1000 airs du Québec et de l’Amérique francophone – Tome 1

Musician for 25 years, active both on stage and behind the scenes of Quebec folk music, Olivier Demers is of course a great lover of the country’s musical tradition. Since 2007, he has undertaken this process of transcribing archives and traditional melodies. The beginnings of this long writing process were purely fun, but this fascinating work quickly became the breeding ground for this collection.

After serious questions about the usefulness of producing a book dedicated to a repertoire that is ideally learned orally, he decided to set out to collect, under one cover, 1000 tunes from this incredible repertoire. This collection will hopefully be another tool for research by musicians from the traditional milieu, but also an approach for other musicians who are less familiar with this music and who would like to learn more.

It is certain that this book does not offer shortcuts to musicians who have to “do their classes” to learn orally the manners and sensations that cannot be translated into notes or scores.

You will find in these pages a repertoire that represents the strength of a nation and its subsistence, the interactions of these people with newcomers from other countries, in short, part of its identity.

Good reading and play well.