Passadoc Gazette - No 116

The weekly 116

The music from home...

If you want to know a people, you have to listen to their music.*.

A poet – a little crazy perhaps – claims that the most beautiful of Occitan music is that of the mistral when he blows loudly and makes the pines of the hills sing, the plane trees of the cities and the olive trees of the fields...
More seriously – perhaps less beautifully – the wise one claims that Occitane music is above all the mixed song of galloubet and tambourine.

« Galoubet, the tambourine at b flat« As Frederic Mistral calls it!

Galoubet and not fife! If both are part of the wind instruments, the first is recorder, the second is flute. As for the drummer, it is of course a percussion instrument.

The galloubet plays the melody, the tambourine, touched by the massette, makes the rhythm and the tambourine plays one and the other at the same time.

This couple of instruments dominated until the 16th century, and then disappeared when a new instrument appeared: the violin! It is necessary to wait two centuries for the duo to return to its place – it is said... – in Paris society and its taste for rustic, rural life.

– When are we listening to our tambourine?

Patience Hey! Here he is... He plays and tells everything on this page...

* Plato

Jeanne Monin
Research carried out at various sites.

Do you recognize these musicians singing in front of the Provencal flag?

So... you found it?

On the left, the late Péire Pascal, the original alpine bass, whose beautiful songs still run in our holidays.

On the right, Paco Ibanez, an international star, who had volunteered to sing in Roquebrune on the occasion of the creation of the association "Region Provence".

Paco and Péire were friends. Paco sings songs from Brassens in Spanish translated by Péire.

André Abbe

Paco and Georges...

The Echoes of the Week
A getaway...
Egg
Kilimanjaro glaciers
An exhibition...
Participate in « The Gazette » Hey!
The Library of Passadoc

A getaway...

I just saw you on TV. « The Great Escape« in French « The Great Escape« .

Escape, for escape... the English word comes straight from the language of the word « escapar » and name « escapada » which the French language has also adopted (« getaway » rather applies to lovers and « escaped » to cyclist riders, but I am moving away from the subject).

There are other words that have moved from the language of Oc to English without entering French. The best known is « remembrance »in French « memory », from « remembrança » Occitan.

These loans date back to the time when Richard Lion's Heart was both king of England and great lord of Aquitaine and Poitou.

Let us remember that the vocabulary of English comes for a good part from French. The name of London's most chic avenue, Pall Mall, comes from the old French straw-maille that was a kind of croquet game. Pall Mall was once a playground for English aristocracy.

Follow me on the carriage that faced traffic on Pall Mall in 1997 on a Sunday morning!

André Abbe

Michel Teychenné
– ...it's not a carriage, it's a coupe!

The carriage is a four-wheeled horse car with a bellows hood at the rear and an elevated seat at the front.

Egg

One of the first posters of the egg festival in Tourtour designed by Bernard Buffet!

Thank you Marie-Jo Guiol for sending it.

The idea of this party would have come from a Tourtouran.

2023: it will be the 30th Egg Party!

Kilimanjaro glaciers

Our world evolves at high speed, everything moves, everything changes, to the top of Kilimanjaro where glaciers have disappeared. In 1984, when I went the cast iron started...

In France, the sea level rises by 3 mm a year but it is too little for us to see. Fortunately, we have constants reassuring for those who want everything to stay as before.

In 1950, our elders were desperately turning the phone crank to try to get the operator, sometimes for hours!
In 2020, I waited for almost two months for Free to re-establish the internet, the phone and the TV channel mix.
A Free night came back without hurry, like Zorro (which came to him in the song of Henri Salvador!). I was surprised to be happy. My dependence on the telephone and the internet had become addicted.

During confinement, the phone was even more useful and one of its "skype" avatars allowed us to see the inaccessible family on its screen.

My parents didn't want the phone to be bothered, the eldest of my granddaughters already has her own...

It seems that phones and computers consume a lot of energy and that it speeds up global warming... and that's why there's no glacier at the top of Kilimanjaro.

André Abbe

Christophe Malherbe

– Amunsdsen... young

Thanks Christophe for that smile!