Le patrimoine québécois : enjeux de préservation et de renouvellement

The NEM at the Université de Montréal: Training the Next Generation Through Practice

In residence at the Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Music, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne plays a central role in training the next generation of performers specializing in contemporary music. Its presence goes beyond a conventional institutional partnership: it creates a genuine professional training environment where students learn through direct contact with artists active on Canadian and international stages.

NEM musicians serve as mentors to members of the Université de Montréal’s Contemporary Music Ensemble. Through rehearsals, workshops, specialized coaching, and ambitious creative projects, they share the knowledge, working methods, and standards essential to the professional practice of contemporary music. This approach helps students develop advanced artistic skills while preparing them for the realities of professional life.

The project Quebec Heritage: Challenges of Preservation and Renewal offers a compelling example of this mission. Presented as part of a study day devoted to collective memory, cultural transmission, and the future of Quebec’s heritage, it brings together NEM musicians and students from the Université de Montréal’s Contemporary Music Ensemble for the premiere of Les mi-carêmes by composer Charles-Vincent Lemelin. Under the direction of Jean-Michaël Lavoie, this collaboration places emerging musicians at the heart of a major artistic project that brings together musical creation, living heritage, and interdisciplinary dialogue.

Through its university residency, the NEM helps train highly skilled artists while ensuring the transmission of the most innovative musical practices. This convergence of professional excellence, contemporary creation, and training for the next generation represents one of the NEM’s most distinctive contributions to Quebec’s cultural ecosystem.

The NEM is partnering with a study day dedicated to collective memory, Quebec culture, its transmission, and its future. Titled Le patrimoine québécois : enjeux de préservation et de renouvellement, this day will bring together specialists from the fields of Quebec traditional music, dance, and song around three panel discussions.

The discussions will be punctuated by practical activities allowing the public to get acquainted with called dance and take part in a traditional music session.

To close the day, the NEM will present the creation of Les Mi-carêmes by composer Charles-Vincent Lemelin. This work for jig and soloist orchestra is inspired by the Mid-Lent as immortalized in Pour la suite du monde to evoke a carnivalesque imagination where past and present merge, where the noble meets the popular, where La Bolduc encounters Stravinsky and where Bonhomme Carnaval dances in a rave.

On a choreography by multidisciplinary artist Delphine Véronneau, four jiggers will join the musicians of the NEM and the students of the University of Montreal's Contemporary Music Ensemble in a proposal situated at the border of concert and ballet. Les Mi-carêmes joyfully and affectionately questions the forms our collective memory can take and invites the public to reimagine its ways of thinking and making culture.

University of Montréal Contemporary Music Ensemble (UdeM)
Axelle Renaux, flute
Isabelle Cloutier, clarinet 1
Nicholas Kerr-Barr, clarinet 2
Sacha Lessard, horn
Honoka Kobayashi, piano
Em Gagnon, violin 2
Sidony Delaporte, cello

NEM Musicians List

Élise Poulin, oboe
Alexandra Eastley, bassoon
William Laurin, trumpet
Bruno-Laurence Joyal, trombone
David Therrien Brongo, percussion
Antoine Bareil, violin 1
François Vallières, viola
William Boivin, double bass