For lovers of Early Music, the medieval French town of Ambronay has long been a site of pilgrimage, renowned for the Ambronay Festival held in its historic Benedictine abbey. Attracting leading musicians and ensembles from Europe and beyond, the festival has been running every October since 1980. Throughout that time, Ambronay has sought to support musicians at the beginnings of their careers – but in recent decades this contribution has grown significantly.
Ambronay’s Centre Culturel de Rencontre (CCR) coordinates a range of year-round support for Early Music performers. One of its ongoing projects is Sustainable EEEMERGING, a European-wide residency and training programme for Early Music ensembles at the start of their careers.
“Ambronay first started to work with young talent in 1992–93 with the European Baroque Academy,” explains Isabelle Battioni, Director of CCR Ambronay. “Back then, the Academy mounted a full-scale opera production – at the time, there weren’t big Early Music ensembles for young musicians. One barely had Early Music at music conservatories or music high schools, and one didn’t have much space to practice together in large ensembles, so that was what the community needed.”
Since then, though, the programme has evolved. “We began to work with young ensembles because that’s where we felt the need was strongest – to help young ensembles kickstart their careers. We had lots of people starting ensembles after they met at the Academy, and they would ask us to help launch these groups. We set up a residency programme specialising in providing help to young ensembles. Over the years we have identified very good talent, such as Leonardo García-Alarcón and La Cappella Mediterranea.”
As the Academy had always been Europe-wide, with young ensembles generally based in Europe (even if their individual members came from outside Europe), CCR decided to expand the programme into a larger European cooperation project jointly with partner organisations, obtaining funding from the European Union through the Creative Europe programme. Thus the EEEMERGING project (2014–18) was established, succeeded by the EEEMERGING+ project (2019–23), which can be read about here (EEE stands for Emerging European Ensembles).
“The most important feature of the EEEMERGING project was our finding ways to cooperate with other partners, which included festivals, concert venues, and conservatories – some of whom are still with us,” Battioni says.
“The ensembles on the scheme are offered residencies and training with partner institutions: it’s a different type of way of working together compared to what we had before, because the Early Music scene can be very different from one country to another, even within Europe. The first EEEMERGING project was very fruitful, and we still maintain connections with the ensembles that were supported during the project, such as the Sollazzo Ensemble who have gone on to have a successful career.”
However, there were issues with the initial phase of the project. EEEMERGING had a pyramidical structure, eliminating groups over the course of the programme, rather like a competition – what young ensembles and partner institutions really wanted was for there to be a place for everyone. In the second phase of the project, EEEMERGING+ (2019–23), the modified programme aimed to build more of a sense of community and cooperation amongst participating groups – which turned out to be extremely beneficial during the Coronavirus pandemic.
“EEEMERGING+ started in 2019, so we had basically a year and a bit of normality,” Battioni says. “When Covid came, it was a matter of reinventing ourselves. Somehow we managed to keep all the partners on board, and managed to keep an eye on almost all the ensembles, hosting online learning sessions and creating alternative ways of holding residencies, as the ensembles couldn’t travel to many of the partner organisations. Fortunately, Ambronay Festival could be held even in the autumn of 2020, albeit in reduced form, so we were able to invite the ensembles here for weekends during the festival.”
Now, building on the achievements of the previous two phases, the Sustainable EEEMERGING project (2024–27) is underway. The scheme will help 20 ensembles over four years, with each ensemble receiving three residencies (six days each) at the partner sites to pursue research and creation, and to receive specific training and tutoring on practical issues by the host team, with all expenses covered. The first 10 groups (2024–25) include Spanish Early Music ensemble Anacronía, The Banshies, and Coloquio 6, the multinational period wind ensemble. Currently the call is out for the next 10 groups (2026–27). The application deadline is midnight on 2nd March 2025, and auditions will be held in Cologne in June.
Why did the programme decide to focus on sustainability this time around, and what are their goals in concrete terms? “At the end of EEEMERGING+,” Battioni says, “we conducted a survey and asked ensembles, venues and festivals what they felt was needed for the future. The responses we got repeatedly emphasised a need for sustainability – both relating to the green agenda in general, but also professional sustainability, and what this means to musicians and venues.
“This was the dual path we chose: on the one hand, to work with young ensembles building the professional bridge between the end of their studies and their beginning careers – and on the other to examine how to obtain longer term sustainability. It’s not only about decarbonisation, but sustainability considered more generally, for both musical life and the planet itself.”
The programme is distinctive in that it’s not only participating ensembles that will tackle the sustainability issue, but also the project’s partners, which include organisations such as the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra, Athens Conservatory, and Concentus Moraviae Festival.
“Of the 13 main partners of our programme, we have 11 coming from the music field, and two coming from the environmental and sustainability world – The Green Room and Pro Progressione. Of these, one will give training to the ensembles, and the other will help the music partners see where we stand regarding sustainability and provide a sort of roadmap for each of us on what we can change.”
One of the primary agendas of S-EEE is to consider the social conditions, health conditions and mental health conditions of the musicians – in other words, their overall wellbeing. “The life of musicians is not always easy. You are away a lot of the time and there are all kinds of invisible things that you are meant to stay on top of, especially as small ensembles, such as communication, publicity, scheduling, taxes and budgets – going far beyond what musicians are taught,” Battioni says.
“As a musician, you could spend 15 or 20 years training to perform, only for a professional career to be unsustainable because you can’t do a budget. Or if you can’t do it yourself, you have to bring in someone who can – we try to talk about things like that, how to think strategically, how to get rooted somewhere, in a country or region, with a local authority, with a theatre, venue, or festival. These are considerations for the venues and festivals too.”
And while obtaining professional sustainability is hard, so too are issues relating to environmental sustainability – which is not just about mobility, Battioni insists. She wants to enable a discussion about how young ensembles see the green agenda on environmental issues, and how the venues and festivals are seeing it, and see how they differ, so that together organisations can tackle these complex issues concretely, in their day to day activities. “What matters is to have a concrete transformation, not just intentions,” she emphasises.
Furthermore, there is the question of diversity: the diversity of programmes, diversity on stage, and diversity of backgrounds among music professionals. While these longstanding structural problems in classical music can sometimes be thorny, Battioni speculates that diversity in concert programmes is in many ways the easiest issue to tackle. Based on her experience, she has found that it doesn’t matter for the audience whether music is composed by men or women – it’s quality that matters.
Early Music groups that have emerged from the successive EEEMERGING programmes include the Sollazzo Ensemble, PRISMA, and the Consone Quartet, and groups such as the vocal ensemble Cantoría have since become associated ensembles of CCR. Such groups have grown to be part of a community at Ambronay, through performing in the festival or via recording projects with the Ambronay Éditions label (alumni Cohaere Ensemble from Poland will bring out a CD soon). The 2023 festival celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Academy by bringing together former participants and directors, including Patricia Petibon, Ophélie Gaillard, Vincent Dumestre, Leonardo García-Alarcón, and William Christie, and EEEMERGING ensembles.
Somehow it seems fitting that young musicians reinterpreting music of ancient times are tackling the sustainability of their profession in the future. If you are in Europe, look out for appearances of the budding S-EEE ensembles in Ambronay and beyond. And as we listen, we should consider how our own actions can make music more sustainable, in every sense.
Applications for Sustainable EEEMERGING are open until 2nd March 2025.
Sustainable EEEMERGING is supported by the European Union.
This article was sponsored by Centre culturel de rencontre d’Ambronay.
