Protest Song And New Song

"Still not wide awake, he hears the loud knock. And he throws himself through the window onto the street at one go. Those who knocked remain silent, but one of them, perhaps the one in charge, leans out of the window. Behind, the mother screams. They knocked early in the morning; the law comes at a certain hour. Now the student is dead. He died from a knock at the break of dawn."

These are the words (in rough translation) of a song called "What Do These People Want?" ("Què volen aquesta gent?"). The lyrics were the work of Lluis Serrahima. They were interpreted and popularised by Maria del Mar Bonet, Majorca's greatest living singer.

The song was a protest song. It was a protest song at a time - the end of the 1960s - when protest was frowned upon. More than just frowned upon. Protesters could die in police custody. And they did die. Or they might throw themselves to their death when there was the early-morning knock on the door, as Serrahima's lyrics explained. Maria del Mar Bonet experienced time in custody. She was twice detained. She was subjected to "horrific interrogation". But she was detained only briefly. She was a protest singer, a voice that the Franco regime could not stomach and tried to suppress, but she was also immensely popular. The police could be brutal, the regime was brutal, but it wasn't completely stupid. It could frighten a young woman, barely into her twenties, but even it wouldn't dare to do more: Bonet was becoming too popular and too well-known for it to take more extreme action against her.

Born in Palma in 1947, Maria del Mar Bonet was to become, from the age of twenty, one of the principal voices in a musical movement called the Sixteen Judges. This was a movement, started in the late 1950s, which sought to revive Catalan culture and language and Catalan song. It gave rise to the "Nova Canço", the New Song, much of it extremely brave because of its protest element. Of others, there was Lluis Llach i Grande. He wrote "L'estaca" ("The Stake"), a song so powerful in its condemnation of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes that it was to become an anthem adopted by Solidarnosc in Poland and, many years later, by the Arab Spring.

The final years of the regime were marked by a more tolerant attitude towards Catalan, but the brutality could still surface at any time and continued to even after Franco's death and during the period of transition to democracy; Llach wrote a song in 1976 about the death of five workers who had been on the wrong end of police violence. Nevertheless, the greater tolerance was such that music festivals began to take place. In the spirit of Woodstock, one of these was the Six Hours of Song. It started in 1971 and was held in Canet de Mar, north of Barcelona.

These festivals and the music were certainly inspired by the American protest singers and also by Joni Mitchell and the many rock musicians who had turned Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles into their own community. But there was also a distinctive and singular Catalan style. It was one that Maria del Mar Bonet was to come to personify.

Once democracy was truly established, the need for protest dimmed, and so rather than interpreting the words of Serrahima, Bonet set about setting to music the works of Catalan literary greats, such as the Pollensa-born Miquel Costa i Llobera. Her version of "El Pi de Formentor" ("The Pine of Formentor") became one of her many classics. She also, as with other major artists, broadened her musical interests. While the likes of Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon looked to southern Africa for new inspiration, Bonet went to the eastern Mediterranean and also to north Africa.

It isn't an exaggeration to say that Bonet can be counted as being among the most important performers of the past fifty years: not just in Majorca or Spain but also in Europe and beyond. That she may not have great international fame compared with others can be attributed to the language, but she still deserves to be placed in the higher echelons of modern popular and folk music.

On Thursday, Bonet will be performing in the small town of Muro. And she will be doing so for free. They'll be packing them in. Getting a ticket might prove tricky. Everyone will want to see Maria del Mar Bonet.

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