Perrine Bourel

Perrine Bourel lives in the Hautes-Alpes, she is a violinist. For twenty years she has forged her skills by meeting musicians who touch her (in France with Michel Favre and in Ireland with Ronan Galvin and Mick Brown…). Today she is the ambassador of an almost forgotten violin music of the Southern Alps and Dauphiné. Far from the academicism of fiddle playing, her research questions the intersections of traditional and experimental contemporary music. Collaborating with artists from diverse backgrounds reveals facets that broaden her playing, her practice and her conceptions. Encounters with specific sites, with landscapes, become her research objectives and are directed towards sound experimentation, where the violin is a medium of exploration that goes beyond the field of music. In solo and in various groups of the collective La Nòvia, she plays repertoires of traditional music from the Southern Alps – Dauphiné, the Massif Central, pieces by contemporary composers (Terry Riley, Guilhem Lacroux, Yann Gourdon…) and solo compositions.

Her work has been heard at the LU (Nantes), at the Pompidou Center in Paris, at the Consortium (Dijon), at the Penn-ar-Jazz (Brest), at the Chaillol Festival (05), at the Météo (Mulhouse), at the Instants Chavirés in Montreuil, at the Densités Festival (55,)…

The Artist’s Word

I started to sing while walking in the hills, fields and woods surrounding my house. During these wanderings I learned the songs of Marie-Jeanne Beysseyrot (1908-2005) and Louise Reichert (1896-1985), two women from Cantal. I use my violin and my 5-string banjo to accompany these songs and to play the traditional and experimental music that thrills me.

Perrine Bourel