Music Articles

02/18/2024

Marthe Vassallo: “Ambivalent ghosts and toxic cocktails: being a woman in Breton music today”

We present the article “Ambivalent ghosts and toxic cocktails: being a woman in Breton music today”, which we did not write. It is the work of the remarkably talented and thoughtful singer Marthe Vassallo, taken directly from her lovely blog The Kerbiquet Wheneverly News, here translated into English for your reading pleasure. This piece is particularly apt for us since one of the oddballs providing this site to the public is, you know, a woman… a female musician. Footnotes are in blue.

“Ambivalent ghosts and toxic cocktails: being a woman in Breton music today”

That's it, here it is! Eagerly awaited by, oh, at least three of you! the text of my intervention, last October [2019], at the conference “Orfeas Orfanèlas, Orphees orphees or feminine music” organized by La Talvera in Albi, in complicity with Dastum Bro-Dreger. The complete proceedings of the conference will be published within a few months, and I highly recommend them to you, ladies and especially gentlemen! This text above all sets out a reflection in progress: many points would benefit – will benefit, I hope – from being spun and unraveled better than they are here. But that's the rule of the game: here, just a little straightened out, are my notes for this intervention.

I am only talking here about a daily, diffuse, often unconscious machismo and its possible historical roots; following my usual formula, for me, Breton music is a much more macho than misogynistic environment. As the conference was largely focused on the presence of women on both sides of the collection microphones, I also developed this aspect at greater length than others. The news being what it is [Editor's note: this post was published in January 2020], some of you may be surprised that I do not address the issue of sexual assault. The first reason for this is that it was simply not my subject: even if it is, obviously, oh so closely related to what I am describing, it is nonetheless a very different place in a broad continuum of behaviors. What I'm talking about here is simply the unnoticed, omnipresent inequality that many men and women take part in without even thinking about it. This inequality has, in Breton music, some particular contours which it is interesting to consider in themselves. Concerning attacks, on the other hand, as appalling as the case currently under investigation is, which has been making a lot of noise lately (and of which I was unaware at the time of the conference), I hope I am not mistaken in saying that it does not prove that there are more attacks in Breton music than elsewhere; However, it reminds us that we would have to be very naive to imagine that there could be fewer of them .

What I am about to describe to you is not the sociological and statistical study that it would be useful to carry out on the subject; it is my testimony and my reflection as an artist. From this point of view, what does “being a woman in Breton music” mean? The first obvious answer is that it's being quite alone. In any case, often being the only woman surrounded by men.

PART ONE: THE PRESENT LANDSCAPE

1) THREE SATURDAYS ON TAMM-KREIZ.BZH

To find out for sure, I did a little exercise: I went to the Tamm-Kreiz.bzh site, which centralizes almost all of the fest-noz announcements. I chose, arbitrarily or almost, three evenings: the first in peak tourist season, last August 14; the second out of season, Saturday September 28; the 3rd closest to us: tomorrow evening's date 1 . I counted the men, the women, the singers, the singers, and the instrumentalists of both sexes 2 , in the festoù-noz and concerts in historic Brittany announced on the site 3 .

I did this very quickly and I am not immune to an error, but, as you will see, the trends are so marked that we are not within a few units.

For the three evenings, with a total number of 205 to 276 people on stage, we had:

• many more men than women: the proportion of women ranged from 13 to 17%;

• among women, a majority of singers (between half and two thirds), while singers are only a minority among men (7% to 17% 4 );

• therefore an even more marked minority for female instrumentalists (from 6.38% to 7.25%);

• despite the disparity in the proportion of singers/instrumentalists for each gender, there are so many more men on stage that the ratio between the number of singers and the number of female singers will above all reflect this favoring: in one case, 12 singers for 20 female singers, and in another there are 24 singers for 12 singers.

A glaring inequality, a very sensitive debate

Immediately, I posted the figures for August 14 on Facebook. The result was 48 hours of multiple, very rich conversations, which testify to the sensitivity of this subject.

Several people suggested that things would be different in other traditional music: Occitan music was mentioned, as well as Irish music. In the case of the latter, it is clear that in fact, there seems to be greater recognition for female instrumentalists and even (perhaps especially?) young women. Irish girls have their own issues though, which I won't get into! But these observations suggest, in any case, that gender inequalities can have slightly different contours for each musical environment, including within the “traditional music” category. This is an important point because, as we will see, many of the mechanisms of this “musical patriarchy” are those of patriarchy in a general sense; this can lead us to lose sight of the specificities of each environment.

Many of the reactions I received focused on the only phenomenon observed: the place of women downstream, at the time of programming. As if the question were only: “Is there any reluctance among programmers to work with an existing female act? » On this, the testimony of a summer festival organizer is interesting: “We take care to highlight the work of women,” he told me in substance, “but we do not, however, manage to exceed a proportion of 20 to 30%. » This confirms the general feeling: there are actually fewer women in this line of work. But 20 to 30% is still practically double the figures from my little “sampling”! It is therefore good that, in ordinary times, there is a brake on the programming of female musicians, even if they are, moreover, in the minority. There is therefore a problem downstream AND upstream.

At the same time, fellow teachers all report either a majority of girls in their classes and their internships, or at least a female presence which will not then be reflected on stage, and even less in professionalization. It is therefore not, as we can still hear, that Breton music attracts fewer girls, it is that, somewhere in the transition from girl to woman, musical practice tends to become invisible.

So, again: why?

The question has already been explored for music in general. Many of the mechanisms identified then are those found at work in Breton music, obviously; I will try to quickly cite a good part of these, so as to have time to develop a few others, perhaps a little less universal.

2) EVER PRESENT QUESTIONS

Let us recall some major general issues, those that we will potentially find in all areas, and which make the simple act of playing or singing in public a transgression for a woman:

• Motherhood: the pot around which we constantly turn. The image, and unfortunately the reality, of a musician's life are in conflict with the life project of many young girls – or with the project that those around them envisage for them. For me, as long as society as a whole has not moved forward in the management of parenthood, and the musical world as well, we will not really progress. (I'm not just talking about sharing home tasks.)

• Gendered visibility: in a world where “someone” without specifying gender is necessarily a man, every woman is automatically distinguished by her sexual characteristics, at least as long as she is old enough to appear a possible partner. Our mere presence on stage is therefore, whether we like it or not, sexualized and literally remarkable. This gendered visibility also goes against the education received, where from early childhood we are instilled with the values of discretion, modesty and modesty.

• It also results in hypervisibility: every woman being remarkable, we will have a feeling of parity when there are in reality only two women out of ten people; and as soon as you are scheduled twice, we feel like we only see you.

• Authority: men are presumed competent, and their comments presumed interesting, and women presumed incompetent and their words assimilated to chatter; and this at all hierarchical levels, in all environments. However, in the current world of Breton music, which has been the subject of gigantic collection work largely carried out by the musicians themselves, knowledge is an important value.

• Power: the musician on stage exercises direct power over the audience; like all power, it is considered naturally masculine. (In Breton music, this dimension of power is particularly strong in dance music.)

• The attribution to the emotional and the lack of self-control: emotion and abandonment are however very valued in certain music; the fact that we nevertheless came to consider that these traits, ordinarily attributed to women, disqualified them, clearly highlights how central the criteria of authority and power remain.

• Potential seduction . I will have the opportunity to come back to it.

It is in all music that these factors contribute to perpetuating male domination, which remains very strong.

3) CURRENT MUSIC, BRETON MUSIC: A MEN’S WORLD

By narrowing the focus on current music, we can add strong values that can be described as macho , and some of which are very strong in Breton music. Very present in particular:

• partying through drunkenness, risky behavior;

• power: sound power among others, power of the aforementioned power;

• an idea of freedom, independence, even rebellion, which is also hardly compatible with the family-life project typically proposed to girls;

• the sexual symbolism of the instruments (very strong for the blowers, among others; extremely strong for the biniou-bombarde);

• a historical substrate of activism, with what this will entail in demonstrativeness;

• in the particular case of bagad, the military, even paramilitary, origins of the formula (however far from this spirit the bagadoù of today may be). Let us remember that some bagadoù have only been mixed for a short time 5 .

Something else that is particularly strong in Breton music: the primordial role of affinities . Being a Breton musician is as much a way of social life as it is an artistic practice. The result is a musical environment that relies mainly on human connections, and therefore, among young people, on gang phenomena: a lot of groups are founded from groups of friends, where girls have little space. And the groups of friends do not found lasting musical groups, because, for all the reasons that I have been listing earlier, the majority of girls abandon the practice as they settle into adult life. Those who remain are most often isolated within male networks 6 .

