Q: So here's where you compose your songs, on a dead end street... How can a music, created in this solitude, in a world folded in on itself, end up in Hong Kong, have interest for a person at the other end of the planet? How does your music travel?

René Dupéré: Here we are touching on something that I’ve never managed to understand, something that is very mysterious for me. Where does music come from? I remember reading the correspondences between Mozart and his father. In one of his letters, Mozart writes to his father that he is depressed, that he’s not writing anything interesting; he wonders how he’s going to get out of it. Well! It’s exactly in this period that Mozart composed his concerto for clarinet, one of his most beautiful orchestral works! If Mozart himself had such little critical sense regarding the music he was in the middle of composing, how can I possibly understand the phenomenon?

I don’t know where music comes from. I’ve always had it in me. But I know one important thing. I must be available, available to everything. I never censor myself. When I work, I let whatever comes come out. It’s only later that I evaluate if a creation is of interest or not. But before editing, I always let what has to be born be born. Time allows me to filter my creations.

Where does music come from? I have no idea. Not being a mystic, I can’t speak of channeling. I find that the idea of a transmitter, a conduit through which others express themselves could be interesting, but I like my music to belong to me. That theory takes away my value as a creator, and my own conceit rebels somewhat against this type of explanation...

Q: There is a style of music that has to do with a locale, one which develops a sort of identity search. Your music doesn’t identify itself especially with any specific locale but aims to be planetary, joining people of diverse cultures. What is the “antenna” that allows you to compose such music?

René Dupéré: Even if I don’t know where music comes from, I know nonetheless why it arrives in this way. You mentioned locale. I don’t believe in locale; I believe in roots. There's a fundamental difference there. I say that I’m not a québécois musician, but rather a Québécois who is a musician. By no means do I want to distance myself from the people who call themselves québécois musicians, but rather to express my specificity. I am québécois; my roots are here, in Québec, I live here. And I’m interested in the rest of the world. My music is what it is because of my curiosity, because of my culture, because of my availability to music. I was always available to music, to any kind of music.

I first had a culture of classical music, thanks to my father who was a singer and made me listen to opera. Moreover, since my childhood, I was fascinated by other cultures. We were quite poor, we had very little money, but each month we received a National Geographic. It always astonished me! We also had an encyclopedia titled Countries and Nations, which contained photographs of almost all the countries of the world.... which excited my curiosity. From a very young age, I was fascinated by other countries. In fact, I’ve traveled very little, except in the last ten years, but I’ve always been in contact with people who came from elsewhere...

I’ve also had the luck to participate in events like the Francofête, in 1975 in Quebec, an absolutely magical event, putting many African groups on the stage, who used almost exclusively percussion instruments. For me who had a classical education, essentially, percussion hardly existed. It was the last instrument to arrive in the orchestra, after the strings and woods, which illustrates the highly spiritual aspect of the classical, which has neglected the primitive aspect of music a bit. What I’m saying here may be sacrilegious to classical musicians, but I think that classical music has ignored a large part of the human spirit, which rests in the very primitive roots that are expressed in percussion.

I was always deeply curious; I needed to know, as much in music as in literature and other domains. Without necessarily doing a thing, I need to know how it functions. Thus, I’m familiar with cars, but I’m incapable of repairing them. I’m thirsty for knowledge. I was always like that.

Q: At this time, you have established some distance from Cirque du Soleil. Can one say that today you are free from constraints, liberated to produced a freer music?

René Dupéré: No. I never felt, during my years with Cirque du Soleil, any type of constraint. People identified my music with Cirque du Soleil, but I don’t compose “Cirque du Soleil music,” I compose “René Dupéré music.” This identification of my music with Cirque du Soleil has sometimes created problems. Some people who want to work with me say, “We’d like your music, but we don’t want it to sound like Cirque du Soleil...” All right, what do you want it to sound like? It doesn’t matter? Well, you should find someone else!

I compose “René Dupéré music.” It’s obvious, for example, that the music that I create now for a television series won’t sound like that composed for Cirque du Soleil; the orchestration is very different, etc. But all the same, it will have my signature. There is, in the music of Cirque du Soleil, the signature of René Dupéré, which is to say interesting melodies, a sort of mix of cultures (which is for me very different from a melting pot)... Those elements are present in my music, whether I’m composing for the Cirque or for something else.

It’s as if they had said to Ennio Morricone, when they asked him to do the music for the film The Mission, “We don’t want it to sound like Once Upon a Time in the West.” No, it doesn’t sound like that at all! But when you listen to five seconds of Morricone’s music, you recognize its composer immediately. That’s what I call a signature. And I know that my music has a signature.

Q: In other words, whether it’s for a music like Alegría, linked to a circus show, or for Voyage, there's the same basic inspiration.

René Dupéré: For me, yes. Completely. I think there are as many differences between Saltimbanco and Alegría as between Alegría and Voyage, or between Voyage and the music composed for the television series, L’ombre de l’épervier. But it seems people recognize my type of music. One of its characteristics is that it isn’t meant to be modern. “Fashionable” music doesn’t interest me at all. My aim is not to compose music that one will hear for one or two months on the radio. Many do that job much better than me. The songs that I am doing currently with Élise [Velle] are meant to be timeless. Not “eternal,” but they could also easily have been composed in 1955 or in ten years. I want to compose a music that is not identified with this time. When someone asks me what my musical influences are, I always reply: “Brahms and Pink Floyd.” I think I’m a 19th-century romantic who expresses himself with the means of the 20th century, synthesizers, among others. My music reflects this mix. It carries also a certain lyricism, very important for me, which is one of its fundamental characteristics.