Cheng, the philosopher Henri Maldiney. He gave them complete freedom, and Sénanque became a laboratory of ideas. Georges Duby held several sessions there each year. François Cheng spoke about Chinese art, painting, and philosophy. Henri Maldiney, who did extensive work on the perception of self and others, organized a symposium there on the ambiguity of reality, highlighted by Organum’s first concert—featuring a program of 12th-century music. Other musicians came as well, including William Christie. It was there that the very first early music workshops in France took place. The first concerts of what would later be called “world music” were held there. It quickly became a completely extraordinary laboratory. When one compares the budgets with which we operated to those of today’s cultural centres, they were ridiculously small.

In 1988, the monks returned. They were no longer Cistercians, but the Brothers of Saint John, a new order that lacked any real intellectual depth. They felt the Church was too triumphalist, and they took a very dim view of what had been done before: the encounters between Buddhists, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and all that non-Christian literature. They threw it all away. Then they left. Today, the Cistercians are back once again. They maintain a spiritual life despite the enormous influx of visitors. Yet they still have a very negative perception of the Berliet era. A book ought to be written about Sénanque during those years, because very few people truly know what happened there…

Royaumont: Splendour and Conflicts

Organum then spent about twenty years at the Royaumont Foundation before settling in Moissac in 2001.

M. P.: I first arrived at Royaumont in 1981 as a trainee with René Clemencic (1928–2022). It was there that I met the French countertenor Gérard Lesne and Dominique Vellard, director of the Ensemble Gilles Binchois since 1979. We were all very young at the time. When I created Organum, Francis Maréchal—who was not yet general director but was responsible for musical activities—immediately associated us with his project. In 1984, we created an association for the development of research into medieval music, headquartered at Royaumont.

Constellation: John Eliot Gardiner’s Second Act

This association became a department of the foundation, the CERIMM—European Centre for Research on the Interpretation of Medieval Music (CERIMM). It functioned very well until 1999. Then conflicts emerged, notably concerning the Cavaillé-Coll organ in the monks’ refectory. The president wanted to get rid of it. I was the only one defending the instrument. I managed to save it, but it created a tense atmosphere. With the Year of Morocco, I had begun serious work on the historiography of non-European music and on museography—I had brought ancient instruments from Moroccan public collections and had them restored; all of that work ended up in the trash. I had also begun an editorial project on the aesthetics of liturgies in European cathedrals. With my departure, the whole thing fell apart. We were on the verge of getting the government to officially approve a budget for medieval music… And then everything fell apart right in the middle of it all. I realized that the system put in place during the Lang and Mitterrand years—which had fostered cultural growth—wasn’t going to last. Everything was becoming too expensive, too bureaucratic. It’s not normal for an organization’s artistic activities to account for only 18% of its overall budget. I believe that intellectuals and artists must remain at the centre of the system and not become administratively managed musicians.