The exclusive nature of this masculinity still often materializes in the performance environment : absence of toilets near the stages, impossibility of washing hands, dressing rooms which serve as a general foyer, accommodation with questionable security, etc. If you think these are just small, inconsequential annoyances, then you are a man! Having to cross the entire marquee under full view, to sink into the cornfield hoping not to be followed, to endure excruciating cramps because you couldn't change your sanitary tampon, that's also what being a woman in Breton music. Besides the fact that our dignity, our health and our safety are at stake, it is also, each time, a rather violent reminder of the fact that our very existence was not planned.

Finally, women are at a disadvantage when it comes to travel , so valued in Breton music and world music: in addition to the obvious questions of security and the prohibition of certain spaces, it is impossible for them to be invisible, impossible to expect a priori a simple and cordial socializing with local musicians. The position of musician, because it presupposes a relationship of equals, seems to me more difficult to maintain even than that of observer (ethnomusicologist or journalist). A woman can obviously establish deep, long-term contacts in other countries; but the “musical tourism” of our colleagues is sometimes complicated, sometimes impossible, and often dangerous.

PART TWO: A NOT SO DISTANT PAST

That is the observation in the present, but all this does not date from yesterday. This is even my point: we are dealing not only with an inglorious state of affairs, but above all with roots which go back to even much harsher realities. These realities belong to another time, but a time not so distant, in which certain habits and certain shadows persist.

1) “CLASSICAL” MUSIC AND WOMEN

This applies to music in general: we can never stress it enough, the opening of the world of music to women was very late, much more so than that of literature, for example. I have a history of music which dates from 1946 and where the philosopher Charles Lalo calmly explains to me why the nature of women prohibits them from musical genius.

Even when there is openness, it is rare that it is not accompanied by disrepute: we know the quote by Virginia Woolf from a music critic from the interwar period, comparing Germaine Tailleferre to “a dog who walks upright on his hind legs: it’s not that he does it well, it’s that you are surprised that he does it” 7 . Let's rest assured, the Grove music dictionary from 1995 still tells us that Germaine Tailleferre's music “remains graceful and feminine”.

We might think that classical music is not our problem. We would be wrong: it remains the source of references and concepts, even when we work to free ourselves from it, and even when we have not been directly trained in this framework.

2) TRADITIONAL FUNCTIONS IN BRITTANY

Musical practice, a reflection of general inequality

Music was no exception, in the past, to the general rules of society. For example, for the potato threshing or digging festivals before 1945, the singer Marcel Guilloux describes young men going to sing and dance wherever they want, including being accepted by their very singing; girls, on the contrary, can only participate if the party takes place at home, or elsewhere, if they took part in the working day or if they join their sister who worked there 8 . In other words, music and dance are for boys the means of emancipation from the family, while girls remain connected to the latter. Apart from beggars and singers (often the same ones), women are not supposed to sing outside their intimate circles.

Furthermore, for my part, I do not know of any great ancient female instrumentalist in Brittany. Either there isn't one, or, at the very least, we don't talk about it. Since instrumentalists can be, unlike singers, "professionals", invited and paid, most often in the context of a well-watered party, we understand why this thing was forbidden to women. Perhaps we should add to this the relative rarity and high cost of musical instruments.

3) COLLECTION IN BRITTANY: WOMEN IN THE HONOR?

Collectors and collected

On the other hand, what will often be highlighted is the great presence of singers in collection funds, both old and recent. In a conference on women and gwerziù (to which I had the pleasure of contributing) 9 , Eva Guillorel underlined the disparity between, on the one hand, collectors who are almost always men, and on the other, informants who are mainly female informants. And this both in the 19th and 20th centuries. Here again, I will not have enough time to explain all the possible explanations to you, but I would like to highlight a few points.

Shadow collectors

Bernard Lasbleiz told us about it: in the 19th and even 20th centuries, there was a significant contingent of “hidden collectors”: François-Marie Luzel’s sister, Perrine; the mother of Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué, Ursule Feydeau de Vosgien; Madame de Saint-Prix; Constance Le Merrer, remained unpublished for a century. The assistance of the wives is also ignored: for example, closer to us, we rightly praise the role of Patrick Malrieu in the birth of Dastum, we generally forget to mention the enormous investment of his companions Magdie Bellego then Véronique Perennou.

Early 19th century: male romanticism

If we take the precursor works of collecting and folklorism in Brittany, The Last Bretons by Emile Souvestre and Barzaz Breiz by La Villemarqué, we would look in vain for this famous feminine omnipresence. The universe in question is virile, and even warlike in Villemarqué, with a romanticism where everything or almost everything is seen through the eyes of a man. The Breton is an actor in a story whose memory he voluntarily maintains. It seems to me that it was in the second half of the 19th century, and in particular with Luzel, that the figure of the singer-storyteller appeared, and that is where it is time to talk to you about the best-known 'between them.

Marc'harit Fulup: the “half-idiot” icon

Marguerite Philippe (1837-1909) is at the bottom of the social ladder: beggar and professional pilgrim (she can do almost nothing with her hands, one paralyzed, the other crippled), of course illiterate and monolingual. She was only in her thirties when she met Luzel, and we see the establishment between them of an intense relationship of collecting, over several years, both tales and songs. Much later, at the end of the century, when the regionalist movement developed, Marc'harit, through the writer Anatole Le Braz, a former young collaborator of Luzel, would become a kind of mascot, invited several times to sing at the congress of the Breton Regionalist Union. After his death, all the great regionalist poets will pay tribute to him.

When I started singing, Marguerite Philippe was the legendary figure of the singing tradition. However, in the literature devoted to it, something jumps out: the passivity attributed to it, presented as the guarantee of its reliability as a source. Le Braz, who venerates her, calls her “half-idiotic” 10 , Berthou writes that she “traveled the world without waking up”, and so on. Marguerite is presented as unconscious of what she is doing: she is only the vessel of tradition, a “human harp” in the words of Le Braz.

Now, Bernard Lasbleiz spoke about it earlier: if we think for a moment, she would have had to be really stupid, much more than half-hearted, to remain passive in such a recurring, rewarding collection relationship. and undoubtedly remunerative, especially since her activity as a pilgrim made her particularly capable of searching for songs and stories. Marguerite Philippe appears much more a kind of collaborator than a simple “collected”, and seems to have seen herself as such. But this aspect cannot be highlighted since it would make her an actress in her repertoire.

From ignorance to innocence, then to purity, there are only very small steps, and we see them definitively taken, among others by the poet Taldir who speaks frankly of his "virgin and wise soul" and by the writer Charles Le Goffic who visited Marguerite in 1905 and, lo and behold, discovered that she had a husband. In reality, not only is she married, but she even had two children who died before reaching adolescence; but we will have to wait another 80 years to discover it in his biography by Guy Castel 11 – and even then we must not blink at the wrong moment: it only takes up three lines.

You will tell me: it's far away... But it was only in 1971 that, at the inauguration of the statue of Marguerite Philippe in Pluzunet, Father Bourdellès declared: “Yes, Marguerite was rich in spirit. But these riches had not been created by her. Marguerite by herself would have been nothing 12 , would have known nothing! Its wealth was an inheritance, a harvest raised over time by the Breton people. »

And you might tell me: it’s anecdotal. I invite you to look around you, in the presentation of music and ancient traditional musicians – and even current musicians, if they come from slightly exotic countries – for these two patterns which are ignorance-innocence and The absence of sexuality, particularly feminine, among the great performers recognized as such.

4) THE INNOCENCE TRAP

Unconsciousness, condition of tradition?

Traditional music is music described with the vocabulary of otherness. This thought of “purity”, of unadulterated authenticity, needs othering, of the 3rd person: not being by definition unconscious, “I” can never be completely “authentic”.

We can even consider that this is a definition of traditional music: music thought of by its performers as “the” music, without awareness that there are others of equal value. Obviously, this approach leads to the assertion that there are no longer, in the Western world, traditional musicians (we place their extinction somewhere at the end of the 19th century – as if by chance, at the time that we know from the works great folklorists, and known to the oldest witnesses recorded in the 20th century). This is of course undeniable, since the very definition contains this limitation. The problem is that this de facto excludes any enhancement of traditional music by the very people who play it: there can only be the external knowing and the internal ignorant. In a case like that of Brittany, I would like to emphasize two things: on the one hand it leaves us without words to name the complexity of current transmission, where the revivalist heritage does not exclude continuity with the ancient rural society, which was also not the long quiet river to which this narrow definition of tradition refers us; on the other hand, it creates a tension, a fundamental contradiction, which runs through all the work of the regionalists, and all the imagery and vocabulary that they have bequeathed to us to name musicians and singers.

The idea of being a traditional musician in a living community, among other communities, assumes that the music played is that of “self”, of “us”. But if we still carry this definition of tradition through this 3rd person of innocence, being a traditional musician therefore means not knowing whether we are “we” or “he”; it is to be a “we” whose ideal remains to be “he”.

