Vincent Epplay

This release (Book + 7") by Vincent Epplay  is a free interpretation of audio and visual archives drawn from sound experiments conducted during music workshops in Freinet schools in the 1960s and 1970s. It serves as a way of reviving these diverse practices, allowing us to revisit the original educational experiments carried out over the course of a decade in various Freinet classrooms. Beyond simply unearthing these hidden treasures, the aim here is to capture a pioneering spirit in which wild improvisations, free singing, primitive manipulations of the magnetic tape, or poetry and the experience of sound, are invented on the spot in the spirit of a “natural method” and experimental trial and error in the service of the child’s development.

Echoing these musical experiments, this publication is illustrated by a series of photos and drawings drawn from the numerous CEL publications, accompanied by a selection of texts excerpted from the quarterly journal “Les Pionniers,” printed at the Freinet School in Vence between 1970 and 1975. Printed school journals have always been a preferred medium for Freinet’s teaching. These sound archives, drawings, and free-form texts constitute a unique record that bears witness to the creative richness of this modern teaching method and the techniques invented by Célestin Freinet in his time.