Dear friend,

Summer at last! It was still spring when the sun shone hot and bright two weeks ago. Since then, cloudbursts have drenched our corner of Normandy. But not our spirits! The hay is in. And Monday was not only the summer solstice, but the Fête de la Musique.
 
The Fête de la Musique takes place on the 21st of June, Midsummer’s Eve. It offers moments of magic and revelation. Once, years ago, we heard this song:
 
"Mon dieu, mon amour, cette mélodie,
Un astre clair, un chant d'oiseau.
Nous chantions au milieu de la nuit une litanie sans les mots…"
 
Mon dieu, my love, that melody,
A crystal star, the song of a bird.
We sang in the middle of the night, a wordless litany…
 
Poetry for a summer night.
 
And so we always “tendre l’oreille” – hold out our ears – during the Fête de la Musique. Something new will strike a chord – si j’ose le dire!
 
Given the circumstances of post-pandemic French policy, many communes around Courtomer cancelled formal celebrations. But one exception was Sées, the charming little episcopal city only 15 minutes up the road from the Chateau. Here, the local “école de musique” performed to proud parents, and later, a band played traditional Irish “juigs, reels et chansons de pub.”

Julien Loko is a French musician and songwriter with several awards and albums to his credit. He has acted in films and musical comedy. The Irish Pub Band is his latest inspiration, complete with waistcoat and sleeve garters. Here, he draws on a well-rooted French admiration for the Irish, perhaps a vestige of old loyalties from the days of the Battle of the Boyne, when Louis XIV half-heartedly financed the reconquest of Great Britain on behalf of his cousin, the deposed James II.

The playlist was Irish trad with a soupçon of 80s punk.

“That’s unlike any version of Molly Malone I have ever heard,” remarked my husband dryly.

Ah, but to hear the fiddle and the penny whistle of his native isle on the cobbled streets of Sées! The merry accompaniment of the accordion! Is the violinist’s muscular bow arm tattooed with writhing snakes? On s’en fiche!

To hear live music again was a moving experience. And to stroll outside in the long twilight of the longest day of the year, to stop at a bar for a sirop and une bière…to listen to the sound of voices talking and laughing in the gathering darkness…quel délice!

This is the way the Fete de la Musique was intended to roll, we thought to ourselves, as we ambled along the narrow main street that leads to the double-spired cathedral of Sées. Lit up for the evening, its twin lanterns glowed for miles around the countryside.

The Fête de la Musique was inaugurated on June 21, 1982. It was to be the midsummer’s eve of the amateur musician…of all those who love and should learn to love music, in the mind of its founder, Maurice Fleuret, then head of Music and Dance in the Ministère de la Culture.

Music was to be the bridge between the individual and the collective, the link between the citizen and the nation, the very incarnation of the new Socialist vision for France. François Mitterrand had been elected a year earlier, sweeping away post-war conservatism with promises of freedom, prosperity, higher wages and longer vacations for all. The first edition of la Fête de la Musique was about singing and dancing in the streets…creativity unbounded by the conservatoire and the concert hall…the cultural expression of a democracy in motion.

“All I can say is, dieu merci Madame Bachelot forbade that sort of thing tonight. It’s supposed to be “faites de la musique” -- make music -- not destroy it,” commented my companion, showing an alarming lack of solidarity with the usual ebullient celebration of the summer solstice in France.

Madame Bachelot is the current minister of Culture. This year, the typical rave-parties and street dancing were discouraged – sometimes by the brusque intervention of les forces de l’ordre. Formal concerts were limited to less than 500 masked spectators “assis et responsibles.” As we noted, most cities chose to cancel. Complaints abounded. But so did sighs of relief.

“If I had to listen to another bath-tub tenor covering that Moldavian pop song tonight, I’d be in a very bad mood,” my husband added cheerfully.

“I think Dad means Dragostea Din Tei,” said Henry, helpfully interpreting. “It was big in 2004.”

