Music against chaos

For a Poetic Engineering of Connection

By Jorge Chaminé, founding president of CEM

A vibration that still holds!

On June 21, cities open up, walls come down, voices rise. Sounds burst from street corners, as if, for one evening, the world could still vibrate in unison.

And what if, from the very beginning, this uproar of instruments and festive bodies wasn’t just some summer folklore — but a political response to the organized noise that surrounds us?
In my view, that was the intent of Maurice Fleuret, the inventor of the Fête de la Musique in 1981.

A dissonant era, expertly orchestrated

We live in an age of strategic fragmentation. The noise around us is no accident of the digital age — it is a method. The method of the engineers of chaos — those invisible architects who manipulate opinion, fuel polarization and antagonism, and erode trust in reality and society. They orchestrate saturation: too much emotion, too much speed, too many contradictory narratives.

Their goal: to break listening, sever connections, and destroy the very possibility of harmony that might hinder their agenda.

Novalis, or music as a science of the world

In the face of this, what can music do?

A great deal, if we follow Novalis, the visionary Romantic poet and thinker: for him, music is not just one art among others. It is the deep language of the universe — a knowledge without dogma, a sensitive science.
Where logic divides, music connects. Where language fails, it still speaks.

Music is embodied knowledge: it does not demonstrate — it transforms.

To harmonize, not convince

In a time when everyone is entrenched in their certainties, music offers a different regime of truth. It does not demand agreement — it invites listening. It doesn’t simplify — it weaves. It doesn’t impose a vision of the world — it creates a shared space where differences can breathe.

It may be, today, the last art still capable of bringing people together without diminishing them.

Against the strategists of division: poetic engineering

This is not about escaping reality through aesthetics. Quite the opposite — it's about re-engaging with reality through other means. It’s about constructing, in response to the engineering of chaos, a poetic engineering of connection.
A way to relearn how to compose — across generations, across cultures, across intimate worlds.

This implies placing music back at the heart of our society and our public policies. Not as ornament, not merely as entertainment, not as a siloed sector — but as infrastructure for the senses.
An omnipresent instrument of slow and profound transformation in service of the common good.

What music reminds us of

In a world saturated with technologies, narrative conflicts, and algorithmic solitude, music remains a primal gesture: to breathe, to vibrate, to sing — to make oneself heard, to answer the other, to hold together.

This is not a luxury. This is not optional. It is a necessity.
Music is what chaos cannot produce — and it must not be weaponized.

A breath of air

This June 21, let us not just celebrate an art. Let us listen to what music tells us about ourselves. It reminds us that we are not made to scream alone into the void, but to vibrate together through time.

And what if, in the end, to resist today means simply this:
To harmonize the world rather than dominate it.