Chamber Music Thrives in France with International Student Collaboration
By Robert Cutietta
USC Thornton and the Paris Conservatoire come together to transform a rural area of France each summer.
Pictured above: USC Thornton’s Ivory Trio from their performance in Missillac earlier this year. From left to right: Clarinetist and 2025 Outstanding Graduate Yan Liu (GCRT ‘25), DMA student and pianist William Chiang, and cellist Yuqi Wang (DMA ’25).
This story is written by and provided courtesy of Robert Cutietta, former Dean of the USC Thornton School of Music (2002-2022) and Professor Emeritus of Music Teaching & Learning.
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Every summer for the past twenty-five years, a quiet corner of western France has become a hub for music and cultural exchange. There, far from the hustle and bustle of any big city, students from USC Thornton join their peers from the Paris Conservatory for two weeks of intensive collaboration. Together, they form the heart of the Rencontre Franco-Américaines de Musique—a gathering where French and American student musicians come together to bring chamber music to life.
Centered in the small village of Missillac, with a population of 5,500, the Rencontre centers around a 14th-century castle, complete with tower spires, a moat, and a drawbridge. Three to five students and one faculty member from each institution arrive with some repertoire prepared, but spend the first several days rehearsing and learning new pieces to perform together. Four to six professional musicians join in on some pieces. Everyone lives, eats, and rehearses together.
The Rencontre was launched in 2000 by Peter Marsh, who was then the Thornton Director of Chamber Music and a longtime first violinist of the Lenox Quartet. Together with Willard Beling, a USC faculty member from the Department of International Studies, they envisioned a festival to promote cultural exchange and showcase high-quality concerts in this small community. Beling, who was the Director of the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation—an organization that funds educational projects supporting international exchange—helped secure initial funding from the Foundation, which continues to support the project to this day. That initial year, there were string quartets from both USC Thornton and the Paris Conservatoire, who played a total of two free concerts for audiences of about 15 people.
This year, 2025, the Rencontres Franco-Américaines: Musique Classique, Jazz, Creations is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and it is, by all accounts, a huge success. The five-day Festival has expanded to include eight concerts (seven classical and one jazz) across six different villages, a community picnic concert, and performances at an elder care home and a youth camp. This year, nearly 2700 people attended concerts, all of which are still free.
This past summer, a trio consisting of Yan Liu (clarinet), Yuqi Wang (cello), and William Chiang (piano), along with Strings faculty member and Robert Mann Chair in Strings and Chamber Music Seth Parker Woods, served as the Thornton representatives. A string quartet and co-artistic director Francois Salque represented the Paris Conservatoire. They found the experience life-changing. This is the most “… unique experience I’ve ever had in my past 26 years of life. I’ve never had to play two concerts in one day. But I think that’s cool,” remarked Wang. Liu agreed, “It develops a type of [playing] ability that’s required from everyone. Because most concerts are given after just one rehearsal — or one rehearsal plus one soundcheck —that’s it. It’s completely professional.” Chiang added, “Just having to, in the span of one day, rehearse two different programs and perform a completely different program at the same time. This is the real world. [It is not] something we see over the course of our education.” Despite the intensity, they all agreed the performances were excellent.
Both musically and culturally, it was exciting and eye-opening for the Thornton students to work with students from the Paris Conservatoire. “We are immersed in their culture here, and in their way of playing, their musical ideas,” said Chiang. In return, “I think we contribute a different set of musical ideas to them. That’s the whole point.” These international interactions “…consolidated, more importantly, the idea that music is an international language. None of us really speaks any French, and the [French] quartet’s English is not great. But it’s much easier for us to build this connection through music than the actual language.” observed Liu.
If the Thornton students noticed a shift in their approach to music, the French did too. When talking with staff and faculty from the Conservatoire, they say that the partnership with USC Thornton has “literally taken us to the new world.” As one put it, “the thing that struck us the most over the years was that when the Thornton students discussed classical music, it was always treated as the neighbor of pop music and the music industry. There was always this idea of being in the present and working for contemporary audiences with some kind of commercial scope as well. This was something for us we needed to integrate, which we needed to understand. Maybe it’s not so clear in everyday life at USC, but it was to us. This was very significant.”
Past Thornton students who participated found it life-changing. Eric Cheng, who participated in 2023, recalls, “It wasn’t the type of experience one would get from school, as we were faced with many consecutive days of performing for big audiences of appreciative and educated listeners, but also had to deal with a condensed preparation routine to be able to pull off such performances in a limited time. It was an experience that pushed me to my limits in a positive way – I came out a stronger musician mentally and physically.”
This Festival has even helped launch careers. In 2003, the Calder Quartet was invited from USC to participate in the event. They were the first of several student ensembles to go on to professional careers. Others include the Blue Rose Trio from USC in 2007, the Amédéo Modigliani Quartet in 2004, and the Arod Quartet in 2014, both from Paris.
Seth Parker Woods mused “Beyond the performances, a major takeaway from being there is the meeting of creative minds, the exchange of lives on both sides of the Atlantic, and the sharing of melded stories of hundreds of concertgoers night after night.”. Wang summed it all up simply with “The Rencontres is a fantastic place to make music.”
A Rocky Start
Though the Festival is an overwhelming success today, it wasn’t always so.
Missillac is a rural community with roughly 5,500 residents. It has long been an agricultural area. Its current population is the largest in its more than 230-year history, with a historical average of around 3,000. The nearest large city is Nantes, about an hour’s drive away. Even though it is a small village, it features the 14th-century castle as a very unique landmark. The castle is a key part of this story.
