"When I was little, I heard my father playing new tunes on some weeknights when he wasn't working. On Saturdays, uncles and aunts applied and young and old alike shared their novelties and favorites by alternating violin tunes, songs and fashionable dances. »
"Wicked beautiful evenings!" which were sometimes or rather rarely joined by local fiddlers whose family archives can testify.
Dad, with legendary charisma, reigned over our universe and we were delighted! Over the years, many people in the Remon and Leblanc families moved to Montreal to work, like many Gaspésians at the time.
But the family musical ties still remained active because they were still exchanging recordings on reels and cassettes and these "memoirs" were added to those my father made at home. The famous cassettes! A treasure from which I have drawn a lot of material for twenty years and which I am still far from having toured.
Thanks to the time that the pandemic has given me, I was finally able to devote myself to recovering and digitizing these family archives that were trapped in obsolete media: more than 50 reels and as many cassettes recorded between the 1950s and the 1980s. Through this active safeguarding, I have catalogued nearly 250 violin pieces with various influences: from Cape Breton, Acadia, the Magdalen Islands and the United States, all played by my father and his fiddler friends. A precious rediscovery of my family heritage, but more broadly, a kind of rediscovery of Gaspé music.
To do this, I made the transfers (by cooking the reels), before cutting the scanned parts to make a first summary identification. I adjusted the tones (the old ribbons changing the speed and pitch of the notes) and was able to transcribe some 250 violin tunes.
This project is a tribute to my father Réginald Remon with immense respect for all those who played with him, tribute to my large family of kitchen musicians as well as to my part of the country, Gaspésie!
Here is the Cap Es Trad show of December 20, 2020 on CKRL 89.1 where I present the members of the Leblanc and Remon families who filled my childhood with music.
Remon Family Music Archive
Méthodologie d’archivage :
The number of each piece corresponds to the first piece listed following the digitization of my father's cassettes and archive reels. For example: 5a-8 is the 8th range on side a of cassette 5. The cassette number follows the order of scanning.
The number of a part is not necessarily the same as that of the audio clip. It is simply another version of the same room, with better sound quality. For example, the one named 5a-8 corresponds to the audio version 34a-9.
Obviously, if the word bob appears before the number, the part comes from a reel.
Rf refers to the cassette named Remon famille and 9s to the one titled 9 suite.
The transcripts correspond to the audios played by my father or family friends, with their way of doing things, which can very well differentiate from the originals.
Navigation, classification and search:
J’ai gardé les numéros de cassettes et bobines et rajouté le vrai nom de la pièce quand je le savais ou tout simplement, rebaptisé certains airs pour les retrouver plus aisément. Un nuage d’étiquettes permet de trier les résultats selon certaines spécificités (par ex. un accompagnateur particulier). Sauf mentionné, tout le répertoire est joué au violon par mon père Réginald Remon. En cliquant sur le lien plus, vous aurez accès à une partition, un titre si connu et peut-être, une autre version du même air.