This is a long story about the founding of the Deia International Festival of Music. Patrick also talks about his work with Daevid Allen and Gilli Smith of Gong.

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Keep it short, I say to myself. I will try.

All of us who settled in The Village developed in our own way. The great thing about Deya was that one was permitted to become what he wanted. The local villagers put up with us and in most cases encouraged us to continue with whatever it is we were doing.

I met Stephanie in the bar. I said I like the way you are. And she said I like the way you are… So I moved in and 30 years later we were still together.

At that time Stephanie had a telephone. Not all that common in Deya… Daevid used to come up from the Clot to call Virgin Records. Or maybe at that time it was Charlie records. Once in a while we would go down to his house and Gilly would make a vegetable soup. While there Daevid would invite us up to the Banana Moon Observatory. He would turn on his recording outfit and we improvised, stoned, of course. Not Daevid. I never saw him smoke a joint. He would mix those sounds in later when he was making his albums. He kept an archive of friends’ recordings.

For instance on the album Now is the Happiest time of Your life where he has his finger up his nose on the cover, you can hear Stephanie playing the bass recorder and I don’t know what else he got out of the recordings.

About the same time, Gilli was making the record called Mother. She wanted a harpsichord behind the song Taliesin using the theme from Greensleeves. So we went across the island to Puigpunyent. Friend Anthony Bonner (of Ramon Llull fame) had one of the first harpsichords on the island and Daevid recorded me improvising around Greensleeves and that’s what you hear on that record.

Phil Shepard came up to our house and hung a cymbal from the rafters. David lent us his 8-track. Phil read (or better said) chanted his poems and I improvised on the piano until we found something that worked and he sang his lyrics. Later I added in the flute, a bass part in Solar Brother with the peg leg bass (I later gave it to Juan Graves in Pa amb Boli), Pepe Milan did mandolin on The House of Mirrors, and Stephanie handled the 8 track. We made a cassette called Artificial Knees, the title coming from the cover of the Scientific American which arrived while we were recording.

Lali did some backup singing in at least one of the songs. She and Stephanie repeated lines Phil had sung, with an echo. I remember on place where she sang nobody knows.

I believe that Phil still has a copy, but I’m not sure. I have lost mine. I liked the line about Jackie Kennedy, a handsome werewolf by her side. And the song Get yourself a God Stink badge, Wear it every day…

Then Daevid, with the help of Pau Ribas, got a contract to play in Canet Rock outside Barcelona, and he asked me to join his group Gong with my electric piano.

That experience changed my life forever. I had toured in Florida with a group called Travis and Barlog, and recorded with them, but we never hit it big. We sounded too much like The Eagles, or so I thought.

But this was different. Maybe twenty thousand people in front of us in a field. Just before Gong the singer from Velvet Underground performed, moaning along with her foot-pumped harmonium. We were next. While we played several things were going on around us on stage.

First there was a tall guy in a black leather hat and black leather jacket black leather boots up to the knees black leather pants and he was blithely pissing into the audience.

Behind us the drummers of Blondie were having a discussion with the drummers of an act that they thought should be after them. Drums tossed back and forth between them.

And at the top of the steps leading up to the stage there was a young woman with her dress up to her waist, obviously stoned out of her mind, masturbating. A team of first aid people began chasing her around the parking lot.

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When I got back to the house in Deya, I unpacked my set recorders: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, my last purchase before leaving New York. Stephanie dug around in the back of one of her closets, dragged out a worn leather case and opened it up. A beautiful Coolsma ivory and ebony alto recorder, and a rosewood soprano. A gift from the most famous flute player and conductor of Baroque music in the world. Not that anybody in Sa Fonda would ever have heard of this guy: Frans Brüggen.

Nevertheless…

So we began practicing duets. She was teaching me how to play well, in style, and with feeling . And then I discovered on the top floor of her house her grandmother’s little piano. In my twenties I had studied with a very famous pianist that nobody around us probably ever heard of: Ernst von Dohnányi. Not that I learned very much. But he was a great and famous teacher.

Anyway I began to practice. And I begin to teach Stephanie how to play the silver flute so we could do flute sonatas.

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August 1978. By now we had sold her grandmother’s diamond ring. With that money we bought a harpsichord. Not long after we had the harpsichord in the house, Narcis Bonet knocked on our door. He was living in Lluch Alcari.