An anti-Marguerite Philippe: Marie-Yvonne Le Flem

This tension is recurrent, for example, in the notebooks of Anatole Le Braz. It is from these notes that I drew the material for a show 13 dedicated to one of his informants, who also sang for the musician collector Maurice Duhamel: Maryvonne Le Flem (1841-1926). She was only 4 years younger than Marguerite Philippe, she was also a monolingual illiterate, and Le Braz's notes cover from time to time a period of thirty years: firstly a somewhat impersonal collection (for La Légende de Death ) then truly friendly neighborhood. What attracted me to her is the kind of health that emerges from these notes: we see Maryvonne take possession of her story through what she tells Le Braz, and we see Le Braz being part of it. admiring (even if some tropes of passivity resurface from time to time). In a way, Maryvonne appears to be an anti-Marguerite Philippe: she has an opinion on everything; among other jobs, she works in masonry and blasts rocks in the fields; she has children including a daughter out of wedlock, a mother, a husband; in short, it has a story and it acts. We can even argue that his songs help him express himself, to “rebalance” his life. But we must hasten to point out that she will remain in the shadows: certainly Le Braz presents her to a few writers and artists, but clearly no one has the idea of making an idol of this physically powerful woman (she was of remarkable stature and vigor) and spirit. There may be all kinds of stupid practical reasons for this, but the result for us is that the one who is immortalized as an icon is indeed Marguerite the Innocent, in her misery and her indefiniteness. The one that Le Braz ends up knowing as a person, with her weaknesses and her strengths, remains in her notebooks, in complete obscurity.

Of course, this tension between first and third person also concerns men, just as it concerns more or less everything that relates to a tradition and not only music (when it comes to intangible cultural heritage, for example, she begins to make a deafening silence). But I would like to state that, in many cases, and particularly in the history of Breton music, it concerns women in a particular way because, in a masculine world, femininity is the first degree of otherness.

Older women: sheltered from the world… and from sex

For example, to explain that the majority of informants are women, we put forward demographics and a supposed female conservatism 14 . We focus less on the complementary idea: the purity of men's knowledge was supposed to be compromised, in the 19th century, by their military service, their travels, and the practice of French which was the consequence - which amounts to saying that the The reliability of women's knowledge was guaranteed by their lower status 15 . What we forget to see, moreover - and this is even more true for the 20th century - is that all or almost all of these women were old, so that the idea of their sexuality was non-existent for the young men who recorded them. In short, they were three times “other”, three times distant – women, monolingual (or, for the 20th century, with a main language other than French) and old – which allowed them to be “authentic”.

The Goadec sisters, “born old”

Let's take another legendary figure of singers, this time in the plural: the Goadec sisters, who sang on stage between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1980s. Here too, we imagine three old ladies, therefore necessarily prudish; but when they started singing in public, the youngest was 45, and at least one of their best-known songs is quite light. But in the general public's image, they are “born old” and have no intimate life; they reproduce by parthenogenesis, according to the fact that our fellow singer Annie Ebrel, due to distant kinship by marriage, is often presented as “the granddaughter of the Goadec sisters”…

As for unconsciousness, the image is more diffuse as far as they are concerned, but I note this little formula in a recent article from Ouest-France: “Over the years, their repertoire expands.” It is not they who enrich him, it is he who expands. What is omnipresent, however, are the mentions of their indifference to their media success, as of a kind of impermeability where it is not necessary to scratch much to find the notion of purity and passivity. However, in reality, the Goadec sisters leave the memory of combative competitors in competitions, and of brilliantly masterful performers, and conscious, of their effects.

CONCLUSION: CLASH OF EXPECTATIONS, ISOLATION, UNDERMINED

This stereotype of the traditional singer, where the idea of old age goes hand in hand with the absence of sexuality, and authenticity with passivity, was still very present at the time when I started singing (at the beginning 1990s). It would not take long to come into head-on collision with the sexualization that I was talking about earlier, that of the musician on stage: in addition to the inevitable visibility, as the Breton scene has embraced the functioning of current music, the demand in terms of female image has married those of this music. It follows that today, to be a Breton musician on stage is to find oneself crushed between, on the one hand, the injunction to be young and pretty (and then, if one is no longer very young , at least very beautiful); and on the other hand the different levels of discredit that being young and pretty will bring you (or, if you are no longer very young, etc.). To the macho discredit in general – you lose in authority what you gain in visibility, or even in immediate success – will be added what we can call “folklorist discredit”, which means that if you are an attractive creature, you are not innocent; if you're not innocent, you're not authentic. There is only one very small niche common between these two injunctions: that of the pure young girl – a very brief career and not open to everyone…

Difficult to fight against such opposing pressures at the same time; for my part, I went to war against this fantasized innocence, but I was forced to recognize that it sometimes made me bring grist to the mill of those who saw no other interest in us than to be attractive. To counter these, I had my ability to verbalize... Which could only push me further down into “folklorist discredit”.

By the way, the power and limits of this visible sexuality is a debate which runs through all music today, and which also concerns us; Let us remember, however, that in this same world of current music, the gestures and overtly sexual expressions of the men on stage rarely raise questions.

To be a woman in Breton music today is therefore: to be quite alone and, so to speak, unforeseen; being caught between conflicting expectations; for singers, it means being measured against past figures who become limiting for the very reasons that made them sacred; for instrumentalists, it still means lacking figures with whom to identify, it means having to invent an entire culture of musical practice. It is also, for all of them, adding up the reasons for lacking self-confidence: I said earlier that a certain definition of tradition leads a musician to never know if he belongs to “us” or “they”; However, being a woman already means never knowing a priori whether we are perceived as “us”, “they” or “her”. These two phenomena combine to profoundly undermine the confidence of female musicians, including at high levels of recognition.

The idea of parity is a tool, not a goal. Basically, if it were to turn out that yes, women are generally happier elsewhere than singing or playing, I wouldn't be any worse off. The problem is that that's not what I see today. What I see is the rarely spoken suffering: that of women who have ended up giving up, that of young girls who see their fellow boys encouraged towards a vocation that no one envisages for them, that of each of us when programming figures, or a little comment in passing, remind us that we are not alone in devaluing our skills.

So I don't dream of parity, any more than uniformity. What I want is true diversity, true equality. May music truly be a possible choice for a woman as much as for a man. I don't know what's happening with all our neighbors, but I know that in Breton music, even if we are currently experiencing the beginnings of awareness, we are still far, very far from equality.

Notes:

1 October 19, 2019.

2 I only excluded the groups for which I did not have information, and in particular the bagadù. In any case, we can observe that, given the numbers of the latter, it would not necessarily have been wise to include them in the statistics without distinction.

3 Note that there is no observation tool that allows the same kind of “coring” to be done on concert practice alone, on which Tamm-Kreiz is much less exhaustive than on fest-noz. The fact remains that the fest-noz is a very important activity of a large number of Breton musicians; that for many of them, it is the only one; and that it is also, as a general rule, the most visible.

4 This 17% was, moreover, increased by a large fest-noz sung that evening.

5 The stories I have heard speak of an opening in the 80s to 90s, and not without debate. However, it should be noted that each bagad has its own history.

6 In the discussion that followed, I had the opportunity to clarify that this isolation is not necessarily unpleasant, particularly at the beginning: being a woman surrounded by male friends can be fun and rewarding! The isolation is no less real, and reveals itself over time, as we try to understand our experience: it becomes apparent to us that we have not shared with anyone everything that, in our career, was linked to our status as women, both for lack of interlocutor and because, all of our desire to be “a musician like the others”, we have minimized this specific experience.

7 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own , 1929 (chapter 3).

8 Marthe Vassallo, Ifig and Nanda Le Troadec, Marcel Le Guilloux, singer, storyteller, farmer from Central Brittany, Dastum/PUR, 2019 (pp. 71-72).

9 Eva Guillorel, conference Women victims, women guilty? Breton society of the Ancien Régime through the prism of complaints from oral tradition , on the occasion of the 2016 Congress of the Society of History and Archeology of Brittany.

10 Quoted by Françoise Morvan, François-Marie Luzel , Terre de Brume/PUR, 1999 (p. 189).

11 Guy Castel, Marc'harit Fulup, tales and legends of Trégor , Les Cahiers du Trégor, 1989. (All my quotes concerning Marguerite Philippe come from there, with the exception of note n°10.)

12 Emphasis added.

13 Maryonne the Great , created in 2017.

14 Eva Guillorel pointed out, in our conference, that it was the vision of Luzel, who cited Plato and Cicero in support of his choice to interview mainly women.

15 I think it is for the same reason that there is no male equivalent to Marguerite Philippe. The regionalists had their ringers, but younger and who were not the subject of the same canonization.

By Marthe Vassallo, Jan 31, 2020 at 6:11 p.m.

