Patrick begins this recording of 18 March 2017 explaining the meaning of Stephanie’s marker and what he’d like for his own. The tale then expands to the music festival and how their festival spawned a bunch of separate festivals all over the island.

JP: So that will still there [Stephanie’s marker on the cemetery wall] even if her body is not?

PM: Right.

JP: Okay, so the marker will stay there.

PM: It has a quote from a song by Schumann, The Life and Loves of a Woman, and at the end when the husband dies, the woman sings this line “Oh! This is the only time you ever hurt me!” That’s the quote.

So I was thinking above that, this plaque, when I go and just have some silversmith fill-in … Let’s see what’s there now….

You have to ask the people in Deia, ask the town hall to send one of their guys to put it in the wall.

So what I think it ought to say is: Stephanie Shepard and the dates, and Patrick Meadows and my dates.

JP: I can see them marked lightly with a marker there.

PM: This should be taken off the wood and set in cement above her plaque. That would be good.

JP: So the music festival that you did all those years that was the Deia music festival. I thought it was the Palma festival for the whole island.

PM: No, que va. In Palma there were three or four festivals. In Pollenca there was another one. After my festival started, I made my festival portable and took it to Andratx and to other parts of the island.

JP: Soller? Puerto Soller?

PM: No, not those. They had their own thing going on, but on the other end of the island there are a couple of towns and I did concerts there, maybe in 10 different villages. So we transported the festival because the artists, when they came here, weren’t getting much money and they wanted to play more.

What happened was, for instance in Arta where I had concerts, one of the flute players, who was a friend of mine, who played in my festival, decided to do a festival in Arta. So he transported my idea there. There was another guy in another town and he did the same. They started reproducing the idea.

Nobody thought it would work when we started–they thought it would not work. Nobody would go that far out of Palma for concerts. But all you have to do is find the right place. In fact the guy… outside Vienna… I don’t remember, did you meet a guy named Wax?
JP: I might have, I think so.

PM: He’s a cellist and a doctor. He played in a church for our festival, with his string quartet of doctors.

He said he would like to something like that in Austria. I told him all you have to do is go out some 50 or 60 miles, find a castle, and ask the people if he could put on concerts. He said there’s no such place.

He went back home and then he went to visit his mother, which is 50 or 60 miles outside of Vienna, and from his mother’s house you look and there’s a castle! He never realized it, he never thought of that as a …. So he made a deal with them. Now I’m thinking it’s 20 years [old], that festival.

It all started in Son Marriog.

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Patrick and I had two recorders running for this conversation. I now realize most of this recording has already been posted here.