2023-12-29 18:59:19
In 1929, the poetess, composer and folklorist Palmira Jaquetti (1895-1963) he spent two stays at l’Escala, commissioned by theWork of the Popular Songwriter of Catalonia, to collect the popular musical heritage. So he interviewed, above all, fishermen’s and farmers’ wives, about fifteen, who passed on the songs they treasured. Of men he chose only three. The musician Ramon Manent explains that the researchers they censured the men because they “sang more satirical and greener songs in the tavern”, while the women provided a more poetic image of the country. Nevertheless, the women also self-censored, in this case, “out of shame”. In spite of such prudence, some of those doomed songs, as A Catalan road they have reached us, in this case orally.
Palmira Jaquetti gathered more than two hundred songs. Three years earlier, the also folklorist of the Work, Antoni Gallardo, gathered seventy-nine of them – some were variants – of Caterina Albert’s mother and sister. All of them now revive a The Songstress of the Scale by Ramon Manent, a book that was supposed to be presented this Thursday, December 21st, but which had to be postponed due to illness until January 19th. The book will also be accompanied by an exhibition at the Anchovy and Salt Museum. One of the particularities, apart from opening the museum’s “Ethnology and Oral History” collection, is that it reproduces the reports that Jaquetti made of the stay. Ramon Manent has transcribed them and made them comprehensible because in the original, “a difficult to read, but very beautiful manuscript”, he narrates day-to-day details. Too “psychological profiles of female singerswhat character and what attitude they had, if they sang to their heart’s content, very human things.”
This book, with a foreword by the musicologist Jaume Aiats, who has also done advisory work and will attend the presentation, bears witness to a time when “everywhere everyone sang a lot and knew many songs; everyone had time to share them.” The main source at l’Escala was Maria Artigues who sang about sixty. Some of these are still heard in the village thanks to workshops run by Manent himself: “I do them to my heart’s content because I have the feeling of continuity with the Songwriter’s Work”. He recalls the selflessness of those men and women who traveled the country looking for songs: “They did it for the love of music”he says, a sentiment he shares.
The history of the Popular Songwriter is epic, since the thousands of files with songs that were made were hidden, due to the Spanish Civil War, in a monastery in Switzerland. The family of Rafael Patxot, the patron who promoted the Work, returned this heritage to Catalonia in the 1990s by depositing it in the Abbey of Montserrat where Father Josep Massot made a first inventory and published some materials. Currently, everything is preserved in the Fonoteca de la Generalitat where Manent has had access to Palmira Jaquetti’s manuscripts.
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