Maurice Fleuret

Maurice Fleuret (22 June 1932 – 22 March 1990) was a French composer, music journalist, radio producer, arts administrator, and festival organizer.

Born in La Talaudière in the département of Loire, Maurice Fleuret received his secondary education at the École normale d'instituteurs in Montbrison. In 1952 he moved to Paris and began studying music in the classes of Norbert Dufourcq, Olivier Messiaen, and Roland-Manuel at the Paris Conservatoire, graduating in 1956 (Lonchampt 1990).

In 1955 he became a lecturer of the Jeunesses musicales de France, a position he held until 1965. From 1974 he became artistic adviser to this same organization (Anon. 2001). In the meantime, he had undertaken other activities as well. In 1958 he edited the review Musique de tous les temps, from 1960 to 1964 he was director of the music division of the Centre National de Diffusion Culturelle, and in 1962 he began a career as a music critic, first for the France observateur and then from 1964 for its successor, the Nouvel observateur. In 1962 he also became a radio producer, first at ORTF and then at Radio France, where he had a regular weekly programme titled Evénements-musique (Anon. 2001; Lonchampt 1990).

Obsessed by the desire "to understand contemporary music", he began his collaboration at the Nouvel Observateur by stating at the outset that he would not report "concerts where the three B's—Brahms, Bach, and Beethoven—are heard all night long" (Daniel 2004, 34). He wanted to "create a new musical criticism, a chronicle of introduction to contemporary music, and not one of reporting" that would "put everybody off" (Daniel 2003, 430).

But even if his articles had "as high a profile abroad as in France" (Lonchampt 1990), he could not just criticize the ideas of others without trying to form his own. In 1967, he decided to abandon his lecturing to devote himself to entering into music in new environments. From 1967 to 1974, he organized the Journées de Musique Contemporaine de Paris (Days of Contemporary Music Paris), where he brought together some twenty thousand people in cycles devoted to composers such as Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, or Pierre Henry.

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