Canteloube — Songs of the Auvergne

‘I roamed through farms and villages listening to the songs of the country folk — old men and women, shepherds and shepherdesses in the fields, farm-labourers and harvesters at their work.’ — Joseph Canteloube

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When?

Cantaloube started writing his Songs of the Auvergne on a train travelling through the southern French countryside in 1923, the same year that:

• Troops from France and Belgium occupy the Ruhr area to force Germany to make reparation payments. In Germany, hyperinflation sees the cost of one US dollar rise to 4.2 trillion marks.
• Soviet Chairman Vladimir Lenin suffers his third stroke, which leaves him bedridden and unable to speak; he will die the following year.
• Mount Etna erupts in Italy, making 60,000 people homeless; more than 100,000 die in an earthquake in Tokyo and Yokohama.
• Lebanese poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran publishes The Prophet.
• Construction starts on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and on ‘Provisional Parliament House’ (now Old Parliament House) in Canberra; the telephone link between Sydney and Brisbane is officially opened.

Fast Facts

• The Auvergne is a region in central France, south of Lyon. It’s full of hills and forests, fertile valleys and picturesque villages and towns.
• Joseph Canteloube was born in the Auvergne in 1879, in the town of Annonay, and first encountered the local dances and folksongs as a boy, on long walks through the countryside with his father. He was so attached to the region that he had his first six years of composition lessons by correspondence, rather than moving to Paris.
• Canteloube believed passionately in the power of folk music to renew and enrich classical music. Artists, he said, should value feeling above thinking, and should have a real love for the soil of their own land.
• He wrote five books of Songs of the Auvergne, over a period of more than 30 years. The tunes are traditional melodies, and the words are in the local language, Occitan. But rather than trying to represent folk performances of the music, Canteloube uses the orchestral accompaniments to capture in music the atmosphere of the time and place in which the songs were traditionally sung.

Joseph Cantaloube