Formentera in spotlight for new Consell-backed edition of Pine Islands’ folk songbook

foto OCFThe Formentera Heritage Department has partnered with editor Jaume Escandell Guasch to publish a Formentera-specific volume of a folk song repertory whose story stretches back to 1928, when Baltasar Samper i Ramon Morey put out the original Obra del Cançoner Popular de Catalunya (“Popular Catalan Songbook”).

After close-ups on Sant Josep de sa Talaia (dir: Isidor Marí) and Sant Antoni de Portmany (Cati Marí Serra), the third installation in the “Pine Islands Songbook—1928” series features Isidor Marí’s return to coordinating duties and turns the spotlight on Formentera.

Heritage councillor Raquel Guasch congratulated Cançoner’s authors on their “exhaustive cataloguing of island culture at its most essential” and asserted, “This brings us closer to our roots through popular hometown music”.

In addition to an extensive collection of song lyrics documented by Baltasar Samper on Formentera between 15 and 18 September 1928, the volume also contains musical annotations by the author as well as thirty original photos of interview subjects and sites which struck Samper as eye-catching.

The physical documentation produced by Samper’s original 1928 mission in the Pine Islands is today kept at the Biblioteca de Montserrat. The Catalan government’s CDCPT holds the documents in their digital format.

Volume 10 of the “Popular Catalan Songbook”, put out in 2000 by Abadia de Montserrat Publishing, included a limited selection of texts and photographs, but the current edition constitutes the first-ever exhaustive release of Samper’s collected research.

The Formentera edition of the “Pine Islands Songbook” cost approximately €3,500 to put together and will be available in book stores. As ever, the edition had the support of the Consell de Formentera, Consell d’Eivissa, the town councils of Eivissa and the Balearic government.

21 December 2020
Communications Department
Consell de Formentera