Tout d’travers

Program Notes:

This is a funny song about a woman whose husband was so small, on the wedding night she lost him in the bed. At the end of a sad and unlikely series of adventures, the woman says “The next time I get married, it will be to a man who is 6 1/2 feet tall and I’ll have a lot of fun!”

“Tout d’travers” means “doing it all wrong”.

Conductor Notes:

SSA a cappella and soloist – to which men’s voices can be added down the octave on the responses.

Sung in French.

Elektra’s May 2019 concert featured Acadian/Montreal-based soprano Suzie LeBlanc, and we agreed we would end with a 20-minute set of traditional Acadian songs. Suzie has two CDs of this material with band and without choir, and I knew she would really be able to engage with the audience if the music was completely familiar to her. So we replicated the band as best we could with fiddler David Greenberg and our own Stephen Smith, using the exact key and road map of the CD versions. We then commissioned Marie-Claire to write 3-part choral arrangements that would nest into these structures. The results were very successful.

Tout d’travers happened to be an a cappella piece, and we used it as our encore.

The other pieces Marie-Claire arranged for this set were En montant la rivière and Avec un avocat, both of which have their own listings on this website.