"Thanks to the accordion, the villagers could hold each other by the waist and look them in the eye!"

ArseguelWe met Artur Blasco (1933) at his home in Arsèguel, a small village in the Alt Urgell region, where he has lived for over sixty years. There, he worked tirelessly, over the past sixty years, to recover the diatonic accordion and the popular songs of the Pyrenees and their presence "in the old days" in the Pyrenees. We found him surrounded by recorded tapes in different formats, papers, scores, books, instruments, and hundreds of unpublished and unique documents, which he has collected over the years. A musician, researcher, and educator, he has been awarded the National Culture Prize (2004), the Sant Jordi Cross (2001), and the Civic Action Prize from the Lluís Carulla Foundation (1998), among others.

In the late 1950s, Blasco decided to leave his studies and travel the world. At lunch with a friend in Barcelona, he suggested that he accompany him to a town near La Seu d'Urgell to run an errand for his father. "On that trip, two things happened to me that changed my life," he says. "In Arsèguel, I bought, on credit, an old house, Cal Miró," he explains. He still lives there. In La Seu d'Urgell, having a coffee at the Café Mundial, he heard from a distance an elderly man playing the diatonic accordion in front of a bar, in the shade of the plane trees along the promenade. It was one of the polkas played by the shorthand operator of a Greenland fishing boat on which he had worked while traveling around the world. "That sound brought back memories of Greenland, with the icebergs drifting across the Baffin Bay sea, filled with starving gulls. And the Sunday dances in Skansen Park in Stockholm. I approached him and asked him questions, and he said, 'I'm here; you're interested in all this, come home, I'll tell you everything,' he explains. His name was Ricard Muntané, better known as Fiter de Canelles. Those two things made him decide to leave his life as a traveler and return home.

A year later, already settled in Arsèguel, he visited the Fiter de Canelles, who gave him names of people who knew how to play, but who had already abandoned the accordion, and who had danced in the villages with the diatonic accordion. They all had one thing in common: they weren't full-time musicians. They all had other jobs, and on Sundays and holidays, they played in the villages in exchange for a prearranged stipend.

Artur Blasco went from farmhouse to farmhouse, village to village, looking for godfathers who still played the accordion or who had played it and had it stored in the attic. "I recorded them all, and I collected material. First I recorded it with a VHS camera they lent me, and then BMC taught me how to use a professional camera that recorded the audio and interviews at the same time. Some tapes have been lost; I was able to save 75% of the material."

"I followed them; some had died, others said they no longer played, but I invited them every Tuesday, market day in La Seu, to the workshop of an accordionist who was an electrician, Estevet Ubach, and we met there. The Tuesday gatherings," Blasco says. "...brandy from a carafe accompanied by black olives that Estevet took from a Jerusalem artichoke tree," he confesses. They also decided to relive their repertoires, turning those gatherings into musical evenings.

Artur told them to lend him the accordions so he could take them all to be repaired and tuned in Barcelona, to Auxèncio Fernandez's workshop. "I learned to play the accordion because I used to listen to a man from a farmhouse here, from Ansovell, when he was herding the cows. Anton Pubill, from Cal Ponet. Ton, while he was herding the cows, played the diatonic solo," he explains.

At one of the Tuesday gatherings at the Estevet Workshop, he told the sponsors who were gathering why they didn't go to Arsèguel to have dinner together in the square; they would make a simple dinner with cakes and cava. The important thing was that they bring the accordions they had already had repaired and tuned. This was August 2, 1976, fifty years ago. "And that night," he recalls, "the old diatonic accordions of Alt Urgell started playing again."

