Missing a beat

I've been missing music, terribly. Alex brought an iPod with him, but I'm not an iPod person. I've tried, but I want music to come towards me in waves, not bore directly into my brain.  In Sydney, where invasive commercial music is like a weed infestation in the city's public and private spaces, I find myself more and more choosing not to listen to background music. I treasure the silence of home.  But at Port Napoleon, where we have no musical options at all bar French television and the high-pitched noise of the wind, I find myself longing for sweet sounds, rich sounds, moody and upbeat sounds.

Quiet as a library in our apartment 

Yesterday was a good day for music. We drove across the Camargue to St Maries de la Mer in search of bulls and horses and we found both - not in action in the ring or on the streets, as I'd hoped, but close enough and very much in the flesh. Here they are.

Poster for the weekend's sport

But as bonus we walked into a square behind the town's austere stone church and found Spanish flamenco musicians and a dancer were performing for the patrons of restaurants and lunch places.  I was entranced. She wasn't a classical Spanish beauty, but her arms moved like fish through water, and Spanish song is unlike any other. It breaks into your heart as easily and quickly in a crowd of midday tourists as under a moon at midnight.

From St Maries, we drove back across the marshy plains towards home, and stopped in at the Chateau d'Avignon. Again we got lucky, arriving at the state-owned former hunting lodge (below) in good time for a concert of traditional Languedoc hillbilly music, brought to us courtesy of Les Suds festival in Arles which I mentioned in the previous post.

The musicians, from a place called Black Mountain about 30 km north of Carcassonne, were  playing the bodega, a bizarre-looking piped instrument with the bag made out of the hide of goat, legs and all. It sounds very like the bagpipes, but more sonorous - a deeper, more mysterious pipe. The leader of the band, Sophie Jacques, held her bag in front of her, like a baby in a sling, while the boys each tucked their goat under one arm.

The music was for mostly made dancing, like Irish jigs. We were sitting outdoors, under large plane trees, behind the chateau which in the late 19th century had been ostentiously renovated by a very wealthy Marseille wine merchant called Noilly Prat. A couple of women kicked up their heels at the back of the crowd, Sophie (credited with rescuing the bodega from obscurity) told legends of the Black Mountain, Alex focused on the lovely eyebrows of the woman behind the camera, drums and brass and concertina added a touch of the Marseille waterfront and we all clapped and tapped our feet.

Inside the Chateau d'Avignon was one of the most wonderous and whimsical art exhibitions I've ever seen - mostly sculpture which riffed on the theme of humans and animals (think hunting lodge). If I could have whisked my sculptor daughter across the world on a magic carpet to enjoy its ingenuity with me I would have, because there's no other way for her to see these fabulous creations but to be here. There's no catalogue (yet), and Alex was nabbed for taking pictures, and forced to delete them under the don't-mess-with-me eye of chateau security. Perhaps you can make out an intricate paper cut-out of a dress stuck to the first floor window above where the concert was taking place in the the chateau's shaded but still glowing northern side. That's just a whisper of what's inside.

Last Sunday, before the mistral blew in and when the late evenings were still and warm and the mosquitoes rife, we took ourselves off to another outdoor concert, this time in our nearest town, Port St Louis du Rhone (sample architecture below). A European youth orchestra, with a Belgian conductor, took on the bugs and the local petrol heads to play a programme of Beethoven's 5th piano concerto (with a perfunctory Florentine soloist who wiped the keyboard and his head periodically for sweat or bugs, or both), a short Mendelssohn overture and a robust Rimski-Korsakov piece, supposedly Spanish in flavour, but definitely an anti-dote to the Germans. We forgot to bring the camera, which is a pity because le tout Port St Louis was out that night, with local pollies kissing and hand-shaking row by row - bypassing us, the obvious strangers.

Then there were the Indians. They played Port St Louis on the eve of 14 July, a huge night in any French town.  I don't know what you'd call their style - breezy brassy jazz mixed with carnival, possibly. It was jolly, and loud, and it went down well with the mussels and frites brigade, the beer, the aperifs and the barbecued fish. How the Jaipur Jazz band came to be invited to this scruffy seaport, marine industry and fishing town is anyone's guess. But the cultural programmers in Provence are a busy and imaginative lot. If we can find this much live music with so little effort in a week in a region which is far from fashionable, then bravo them. All of it was free too.