The Fête de la Musique is an annual event in France, held on the 21st of June every year (the same day as the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere).
The aim of the festival is to let anyone and everyone play music, whatever the genre and wherever they want. It tries to promote different styles of music, to fans of all ages. But the best part is that it’s free! The performers play for free and the concerts are all free. In the afternoon I was in town and there were small groups performing all over – some fairly organised with stages set up and with loudspeakers in parks, in the street, in squares, etc., but in other places there were more impromptu performances, basically just a guy with a guitar on a bench.
In the evening I went out with some friends, and we ended up spending most of the evening on the “paquier” – a large, grassy, open space on the edge of the lake. A couple of stages had been set up and a number of groups played. Luckily the weather improved just in time as well – the last couple of weeks it’s rained almost every day, but this weekend we had sunshine the whole time, so in the evening it wasn’t cold and on top of that we weren’t wandering around in mud.
At one point, two of the people I was with went to the lake because nature was calling, and 15 minutes later when two more of us had gone and come back and the first two were still nowhere to be seen, we called one of them. When asked what was going on, we were informed that one of them had managed to fall into the lake. We never did quite figure out how he did it, because he wasn’t drunk, but either way it provoked much laughing (although it turns out he hurt himself on the pier he fell off of).
Sadly the weekend is over though, and the boring drudgery of work must begin once again..
