Music without spectatorsThe chronicle of listening

Reviews 23.11.2021

At the Errobiko festival in the Basque Country, there is music and there are spectators. But above all, there is a genuinely cultural way of linking one to the other that should certainly be a model.

It was on Friday 23 July in Itsasu (Itxassou), in the green and Edenic valley of the Nive, in the Basque Country, on the second day of the 25th edition of the Errobiko festival, an event dedicated to Basque culture in all its forms, as long as they are alive (i.e., they rub shoulders with other traditions and other cultures, ancestral or not, instead of being kept under a bell). In the garden of the Hotel-Restaurant du Chêne, a "palaver" brought together Beñat Achiary, a great voice of Basque song and co-founder of the festival, the poet Itxaro Borda, Jennifer Bonn, a Swedish-Canadian artist and Pyrenean by adoption who invested ten years ago, Ten years ago, she and her partner took over a group of barns at an altitude of 1,200 metres to turn them into a place of life, creation and utopia in action, the Hourc, and the musician Jean-Christian Irigoyen, who will discuss the fascinating question: "How and why is artistic creation born? " This discussion was certainly fascinating, so rich in insights that the light rain that soon began to fall did not manage to scare anyone away. It was a rare moment of grace and poetry, of listening and collective intelligence, a moment out of time, magical as the inaugural discussion on the festival's first quarter-century had been the day before, the enchanting interventions of the KIMU Txalaparta duo - Sergio Lamuedra and Txomin Dhers, virtuosos of the percussion instrument of the same name (the txalaparta), a kind of xylophone with stone (or more generally beech) blades that have the particularity of being struck vertically, "in a rammer".

New rituals

It was in the course of this conversation that this expression - was it in Beñat's mouth? - an expression that I have often thought about since: music without spectators. It was not a question of evoking the current lack of interest in concert halls and other 'cultural places' in this disastrous period of pandemic. But to evoke the time before what Ludovic Tournès calls "the society of continuous and permanent sound"(1). (1) This time of the "societies of discontinuous sound" before the middle of the 19th century, essentially rural societies, which "certainly did not ignore music or songs, but (where) these gave rhythm to collective life at very specific times (festivals, songs accompanying the harvest, etc.) and in clearly identified places (cabarets, village squares, etc.)". This time of collective practices when music was shared by all, when everyone participated in the musical event, when there were still no borders, no barriers between the "artists" and the "public", between the "stage" and the "hall". That time before the triumph of capitalism when, as the American historian Larry Portis wrote, "there was a creative activity of non-professionals to entertain or enrich the life of a community"(2), that time when folklore had not yet become a "product" (even if it was a cultural one), that time before "cultural venues". Before the "society of the spectacle".

Of course, it is not a question here of abandoning ourselves to the sterile antiphon of 'it was better before', nor of blindly subscribing to the nostalgia of a supposed 'authenticity' which Portis emphasises is, in any case, illusory. It is true that each new society has invented its own rituals: that of the public concert is only two centuries old, and it took the appearance of the Romantic version of the artist (and then the invention of electricity, which made it possible to make the auditorium dark), and the triumph around 1820 of the German taste for attentive listening, which gives pre-eminence to the aesthetic function of music, for the frontal and silent form of this interplay between a performer, a listener and a work to be ritualised in its turn. Certainly, many concerts of music, whether 'learned' or 'popular', have given me a deep feeling of communion, even of community, and demonstrated, if proof were needed, that music has obviously lost none of its social function. Of course, Errobiko is no exception to the rule, with its programme featuring concerts given in a frontal format by professional musicians.
(A magnificent programme, by the way, which allowed me to discover live (and as a spectator) the poignant duet between the Soulet singer Maddi OIhenart (Soule is one of the provinces of the Basque Country, like Labourd where Itsasu is located) and the multi-instrumentalist Jérémie Garat; or the no less striking trio Revolutionary Birds, a fusion between the Sufi singing of Tunisian Mounir Troudi, the bagpipes of Breton Erwan Keravec and the percussion of Franco-Lebanese Wassim Hallal.)

And yet, these words struck me. What was being played out at this festival, in this verdant and Edenic valley of the Nive, where people of all generations, equally impregnated with a thousand year old language, were rubbing shoulders, seemed to me to be something genuinely cultural. That is to say, much more important than the "artistic creation" to which, in France, culture is too often reduced. Art - one might ask, paraphrasing Robert Filliou - is that what makes culture more interesting than art? 

Cultural rights

Culture is "what 'socialises' art", as the musicologist (and inspector at the Ministry of Culture) Sylvie Pébrier - whose latest book precisely calls for " reinventing music " - brilliantly reminded us during a conference proposed this autumn by the Futurs Composés network on the issue of cultural rights. For it is finally to this notion, so stupidly controversial, of cultural rights that, against all odds, this column brings me back. In 2021, it is undoubtedly there, the "music without spectators": in this renewed way of sharing musical creation, in this "affirmation of equality as a political horizon for music" (Sylvie Pébrier). This summer, at the Errobiko festibala, there were still musicians, still spectators, but there hardly seemed to be any separation between them, the exchange was done as equals, each one, in his own way, seemed to participate in the magic of the moment.

There is still a long way to go in the land of Descartes and Malraux - where the Ministry of Culture is still essentially the Ministry of Art; where the term 'community' is used with almost as much reluctance as the term 'spirituality' - before we manage to move away from this vertical, univocal and anachronistic conception of culture; to recognise that everyone is a bearer of culture, and that it is this diversity which, beyond the 'official', labelled culture, which is so lacking in diversity, is the source of the greatness of our country. Thank God there are activists like those who preside over the destiny of Errobiko, or wise men like the film-maker and writer Eugène Green, a great lover and connoisseur of the Basque Country, who told me three years ago: "The Basques have kept a naivety, in the original and positive sense of 'simplicity'. Both between people - there is a feeling of community, fraternity, social relations based on kindness, love and mutual aid - and towards nature, to which they have an extremely strong relationship. (...) For me, it is a civilisation that has kept its original foundations and that includes many things essential to human existence; things that we have lost and that we must try to reacquire by a very strong will, and also by renouncing many things that are part of our current environment.

Pyrenees1-BasaAhaide from Obatala on Vimeo.

Culture is located precisely there, at that place where the past meets and nourishes the future, where the autonomy and emancipation of each individual are the conditions for the success of the collective, where each individual is an actor and no longer a spectator. In this ecology of art that culture ultimately constitutes - and we think back to Jennfer Bonn, author of a recent doctoral thesis on "the voice as a creator of links in a mountain environment", and to these words taken from an interview published in 2019: "How can ancient practices be an inspiration for future innovations, how can we draw on them to live better today. With the will to restore these places to make them living places and not to restore a building so that it becomes a kind of museum. (....) We can find a kind of flexibility in the interpretation of a knowledge and a past and to create a future, to transform a form of truth into a powerful tool. To make truth less fixed, more flexible and to be able to modulate it so that it serves the community. (...) We try to ensure that everything is put on the same level, not to separate an artistic part from a technical part of construction for example. (...) We ourselves don't make any difference between doing an art project or a barn project, going off to pick plants, singing or going down a river, it's done with the same intention and a tiny bit with the same methodology."

David Sanson

1. See Ludovic Tournès, Musique. Du phonographe au mp3. Une histoire de la musique enregistrée, XIXe-XXIe siècle, Paris, Autrement, coll. "Mémoires/Culture", 2008.
2. See Larry Portis, " Musique populaire dans le monde capitaliste: vers une sociologie de l'authenticité ", article published in the journal L'Homme et la société n° 126, "Musique et société", 1997.

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