Benjamin Bagby interview for Utrecht Oude Muziek Magazine

Questions: Lieve Schaubroek

LS: In a short introduction I would like to refer to previous concerts you have performed in Utrecht. Which were the highlights for you?

BB: The highlight was definitely our performance in the first festival, more than 30 years ago. We presented Hildegard von Bingen's music drama, Ordo Virtutum, in the Pieterskerk in Utrecht. It was a time of enormous excitement, all facilitated by Jan Nuchelmans and his genial vision of what an early music festival could be. It was also Jan who commissioned me (actually he dared me!) to prepare a solo programme of Beowulf for the festival in 1990, and without him I might never have developed the solo programme which I have performed ever since. In this, the festival has had a strong voice in my own artistic life. The Beowulf premiere was given in the tiny crypt of the Pieterskerk, lit only by candles and very crowded, so that I think by the end there was not enough oxygen left for a church mouse.

It might be interesting to mention here that one of our first concerts in the Netherlands, given in the Muidersloot as part of the Holland Festival 1980, was written about by Nicholas Kenyon in an article about the festival for The New Yorker, a publication which very much established Sequentia's reputation (and the festival's reputation) in the US cultural world.

– In your résumé I noted that you studied music (voice) and German literature at Oberlin College. What inspired this combination? Were you already fascinated by medieval music back then or were you rather thinking of Schubert's Lieder? And what came first: the medieval literature or the medieval music?

I was always focused on music and singing, since I was a boy, but I also wanted to pursue an intellectual life. So when I decided to go to a conservatory instead of university, I chose Oberlin Conservatory not only because it had an excellent reputation and was relatively small and personal, but because conservatory students could take courses in the college, or even finish a diploma in the humanities. During my years at Oberlin, the study of baroque music became a part of the curriculum, but medieval music kept its outsider status – limited to musicology and the collegium musicum. This continues to be the case at Oberlin and in most music schools today.

I had always been interested in German: my mother's grandfather came from Germany but the extremely rapid assimilation of German-Americans after the war of 1914-18 meant that the use of the language quickly died out. Still, I grew up in a culture which at that time still felt its European roots strongly and I always felt immensely drawn to German music, language and culture.

I became fascinated with medieval music when I was sixteen and attended a concert of 13th and 14th music given by the New York Pro Musica. I started my first early music ensemble immediately after this big event. Previously, I had been singing and performing regularly in school, mostly classical music (and yes, plenty of Schubert Lieder!) but also a lot of musical comedy and Gilbert & Sullivan operas. I was always fascinated by 20th century music (Ives, Cage, Partch, Bartok, Britten, Berg), and I was also involved with non-musical drama. I lied about my age and was admitted to the Chicago Symphony Chorus, which allowed me, in my teens, to experience many legendary conductors in a working situation. Medieval literature (monuments like Beowulf and Dante's Divina Commedia) had already been a part of my studies since I was twelve, but the literature and the music connected only later.

– When and how did the harp come into your life? In Basel? You wrote an extensive essay about "Imagining the Early Medieval Harp", comparing it with the mbira from Zimbabwe. How has this influenced the choice of instrument(s) you are using now and your way of playing?

My first early instrument was actually the Renaissance lute, which I began playing (very badly) when I was seventeen. Years later, in Basel, I was able to borrow a 'medieval' lute which the Schola Cantorum owned, and studied with Thomas Binkley. I kept playing lute in the early years of Sequentia and my interest in pursuing harp was only hindered by the fact that there were so few instruments available back in those days. I finally bought my first harp in 1978 and basically taught myself how to play, profiting technically from my years spent playing 5-string banjo as a boy.

My essay on the early medieval harp was designed to demonstrate to historical harpists how our own minds and imaginations determine the way we think we should approach an instrument. My hope was to shake some of the preconceptions about the medieval harp by examining the attitudes of players of a similar type of instrument from a non-European culture – in this case the mbira – without however copying their techniques. For me this study has been very liberating and has influenced my attitude towards the function of the instrument, but it has not necessarily influenced my choice of instruments.

– "Sequentia is one of the world 's most respected and innovative ensembles for medieval music. It is an international group of singers and instrumentalists dedicated to the performance and recording of Western European music from the period before 1300". Is it coincidence or a deliberate choice not to include the later repertoires of the 14th and 15th centuries?

