Blog :: Dieppe seen by Peter Avis

An eternal sound of music | 24/06/2010

Zic La Fête de la Musique of 21 June is over for 2010. But don’t worry: another festival day will be coming up in 2011 and in the years after. And, in any case, there is plenty of music around at other times of the year. And especially, it seems, in Dieppe.

It was Jack Lang, President Mitterrand’s rather dandyish Minister of Culture, who introduced the annual Fête de la Musique in 1982, as a kind of pagan festival celebrating music and summertime, held annually on the longest day of the year. Merci, Monsieur Lang: you had a brilliant idea.

This year, as usual, there were groups of musicians, many of them amateur and mostly heavily into pop and rock, performing all over the centre of town: on the pavement, on café terraces, in restaurants and on the seafront. The young (and also not so young) students of the local Conservatoire de musique were out and about, too, showing off their burgeoning prowess.

All through the year you will see youngsters from the town and from villages nearby lugging their instruments in their hands or on their backs as they traipse to their weekly lessons at the Conservatoire Camille Saint Saëns. This is the pattern of musical education in France, rather than giving music lessons in primary and secondary schools.

The well equipped school in the Grande Rue bears the name of the composer Camille Saint-Saëns, who spent much of his life in Dieppe and is commemorated with his recreated study in the Château Musée. Other composers who lived in this corner of Normandy were Albert Roussel and Claude Debussy: Debussy’s La Mer was completed in Dieppe.

The great conductor Pierre Monteux first gained fame a century ago by running the musical activities of the Casino in Dieppe. And, before him, Rossini was an illustrious visitor and performer in this town.

Concerts and recitals take place from time to time at the Église St Rémy, which is endowed with a restored organ built by Claude Parisot in 1739. And, for early and baroque music lovers, there are concerts of the Académie Bach in the church of Arques-la-Bataille, just south of Dieppe, at the end of August.

Coming up in September, there will be music in the sky over Dieppe, on the night when kites become ballet dancers at the international kite festival.

Dieppe is indeed a rather musical place, with a remarkable tradition in the art.

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