Christophe Caron: le sonneur de Pays Blanc

01/27/2024

A musician revered for his exquisite tonality and technical prowess, the late Chrsistophe Caron was a unique and inspiring individual. This interview, dated to the release of his classic duo recording Gwenrann, with pianist Christian Metayer in 2000, tells us a lot about his approach towards his beloved instrument, the bombard.

Some of the earliest recordings that we heard of Breton music, from musicians as diverse as Alan Stivell and Bernard Benoit, featured occasional bits of bombard that carried an indescribably fine, regal tonality - the sound of Christophe Caron. In the Gwenrann recording, playing on my stereo as I type this, Caron also settled into the use of the bombard in F as a profoundly beautiful balance point between the shriller tone of the smaller instruments and the warm, rounded sound of the hautbois or “pistoñ”.

Our recent discovery of this article dating from the turn of the century inspired us to translate and present it here, as a wonderful retrospective into this fascinating musician.

Translation ours. ~Fañch

Christophe Caron is a dandy, and if that word, which does not suffer from any comparison, since by its nature having no definition and therefore no example, seems a little pejorative, it remains likely that he would still not refuse it.

Having the elegant look, sharp tone, and pointed humor, Christophe floats above criticism and serenely follows the difficult path around this damn hautbois rustique that he refuses to just lock away in a straitjacket.

As this album of bombard and piano is released with the talented pianist Christian Metayer, who echoes the spirit of Debussy, we meet the man that some, like Erwan Hamon or Ronan Le Gourierec, consider to be a master... how did all this happen?

“First of all, I am very proud to know that I am cited by musicians such as those you name, and to learn that there are others! My "innovative" path has not been easy nor free from pitfalls of all kinds. When one day we see others break through by means of self-discipline and the blossoming of their approach, while you, perhaps, are just beginning, it is rather encouraging and even gratifying and you tell yourself that everything is not dark!

All this happened to me quite simply because it was all around me! I followed the family tradition; my father and his cousins played and I was initiated in this way by the age of 10 or 11. (Sonneurs de) Couple, Bagad, stages in Rosporden or in the Montagne with Birrien, Le Meur, Castel, Le Vallégant and all these sonneurs from the end of the 70s who also allowed me to rub shoulders with the elders still alive at that time.

At the same time, I also received classical piano training from the age of 7. And then, it's true, I heard (bombard player) Jean-Claude Jégat and discovered the vibrant quality of his sound, his sensitivity, and I listened a lot to Bernard Pichard and I said to myself that I was going to work in this direction and develop such a technique.”

“The quality of traditional musicians proves it: it is impossible today to consider the Bombard just a simple, thunderously loud instrument with only approximate intonation. My wish is to show other sounds and the concert reality of this ancient oboe. In this sense, the piano gives its full measure to assist in exploring this potential.”

Q: Let's discuss this technique that you seem to work on with particular focus, and about your challenging repertoire...

“For me the technique is not an end in itself. It is only as good as it is appropriate, fully incorporated in order to be at the service of the music. I am not a bombard technician, in the mechanical sense of the term. A pen is useless if you don't know how to write and without a pen you can't write. I’ve always wanted to show that the bombard has immense potential and depth, and this has been my spelunking period! It was important to me to contradict the definition found in certain dictionaries, which defines the bombard as a "thunderous instrument with only approximate tuning”! I then put on my pilgrim's clothing, which was not always popular in Brittany but found echoes and an audience elsewhere.”

Q: Why are you obviously looking for other roles for the instrument, even while performing in duo with Ronan Robert on the accordion?

“Because why not! The instrument is so rich that the player only needs to offer it new ideas to make it sing, to become music.”

Q: Our ears are accustomed to the sound of a bombard and organ duo (common in Brittany but generally not explored on this website), but isn't there ultimately more finesse, more interesting interaction with a piano?

“When I play with Mathieu Hamon, who is a singer, or with Ronan on the accordion, it's always different. I always come back to the intent of the project. So yes, more finesse perhaps, and more emotion because we are always progressing. It’s a duo that works spontaneously, simply. We have the ideas, we define directions and the choice of repertoire becomes obvious. There are still many openings and the concerts are sometimes different from each other. To return to the piano-organ comparison in Guérande, Hervé Rivière wanted a bombard with a piano and I reminded him that the pieces where people let loose the most in concert are those played fortissimo; we like a bombard that plays with an organ that’s just screaming!"

Q: In your home region around Guérande, you are a trainer, you work with the new generations of musicians. What do you think of these new arrivals?

“Precisely because I am a trainer, I am happy to see a concern for quality within the groups, the bagadou, especially the (sonneur de) couples, and if I see shortcomings it is essentially on the human level. The development of musical quality is all the more remarkable when the individuals remain themselves: natural, simple. Unless they are not, and we are not! Let us never forget that we have the opportunity to present our work to the public on a regular basis thanks to volunteers and enthusiasts. It is all possible because of them as well as those who give you food and sweep the room after the concert.”

Christophe concluded this meeting with a sentence from the poet Jean-Louis Giovannoni - “It is the words of others that give you a body”. In the end, he is perhaps more of a wise man than a dandy, who knows. We also find in this beautiful album a track dedicated to Benny (English composer Benjamin Britten), who deserves it.

bombarde et biniou, Les secrets de la vie de couple , by Ifig Castel, Dastum, 2008

01/12/2024

bombarde et biniou, Les secrets de la vie de couple is a big, hardcover book and enclosed DVD. bombarde et biniou is Brittany’s first method book dedicated to the subtleties of playing in couple format, specifically the bombard and biniou pairing that is a central pillar in the milieu of Breton music.

Inside are tips and secrets for tuning, maintaining, and improving your respective instruments. This work deciphers the different aspects of playing as a couple: refrains, starts, stops, and repertoire. It provides a very rich source of information about the two instruments and the ensemble they traditionally form, including the making and preparation of reeds.

But - you ask - this book is not in English and I don’t read French! That is a good point, as this website is oriented towards the English-speaking reader. The answer is that, while the text and illustrations are still of value to anyone playing these instruments even if your comprehension is poor or non-existent, the secret to this book lies in the mind-blowing DVD that comes with it.

The DVD says “15 Vloaz Moal-Chaplain” but there is a bit of a surprise - there is a second, extra film, a more primitive but very cool film featuring the luthier and musician Jil Lehart. You can see Jil making bombards and binious and hear him play music with his longtime musical partner, Daniel Feon.

The main event is concert footage of a Fest Noz celebrating 15 years of Gildas Moal and René Chaplain (both of whom were amongst the technical consultants for this book) playing music together. This is a ‘who’s who’ of bombard/biniou couples, the mostly regular working people who have been playing this discipline for most if not all of their lives.

This is certainly the most well-done film of bombard and biniou players ever released. Pair after pair of musicians come out and perform a signature piece of music. You can see the fine sheen of sweat on some of the players, see spittle fly, see the tiny details of how they play. The sound is captured as though you are right there - this is an intense piece of musical footage. If you play bombard or biniou, you simply must have this DVD. You will want to watch it repeatedly because it is a resource of the utmost value. There is nothing else like it.

~ Fañch

01/01/2024

NozBreizh: Danses et musiques Bretonnes…

NozBreizh.fr is an incredible, unsung treasure of resources for information and examples of Breton music and dance. Some anonymous person has created, and constantly updates with fanatical zeal, a compendium of Breton recordings new and old, placing them into a database that can be accessed according to tune type, region, and any combination thereof. Other sections of the site provide troves of photos and videos from music and dance scenes, news articles, announcements, scans of news articles about Breton music and dance - you name it. Noz is, obviously, Breton for ‘night’ and is taken from Fest Noz, while Breizh (pronounced much like the English word ‘braise’, by the way) is the indigenous name for Brittany.

So who is this person? All it says is, (in French): Welcome to my website. I am a fan of Breton dances and Breton music (mainly dance music). I hope you will enjoy my site and the music articles (published, marketed or broadcast) & Breton dances that can be found here...

On the front page you will find a rotating slideshow of new releases. Perhaps it moves along a touch too briskly… Nonetheless, you can click on any of the covers and a new tab will open with a JWPlayer list of all the tracks from the album, with the tunes neatly categorized according to dance type, even if they are not categorized on the recording itself! JWPlayer presents 30 second extracts of each track - more than enough to get a sense of the recording as a whole. I cannot count how many times this has saved me from buying a complete dud, or conversely, helped me to uncover an obscure treasure.

Besides presenting the latest and greatest recordings for your listening pleasure, the musical database can be used for research purposes. For example, if you are a musician and composer, and looking to create a Rond De Landéda suite, you could click on ‘Danses’ from the top menu bar and then select ‘Danses (de A à Z)’ from the dropdown menu. Then, select R and scroll down to Rond de Landéda. Click on it, and voila ! A new window will open, with JWPlayer presenting a list of 30-second extracts of countless recorded Rond de Landédas.