Anyone who is seriously involved with 'medieval music' knows that the term itself is an artificial construct (influenced by the ideas of 19th century art historians) which long ago turned into an inflexible monolith of music history. Rather than relying on such a useless and outdated label, it seems more logical to me to identify with those genres, styles, language zones or manuscript traditions which most fascinate me. However, since most of these are unknown to the general musical world, we remain stuck with the one-size-fits-all moniker 'medieval' . At least I can draw the chronological line at 1300 (or shortly thereafter, with the manuscript of the Roman de Fauvel), since it marks the beginning of a period we can rightly call Ars nova: self-conscious and radical new departures in musical notation, the incipient cult of the 'genius composer' and Schriftlichkeit, new instruments and a new kind of polyphonic song. I definitely feel that I belong to the older, pre-Ars nova world, to a time when oral traditions still dominated European musical creation and notation was used only for documentation, not for music-making. This choice renders my work more difficult in terms of the availability of sources and the degree of certitude about their interpretation, but the texts, the sounds and the Zeitgeist are irresistible to me.

– Although you have lived for 38 years in Europe, you have continued to perform and teach in the US. Medieval music is still quite difficult to promote in Europe, in comparison with for instance Baroque or Classical music. I wonder, what is the reception in the US today? Is there a growing interest for early music in general and for medieval music in particular, or maybe not at all?

The problems with the reception of medieval music in Europe or North America are quite similar in terms of audience size and age: the audience was young and passionate in the 1970s and is now tending to be old and passionate. But there are also important differences: European musicians (and some Canadians) still enjoy public arts subsidies which are the envy of every US ensemble and concert presenter. And for medieval music performance it is obviously much more difficult to find a proper acoustical space for concerts in N. America. The other big problem with performing in N. America is the huge distance between cities once you leave the Washington-NYC-Boston corridor (how they envy the Netherlands!), making touring extremely expensive and time-consuming. The interest in early music in the US has been substantial since the 1970s and remains strong, especially in the larger cities and on many university campuses. Almost every major city has one or more resident baroque orchestras, and most major conservatories now offer diplomas in early music performance (most recently, the prestigious Juilliard School in NYC). Many of the Americans of my generation studied in the Netherlands, and a number of them, or their students, are now the elder teachers in N. American schools.

– What is the purpose of the Barbara Thornton Scholarship?

Following Barbara Thornton's death in 1998, I asked our friends at Early Music America to host a scholarship fund for young musicians as a living memorial to Barbara's work and dedication to her craft. The initial capital for the fund was provided by many friends and Barbara's family, and it is managed by EMA. A jury is selected every 2-3 years when the scholarship is awarded, and a recipient is chosen on the basis of musical talent, accomplishments, and a firm sense of purpose. We have stated that the award will go to 'an outstanding and highly-motivated (and possibly unconventional) young performer of medieval music who seeks to widen his/her experience through more advanced study and/or auditions in Europe'. As a student with absolutely no money, Barbara was drawn to Europe, specifically to Amsterdam, in order to study early music, and studed voice for 3 years at the old Amsterdam Conservatory before moving to Switzerland to pursue medieval music. So, this scholarship is really intended to help a young and highly-motivated musician from 'the Americas' who – like Barbara before her first jump from New York City to Amsterdam in 1970 – finds a compelling reason to study medieval music or search for work in a European context.

– Apart from Latin you use texts in Old Icelandic, Old High German, Anglo-Saxon etc. How do you handle these languages? Do you analyze the texts yourself or do you work with translations made by specialists? And what about the pronunciation?

For all of the work I do with old languages I must rely on the expertise of philologists, and over the years I have developed wonderful collaborations with a number of fine scholars. Of course the pronunciation is always a primary concern for any singer, but I also am interested in questions of rhythm (hugely important for the music I usually perform, which is not metrically notated), rhetoric, dialect, and the relationship of long to short vowels. Of course all of the collaborative work does not prevent me from analyzing the texts myself, a labor of love and discovery which never ceases.

– The title of your concert programme is: "Frankish Phantoms. Echoes from the Carolingian Palaces (8th-10th centuries)". Can you tell me some more about those palaces? And where do/did the phantoms come from - are they mentioned in the lyrics?

