Aux marches du Palais

Description

How to judge in the 21st century a music that speaks both to our sensitivity as music lovers and to our childlike soul? What is the difference between the song "En passant par la Lorraine," still known today, and its counterpart from the 16th century? What separates them is more than four centuries, an infinity of time - and yet seems to be just a parenthesis in the metamorphosis of the song. A curious fate, therefore, for these musics that have had the fortune to cross the centuries and reach us, often well transformed, but which retain a vigor, a freshness that guarantees their longevity. The song moves with time, the years, the decades, the centuries ultimately because it is linked to the expression of moods, to the tastes, to the dances of everyday life. It constitutes a social breath – and it is – because of that, ephemeral, fragile," says Claude Duneton in his beautiful History of French Song. It is the echo of the singular and universal history of men, carried to us by all those vanished voices who, before our parents, before our grandparents and our ancestors, hummed them.
The purpose of this record is to return to the sources of these songs, that is to say, very simply, to the songs of our sources, by evoking their history and the way they have reached us, and giving them to be heard so that, at a time when the hegemony of audiovisual media accelerates the disappearance of ancient oral cultures, they remain, fragments of a threatened collective childhood.
Vincent Dumestre © Abeille Musique