By the 1960s, the castle had fallen into disrepair, and the population of Missillac was shrinking. To add a bit more drama, the last descendant of the family that lived in the castle lost it in a poker game. The 500-year-old castle was then sold to a real estate firm and transformed into large apartments. The grounds, including ornate stables and staff quarters, were turned into an upscale golf and hotel complex called The Domaine de la Bretesche.
In the 1980s, Willard Beling, Chairman of the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, took his wife Betty and their two daughters from Los Angeles to Missillac for a family vacation to play golf on the beautiful, newly renovated grounds. During that trip, they rented one of the castle’s apartments, and that’s where this story really begins.
Although the castle was still in disrepair, the Belings fell in love with it. “Bats were flying around the dinner table,” recalls daughter Janna Beling of that first vacation. Still, the Belings bought the apartment that occupied the entire first floor of the castle.
They spent years renovating the large apartment, which was once a community center with black-painted walls, pool tables, and even a disco ball, into a beautiful home they intended to use to support education and culture.
The Belings visited frequently and became part of their new village. They became well-known and respected within the community. In the late 1990s, several local doctors were playing golf with Willard. They lamented the lack of “high-quality” cultural events in the city and asked if Willard had any suggestions on what to do. He had no immediate ideas.
Dr. Beling returned to Los Angeles and, by chance, found himself seated at the annual Thornton Dickens Dinner with Peter Marsh, who had been the first violinist of the Lenox Quartet for 23 years and was now the Director of Chamber Music at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. No one knows exactly what they discussed that evening, but it’s clear they devised a plan.
When Beling returned to Missillac, he suggested launching a Chamber Music Festival featuring student performers from Los Angeles and Paris. The festival aimed to promote the cultures they valued, connect young people from both cities, and strengthen Franco-American relations. This Franco-American partnership was crucial to him. The Foundation would cover the costs for musicians from USC and the Paris Conservatoire. He reported that Mr. Marsh had promised to bring “the best students from both schools.” As a result, the concerts would be of high quality.
It’s hard to imagine how absurd and illogical it seemed to propose a classical chamber music festival in rural France, far from any big city. While the doctors were excited, the city leaders were not. The story goes that the President of the Cultural Office in Missillac felt it wouldn’t work. The idea was that the locals listened to the land’s music—the music of cows and sheep, not classical music. To which Willard replied, “I have gotten to know the people of this city, and they have big hearts. They will love this music if we bring it.”
Despite the hesitation, the idea moved forward. The city owned a country manor that could house the musicians, and they would perform concerts in the large 19th-century church on the town square. So, in 2000, Marsh and students from USC and the Paris Conservatoire co-created the first Festival Franco-American de Musique de Chambre.
Unfortunately, at first it seemed that the President was right. The concerts only attracted about 15 people. Former city council member Daniel de Genouillac, who was tasked with promoting support for those early concerts, recalled, “It was difficult at the beginning, because…in the country …when I told …the people around me, they said, ‘What? Are you out of your mind?’.” But everyone was undeterred, and the commitment was made to try again the following summer.
In 2001, two student quartets—the Alma Quartet from the Paris Conservatory and the Kalos Quartet from the USC Thornton School of Music—took part in the Festival. Everyone agreed that the performances were of high quality, showcasing music by composers such as Haydn, Shostakovich, and Beethoven. To everyone’s disappointment, however, the audience remained small.
Undeterred, the mayor of Missillac approached another rural village, about 12 kilometers away, to form a partnership with Missillac. The mayor of St. Gildas de Bois, André Trillard, remembered that “I was just waiting for him to ask. Why should the people of Missillac have [concerts] but not us?”.
Additionally, French musical co-director François Salque, a member of the Isayi Quartet, joined the team to work with Marsh. They began inviting a composer from each institution to create pieces specifically for the eight students in the ensemble. Hearing compositions made especially for the students increased the audience’s growing interest in the chamber music process.
Another positive decision was to offer coaching sessions for student ensembles that were open to the public. Residents watched the process and gained a clearer understanding of what influences the performances. This further boosted interest in chamber music.
Thus, in 2002, the concerts took place in two cities, had both a French and an American co-director, and introduced the process of chamber music by commissioning new works and opening coaching sessions to the public. The stage was set to develop an audience for chamber music, and this year marked a turning point for the Festival.
The Festival continued to grow and expand. In year five, the organizers introduced an outdoor picnic concert designed for families and community members who might feel uncomfortable attending a formal concert. Later expansions included performances at senior citizen homes and youth camps.
Within a few years, the audiences were nearly full; the “rencontre” or “meeting” of French and American students and audiences was secure, and the Festival’s significance to the towns was established. With each concert, the Rencontre not only offered entertainment but also built a sense of community and pride among the villagers. People started to gather, not just to listen to music, but to reconnect with one another.
The Future
Today, the Rencontre looks to the future. “Les Amis des Rencontres Franco-Américaines,” a group of enthusiastic volunteers formed in 2023 to support the Festival, is planning new and exciting initiatives for the next chapter in the event’s history. While discussing potential changes, two things remain at the core. First, the Rencontre is centered on the strong partnership between The Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, USC Thornton, the Paris Conservatoire and, of course, Les Amis des Rencontre Franco-Américaines. Second, the concerts will always be free for the community. As Professor Woods exclaimed, “It is evident just what a magical and powerful force for good this festival is. Long may it sail!”
All photos courtesy of Robert Cutietta, former Dean of the USC Thornton School of Music and Emeritus Faculty in Music Teaching & Learning.
