Se hace camino pour mandole

Camino = the way. The few words of the title (borrowed from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado) evoke the paths of exile, those of the Retirada of February 1939 when 500,000 Republican fighters and antifascists painfully crossed the border of the Pyrenees to their first land of exile: the La France.

Parked in internment camps hastily built on the beaches of Roussillon, many will continue to fight on the various fronts to come. Five years later, the first tanks of the division Leclerc entering a Paris recently released, are named after the great battles of a Republic assassinated by Franco and his German or Italian allies: Guadalajara, Teruel, Brunete ... Composed for the mandolinist Florentino Calvo, this short piece evokes this exile, but also other exiles, more recent but equally painful: those of men of women and children who are today described as "migrants" .

Several symbols and / or musical gestures illustrate this double vision of the exile: the memory (sorts of compas and falsetas, percussions on the instrument - like a cajón of flamenco, republican song whistled, like a memory whose text - not pronounced - begins with the following words: If you want to write to me you know my address ...) but also a kind of imitation (modal) of the Oud, an evocation of the music of the Middle East, land of the new exiles of today hui. The mandolin: a popular instrument par excellence, an instrument found in all Spanish refugee camps, a solitary instrument capable of evoking the nostalgia of an entire people, but also able to move with hoarse sounds or, on the contrary, crystalline and almost pure.