There you have it; an astonishingly thorough list of assiduously collected material. Not all of it will be good. In fact, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hurl - yes, there are countless examples of really bad Breton recordings as well. But if you want to get a specific sense of the rhythm, feel, and repertoire of a dance tune type, this is an invaluable resource.

~ Fañch

01/01/2024

Beyond Folklore: The Festival Interceltique de Lorient

We present the treatise Beyond Folklore: The Festival Interceltique de Lorient, which we did not write. It is remarkable and insightful, unlike most writing about this spectacular event.

In the world of Breton music, The Festival Interceltique de Lorient (FIL) is a big deal. It’s actually a big deal by almost any metric. Boasting some 650,000 attendees per year, it is one of the largest international festivals in the world. In looking at the (pretty good) Wikipedia article, and going to the official website, we found a bunch of facts and figures about the Festival but did not find what interested us the most. Which was specifically, a look behind the curtain of the somewhat blithely superficial language that permeates every aspect of analysis having to do with the FIL.

While the anthropologist on staff was pondering writing an in-depth piece seeking to look beyond the platitudes, our lazy asses were spared the effort beyond writing this introduction because we came across Beyond Folklore: The Festival Interceltique de Lorient by Catherine Bertho Lavenir. It’s not for everybody, but that’s fine. It’s long, detailed, and thoughtful. Here, then, is the long, detailed, thoughtful treatise Beyond Folklore: The Festival Interceltique de Lorient, by Catherine Bertho Lavenir, reproduced in its entirety, including notes.

Abstract: Examining some elements from the Festival Interceltique de Lorient (FIL) offers a prism that can bring to light certain traits in the changing processes at work within Brittany’s traditional culture. The festival is held in a modern perspective in so far as it takes up some characteristic aspects from 20th century folk festivals. Other traits link FIL with post-modern recreational celebrations. Among them, asserting local political issues wrapped up in terms of belonging, along with a deliberate inscription in a globalized world, and obvious bonds with the industries of culture and aesthetic forms of show business. The paper shows that FIL is not only the place and time when a traditional culture may be revisited in its shaping and symbolical message, it is a moment when that very culture is being re-negotiated.

Beyond Folklore: The Festival Interceltique de Lorient

by Catherine Bertho Lavenir

In Ethnologie française Volume 42, Issue 4, 2012, pages 719 to 731

Translated from the French by Cadenza Academic Translations

How can we demonstrate the transformational dynamic of traditional Breton culture in its relationship with the most contemporary forms of cultural life? This article will try to describe some of the changes at work by transposing to the field of cultural history a method that is familiar to scientific and technical historians: opening the "black box," to identify the procedures that have governed the development of the object of study, and to discover the influences that are to be found there (Latour 2005). The Festival interceltique de Lorient (Lorient Inter-Celtic Festival) is well suited to this process of deconstruction. Created in 1971, it was always a composite cultural object that brought together different traditions, and various situations within Breton culture (Cabon 2010).

Like other festive occasions such as the Grandes fêtes de Cornouaille in Quimper (1948), now called the Festival de Cornouaille, or the Festival de la Saint-Loup in Guingamp (which has been home to the Kendalc'h federation Breton dancing competition since 1957), the Festival interceltique de Lorient illustrates the trajectory of cultural objects such as pieces of music, dances, and costumes from a peasant culture that was still alive at the beginning of the twentieth century, and which is now part of a performance culture more typical of the twenty-first century. The championship of musical groups, which is held in the town stadium on the last day of the event, aligns the festival with the Breton folk movement heritage as it was reinvented in the 1980s, aesthetically and ideologically. Through the parade of circles and bagadoù (Breton bagpipe orchestras) on the streets of the town that opens the festivities, it is connected to a similar vein of public display of the material elements of the former peasant culture. The inter-Celtic dimension illustrated by the concerts held in various places in the town (pubs or concert halls), as well as the international invitations associated with it, are more similar to contemporary forms of cultural events or live performances (Poirrier 2012). Based on a reconstructed perception of the Celtic space, the festival also, by defending the notion of musical and aesthetic fusion, demonstrates a transformation of the values and representations associated with festivities. The relationships to the past, to identity, to the land, and to the spectator are in some ways typical of the great postmodern events.

To understand the different dimensions of the event, we will first retrace the steps that have led the Breton cultural movement, with its different components, to participate in the festival. We will provide a mediological table in order to schematize the different phases of transformation of the music, dances, and costumes, with regard to their aesthetic characteristics and their social function in Breton and French society in the twentieth century [Editor’s note - table not included]. We will then look at the characteristics inherited from the "folklore" period. Lastly we will identify certain elements that are specific to the globalized postmodern culture of the early twenty-first century, particularly through the notion of "fusion." Focusing on the typical aspects of festive events (occupying public space, constructing a symbolic geography, renegotiating the values associated with organizing them) will allow us to understand the composite nature of a festival that includes some elements inherited from the folk tradition as well as elements that are specific to the economics of contemporary live performance.

A Festival Inherited from a Composite Tradition

The creators of what was (in 1971) called the Festival des Cornemuses (Bagpipes Festival) belonged to the immediate posterity of two kinds of local festivities: the Triomphe de la duchesse Anne d'Armorique (Triumph of Duchess Anne of Armorica), which was held in Lorient for four years from 1953, and the Fête des ports bretons (Festival of Breton Ports), which was established in 1969 by the town festivities committee. The inter-Celtic festival itself, which added the qualifier to its name in 1972, can be seen as the immediate inheritor of several types of cultural activity that are related but different, each with their specific participants and their own aesthetic.

Through many of its formal characteristics, the inter-Celtic festival was initially associated with the tourist and commercial festivities invented in the first half of the twentieth century—the Fête des Filets bleus (Festival of the Blue Fishing Nets) in Concarneau and the Fêtes d'Arvor (Arvor Festival) in Vannes. The program of the Fête des ports bretons in 1969, for example, included elements that were not particularly unique to Breton culture: fireworks over the harbor or the air display (even though the air and naval base of Lann-Bihoué was very close by). The musical selection had a Breton dimension but was not exclusively heritage-based. The singer Alain Barrière, originally from the region, was invited, alongside the orchestra of Europe No. 1 radio station. The inter-Celtic festival was also keen to highlight the town's maritime activities, particularly fishing. There were nocturnal visits to the harbor and, above all, the cotriade, a large communal meal of fish from the local port, which, in the 1980s, reflected new kinds of citizen participation in the life of the town, in the form of communal and festive meals.

There were, however, strong links from the start between this kind of festivity and the Breton cultural movement. In Lorient, the Triomphe de la duchesse Anne d'Armorique, organized with the participation of the local Celtic circle, was based on the model of the many folk festivals that re-emerged in Brittany from the 1950s. It brought together a significant number of bagadoù (Breton orchestras) and Celtic circles in the streets of the town (14 bagadoù, 33 circles). The years after the war were marked by intense activity on the part of the musical groups and the circles. In fact, they often participated in events and parades where they could perform; for example, the Festival de Cornouaille in Quimper, set up in 1923 and recreated in 1948. In 1969, in Lorient, the Fête des ports bretons re-established a direct link with the movements in charge of Breton culture. Its program included all the typical elements of a great tourist folklore event: a national competition of musicians in pairs, a parade of bagadoù and the circles (thirty), and to finish, a "triumph." The parade and the triumph were the chance for the circles to perform in the streets, showing off the beauty of the costumes and the expertise of the dancers.

This festival was the first sign of rapprochement between the authorities of Lorient and the powerful Bodadeg Ar Sonerion (BAS), the Assembly of Breton Musicians, which was a vital organization for the peninsular music movement (Collectif 1996, 404). Created in 1943, this association ensured that Breton music would endure for posterity, by facilitating the transition between the last players said to be "traditional," the organizers of the old rural festivals, and new forms of music. Associated with the musicological movement through collecting, it promoted a more learned approach to the traditional repertoire and undertook the education of young musicians. BAS finally espoused the methods of public presentation of the folk movement, such as public competitions and parades (Morgant and Roignant 2005). When the Festival interceltique de Lorient (which is its full title) finally arrived on the scene, it was in some ways a response to the need that BAS felt to find a new venue for the final of its competition. After a conflict with the town of Brest, the association had to find a new partner and a new venue: this would be Lorient.

The festival's beginnings in the 1970s were marked by a turning point in music that propelled reinvented traditional Breton music onto the international public scene. In its first year, the organizers invited the musician Alan Stivell, whose reputation went beyond the sphere of Breton folk music [1], and even the Irish group, The Dubliners. By doing this, they associated the festival with the contemporary music economy, at a time when international record companies were taking over the production and distribution of new kinds of folk music. Formed in 1962, The Dubliners were a group that, particularly during their United States tours, appeared on stage with a repertoire of traditional Irish ballads and songs. The broadcast of a song called Seven Drunken Nights on the British pirate radio station Radio Caroline in 1967 brought them international renown.

