Sundown on Christmas Day, about 5pm. Why is it so green? That's winter wheat, which is planted in autumn in this climate. It will be harvested some time in very late spring. The first real stirrings of spring occur in February. About the middle of that month, we'll see blossoms on the almond trees—the ones that are left. Almost all of the almonds in this region and further north were eliminated in time. It used to be a significant crop. Still, the tender white blossoms of these trees are a reliable harbinger of spring. Way in the distance, on the left of the horizon, is Mont Ste. Michel, near Aix-en-Provence.
It’s clear enough that on Christmas morning, the inmates take over.
At least this is so on RadioFrance, France Musique, the classical music station throughout the country. It’s as if some ur public radio station had been decimated some time in the past, and the parts parceled out to different portions of the FM dial. FranceCulture features talk about the obvious. FranceInter, more of the same, with a thin line separating these two programming groups to this impaired francophone. Then there’s FranceInfo, and God knows what that is—though it seems to be news, weather and financial matters. FranceBleu is for the hoi polloi, interpolating nondescript French pop music with call-in shows that are localized so listeners can banter with the host and then offer something to sell, the asking price, and their phone number. It's wildly popular.
France Musique is a throw-back, in this analogy, to the days of Boston FM radio of the 60s, which offered at least three professional FM stations playing classical music (and a modicum of jazz) around the clock: on the public station WGBH, and two commercial stations, the still extant CRB, and the now defunct outlet in the city of a fledgling network of concert music (with outlets as well in Hartford and Providence, and others planned before they all went bust—BCN [Boston Concert Network] is now, of course, a mélange of shock jock radio (and the station for Howard Stern before he was forced to decamp to the terrestrial orbit of satellite radio), New England Patriot game broadcasts, and the same old combination of fringe and golden oldie rock music.
The French are distinguished, of course, for their love of talk, and I recall listening to RadioFrance FranceMusique (RFFM) during my earliest sojourns, when the broadcast style featured two solemn Frenchmen (sometimes one was a woman, usually with an alto voice—one imagined it thickened by chain smoking Gauloises, sometimes stuck in the corner of their mouths to free their hands to flip the vinyl on the turntable) offering interminable, punctilious and exacting exegetical discussion that ran at least 20 minutes straight at a time concerning the four bars of one movement of a chamber music piece they had just played. I’d guess the ratio of talk to music was about 10:1. As a sop, towards the end of the hour, they’d play almost all of a single movement, and not necessarily the same one under consideration, that is, until they ran out of time, because at the hour the composer and the discussants changed. Their forte was to compare the same four bars as played by six or eight different groups of musicians, deconstructing the minutiae of interpretation, bowing (let’s say, if it was a string piece), or embouchure (for brass), the health of the lead musician at the time of the recording, etc.
I remember bellowing at the radio in the tiny four-banger rental cars I used to rent in those days—usually Fords, in models not available in the U.S., no doubt because too small, too under-equipped, except under the hood, and too much of a tendency to turn the occupants into mixed organ meats should you encounter a larger vehicle at highway speed. “Shut the fuck up and play the music!” But they would babble on, oblivious. I imagined my French fréres bellowing the same, only in French, those who were not the superannuated listening audience they targeted when first deploying the station—dowagers and Sorbonne graduates of the 30s, musicologists, and the fabled “French intellectuals” who are always depicted packed cheek-by-jowl, barely able to bend an elbow to lift their espresso cups, at the famous Café Flore [headquarters for Jean-Paul Sartre in his heyday, and, of course, his distaff combination confrère and lover, Simone de Beauvoir] or the gathering place of impecunious ex-pat American writers in the 20s and 30s, Les Deux Magots, now the enclave of American tourists still looking for Jean-Paul Sartre, who has been dead for over a quarter-century.
Sometime in the ensuing dozen or so years, FranceMusique underwent a transformation, as if they finally heard my screaming. Either that, or the program managers of the earlier years had been put out to pasture (it is a state radio system; I assume a mandatory retirement age). Whatever the cause, though there’s still a lot of blabbing, they talk less and play more music. And the detailed, agonizing explications note-by-note have given way to more expansive, philosophical, dare I say, subjective, opining. When there are two people talking, inevitably it is one of the limitless or, at least, massive staff of regulars conversing with a foreign artist or composer.
