When, in October 1981, Maurice Fleuret became Director of Music and Dance at Jack Lang's request, he applies his reflections to the musical practice and its evolution: "the music everywhere and the concert nowhere". When he discovered, in a 1982 study on the cultural habits of the French, that five million people, one child out of two, played a musical instrument, he began to dream of a way to bring people out on the streets.
And thus, in a few weeks' time, the Fête de la Musique was launched on June 21 1982, the day of summer solstice, a pagan night which recalls the ancient tradition of Saint John's feasts.
Given the immediate success of this popular and largely spontaneous event, this gathering of professionals and amateurs musicians, with its new focus on all kinds of music, was the incarnation of a policy striving to give an equal place to amateur musicians, to rock, jazz, singing and traditional music, all of which were given a chance to be heard alongside so-called "serious" music.
The free concerts, the SACEM's support, the media's help, support from territorial municipalities, and participation of an ever increasing share of the population...made it one of the major French cultural events, in only a few years.
It began to be "exported" in 1985 (the European Year of Music). In fifteen years, the Fête de la Musique would be taken up in over one hundred countries throughout the five continents.
Though the European dimension remains the most visible one, now that Berlin, Budapest, Barcelona, Istanbul, Liverpool, Luxemburg, Rome, Naples, Prague and the French Community of Belgium, Santa Maria da Feira have signed the "Charter of the partners of the European Festival of Music", the Fête has also taken root in San Francisco, in New York this year, in Manila, and has practically become the national feast in many African countries, not to mention Brazil and Colombia.