By inviting them, the festival organizers showed their desire not only to give substance to the "Celtic" space, but also not to cut themselves off from the folk movement as promoted by the international record and performance industries. Alan Stivell, the other star guest of the first event, was at a turning point in his career. Having received his musical education at the heart of the Breton revivalist movement, he had already changed record company from a solely Breton one (Mouez Breiz) to Fontana, a subsidiary of the international company Philips. He released Telenn Geltiek in 1966, which offered recordings previously performed for Mouez Breiz to a new audience, thereby clearly affirming his roots in the Celtic space. [2] The record Reflets, with the same company, was extremely successful in France in 1970, and was distributed by Fontana in Great Britain and Canada. [3] The concerts organized in the town also created a link between the festival of Lorient and the festou-noz movement, which was then at its height. The festou-noz were festivals where dancing was not reserved for the specialists of the Celtic circles, and the bands played music that was free from the constraints imposed by the BAS federation and the competitions. [4]

The Metamorphosis of Festivities:

Festivities in Traditional Society

Three different periods can be distinguished. In traditional society, in this case a rural society, festivities were mostly associated with the agricultural calendar and religious festivals (Van Gennep 1991; Fournier 2011). Dances, for example, were linked to practices such as the preparation of the soil in the area to be plowed. Dance music was played by specialized musicians during employers' or parish festivals (the pardons). The costumes constituted a system of signs. They indicated the matrimonial status of the man or woman wearing them, their wealth, and their village of origin. They became more and more magnificent throughout the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, at a time when certain peasant communities were becoming richer and the textile industry was making fabrics available that were previously inaccessible (such as velvet). Dancing was practiced in a way that was typical of communities of old: there was little or no difference between "participants" and spectators, all the members of the community could dance, there was no formal separation of the dancing area, and nor was there any precise moment specified in terms of the times of the dances. They had "afternoon" dances, and dances "before vespers," "until nightfall," or as long as there were enough musicians or singers available, and so on. Although it was continually evolving, this type of festivity persisted in some places in Brittany until the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century (Guilcher 2007).

The "Modern" Folk Festival

New festive modes emerged in the urban and rural world in the twentieth century (Lagéiste 1998). These festivities had the same fundamental elements—music, dance, costumes, and so on—but they belonged to a different set of signifiers. The modern folk event that developed in Brittany and in France during the twentieth century was part of a different, urban and national culture. It was in fact invented in the emigrant cities (by the Bretons in Paris, for example), as well as in the holiday resort towns frequented by the national bourgeoisie (the Fête des Filets Bleus in Concarneau, for instance). Folk performances also became part of national events where the nation was on display, such as the great exhibitions and international exhibitions (Peer 1998).

In Brittany, the great modern folk festivals that were established in the first half of the twentieth century were different than the older festivities in a number of ways. They mainly took place in towns, particularly resort towns. The preferred form was open-air performances with parades through the streets of the town. These events often included the election of queens, and music and dancing competitions. They soon became tourist attractions. In 1905, the singer Théodore Botrel founded the Pardon des Fleurs d'Ajoncs (Parish Festival of the Gorse Flowers) in Pont-Aven (Duflos-Priot 1995); the same year, a group of writers and artists established the Fête des Filets Bleus in Concarneau in order to help fishermen who were suffering from an economic crisis. These major events had certain characteristics of folk festivities, although they could not be reduced solely to this. As with the folk festivities studied by Marie-Thérèse Duflos-Priot, local traditional practices were of course used, while the organizers belonged to a culture that was noticeably different. [5] The Breton festivities were unique in this respect. While in other regions of France, festivities were losing elements of rural culture that were no longer alive (such as costumes no longer worn), in the Breton countryside, the dances and costumes were maintained. It was the displacement of the framework for displaying elements of rural culture that made the festivities modern, while the "personality and the intention of the organizers altered their traditional and popular character" (ibid., 28).

Furthermore, these large festive events were composite from the outset. The Fête des Filets bleus, for example, included elements that were not part of traditional culture. This rendered them more similar to charity fairs: a queen was elected, and there was a funfair and competitions (swimming, with oilskins and hats). The introduction of a queen—something which was itself derived from the tradition of the rosière (a young woman rewarded for virtue), and close in its final form to the "Miss" beauty pageants—was a practice borrowed from other festive models (Segalen 1982; Ribereau-Gayon 2007). In Quimper, the first Fêtes de Cornouaille involved a parade through the town, a music competition, and the election of a queen. The manner of selecting the queen was in fact one of the main difficulties when the festival was re-established in 1948. A procession model was used, which was associated with the promotion of local products, sometimes freshly made. In 1909, in Pont-l'Abbé, the queen of embroiderers and her maids of honor paraded on a chariot as part of a procession. In 1922, the second Fête des Cormorans (Cormorants' Festival) in Saint-Guénolé-Penmarc'h included a (reinvented) Breton wedding, a costume competition, and a lace exhibition. The creation of spectacular events (the reinvented wedding) showed a similar expertise to the Anglo-Canadian pageant from the perspective of "inventing traditions." It was coupled here with the promotion of local products for commercial purposes.

Folk Music Groups and Musicians

These big festive events were the opportunity for amateur folk groups to perform in public, to find out how good they were, and to display a symbolic geography of the region. This was part of a performance mode. From then on, there was a clear distinction between the participants (musicians, dancers, and uniform or costume wearers) who were on show and the spectators, who were confined to the ranks of the audience, and positioned below the platform or on the pavements while the street acted as a stage for the parades. One of the media that communicated this image most effectively was the postcard.

The aesthetic reference shared by the participants in these modern folk events was that of authenticity. The notion must be understood with its contemporary meaning, as the result of a process that is a focus for action. Not all of the organizers of these events attached the same importance to it, and the relationship to authenticity did not play out in the same way everywhere. Overall, musical groups and Celtic circles still constructed their relationships with tradition within a framework strictly set out by the federations that led these activities. The authenticity of the dances, the music, and the costumes was developed through a cultural process controlled by them and implemented during the competitions. The groups were asked to be loyal to an artifact of the past, identified by scholarly research as coming directly from the tradition. Like putting a collection of costumes on display in a museum, musicological research and collecting resulted in collectively accepted cultural references being fixed. The competitions enabled a judgment of the fidelity to the models, as well as the ability to master the learned codes of Breton music; these aspects were validated by a panel of specialists from the world of community organizations (Goré 2004; 2009).

The Postmodern Event and the Festival Form

The Festival de Lorient goes beyond the model of the modern folk festival and presents characteristics that allow it to be identified as postmodern. To begin with, it soon became part of an enlarged symbolic space that included the whole Celtic world, giving it an international dimension. Guests at the 2011 event, dedicated to the diaspora, might have come from New York or Australia. In other years, groups from the Maghreb or Palestine performed. Supported by grants, it is also part of the current live performance industry and has connections with the performance industry: guests have included certain Scottish or Irish groups who are professionals that tour throughout the world. The festival is like a brand, extended into big shows at the Stade de France, Paris-Bercy, or La Villette that are organized according to the current rules of show business. The money involved means this is big business. In 1998, for example, the budget of the Festival de Lorient was 16.5 million francs, self-financed to the tune of 62.5 percent (13.5 million contributed by sponsors and 24 percent from grants). [6]

As for earnings, the figures show how significant they are in the live events industry (100 artistic jobs and 250 production jobs, earning a total of 2.5 million francs in 1998). The festival organizers and the leaders of many of the federations and groups invited are neither amateurs nor activists, but professionals of cultural mediation, who may, in addition, frame their activities within an activist context. Most of the groups are funded by local institutions, and their grants depend partly on the group's capacity to train young people, or meet social and cultural requirements (creating links [Di Méo 2005]).

The place of application for festivities is still the urban space—Lorient is an example of a complete performance—but the festival also exists on and through contemporary media: television and the Web. The television broadcasts images of this summer event, but for a long time this festival had a very limited presence on the main national public or private channels. On the other hand, video and YouTube are the preferred media for conserving and transmitting images of musical and choreographic performances on the Internet. Their main value is visibility, and it is compatible, at this point, with participation in the performance industry: the dances are more spectacular, the choreography adapted, the costumes redesigned with a view to what should be seen and captured.

The Festival de Lorient: A System of Signs

This multiple heritage explains the complexity of the symbolic economy of the festival and its permanent evolution. The source of the transformations lies both in the internal dynamic of the Breton cultural movement (evolving dance and music groups), and in the addition of new aesthetic forms. We will focus here on specific aspects of this question: the use of space, the relationship with tradition, and the ideology of festive events.

