Jean-Jacques Castèret, Multipart singing in Gascon Pyrenees: Tradition, evolution, resilience.
Paris, L’Harmattan, Anthopologies et musique, 2012, 367 p.
ISBN : 978-2-336-00821-9, 37,50 €
In Pyrenean Gascony, multipart singing is something general for both Sunday masses, patronal festivities or festive gathering. It is, however, long remained in the blind spot of ethnomusicological research as cultural action.
After fifteen years of research, this book invites to discover a social practice that draws a very classical and post-modern field.
From pub to pub, feast to festival, closer to the singers, this research focuses on understanding the musical and human springs of multipart singing, the meaning of this work in progress that say by turns the Pyrenean communities mood, individual and collective aspiration to a form of absolute.
The author explores beyond the history of this very resilient practice: the process of transmission in the last fifty years in the context of mutation of the traditional society. The contemporary history of a generational shift. A centuries-old history crossing in the nineteenth century the construction of the rom
Between musicology and ethnomusicology, anthropology and history, Jean-Jacques Castéret revisits in this book the notions of oral and written, profane and religious, popular and scholarly, revealing the Pyrenean part of a very extensive European archipelago where church faux-bourdon, fallen into history oblivion, and secular multipart singing are combined for more than five centuries.antic Pyrenean imaginary and the emergence of early mechanisms of patrimonialization.
Dr. Jean-Jacques Castéret is ethnomusicologist, PhD. of the Université Bordeaux 3 – Lacito du C.N.R.S. Head of the Culture & Society pole of the Institut Occitan d’Aquitaine, he develops public programs of sound archives valorization (www.sondaqui.com) and safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Associate researcher of the Laboratoire ITEM de l’Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, member of the Research Centre for European Multipart music (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien), of the multipart group of the International Council for Traditional Music, of the Société Française d’Ethnomusicologie and administrator of the CIRIEF.