The idea of the 'phantom' and the 'echo' comes from the simple fact that our access to Carolingian music takes place in a palace full of ghosts we can neither see nor hear, but we feel them all around us. The music which does survive intact from Carolingian Europe tends to be liturgical Christian chant (which we now call more generally 'Gregorian Chant') and this provides us with a limited and one-sided vision of a Carolingian courtly musical life which was, of course, hugely varied and colorful. But the liturgical chant was sung in churches, not palaces, and was later written in manuscripts, some of which have survived to this day, whereas the other music was – with a few precious exceptions – doomed to perish during the long evolution of oral traditions. The phantoms of those 'doomed' songs have long fascinated me, since we do possess a few fragmentary musical sources, many beautiful texts which we know were sung, and a lot of information about musical techniques and instruments we can reconstruct. Beginning in the early 9th century, the central Carolingian palace would have been the imperial compound in Aachen, but prior to its completion Charlemagne was always traveling, stopping only to rest at any number of smaller palaces as he worked to build his power bases over the huge region he ruled. Most of these palaces have not survived. Later, as the base of the Kaiser's power shifted eastward into Saxony and beyond, the number of palaces multiplied but Aachen remained the symbolic site of imperial authority.

– For this programme you have reconstructed 'lost melodies 'with the collaboration of musicologist Sam Barrett and others. What do you mean by 'lost melodies'? Please tell me some more about the reconstructions.

There are several ways to 'reconstruct' melodies which have been lost to us when no directly-notated source has survived. First, the melody can be found in the notated version of a similar piece which shares a specific verse form. In other cases (and where I work with Sam Barrett) we have a surviving notated version which does not show specific pitches but only neumes, and from these we can infer the pitches based on what we know about the way modes behave, their typical gestures or attributes. Finally, we can make use of an outside musical source to provide us with a series of pitches which interact with the metrics of the texts and the nature of the mode in question. In this, the most hypothetical of the three solutions, the singer is actually declaiming the text using usually only a few notes, not singing anything we might call a 'melody', and if an instrument is used, it provides modal coherence and a matrix of tones which the singer uses to tell a story, recite a lamentation or praise-song, or any other genre of sung poetry. Of course in any case where an actual melody does survive, we make full use of it, in the knowledge that it is coming from an oral tradition.

– Especially for this programme, Norbert Rodenkirchen commissioned the reconstruction of a 10th century cithara (citole) made by French luthier Olivier Feraud. What is so special about this instrument?

This is a plucked string instrument with frets which dates from well before the introduction of a lute-type instrument into northern Europe. It was an important accompanying instrument for singers, but also for instrumental ensembles and solo work. Unlike the lute, it has three single strings and a relatively long neck, with a corpus carved from one piece of wood. It is played with a plectrum made from thick parchment. The flautist Norbert Rodenkirchen had played plucked instruments in his youth, and was interested in expanding his range of sound for our programme, and when he learned that Olivier Feraud was interested in this very early cithara, the rest was history.

– Since 2005 you are teaching in the master's programme for medieval music performance on the music faculty of the Université de Paris – Sorbonne, together with your wife, the Croatian singer and musicologist Katarina Livljanic. Have you split the repertoire into Northern and Southern (Mediterranean) music, or earlier and later music, or do you just teach the courses together? Do you have special projects with your students, involving them perhaps in new programs?

Our masters programm at the Sorbonne offers a research and performance-based course of study which covers principally vocal music of the Middle Ages, but it is a full course of study and not necessarily linked to the performance projects of our two ensembles (Katarina Livljanic is a vocalist and directs the ensemble Dialogos). My role is to teach a 2-year performance course in medieval Latin and vernacular song and polyphony, and Katarina (who, as a musicologist, works with medieval chant) teaches practical courses in liturgical chant performance and early polyphony, as well as academic courses on chant notation, sources, reception, the role of notation and oral tradition, and medieval music history. In this context I do not teach Icelandic and Old English repertoires, and she does not teach Glagolitic chant, since these specialities of our ensembles belong outside the reach of a 2-year masters programme. Our colleagues at the Sorbonne and our partners at the Conservatoire national teach other academic courses to our masters students, as well as practical courses in singing from medieval sources, medieval counterpoint, and medieval improvisation techniques.