France Musique streams classical music and jazz around the clock, broadcasting live concerts from Radio France's own orchestras alongside recordings drawn from a virtual concert hall of roughly 5,000 works. It is one of Radio France's national public channels, available free today on Radio Shuffle alongside France Musique's own eight thematic web radios covering everything from baroque repertoire to contemporary composition.
A Channel Built on a Poet's Proposal
France Musique traces back to 1954, founded on an idea from poet Jean Tardieu and launched by Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française as "La Chaîne Haute-Fidélité," according to Wikipedia's history of the channel. The name changed repeatedly over the following decade, becoming France IV Haute Fidélité in 1958, then RTF Haute Fidélité in 1963, before settling on France Musique later that same year. A brief spell as "France Musiques" between 1999 and 2005 was eventually reversed back to the singular form still used today.
From One Signal to Nine Web Radios
What started as a single high-fidelity frequency has grown into a full digital network. France Musique now runs nine thematic web radios, each built around a specific slice of the repertoire, with its eighth, a dedicated baroque channel, launched by in-house programmers Benjamin Hertz, Olivier Le Borgne and Robert Rudolf to cover the Grand Siècle, the Age of Enlightenment, and music reaching back to the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Live Concerts, Not Just Recordings
Unlike a station that simply plays recordings, France Musique broadcasts live performances from Radio France's own musical formations throughout the year, supplemented by recordings captured across France and abroad through the channel's agreements with the European Broadcasting Union. That gives listeners access to concert hall performances most classical stations could never produce themselves.
Tune In
Seven decades after a poet's proposal became a single high-fidelity signal, France Musique now carries an entire orchestra's worth of live music into any browser. Stream it free on Radio Shuffle.