Accordeons at Picherande

I'm just back from a week's course in accordeon playing in the little village of Picherande in the Puy-de-Dôme département in the Auvergne region of France.   A great time with players of all abilities from beginner to a sexagenarian who has been playing since he was six.

The main tourist activities in the area seem to be skiing (in Winter) and hiking in Summer.   I was able to take some pleasant walks along the local farm tracks.   The fields are left to be grazed by the cows, or cropped for hay or for silage for winter feed.   You could tell the presence of cows even when out of sight, from the sounds of their bells.   Though one farmer has gone modern and has (silent) GPS tags on his cows.   Seems to lose something of the romance, somehow.

I was struck by the proliferation of wild flowers by the roadside.   perhas it has something to do with the method of farming, but it seemed to me that there were more, and more varieties of, naturlaised wild flowers.   Maybe I should look into herb lore....

I saw no grains being grown; no maize, wheat, oats, etc just fields of pasture and grazing cows.Water seems to be carfully managed there.   Ditches beside the roads were deep and wide, often with rivulets at the bottom.  Bowsers of water for the cows were freely distributed about the landscape.   The edge of the garden uphill from the gîte had a ditch along its length to take the descending water away.

Slate mine at Travassac

On a free afternoon we went to see the slate mine at Travassac.   It's not far from Tulle, and is well worth the trip.   It offers sepctacular views of the site and the old rocks, plus interesting information about the slate and how it is mined.   The deposit is unusual in that the strata are vertical, due to the pressure from colliding tectonic plates.

The slate deposit was discovered in the 17th century, and the locals were delighted to use the stone to build their houses, and then they discovered that it could be split into wafers and used to cover roofs.   The slate it provides is very high quality: it's only 2% porous which means that it will last some 300 years as a roof covering, unlike the inferior spanish product that lasts a mere 100 years.

The arrival of artificial materials for roofing tiles led to a decline in demand for slate, and the mine was shut down in 1962.  It was re-opened in 1997 as a tourist attraction, and slate is once again mined there to make replacement tiles for those original ones that have started to fail.

The Accordeon and Heritage museum

It has been two years since we were last in Tulle, and at the time they were talking excitedly about the new town accordeon and heritage museum that was being built in an old bank building.   It has been finished, so we went to take a look.  Well worth the visit.

There is an excellent display of the history of accordeon making, plus a more general history of the development of the town.   There is even a real accordeon that you can play (in the vault so no-one outside can hear)

The accordeon and town histories are brought together by the following story:   The town was one of those taken by the military wing of the german national socialists, but was retaken for a while by the resistance.  Retribution followed in the shape of the schutzstaffel who rounded up the menfolk and murdered some 900 of them by stringing them up.   These same thugs went on to Oradour-sur-Glane where they killed the populace by shutting them in the church and setting fire to it.   One of the Tulle residents was taken prisoner and while at Limoges was able to steal back an accordeon made in Tulle, and escape.   This device is exhibited in the museum.

Evening concerts

The accordion festival featured continuous free music on outdoor stages, plus some paid concerts in the theatre.   We went to an indoor one all three nights, they started at 6PM so we could even watch the footie after.

First one, on Friday evening, was by a female group under the name of Oum Pa Pa, who presented very well-played music with a humorous stage show.  There were two flutists with the accordion, they played piccolos as well as the normal C flutes, very well and in tune.   Hard to do.   You can find them on YouTube.

On Saturday there was a pair of musicians, Ablaye Cissoko and Cyrille Brotto who played gentle improvised music on an accordion and a multi-stringed instrument I can't identify.

The last evening, Sunday we had tickets for Théo Ould and his solo show.   Fabulous.  With adaptations of classical music (Rameau, Bach, Shostakovitch), and modern electronic/acousic (Thomas Gubitsch, Régis Compo) pieces, he amazed me.   You can find him on YouTube too.

Accordions at Tulle

We're just back from the accordion festival at Tulle.  We were there in 2022 and had a good time so we went again.   It was less good this year- fewer visitors, and the small groups of musicians travelling about the town centre in various open-top vehicles were almost completely absent.   The local Maugein accordion factory didn't have an open day.  But there were plenty of more formal concerts that we enjoyed, and the new town museum was impressive.

We had lunch on the way down in a quirky restaurant in the middle of nowhere beside the road.  The cars parked outside gave a measure of confidence, so we stopped and checked it out.   The meat was cooked on an open fire, something you don't see very often.    Half of the room was given to dining tables, the other half a car boot sale.   It turned out that the place was for sale; we were two of the four customers present.   Perhaps the cars were a decoy.

Tight rope

One of the entertainments put on in the village this weekend was the "Lonely Circus".   A single guy with a local (Jean-Marc) as a side.   He did slack rope walking, throwing his cap around and catching it with his foot, throwing it onto a water bottle, all while balancing on the slack rope.   At the end he did some leaping about on the tight rope, including standing sideways on it.

He sketched the locals before the performance, and you could keep the sketches if you saw one you liked.  Good fun.   Food and drinks beforehand, music after.   Simple, effective entertainment. Cool.

Fruits rouges

 You know, I don't remember planting this Tayberry, but I seem to have one, and it's making lots of fruit.