Have you read my new article about Occitan music ?

Featuring interviews from Cocanha, Barrut, San Salvador, la Novia, Pagans...

Happy summer y’all. I wanted to share a little update from my career. I got paid to write something. Congrats to me.

At the beginning of the month, the Reset! network published an article I wrote about the Catalan and Occitan music scenes. Even if both languages are minority languages in their respective countries, their situations differs greatly. The article starts like this:

While the Catalan cultural sector benefits from the constant support of its cultural institutions, its French-Occitan neighbour is enjoying a surge in popularity regardless of its independence.

You can read the whole thing here. Click on the image if you prefer.

For this, I interviewed a bunch of people and I hope I’ll be able to use the unpublished interviews for something else. If you know a French or English publication interested in the political situation of Occitan or Catalan music, let me know. In the meantime, I’ll share a couple of outtakes after two short paragraphs for contextualization.

Occitan and Catalan, two minority languages

Because you’re religiously following my newsletter, you know that I have a bit of a thing for Occitan music. I already talked about it here and there but mostly in the posts about San Salvador and the amazing compilation from Pagans, where you can read an explainer about Occitan as a minority language within the French republic. We’re going to talk about it a little more but I’ll use unpublished extracts from a couple of interviews I made to write this article.

Catalan is a regional - and a co-official language since recently - in Spain. The Catalan language is mostly spoken in the Catalonia region (that’s were Barcelona is), but also the Balearic Islands (that’s where Ibiza is) and Valencia (as a spin-off Valencian language). There’s even a handful of Catalan speakers if France, near the eastern border with Spain (that’s where Perpignan is). In the world, 11 million people are speaking Catalan. Which is way more than Occitan, who has between 500 000 and two millions speakers, it’s hard to count.

Behind the scenes

The article in itself is a little more than 8’000 characters but it’s built upon 4-5 hours of interviews with a dozen of people. Some of it was already shared through my podcast The Locomotion (you should listen to the English version) where I interviewed a bunch of Occitan musicians (San Salvador, La Tène, Toad, Barrut) and a couple of bands from Barcelona (Edi Pou, Tarta Relena, Marina Herlop…). During those conversations, we often talked about the struggle for the recognition of both languages, albeit at different levels.

As a touring musician, Edi Pou has a unique point of view. For him, the difference between the two scenes resides in the political positioning : “in this new Occitan scene, I can always see a common ideological link: an ecological, local way of seeing the world, which wants to protect certain traditions endangered by capitalism and globalization”.

For Erwan Billon (Barrut), “there is a true diversity. It ranges from electronic to traditional music, including rap and rock. This is music exporting very well, if we have to speak in commercial terms” he adds. “You can cross the borders of France and sing in Occitan without any worries. Lo Còr de la Plana had a brilliant international career, they even played at Carnegie Hall in New York. It actually works.”

For this article, the Reset! network wanted to add the point of view of various independent organisations from both sides of the Pyrénées. Therefore I recorded new interviews with representatives of cultural venues (Fabra i Coats in Barcelona, Centre de Creacion Musicau in Pau), record labels (Pagans), musician unions (FAMDT), producing companies (Hart Brut, Dardalh) and the Ramon Llull Institute, a Catalan institution promoting Catalan culture on international stages.

In France, the Government is providing subventions and conventions for popular music through the regional art directions (DRAC). But it’s not enough for Laurent Moulédous (from Hart Brut and Pagans) : “We would like to be subsidized at the same level as a classical, baroque or contemporary music ensemble. There’s no reason why our music should not get the same money than the so-called scholarly music.”

I did get to interview a new musician I never talked to before: Lila Fraysse from the Occitan duo Cocanha. A band I loved for a long time. As a true Occitanist, she had a lot to say about the fight against the French state.

“The centralist policy remains the same but now offers certain measures to promote the language and creation from which we benefit with Cocanha. But it is not significant to the point that the transmission of Occitan is ensured in schools. It could be considered a form of contempt: we are given a few pennies to display a policy of heritage preservation, but at the same time it’s not enough for language and culture to prosper. This sort of in-between is part of the complicated relationship between central power and the many cultures of French territory”.

Lila Fraysse, Cocanha

Let me know if you want to read more about this. Next time, we'll return to your regularly scheduled program.