It was while listening to these interviews that I realized that even as much as I only really followed the gist for the first three weeks of a typically three and-a-half-week visit (“just when I think I am getting the French, they pull me back to the ‘States”) what I can do, definitively, is tell when a foreign speaker is palavering in French. Americans are particularly easy to spot, even if they are otherwise fluent, even glib, with expansive vocabularies, and the accent just one second of arc away from the longitude and latitude of the Eiffel Tower. Nothing sticks out in Provence like a Parisian accent, and since all I hear wherever I go out into the ‘hood is the twang of the hicks of the South of France (even those well educated assimilate it—kind of like Connecticut Yankees who settle down in West Texas), the nuances become more and more obvious. Well, it’s a start, overall, to gaining the grail of fluency. Already I am sometimes mistaken for a Belgian or a Dutchman, especially when I don’t make some boobish mistake in grammar or use the wrong word or the wrong gendered definite article, which occurs about every third sentence. Hence, for this, at least, I am grateful to France Musique. Well, grateful for that, and for finally playing a whole symphony all the way through once they shut up. It's only taken 19 years.
They play all kinds of music, manifesting the usual French eclecticism: from Cathy Berberian screeching avant-garde music of the 60s, to Buxtehude. There’s heavy emphasis on late Classical and Romantic chamber works, especially for small string ensembles. They also like Baroque choral stuff, and are mad, currently at least, for almost any choral music sung in German, which always leaves me bemused, given that not a month or so goes by that I do not learn another epithet/slur—usually derivative of World War II slang— for our neighbors to the east, the mildest of which is “boche” meaning “rascal,” apparently, in French, though this innocuous English term belies the degree to which the Germans still detest the word. In any event, détente has made it all quiet on the Western front, at least in the worlds of music and politics.
During the week, RFFM plays an hour of jazz, though the broadcast hour seems to slip about every third visit we make. Usually it occurs during cocktail hour. The announcer is a soft-spoken middle-aged bloke, the unmistakable vocal döppelganger of the host, Ray Smith, of a show called “The Jazz Decades,” which has been on the NPR outlet in Boston, WGBH, for over 30 years. Smith specializes in the earliest jazz recordings starting from the invention of the phonograph through the very early 40s. The French host has a similar penchant, and a real jones for Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, not to mention Louis Armstrong. Even when he does not play their music, per se, he has a habit of saying in an incantatory way, as a cut is ending, “Lady Day...,” with an unmistakable French accent (the “Day” is almost “Deey”), as if invoking the presiding spirit who is, no doubt, floating above the CD player.
It’s not nearly enough respite from the unremitting classical music, but there is the occasional and seemingly random bit. They play a chunk of soundtrack from an old movie—an old French movie—and it is instantly recognizable as one of the Jean Renoir classics. Perhaps the height of the party scene from Les Regles de Jeu, with characteristic music, which is perhaps the point, and which makes it instantly recognizable, for mood, for tone, for febrile Gallic esprit... Then they, the announcers, go off on a riff that somehow has to do with movie music. Last night, there was a fiesta of serious pieces, plus excerpts from scores, by Franz Waxman (responsible among other scores, for orchestrating the score to Fritz Lang’s “The Blue Angel,” before he left for Hollywood in 1935, where he immediately wrote the music for “The Bride of Frankenstein”—from Weimar to weird in just five years; he also wrote the scores, just as a sampling, to “The Philadelphia Story,” “Suspicion,” “Sunset Boulevard,” and “Mister Roberts”). Try catching two hours straight of his music on any American station.
Last night—Christmas Eve—saw three hours of an homage to Josef Krips, one of the great conductors of the 20th century: one of a handful who fled Austria (after the Anschluss) or Nazi Germany, either out of conscience, or circumcision, or both. Krips did wonderful interpretations of Beethoven, and last night they played, from RadioFrance tapes of live performances, a great 7th symphony, and a transcendent 9th (see? more German choral blasts).
But this morning! This morning something was afoot. I turned on the radio early, and clearly the bosses were sleeping in, the wardens were on furlough, the keepers had left the grounds, whatever, because the loonies were in charge.