I don’t know how many people in the village knew him and his brother Jordi, but he was the director of the American school of music in Fontainebleau. His brother was the architect who is continuing the work of their father who continued the work of Gaudi on the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. An illustrious family living summers in Lluch-Alcari. Anyway we played the concert, for the Dia del Carmen, his wife Carmen’s saint’s day. The church only held thirty to forty people but there were about a hundred and fifty outside. The following week we repeat this in the Deya Church. The church was filled. So we decided to do another concert the following week. By this time it was pretty clear this is something the village needed.

So we planned more concerts for the following year, inviting various friends who played on the island and whoever happened to show up we put them into the group. Musicians from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, The Liceu in Barcelona.

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DON BRUNO

Having only recently graduated from the school of Mary Jane, as potheads sometimes called it, we still had residual fantasy options. We knew we needed some kind of support for our new habit, to wit, Art Music as it is sometimes called. We were practicing instruments every day, building a repertoire of Baroque pieces. Little by little we had a reservoir of user friendly musicians from the island and elsewhere.

We put our mind to it, referring to the past for ideas as well as for musical scores. In the old days, there were three principal sources of patronage for such as us.

The church had often supported composer/musicians, the source of such a treasure trove, from Gregorian chant through Bach, the Mozart church sonatas as well as many more to this day. The architecture itself was a boon of acoustics for our kind of playing.

Then there might be a noble prince or king who fancied court musicians, such as the House of Esterházy who kept Haydn prosperous.

And finally some governments paid for the existence of conservatories, opera, symphony orchestras.

The mayor of the moment was sympathetic to our cause. Fanin was a bank manager who had helped Stephanie with her investments, when she still had a little money. That was before I helped her disburse herself of her holdings – in favor of the harpsichord, a baroque flute, a violoncello, a Bechstein grand, plus a house to hold them at the ready. Fanin said he would help, once we figured out what we were doing.

What we needed first, he suggested, was a permit for me to live on the island. Then we needed a legal association for applying to the Island Council for subsidy. Some sort of arrangement had to be made with the Bishop in Palma, who controlled…

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In the beginning, it was not so easy. First of all, if you were going to organize a public event, you had to have official approval. Franco was still in power, and the right to assembly was not in the order of things. I believe it was the Guardia Civil who could give the go-ahead, but the town hall of each village had to present your project to them on your behalf. More than a half dozen persons brought together by previous design constituted a public meeting.

At first, all our concerts were held in the parochial church, which for some reason seemed exempt from this requirement. In any case we were ignorant of all that, but eventually noticed these guys in their green uniforms and tri-cornered hats hanging around, carrying rifles and pistols. Eventually the mayor of the village took us under his wing.

He was a retired Guardia himself, as was his brother. The two of them were from the Basque country. As was the custom then, members of the Guardia were always stationed outside their own province. This prevented familial favoritism, supposedly guaranteeing impartial behavior among this paramilitary force. The brothers met and married sisters in the village and stayed there after retirement.

When in the third year the newspapers started announcing the concerts, and certain institutions presented themselves as potential sponsors, the mayor called us to his office.

“What you are doing is good for the village,” he told us. “But if you want to keep going, you need to put things in order.”

“What things are those?”

“Residence permit, to begin with.”

“And…?”

“One thing at a time. Let’s start there.”

As mayor, and director of the only bank in the village, he carried some weight. A week or so after that conversation, he called us at home.

“Don Bruno will arrange some thing up in his house. Probably on Sunday evening. You and Stephanie should be prepared to play for him and an important guest. He will supply the pianist.”

The only pieces we had prepared in that formation were the three sonatas of Haydn written for flute, cello and piano. We practiced, and had our parts ready, but it was unusual not to meet with the pianist beforehand.

“He can’t come before. But says not to worry. He’s the organist in the Cathedral. He can read music.”

I said I hoped so. We were ready.

“You can practice before the Governor arrives.”

“The Governor?”

“That’s right. Don Bruno has invited the Governor of Mallorca to dinner, with your little concert before.”

Don Bruno was a canon in the Palma Bishopric who had inherited Ca L’Abat, a former monastery. It was no surprise, then, that he could persuade Antoni —– the organist, and Señor Canyellas, the first Governor of the Baleares after the death of El Caudillo.

