Who makes this website?
Florent Coubard
A violinist who is becoming less and less specialised (occasionally an
accordionist, naturalist, gardener, instrument maker, milkman, etc.)
I love human web content: listening to and reading your music, your writing and your craft projects. Écrivez-moi, please drop me a line or let me know your website, blog or Fediverse account to follow.
Work, leanings
I encourage the practice of popular music, for and by everyone, through the organisation of music sessions and the publication of freel/libre notebooks.
I appreciate the “beautiful melody” which you don’t need to be an expert to appreciate, and musical phrasing that is unpretentious and true to the music. Finally, I cherish those everyday musical moments that are opportunities for sharing, without star performers or competition.
Sessions:
Bœuf trad |
Hargla Folkband
Free/libre sheet music:
opentrad (ex-monviolon) |
bœuftrad
Music studies
After studying the violin at the Le Mans Conservatoire (France) and then gaining experience playing in jam sessions and at balls I, like you, intend never to stop learning, brainstorming and sharing knowledge.
On stage
I have played at many balls and concerts since 1997, particularly with the following bands:
VAG (bal folk), Demi-sel (Bretagne, Centre-France), Catfish Fever (bluegrass), La Rochonnière (Bretagne).
Employment
Instrument lessons: teaching violin, mandolin and diatonic accordion were my main activity from 2003 to 2023.
Whilst studying biology, I used to go on tours (“international” ones, as musicians like to say when they cross a border – a dreadful carbon footprint) with my band VAG and I also gave a few violin lessons. One day, Éric Thézé said to me, “Would you like to come and teach at our music school? Our violin teacher had a piano fall on her foot and can’t start the new term.” There was a 12-hour slot on Wednesdays. I gave up biology.
Generally speaking, you need to work at several music schools to earn a living, and the car clocked up the miles. So it costs money, it fuels capitalism and it’s stressful.
To minimise my contribution to the success of the oil companies, I one day decided that I would only use my bike to get to my teaching jobs. Nantes, on the Atlantic coast of France… I went to the agricultural supplies shop and bought a raincoat a pair of rubber boots. From then on, I used to meet Cyril on my road, as a colleague: he was cycling along to teach guitar. You can see what a great atmosphere there was at work!
Academic research
From 2010 to 2019, through a series of circumstances, I found myself working as a research associate on the project led by Françoise Rubellin about the Théâtres de la Foire and the Comédie-Italienne in the 18th century. If someone had told me as a child that one day my job would be to spend hours reading musical notation…
Lilypond made it possible to quickly enter melodies into simple text files. All that remained was to write a few small scripts to extract useful information from them automatically. I thus accidentally developed the musical section of the theaville database, which was designed to link all these melodies to the corpus of opera parodies collected and edited by the research team. It was an interesting and inspiring project.
How to support me
I haven’t received a salary since 2023; I look after my little family, my handcrafted flutes and this website.
I don’t need much, but donations – however small – are very welcome, via Liberapay or other platforms.
What’s more about job, I have a few projects in the pipeline: selling flutes and whistles (as a limited liability company, as there aren’t many options for business structures in Estonia – so it doesn’t bring in any personal money at the moment, but I’m hopeful I might be able to earn a salary from it one day) and libre music publishing.
You can help me by sharing and spreading the word about my work!