Ah yes! I thought back to a warm evening in early summer many years ago, when the school fête at our boys’ school in Paris was just winding down. From classroom windows came the happy shout, “ma ya hee, ma ya hi, he-ello!” The older boys were celebrating the beginning of les grandes vacances.

Music is the natural emanation of the human spirit, says Henry, whom the pandémie serendipitously locked down with a piano and a tender-hearted friend. Fleuret would have approved. But if he was an advocate of singing in the streets, he was no fan of “la dégringolade musicale” – musical chaos. He brought to his task at the Ministry of Culture his perspective as an eminent music critic as well as a composer for movies and the theatre.

We listened to Fleuret's 1982 interview and introduction to the Fête de la Musique, which France Musique replayed this Monday. Fleuret belonged to the post-war generation of left-leaning intellectuels engagés, for whom “the struggle” was not so much between the boss and the worker, but to gather the masses of France’s new consumer society into the folds of the cultural and intellectual elite. Diplômé at the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure before studying music in Paris, Fleuret never lost his vocation for teaching. And he was a joyful impressario.

Fleuret created the "Journées de musique contemporaine de Paris" which from 1967 until 1974 persuaded thousands to discover Bério, Boulez, Pierre Henry, and Xenakis. He initiated music festivals, then a novelty. And toward the end of his short life, he jointly founded a public library of music, now the Médiathèque musicale Mahler in Paris. As the ministry’s director of Music and Dance, he was as likely to promote a Balinese village orchestra performing “Ketjak: The Song of the Monkey” as to play a recording of a funeral mass in Corsica or of Congolese schoolboys in a singing game called “Ma chaussure est tombée dans l’eau.” (“My shoe has fallen in the water.”)

“And they don’t even have shoes!” exclaimed the interviewer on France Musique, back in 1982.

“They most certainly do,” corrected Fleuret, who knew la francophonie africaine well. Intellectual and teacher to the last, he added. “The shoe sets man apart from the animal.

"As,” he added, “does making music.”

Fleuret chose Berlioz’ rousing version of La Marseillaise to close the interview.

“We are living le combat today, » he said. «Mobilisation générale for culture for everyone! »

« An idealist,» commented Henry. But when we got home, we listened to a replay of this year’s Fête de la Musique concert, held outside in the Cour d’honneur at Matignon, the official residence of the Premier Ministre in Paris. Fleuret would have felt justified. It was, as he liked to say, “un bouquet sonore,” a bouquet of sound.

Rebonds, a percussion piece by his old protégé Xenakis, opened the concert. The internationally-known soprano Marie-Laure Garnier, born in French Guyana, sang Fauré with the equally renowned Bertrand Chamayou on piano. A quatuor of music students performed Piazzolla’s tango, La Muerte del Angel. Noëmi Waysfeld, who has just put out an album called "Soul of Yiddish", sang Charles Trenet’s L’Âme des poètes:

“Longtemps, longtemps, longtemps
Après que les poètes ont disparu
Leurs chansons courent encore dans les rues”

A long time, long time, long time
After the poets have disappeared
Their songs still resound in the streets.

None of the various artists performing at Matignon were amateurs it is true; the streets of Paris were less raucous than usual. But if the Fête de la Musique is a mild affair this summer, we nevertheless look forward to many musical events around Courtomer in the months to come.

From musette at the local bal dansant to festivals of chamber music in local chateaux to motets and jazz in our churches, music is part of the experience of summer in the French countryside…a “bouquet sonore” for us to discover and enjoy.

A bientôt!

P.S. Inspired to have your own fête at Chateau de Courtomer? Please write to Heather or Béatrice (both are bilingual in English and French), or, of course to me, at info@chateaudecourtomer.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

P.P.S. Pour le fun...
to see...
Julien LOko and his Irish Band, click here
That "tube" of 2004, click here

to hear...
This year's Fete de la musique June 21, 2021, click here
Mon Dieu, mon amour at La Fête in 2021, click here
The Corsican chorus, click here

to relive...
The first Fête de la Musique in 1982, click here