A landmark gathering in Europe

"At dinner time, we set up a few tables with the town's youth, and the square was filled with people. Everyone had told everyone about it, and I don't know why, but people were very interested. We didn't advertise it or anything, but they told each other, and the following year, when I didn't want to do a festival, they said, 'We have to do that again!'" And we did, and the square was packed. Word of mouth, along with all the almost archaeological research work Artur Blasco has done to recover the folk songs sung and played by the godfathers and godmothers of the Pyrenees, has led to its becoming one of the most important gatherings of accordionists in Europe. It began in Arsèguel, and has since expanded, first with a tent for evening performances, and then with performances in other nearby towns, such as La Seu d'Urgell, the Casino de Puigcerdà, and the Collegiate Church of Santa María de Castellbò, where accordionists from around the world offer concerts and workshops on the history and life of mountain villages.

The meeting now lasts five days and involves more than 50 musicians from different countries around the world: Central and South America, Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland, Canada, Russia, Italy, Portugal... and of course, Catalonia. It has signed collaboration agreements with the Carrefour World Accordion Festival in Quebec and the Ivan Malinin Festival in Novosibirsk, Siberia.

It's five days of music and dance, where not only is the performance played, but many musicians from all over the world gather in the streets, playing in the squares and streets from dawn to dusk, filling the town with traditional music.

"I was lucky enough to be able to live immersed in this society that preserved the way of life of yesteryear and had this rich cultural heritage. They came to me and said: "We know you're interested in this subject, at home there's the godfather or godmother, who no longer sings, but sings healthy, but healthy. collectives. With the first tractor, the decline of popular song began," says Blasco.

He explains that the tradition here in the Pyrenees arrived because, normally, many of the people in these towns had gone to earn a living in Roussillon or Capcir, in Northern Catalonia, and that's where the first diatonic accordions arrived from southern Italy, the Desta, the Casta. Then they all met at the dance in Perpignan, where they began to play these accordions. Most of them lacked musical training, played by ear, and the accordions were usually bought secondhand, so the accordions among them differed in tuning and tonality, and most of the accordionists were not professional accordionists; they all had their own trades.

The festival is based on the tradition of the diatonic accordion used by these old-timers, dual-trade folks who led dances in the villages and changed the way people lived. "That's why the diatonic accordion is more than just a musical instrument; it's a revolutionary element of rural society, not only in our country but throughout the world."

An orchestra in the hands of a single man

With the accordion, the left hand plays bass and chords, and the right hand plays melodies and chords. An entire orchestra in the hands of a single man. "Thanks to the accordion, every Sunday, the townspeople could hold each other by the waist and look them in the eye! It changed their world. Just think, in most towns there were only fifteen people living there, and there were neither people nor money to hire orchestras," he explains. These were songs that were in fashion at the time, and musicians would pick them up by ear to play them on the accordion.

Over the years, Artur Blasco has inventoried almost 1,600 popular songs that were sung in the area, and all these recordings have resulted in a collection of live music, which has been released in DVD format, on 80 discs, and which are part of the video collection of the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government).At the foot of the paths of the songbook It brings together the songs collected and recorded on video, and the personal interviews that Artur Blasco conducted with 300 informant singers from around 200 different towns and farmhouses in the regions of Alta Ribagorça, Ribagorza Aragonesa, Vall d'Aran, Pallars Jussà, Pallars Solsonès, Cerdanya, Berguedà, Ripollès and La Garrotxa.

The Department of Culture of the Generalitat has digitized all the tapes that could still be saved from the many that Blasco recorded, and in 2015 all the audiovisual documentation was incorporated into the collection of the Sound Library of Traditional Catalan Music. In this way, an unpublished historical and sound heritage of the music of the Pyrenees is preserved.

Many of the accordions belonging to the sponsors who played at the first accordionist gathering in Arsèguel are part of the collection of the Accordion Museum in Arsèguel. "They belong to those families who later gave them to me, and they form part of the museum's legacy," he explains. It's a private museum that Blasco and his wife created because, he tells us, people came from all over to see the accordions. With the help of the European Union's Leader Plus program, they bought and restored a house in the middle of the village, which had fallen into disrepair and no one wanted.

"It will remain as a witness to who we are, and where we come from. When I go on stage, no one comes to hear me sing, I don't know. What I know is the history of the songs and of who sang them, and that's what I tell, the story," Blasco assures.