Scads of tuneful takes of bebop interpretations of Christmas music, or the same by the precursors to Frank Zappa. That went on for a couple of hours, and then at 9am a couple of mirthful French zanies, some guy and a very young woman with a very high pitched voice and exclamation points in her speech (who sang the chorus once in awhile for any particularly swinging cut) played some special music for Christmas morning.
The show, for what it’s worth, was called “A Christmas Tree: Crooners and other Wreaths...” with everything from a very young Johnny Mathis (and once again, from the lips of a Frenchman, I heard for the first time the legal name of an American icon: John Royce Mathis) doing “Winter Wonderland,” to Nat King Cole crooning, indeed, a song I’d never heard before from anyone, called “The Shadows” (a ballad, scored by Nelson Riddle, and recorded in 1956 along with an album’s worth of other tunes—never released until 2001, and then, on a CD, called “Night Lights,” though the announcer gave the impression it was called “The Lost Album;” only the French could be up on such arcana) to a very swinging Mel Tormé, doing “Happy Together,” the 60s hit from the bubblegum rock band, The Turtles (and not a mention of his now lugubrious nickname, "The Velvet Fog"). The entire list of songs and singers was actually weirder than that, but delightful, not least of all because it was the antithesis of what one would expect from a French national classical radio station. Also, only every third song or so had anything to do with Christmas or winter. Inapposite as anything could be from the solemnized, earnest analysis that is the bedrock of this cultural manifestation of all that is French.
One should never forget that France produced Francois Truffaut, René Clement, and Alain Resnais. But before each of these, before Camus and Sartre, was René Clair, who makes the Marx Brothers look like a Wall Street law firm.
Postscript [26 December 2006]
As I'm determined on this blog to act like a blogger, as opposed to a journalist, the principle determining accuracy is cousin to the philosophy: never ask permission as you can always ask forgiveness.
In short, I check on the aim of my prescience, in which I have much confidence (too much if you ask some people) after the fact.
And it turns out, indeed, that France Musique has a new policy for the early morning hour, 9-10am, formerly titled Matin des Musiciens. Here it is, formally spelled out, from their Web site:
Au bonheur des gammes
du lundi au vendredi - 9h - 10h
Conçu comme un nouveau « Matin des Musiciens » qui avait marqué toute une génération d'auditeurs, « Au Bonheur des Gammes » décline chaque semaine un thème différent, présenté par un amoureux du genre, l'occasion pour France Musique d'inviter de nombreuses personnalités extérieures à la chaîne, musiciens, écrivains ou journalistes. Dans le kaléidoscope de la nouvelle saison, « Au Bonheur des Gammes » célèbrera aussi bien des anniversaires (« Mozart et le cinéma » par Marc David-Calvet du 16 au 20 novembre, « Mozart derniers temps » par Max Genève du 4 au 12 décembre, Paul Sacher par Alain Paris du 6 au 10 novembre, l'Orfeo et la naissance de l'Opéra par Philippe Beaussant, Dominique Jameux et Marc Dumont du 29 janvier au 16 février, Corneille par Piotr Kaminsky du 9 au 13 octobre), que des expositions (Maurice Denis par Delphine Grivel du 30 octobre au 3 novembre, Théodore de Banville par Martine Kahane du 13 au 17 novembre), des publications (Britten par Mildred Clary du 2 au 6 octobre, Cannes par Agnès Catherine Poirier du 7 au 11 mai 2007) ou de grandes figures connues ou pas (Pellegrino par Jean-Christophe Frisch du 18 au 22 septembre, ou Chabrier par François Hudry du 8 au 12 janvier 2007).
In short, they have institutionalized the concept of letting those who are institutionalized (elsewhere) to run the show, five days a week, for an hour. Go figure... Or, as they say in French, sort of, vous vous démerdez
And OK, so it isn't all Tormé and King Cole. They said (and I said), it's for Christmas.But don't take my word for it on all this. I just admitted I'm a journalist like Peter Mayle, as opposed, say, to Mort Rosenblum (who I believe won one of those Pulitzer things), while we're on the same subjects I usually choose (and to mention two Provençal "neighbors")...
Here's the URL for listening to the France Musique stream on the Web:
http://viphttp.yacast.net/V4/francemusique/fmusique_main_V4.html?id=fmusique [remember, six hours difference in time to the east coast of the U.S.]