Out of Breath

Dan Albertson

[October 2024.]

[“Some kinds of baseness” are meant to be punished. To you, 楊必儒, with gratitude.]

At the risk of giving more exposure to a charlatan whose every move seems calculated to increase his presence in a niche unable to give him and his ego an ample enough platform, the idiocy involved must not be left unchecked. That it brings him more attention is only a necessary side effect, for every act of transparency casts a shadow.

The individual is Raphaël Cendo, who at his next birthday will be 50 and is therefore plenty old enough to know better. As most of the world is neither Francophile nor Francophone, and as Cendo has never quite broken out of the middle ranks even in France, his antics are likely to have gone unnoticed. Let this little missive therefore act as a corrective.

In an August edition of Libération, ostensibly a plug for his album REC.Foundation Vol.1, an unthinking journalist hailed Cendo in terms best left to previous centuries of messiahs and saviors. He wrote of Cendo reconciling stories and reinventing rules (yawn, and yes, let us not forget that he is among the most distinctive voices of his generation too, right?), of him standing up to a theoretical paradigm inherited from structuralism (woe to all those poor composers aching under the yoke of academic fashions or socialist realism, yearning to write whatever they wish), of paying a price for being “the first composer from the establishment” to be vocal in his criticism of the very system that he helped to prop up (keep dreaming: Cendo is far from the first and far from the last), and most comically, of being a feminist (some of the Voix Nouvelles ladies may well disagree), a supporter of “LGBTQI struggles” (no one in these movements needs, or asked for, such faux advocacy), and of “reintroducing the body politic into bourgeois concert halls” (what exactly is his political ideology, anyway, and what is its relevance to the indistinct, mediocre music that he composes?).

Cendo claims that as he now grows vegetables in Burgundy (at least he will not starve, but what a fake-bohemian gesture) and meets people (not himself, surely) who have difficult lives (yes, they are there and they always have been, which Cendo would know if he had lived outside the state-funded bubble all his life – or opened a sociology book), he is convinced that contemporary music is dead (maybe it is, maybe it is not, a discussion can be had, but Cendo’s music was incontestably dead on arrival).

A full rebuttal of these nonsensical claims would take pages. France has long had, and continues to have, a huge number of composers who get very little if any attention at all from the public and public institutions alike, far from the constant stream of resources that Cendo has availed himself of (and never complained about being a beneficiary of, until the funds were supposedly denied him. Is such funding a birthright now?). No one sees them kvetching, and no one would care if they did (sigh). The talented get on with life, the rest complain. Those who have received plenty of largesse from the état can spare a second to think of the countless others who never or seldom have, the works gathering dust in shelves and on writing tables, the ideas not set down for the realization of the futility in doing so, the young or old neglected composer who would leap at one of the countless opportunities that Cendo has accumulated along the way. Growing a ZZ Top beard and pretending to rail against the system that has fattened one to excess is not a protest, it is a lazy act of cowardice that addresses none of the core issues and instead focuses attention on Cendo, which was surely the goal all along.

Moreover, and more pertinently, latching himself onto whatever the campaign-du-jour is – and Cendo made sure to toss in references to several of them, reeling his sister into his schemes as well – underlines that his is an imagination bereft of original thought, a pandering to the hive that befits him, a thoroughly heterosexual man in a heterosexual and heteronormative world that has empowered people like him to take full advantage of ingrained systems of influence.

The nature and embodiment of talent are, of course, subjective matters in any aspect of life and especially so in artistic pursuits. Chacun à son goût, for sure. The fact that the present writer finds Cendo a paltry poetaster in a generation that has such variety to offer (contrary to the sameness that he feigns exists) is not the point. Readers and listeners can decide for themselves. Nor is it a problem for someone “from the establishment” to question itself, its priorities, its biases, its failures. A system without an outsized dose of skepticism and self-evaluation is equally of no benefit to the creative mind. There is indeed plenty of sclerosis in French music, no disagreement there.

No, what galls is the obvious (and enabled) posturing, the desperate attempt to pretend to bring down, or to want to bring down, a system without which whining also-rans like Cendo would have ended up in the almshouse (or vegetable patch) 25 years ago. One could almost defend Cendo, a long-time privileged darling of the state, were he to take up the cause of the unperformed, the nigh forgotten, but he does not. He has no idea of what being a good, kind, nurturing, supportive, at times critical colleague means. He knows only Team Cendo. Now that he is on his own, reinventing his image for the post-composer life, any success or failure is entirely on his own shoulders, a challenge for a soul of such coddled pusillanimity. Looking forward to the rock record, Raphaël.