Concerts recorded by the Mont-Jòia Association during meetings and festivals from 1976 to 1983. A new corpus available for consultation at the Sound Archive center of the MMSH

In 1976, in the very act of rediscovering the French traditional music1, the Mont-Joià Association inaugurated the Mediterranean Musical Encounters from Fontblanche, a district of Vitrolles. This association, active in claiming and reviving the Occitan culture, was also a traditional music group. It would be the engine of a major cultural event for the Occitan movement, oriented towards true Mediterranean identity. This identity, expressed in a manifesto2 was not intended to have space boundaries but to be rebuilt by common questions that arose in the late 1980s. Many of those issues remain pertinent at the present day. Only a few artists and groups (Mont-Jòia deserves special mention) , who performed during these encounters, may be seen live on stage today. The “Rescontrès de la Mar” proposed between 1976 and 1983: dance workshops, music workshops, singing workshops, stringed-instrument making, musicology conferences and concerts. French artists, North African, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Corsican, but also Portuguese, Hungarian, Yugoslav, Macedonian, Iraqis, Iranians were present, improvising sometimes together and creating new mixtures of sounds. This corpus provides an image of world music, as it emerged in the late 1970s and also reflects the Occitan identity trying to define itself. Beside artists’ presentations, introductions to their […]