The Use and Symbolism of Space

The use of the town space by festive events has an obvious symbolic dimension. The Festival interceltique de Lorient is structured into distinct moments that all relate, on the one hand, to the festive folk heritage that developed in Brittany, and on the other hand, to contemporary considerations in terms of town politics and the creation of social links.

Let us start with the cotriade. This is a communal meal organized outdoors, based on fish soup, which is the dish that fishermen made with the fish that they kept for themselves. The dinner in the port recalls one of the town's former vocations, as an important fishing port between the 1950s and the 1980s, prior to a sharp decline in industry. We can see in this event one of the roles attributed to the festival (by the festival itself, if necessary), which is to create social links and to anchor itself in local society through an event that has nothing particularly Celtic about it. It occurs in a workplace (the port), all the participants are equal, and the activity (the communal meal) is a time for pure conviviality, even if musical accompaniment is included. The model is associated with the conviviality instituted in public spaces by political communications in the 1980s, following the example of meals on the street (Blin 2008). During the celebrations of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, for example, ordinary citizens were invited to organize communal picnics along the meridian line that was measured for the first time by the scientists of the Revolution (Weil 2005). [7] Instituted in Paris in 1999, the Fête des voisins (Neighbors' Festival) also represented a time of conviviality organized for and by fellow citizens. The model seems to be associated, too, with the communal meals organized in the southeast of France by political movements trying to create alternative models for expressing citizenship. [8]

The parade through the streets of the town, called the "grand parade," is a very different moment, when the Festival de Lorient is more directly connected to the folk movement inheritance. More precisely, it borrows one of the most obvious characteristics of this movement, while transforming it: elements of rural culture are displayed in the form of an urban parade. Historical anthropology (Tartakowsky 1997) teaches us that parades in the public space twentieth century France had many political and symbolic dimensions. Military parades, for example, demonstrated that the army was on the side of the republic. Demonstrations gave socialists and other workers' representatives the chance to occupy the public space in a controlled way and to display their symbols (Leménorel 1997; Charle and Roche 2002). They both replaced or were in competition with older forms of ceremonial occupation of the public space, such as religious processions. The republic, which assumed the right to legitimately occupy the urban space through these ceremonies, also granted other social groups the right to do this within a specific legal framework: it was the public authority, represented by the head of the préfecture, who authorized religious processions and determined what their limits would be, and it was he too who allowed carnivals to be held (Fabre 1992).

We could consider the identity affirmation of folk groups in the urban space from this perspective. Reframed in this way, these ostentatious parades would reveal elements of the former rural culture transformed into icons and taken out of their usual context. Contemporaries perceived the political value of this presence in the public space, in the spirit of a protest which had greater or lesser support, from the beginning of the century. They saw in it, at the very least, an affirmation of the existence of Breton culture in a context where the rural world overall, and the Breton rural world in particular, was denied as a vector of culture and aesthetics. "Beauty," in this context, acquired a specific value: it was the affirmation of the capacity of a dominated group (here the peasants of the Breton and Breton-speaking countryside) to dominate an aesthetic. The order of the parade was also significant. In Lorient, the "grand parade" was reorganized each year according to several criteria, including technical ones: the musical ensembles needed to be a certain distance apart, to allow the dancers to hear their accompaniment, and the speed of the progressions needed to be regulated. Other criteria were more symbolic. Both local groups and visitors from afar should be visible; special guests should be highlighted, even if they were not very visible or audible (groups from Palestine or the Maghreb); and the annual theme should be illustrated (Scotland, Ireland, diaspora, and so on).

Folk Groups: A Symbolic Geography

More generally, the parade of the Celtic circles and the bagadoù demonstrated a symbolic geography of the province. Each group affirmed the existence of a small country, and the whole parade confirmed the cohesion of Brittany as a cultural space, structured by its music and dance federations. The Celtic circles and the bagadoù in the parade were not, in fact, autonomous entities who had come together by chance. They had a history and belonged to federations. They were the manifestation of a regulated activity, itself highly symbolic. Marie-Thérèse Duflos-Priot has described the genesis of these folk groups. They formed in Brittany in the 1920s, and at that time were focused as much on language and culture as on dance (Duflos-Priot 1995, 62). [9]

Before 1939, these folk groups could be found in Rennes,… They were structured into federations. In the musical arena, Kenvreuriez ar Vinioueurien (KAV), or the fraternity of bagpipe players, appeared in Paris in 1932. The BAS, whose specific role in Lorient was mentioned above, has existed since 1943, and today gives a solid structure to musical life in Brittany. Since the 1930s, movements like Bleun Breug (Flower of the Heather), Ar Falz (The Sickle) or Ar Leur Nevez (The New Area) have been defenders of Breton language, dance, and song, based on their own aesthetic or ideological choices.

As far as dance is concerned, the Celtic circles were grouped into federations just before 1939. After the war, the Breton movement, which received subsidies from the region and also partly from the state, expanded into small towns and large villages, and was structured to last. The Kendalc'h [Maintain] federation was created in 1950. It brought together Celtic circles and organized dance competitions, as well as conducting critical reflection on folklore and folklorization. In 1994, it federated eighty circles, with 2500 members. The other federation, War'l Leur [On the Ground], at that time included fifty active circles, with 3000 members. The creation of the bagadoù and the increase in the number of circles in some ways created a market of numerous groups with the desire to be present at the large festive events. The program of the Fête des Filets bleus in Concarneau in 1957 had no less than thirty of them. Their roots in a precise location were testament to a close-knit network of the land and the region, and at the same time, a particular conceptualization of the Breton space. The activity of the circles and the bagadoù (often united within one organization) was part of a precisely defined symbolic geography. The music or dance group had to have tunes and dances from its place of origin in its repertoire. Like all federal systems, the federations of Breton bagadoù and dancers clearly told everyone who they were and where they were from. Sports historians have shown that the pyramidal organization of competitions structures both time—the competitions take place on set days—and space: the championship is organized within the parameters of belonging, designating rivals and adversaries, and building an imaginary competitive framework.

The competitions that were regulated and organized by the federations also allowed their members to consider the wider framework in which they were rooted, and to designate who was on the inside and who was on the outside of a controlled symbolic space. In Brittany, the existence of several categories, from the first to the fifth, in dance as well as music, also provided a hierarchy of expertise. It covered a cultural and economic geography. The less expert bagadoù and dance circles were often from places with limited possibilities for recruitment. The most accomplished were those from important towns in the Breton tradition such as Quimper and Quimperlé. However, the cultural parameters were in subtle tension with these expected hierarchies. Auray possessed one of the great bagadoù because it was one of the first to be created, and it was able to recruit some exceptionally talented musicians. Modest towns in the Breton département of Finistère occupied a more important place because they took advantage of the intense effort in musical education that had been made for years by the Finistère general council. Brest, Rennes, and even Nantes had access to the resources of university towns. The cultural geography of Brittany was therefore on display at the final of the bagadoù championship in the Moustoir stadium, with a solid structure that was also eminently changeable.

The grand parade also displayed a symbolic geography of the region. A dialectic was established: dance or musicological research identified local forms. Musical groups would learn them, perform them, and transmit them. By doing this, they conferred a real and material existence on the cultural geography reinvented by musicographers, and associated it with a new popular culture. The same phenomenon affected costumes. The federation rules had been strict for a long time. Groups had to wear the dress of the village they were from. One consequence of this requirement was to exclude the circles of emigrant cities (Paris, the Parisian suburbs, Le Havre) from the competition until the 1980s; these circles were founded by emigrants from different parts of Brittany, and so did not have a local costume or traditions. Although the rules became less strict, dance groups still had a specialized repertoire to perform for the competitions. Broader identity references were therefore negotiated in the margins, in the work on costumes and choreography that diversified the references: urban costumes, trade costumes, and twentieth century costumes began to be worn alongside costumes with classic peasant designs (Defrance 2000).

Relationship with Tradition

The geographically fixed practices of the bagadoù or the circles which assigned specialties to each group (dance types such as plinn, gavotte, ronde, and so on) soon came up against the creativity and desires of the dancers. In the 1990s, there was intense self-reflection within the movement, which led to the conclusion that the relationship with tradition needed to be reconsidered. It should not be the permanent repetition of an original version which had been fixed once and for all, but should be reimagined in terms of fidelity within inventiveness, leading to the question of limits. How far could you go to renew the tradition without destroying it? There is of course no a priori response to this question. It is the practice of the competitions and judging panels that defines the permanently movable frontier between what is and what is not "traditional," and it is the practice of festival planning that determines the aesthetic and ideological limits of Celtic identity. With regard to dance, more and more Celtic circles in Lorient, particularly during the grand parade, were transforming the rules of the federations and the choices of the groups. Full place was now given to the history of the working classes in urban Brittany. The Vertou Celtic circle was also testament to reflection on the authenticity of the costumes and the place of urban models of the early twentieth century. [10] Other circles diversified their costumes. The Chateaulin circle showed its understanding of tradition on its website: a link to a specific place or terroir, scholarly research, and differentiation of garments according to when they were worn. In the last few years, almost all of the circles have redesigned their costumes and displayed different images of their past on the streets of the towns.

