Saturday, April 14, 2012
Besancon

Elise and Jean are having guests for lunch, Tony and Agnes Kelly. Agnes and Tony met when they were students studying each other's languages: Agnes is French, Tony is Irish. Agnes works teaches English to French executives of American or English companies, and vice-versa. Tony was a Lecturer at Dijon but is now a Human Resources consultant and labor arbitrator. Both know the ins and outs of English and American speech in its many variations and despite forty years working in their respective fields, are still keen. They live near Nantes, in Britanny, but Jean is a distant cousin, which is reason enough for a visit.

After lunch, Elise takes me with her to pick up her diatonic accordion, which needed repair before tomorrow, when their will be a transhumance. There is no English equivalent for this word, which describes the drive of livestock up to mountain pastures in the spring, and their return in the fall. Besancon has marked the event by hosting a goatheard who drives sixty biquettes --young female goats-- through the streets of Besancon in the early morning, and up to the pastures by early afternoon, a distance of ten kilometers. Elise will be playing her Castagnari-made accordion from a truck accompanying the goats, which will be followed by spectators stopping at points to enjoy a glass of wine and some cheese.

We visit Thierry Cornot, whose business L'Accordeon Comtois specializes in repairing accordeons of all types: concertinas, bandoneons, piano, diatonic, chromatic, and piano. In the United States, the piano, or keyboard accordion is better known, but in France, the chromatic or the diatonic (which can play two notes) is more common. All types other than the piano accordion are also known as push-button accordions .

Thierry's workshop is a veritable museum of push-button accordions of all styles and types: he has a Fratelli Crosio diatonic model that sounds like an oboe. Made in the 1950s, only five were made. He works on small accordions with only twenty buttons, and on professional ones with one hundred. He became interested in the accordion because his grandfather played it, but he was never as interested in playing it as much as in knowing how the sound was made .

While Thierry has accordions shipped to him for repair from all over the world, he also happens to have cousins in Lafayette, Louisiana, in the heart of Cajun country. This is where Zydeco --music which French settlers who came to Lafayette after Le Grand Derangement-- England's victory over the French in the French and Indian War-- forced them to flee from their homelands in the French Canadian colonial settlement of Arcadia. Those settlers were known as Acadiens, after the French name for the province --Acadie.

In Louisiana, those French-Canadian Acadiens became Cajuns, corruption of the French word. Thierry has visited Lafayette, and is very familiar with the music played there, as well as with Mexican norteno music, in which the accordion combines with a twelve string guitar. He tells us that that Richard Galliano, who has recorded everything from Bach to jazz, is one of the greats, and that Danielle Bonel, Piaf's accompanist on the accordeon --and in whose arms Piaf died-- expired the week before at the age of ninety-two.

As we leave, I catch sight of what looks like an accordion with four shot glasses fitted into the bellows --it turns out to be a small bar, shaped like --an accordion.