July 16, 2023
Rest in Langrès
Museum and Organ
The first thing I did today was sleep in. Still, the light is very powerful and so it was maybe only until 8:30 or so. I walked around town, first around the ramparts, taking in the views. Langrès, with its campground with commanding views reminds me very much of Domfront in Normandy . . . which, you guessed it, also has a campground with commanding views.
I tried to go to the museum of art and culture at 11:50 a.m., but like many French places, it closed for lunch, noon to 1:30. I went back to the campsite, and went through all of the upcoming campgrounds, to separate the legitimate campgrounds from those that are nudist camps, mobile home parks, only open at 7:30pm (!?), and other such things.
Then, lunch over, I went to two different museums, which are both owned and operated by the same governmental entity. The first one was a museum to Diderot, the encyclopedia guy, with a bunch of stuff about the printing of the encyclopedie and other things from the 18th century. One guy I'd never heard of before was Omai, a Pacific islander who traveled back to Europe on one of Cook's ships. I hadn't fully reckoned before how much encounters with these other cultures changed European society, which shook Eurocentrism a bit, requiring recognition that there were societies they hadn't even heard of before, with totally different value and cultural systems.
And then I went to the general cultural museum of the Langrès region- same one that I tried to visit earlier - which was pretty good, a typical assortment of regional artifacts. It was very well laid out and that it took you from paleolithic through to modern times in a single linear walking path.
I never got the story on the building itself, but it was remarkable and that it seemed to be a combination of an older ecclesiastical structure, that had been rebuilt with reinforced concrete around it to make it into a bigger more modern structure that still retained its older element.
In my walking about, I had passed the cathedral, which had a sign on it that there was a organ concert at 5pm, for free, put on by "The Friends of the Organs in the City of Langrès".
Visiting a church for a classical music concert is something I try to do every time I come to France come up and so here I could check that box off. I've never really thought much about organs that much, I think I've been to one or two concerts that involved organs, but this one was very memorable and maybe realized just how many different voices and organ really can have. The organist was a young woman from Korea, born in Seoul, now living in France, playing pieces from the baroque period up through to the late 19th or early 20th century (the program only gave the birth and death date of the composers, but not when the pieces that were being played were composed). Some of the pieces were pretty soporific. Like if you're listening to a piece called "dance of the naiads" or "communion" being played on the organ, it can be quite a challenge to stay awake. But for the pieces where the full force of the organ is unleashed, there was one bolero and then this Allegro movement from a symphony by a guy named Widor, it comes across as the sort of industrial yet graceful instrument that it is. You can listen here, I recorded it.
Look at this baby, it is in a category with nuclear reactor control rooms and rocket ground control. I love that they call stops "jeux" (games).
Okay gotta go to sleep, more biking to do tomorrow.
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