Research Projects
For more than twenty years, Yohan Giaume has explored the musical connections between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, with a particular focus on the Caribbean and New Orleans, combining historical research, fieldwork, and musical creation. His work brings research and composition into dialogue to investigate how musical traditions travel, meet, and transform.
His research grew out of a musician’s curiosity: to understand what lies beneath it by examining the historical, cultural, and social contexts of the music he performs, and by meeting the people who keep these traditions alive. From Cuba to Argentina, via Uruguay, Peru, Morocco, and New Orleans, his travels, artistic collaborations, and fieldwork have led him to study, among other subjects, Afro-Rioplatense legacies in the development of tango and the connections between Afro-Caribbean rhythms and the earliest jazz repertoires.
Giaume holds a master’s degree in music and musicology from the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), where his thesis examined the influence of a Caribbean rhythmic ostinato on New Orleans jazz. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the EHESS (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Paris.
Archives, encounters, and the study of musical traditions inform his compositions and productions, while writing, performing, and collaborating with other musicians allow him to test ideas through practice and raise new questions.
Whisper of a Shadow
His flagship project, Whisper of a Shadow, is conceived as a series of independent works connected by a common thread: revisiting the history of musical exchanges between Europe, Africa, and the Americas in order to imagine new forms of artistic creation and dialogue. Released in 2021, the first opus imagines a musical conversation across time with Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869), a traveling Louisiana-born composer whose work, shaped by multiple cultural influences, provides the project’s point of departure.
Through eleven original compositions and arrangements bringing together twenty-two musicians from New Orleans, France, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, Yohan Giaume creates a dialogue between European classical music and the genres, forms, and musical traditions of New Orleans. From opera arias to Afro-Creole melodies, from gospel to spoken-word poetry, alongside Caribbean rhythms and the traditions of jazz funerals, he explores the richness of this musical heritage while questioning the boundaries and hierarchies traditionally established between art music and popular music. By revisiting Gottschalk’s sources of inspiration, he also examines the historical connections between European, African, and Caribbean musical traditions that helped shape the music of New Orleans. The second opus, currently in development, explores the little-known connections between opera and the beginnings of jazz in New Orleans.
The French Opera House of New Orleans
His research has also led him to rediscover the history of the French Opera House in New Orleans, a major institution in the city’s cultural life during the nineteenth century, which no longer exists today. After several years of investigation and collection, and the study of thousands of archival documents, this work has resulted in a historical book (forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press), as well as a digital and acoustic reconstruction of the theater. Beyond the desire to bring forgotten heritage to light and revive it, this reconstruction provides an opportunity to explore the architecture, acoustics, and musical experience of the period, while opening up new avenues for research.
For Yohan Giaume, research and creation are part of the same movement: understanding how music travels, encounters other traditions, and transforms, while exploring new forms of artistic expression.