One of the many cultural initiatives to have come out of France in the past 50 years — and therefore by definition to have been viewed with suspicion by the British establishment — is the Fête de la Musique. One need look no further than Margaret Thatcher and Unesco to get the flavour of what follows; but so complete has been the disinterest in the Fête around here that even I, Europhile to the core and anyway booked to perform in Paris on 21 June, had no idea what I was contributing to.
This Fête began life in 1982 when Jack Lang, then minister of culture in Paris, framed a festival that would put ‘the music everywhere and the concert nowhere’. He had just read a report on the cultural habits of the French which told him that one child out of two played a musical instrument. He reckoned that a street festival, which would promote the best of every genre of music for free, was the very thing these children and their parents needed.
Since then his festival has become an international phenomenon, celebrated on the longest day of the year in more than 460 cities (the claims to be found on the internet about quite how many cities participate are so varied as to verge on the hilarious) and in 110 countries (less scope for exaggeration here, though one wonders what did actually happen in all those places this time), including Germany, Italy, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Australia, Vietnam, Congo, Cameroon, Mauritius, Fiji, Colombia, Chile, Nepal and Japan.
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