Sunday we met Antoni and ran through the Haydn pieces – no problem for him, used to playing on several keyboards and with his feet. We ran through them again for Don Bruno and the Gran Señor, who grunted his approval.

Then we all went to the refectory and had sopas mallorquinas with some terrible wine, the kind that paints bridgework in your mouth and leaves your tongue stained for hours. I had the feeling that this poor man’s dinner was the priest’s pretense at humble life, and that under other circumstances, he would have had more ample fare. Both he and the Governor had bellies that belied such a simple diet.

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So the first step was done. Ten days later, I was a resident of Mallorca, with a permit to work as a musician. Stephanie had been a resident for years, but now also had a work permit.

The mayor smiled his congratulations when he next called us to his office. As Governor of the local bank he had been investing Stephanie’s trust fund since she came into it.

“Now you need to talk to someone in the Island Council. If you are going to make a success of this music festival, you will need a public subsidy. When you have that, you can count on help from the bank as well.”

And so we were introduced to a couple living in the village, both of whom worked for the government in Palma, more specifically the Consell Insular, or Island Council. With their help, we drew up statutes for a non-profit association.

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Alma Concerts, we decided, was a good name for this association. Alma in Spanish has at least two meanings, both of which could apply. The soundpost of the violin is called the alma. And the person who is the driving force behind an activity is sometimes called the alma, or soul, for instance, of what we now named the Festival Internacional de Deià.

In due course, the statutes were presented to the authorities in Palma, and in 1985 were approved. Now we had to form a membership, have a meeting, and other requirements to actually begin functioning.

My ambition? To hear the chamber music of the great composers live: string quartets, piano trios, piano quintets and so on. It’s all very fine to listen to records. But there’s nothing like being in the room with a hundred other people listening to the performers present the piece in their own way, looking at each other, listening to each other, and breathing together.

And then we moved the concerts with piano to Son Marroig, at the request of the owners. We moved our Bechstein there. Later we bought a seven foot Yamaha, and eventually a Model C Steinway.

When we’d heard most of the standard repertoire I began to look for similar combinations by lesser-known composers. Sometimes there were no published versions of these works and so I began publishing those for performance in our concert series. For instance, looking for music by American composers, I found a Piano Trio from 1884 played in the very first All-American chamber music concert in Cleveland, Ohio and we repeated this in 1984. The trio was in manuscript, so I made a playing edition. I started finding other piano quintets and sextets and nonets. This became a sideline, publishing works that were difficult to find or existed only in manuscript, making editions musicians could play from, so that we could hear them in the Festival.

And so for 30 years we presented concerts in Son Mattoig ,when the music was best suited for that venue, or in the church if the music was Baroque and the acoustics favorable.

In Son Marroig we had room for a maximum of 100 people. Which is perfect for chamber music. It was almost always full with folks from around the island who wanted to hear the same things that we wanted to hear.

One thing surprised me. I had always thought that if a person liked literature and art and architecture and the other fine arts, they would also like classical music. It didn’t turn out to be so. Of course a few painters liked to come and listen. Some said it cost too much. I said if you want to hear it come on, I’ll invite you to the concerts. Others obviously just had no interest in that side of things. Never did Robert Graves show up at a concert – he was said to like the music hall genre, whatever that is.

That’s fair enough. I had no interest in the music they were listening to either, not since I quit playing it myself.

Stephanie and I now were living down below Daevid in the Clot. Isolated there from the rest of the village we had our guests who were musicians and sometimes writers and sometimes a couple of architects from Germany, and other people who were interested in what had taken up as our main interest in life.

After the concerts we often had a dinner party for 20 or so in our garden. No music. Just conversation. Other times we would go to Sa Vinya in the village where you can sit outside under the orange-trees and talk: Diana about her painting, Carl about his compositions or the Catalan writers he was reading, maybe a visiting writer who would be telling us what he was working on. In general we felt like we were a little circle apart from the rest of the village. But of course we became more and more non-affiliated you might say with much of the village. No problem for me. No problem for the others in the village. We were all friends in the street and in the bars when we coincided, but our worlds were contiguous, not interpenetrating.

To each his own. Ours was a running tertulia for thirty years.

Our Golden Years.