Moreover, the festival offers the dancers the possibility to perform not just in the parade, but as part of the onstage show. The analysis of videos recorded on site reveal two phenomena. We know that the form of the parade, for example, has led to the adoption of a much more suitable bagpipe. The circles had to invent a performative way of moving along that would entertain the spectators: dancing in a line and not in a round, or running at times. In Lorient, in 2008, a space was reserved right in front of the television cameras: groups could do a very short performance before continuing in the parade. It was on the stage, however, that the clearest transformation could be seen. The choreography developed by professionals was a more or less free association of the basic elements of a repertoire. They took the audience into account, and the need to show the costumes "with all their designs." Moreover, the competitions encouraged the groups to emphasize the most spectacular aspects of the dances, leaps, and lifts in particular.

Fusion Music?

Lorient, a place where all perspectives converge, is also a kind of melting pot for negotiating the introduction of new elements that remold the relationship with traditional music. The final of the bagadoù championship at the Moustoir stadium raises questions about the renewal of styles and musical fusion through performance. Within the strict framework of the rules that require the alternation of compulsory passages with freer sections, the big bagadoù now offer veritable suites that are the like the work of a refined orchestra. The rules of the final allow instruments that are foreign to the tradition to be added under strict conditions: their appearance is timed by the minute. Each big bagad competing for the title must, in fact, find a compromise between tradition and innovation.

The transition toward another conception of Breton music is not only taking place within the framework imposed by the competition, however prestigious it may be. The performances given during the festival, as well as tours, offer musicians the freedom to explore further. The "carnets de voyage du bagad de Saint-Nazaire" (travel journals of the Saint-Nazaire music group) demonstrates the movable nature of this frontier: "The musicians went off to Morocco, to meet the Gnawas, the percussionists and the Berber singers of the festival of Agadir." An astonishing fusion with repercussions for the finale of the bagadoù in Lorient: "The day before, in the performance, they were uncontrollable. For the competition, we almost had to gag them to get them to stay within the rules" (Cultures bretonnes, special edition 2012). The notion of meeting developed, and musicians from very different cultural backgrounds brought their music together. However, liberty does not mean license. The organizers of the festival prioritized locations where traditional music existed and where musicians played in non-tempered scales. The other frontier is the association of traditional and contemporary music. While the musicians of the great bagadoù have a predilection for jazz, younger and less well-known groups are part of a so-called modern music aesthetic. So in 2011 in Lorient, Krismenn, who was in concert at the Dome (a temporary structure where a number of festival events are held), performed a Breton song accompanied by electro rap. [11]

We will not discuss the structure of the festival any further, for its abundant program defies exhaustive description. What should be clear, however, is how the performances—which explore highly diverse methods for representing traditional Breton culture in terms of their content, their form, and their relationship to the audience—relate to one another within a delineated urban space. In this respect, it seems clear that a festival like the Festival interceltique de Lorient is not only a place to see what traditional culture is becoming; it is also the space where contemporary forms are negotiated. The symbolic work carried out, in its most obvious function, is part of a process of transmission. However, "transmission" is a portmanteau expression that should not be conducive to sparing any analysis of changes due to the process. The transmission of Breton culture is coupled with changes to the social context in which the practice of it takes place. It went from being part of the old rural society in the twentieth century, to being part of the neo-rural world and the modern town. At the same time, practices linked to the calendar of traditional social gatherings were reconfigured into structures for training young people before being included in the framework of contemporary festive events, with their political and symbolic dimensions. Each of these changes has altered musical and choreographical practices in their form and their content. As we have seen, the Festival interceltique de Lorient retains traces of these changes, which are like geological layers.

The festival has, moreover, a dimension of social organization. It occupies a privileged role in the life of the Breton cultural movement. In particular, we have seen how the competition (set up by the federations, BAS in this case), which culminates at Lorient, produces a kind of cultural geography of Brittany that determines how the land is delineated and organizes its symbolic production. Repeating the competitions and maintaining a memory of their results constructs a history shared by the groups and communicated to their audiences. The competition, with its performance role, also organizes the activity of the musical groups, who prepare specific sections for each stage of the competition. It offers a kind of social control over the content of what is called traditional music, as decisions made by judging panels are publicly discussed in specialized magazines and, beyond that, by the audience of fans.

Festivals are also a chance to display elements of Breton culture in the national media, particularly through the broadcast of televised images. We note the poor and stereotyped nature of the input frameworks provided by commentators on national channels. The precise and informed words of professionals of the Breton movement, who are invited to comment on the images, are frequently interrupted and their subjects trivialized in order to meet what television professionals think are the expectations of the national audience.

Finally, the festival provides a perspective for analyzing the aesthetic transformations brought about by globalization of the economics of performance. The notion of fusion, with all its ideological connotations, allows for renewal of the Celtic framework, which is itself reimagined within a wider geographical area. It allows participants in the Breton cultural movement to escape from the narrow frames in which they risked remaining enclosed. As a result, they have access, both politically and ideologically, to the support offered to current music.

Other festivities could be analyzed using the same approach, for example the Fêtes de Cornouaille in Quimper, which has a long historical perspective, or the Festival de la Saint-Loup in Guingamp, which offers a vantage point over changes to the Celtic circles and the Kendalc'h federation, or even, in another geographical area, the Fêtes de la Vielle at Anost in the Morvan, which the organizers consider to be part of the Celtic world. There are many cultural objects whose deconstruction would reveal the functioning behind this lively cultural movement.

Notes

[1] Developed by classically trained musicians, the "Celtic" music heritage, as illustrated by Alan Stivell, is based on traditional rural music; it assumes a wide knowledge of Welsh, Irish, and Scottish traditions; and includes influences from pop, rock, and other contemporary trends.

[2] A modern critic (2012) has said of the 1966 Telenn Geltiek: "The themes chosen were from a repertoire that was Breton ("Kloareg Tremelo," "Kouskit Buan ma Bihan!," "Mona"), Scottish ("Bonnie Banks O’ Loch Lomond," "Tir-Nan-Og," with a little detour via the Hebrides for "Na Reubairean" among others), and Irish ("Plijadur ha Displijadur," "Una Bhan"). Others were of a more mixed or uncertain origin. Thus, on the subject of The Wearin’ of the Green, Stivell stated, "the tune is of Scottish origin, but the spirit comes from Ireland."

[3] Alan Stivell was first produced by Mouez Breiz, a small Breton record company with whom he released an extended play record of "Gaelic" music in 1959. From 1961, his music was produced by the international label Fontana Records, which started out as a subsidiary of Philips Records. In 1970, the long play (LP) record Reflets was highly successful. It was released in 1973 in the United Kingdom (UK), and then in Canada by Polydor. In 1971, Renaissance de la harpe celtique was released in West Germany, the UK, and in Canada by Polydor. This was followed by a series of records with Fontana including an LP of the Olympia concert in 1972.

[4] "La Genèse de ‘Musique Bretonne,’" Musique Bretonne 200 (2007): accessed March 1, 2012, http://www.breizh.de/literatur/musique_bretonne-1.htm.

[5] Théodore Botrel, who founded the Fête des Fleurs d’Ajoncs, was neither from Cornouaille nor of rural origin, and had a career in Paris as a regional singer. He made the Fête des Fleurs d’Ajoncs the "summer attraction of Brittany."

[6] “[webpage title?],” accessed March 1, 2012, http://sylvain.rouault.free.fr/html/dea/dea43.htm.

[7] Weil refers to the subject of the "incroyable Pique-Nique" (incredible picnic) on the green meridian, organized in 2000 and designed by the architect Paul Chemetov.

[8] The difficulties encountered the last time the dinner was held (the service times were too long and many of the guests left) was perhaps a sign of the end of this model of citizen conviviality.

[9] Before 1939, these folk groups could be found in Rennes, Nantes, Saint-Brieuc, and Lorient, but also in smaller places such as Pont-Aven, Pontivy, Quimperlé, and Rosporden. The Catholic association Bleun Brug (Flower of the Heather) was founded in 1905, which was the origin, in part, of the scouts in Brittany and one of the oldest bagadoù. The association of secular teachers, Ar Falz (The Sickle) was created in 1933.

[10] “Cercle Celtique de Vertou,”accessed March 1, 2012, http://cercleceltiquevertou.free.fr/TerroirCostum.php.

[11] “chartsinfrance.net,” accessed March 1, 2012, http://www.chartsinfrance.net/Festival-Interceltique-de-Lorient/Krismenn-au-festival-interceltique-de-Lorient-2011-clip-ytyQSQNVVLEQI.html.

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