“A true sonic treasure”: with the Tradere project, the Farandole Biterroise revives “oboe culture”

“Let this be recorded to pay tribute to all my fallen colleagues. […] Certainly, they are no longer of this world but, in their hearts, they are alive.” With this grain typical of period recordings, the voice of Émilien Briançon, master oboist ringer, returns to us from the depths of the 20th century.^e century with astonishing clarity. We owe this little sound nugget to Léonce Beaumadier, a folklorist from Béziers from the last century, who never stopped collecting peasant music in order to pass it on to future generations.

To trade“transmit” in Occitan, is precisely the title of the project undertaken by Serge Boyer, oboe player from Biterrois, who rediscovered this exceptional archive which had been dormant for more than twenty years in the rooms of the former Biterrois museum.

Time capsule

Magnetic tapes, wax discs: in total, more than 400 hours of recordings that Léonce Beaumadier collected during his wanderings in the region. Faced with the scale of the challenge, Serge Boyer and his friends from the La Farandole Biterroise Escolo Trencavel association decided to entrust the funds to the Departmental Archives for digitization. These include wax discs, “which you can only listen to four or five times without them deteriorating”which are the most sensitive. They are sent to Paris, where a company succeeds in extracting the melodic substance without damaging the grooves.

When, in 2023, Serge Boyer retrieves the files, he is captivated: “We all cried at the association: being the first to listen to this music in a century, it was magnificent.” But Beaumadier not only collected these traditional tunes, he also recorded the voices of those who played them. “We hear them speaking directly to the listener, they were really aware of creating a time capsule and leaving something to their successors, it’s very touching”confides the musician who is also a heritage professor at Paul-Valéry University.

“Playing with ghosts”

After the time of digitization, comes the time of “repair”. “Some tracks were really damaged, the extraneous noise had to be removed”explains Serge Boyer. In this task, he can count on his wife, Florence, also an experienced oboist but above all a sound engineer. For almost a year, she was the one who “to clean” the titles, even going so far as to replace the wrong notes with others, more harmonious, drawn from the recordings. Together, they select around twenty which will serve as a basis for the future album.

“We decided to complete the pieces with our instruments”he says. This is the starting point of an original creative process which will bring the musicians of Farandole Biterroise to perform with their colleagues from the last century. “We found ourselves playing with the Briançon brothers, it was a bit like playing with ghosts”he testifies. Tradere, the heritage oboe is therefore a unique album, produced over a hundred years mixing “musicians of the past and the present”.

A sort of “re-recording”whose recording extends from 1937 to 2024, and which traces a link between the golden age of the Languedoc oboe and that of its rediscovery today. Because Serge Boyer assures us: “Oboists have never been as numerous as today.” Enough to give hope to this transmission, as dear to Léonce Beaumadier as to Serge Boyer. Which is also embodied in the very philosophy of this project, “completely royalty free”.