Rajni Lallah creates Music and Musical Public Space on 20th December
21.12.2022
LALIT is always, again and again, breaking new ground. LALIT always dares to do it. LALIT oze!
So, when the 21st June was declared Music Day for all the world – because it is mid-summer, the summer solstice, in the Northern Hemisphere never mind miserable in much of the Southern – and having spent many a year in miserable, cold rainy Curepipe trying to play music, while cursing colonial choices of a “world day” decided by a French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang in 1982 and celebrated ever since, now 40 years later it is a LALIT member, Rajni Lallah, composer and pianist, who on Tuesday 20th December, set up a her digital piano at the Curepipe bus station and gave a one-hour ten minute concert.
Soon a small crowd gathered, appreciating the live music in the atmosphere of a market place.
At the same time, another LALIT member Gary Homet was live-streaming the concert on his facebook page.
Curiously, there had already been another “International Music Day”. It had been decreed by the International Music Council. It was celebrated on a more equitable date of the year, October 1. That was from 1974 onwards. But, Jack Lang, eight years later and not unlike a male dog over-peeing the another dog, in this case the International Music Council, chose a date that suits France, but is not ideal in Mauritius, or most of the former colonies of the world, where it gets dark early, and can be windy and miserable.
So, let’s hope next year on 20 December, we find a few more people going out in to public space to make music and celebrate music. For the record, Rajni informed the Municipality of Curepipe, who requested that she inform the police, which she did, and when at the same time she said she did not need or want any police presence.
All went peacefully, of course.
