Wayback Machine: The Chronicles of BEMF

Tome of BEMF 

"Tempus fugit", which, translated from Virgil's Latin, means "It's already the end of June and we're about to be inundated with trad stuff." So having won a few minutes away from other responsibilities, I'm taking a leaf from the Tha Dieu Blogging Playbook and writing my BEMF chronicles by daily thumbnail. Here goes, in haste...

Thursday, June 11

Lutapalooza!

okay it wasn't really called that...

The plus side of not showing up to BEMF until Thursday is your cats don't starve. The minus side is you've missed a ton of cool stuff already. So the first event I made was Three, Four & Twenty Lutes at NEC's Jordan Hall.* This was a re-creation of a concert** that festival co-director Paul O'Dette had put together for BEMF back in 1989 with fellow-lutenist Pat O'Brien, longtime mainstay of the American early music scene who passed away last year. So this concert was by way of a memorial as well, and a fine tribute to a teacher who had taught everybody on that stage at one time or another. And since that everybody included a core four of O'Dette, Grant Herreid, Charles Weaver, and other festival co-director Steven Stubbs, even somebody unschooled as I am in the history of modern lute pedagogy could see this was a major occasion.

Repertoire for the concert was all from the 16th-17th century hot zone, including but not limited to Gabrieli, Vallet (Suite for Four Lutes, which we totally heart), Robert Johnson (not the crossroads guy but the other one), and Praetorius (Terpsichore in an arrangement by O'Brien and Herreid). And the ensemble consisted of pretty much every lute iteration imaginable, from treble to bass, plus five theorbos and the odd baroque guitar, cittern, mandora and bandora. It may have been a memorial, but it sure looked like a party.

Along with instrumentals of varying degrees of (high) complexity, the program also included vocal works for 1 to 9 voices, including small choral works by Hubert Waelrant and Orlando di Lasso, with choir duties ably filled by the BEMF Young Artists Training Program. The program closed with music from another party, the wedding of Ferdinand de' Medici (1589): The first was an aria by Antonio Archilei, Dalle più alte sfere, sung (beautifully) by Ellen Hargis. Then Hargis was joined by fellow soprano Nell Snaidas and mezzo Danielle Reutter-Harrah, each with baroque guitar in hand, and the six Young Artists for Emilio de'Cavalieri's O che nuovo miracolo. Which is pretty much the phrase you could use to describe this many lutenists all together arrayed on one stage, here in the 21st century.

For the encore -- of course there was one, after an enthusiastic ovation -- somebody punched another button in the Wayback Machine and they stepped out into Henry Lodge's 1911 ragtime finger-popper Red Pepper. In true Gilded Age mandolin orchestra fashion, all the theorbos stood on cue. And in true opera internet fashion, operablogger Dr T has operatweeter @sasherka's 20 seconds of video.

*Dr T and the Special Envoy were both there as well, in different parts of Jordan.
**the original concert itself presumably stemming from this recording.

Then we repaired to Dr T's favorite Thai place, for the first episode of Lounging and Chatting About Music.

Bicause folklore!

BEMF Tome with Parthenon for scale

The next round for me and the Envoy was Norbert Rodenkirchen's late-night exploration of a popular fairy tale, Hamelin Anno 1284: On the Trail of the Pied Piper. Rodenkirchen plays mostly transverse flutes (and occasionally harp/lyre) with Benjamin Bagby's early medieval project Sequentia. Tracing the history/folklore through written texts -- read aloud in translation by fellow Sequentia member Wolodymir Smishkevich -- and tunes both traditional/anonymous and attributed (Wizlaw III von Rügen, Walther von der Vogelweide), we follow the mysterious piper from the sketchiest early accounts of children gone missing en masse from Hamelin, through various stages of folk-processing into the story's 16th century manifestation as the tale The Rat Catcher of Korneuburg, and into textual solidification as the Grimm Brothers' The Pied Piper of Hamelin.


If you had your act together enough to read the notes in the festival tome, you'd have been able to make more than I did of the musical side of things (I didn't snag a tome until the following day). So to me they were a bunch of really nice solo flute tunes interspersed by some really interesting readings (and very atmospheric in Jordan Hall in the hour before midnight). I thought at the time it needed a bit more something (exposition, perhaps?) and I'm not sure I think differently now I understand the context better, but it was still pretty great and I hope I get the chance to catch it again somewhere. Here's the opening piece, Wizlaw III von Rügen's De voghelin untphat des lechten meyien scin



Okay, that wasn't all that hasty. More anon.

Axe Age: Sequentia ~ The Rheingold Curse @ Ozawa Hall

 So while Mother Nature, with the able assistance of All Humankind, celebrates the Woody Guthrie centenary with weather to remind us what those Dust Bowl songs are all about, and while we water discreetly the Thirdfloorian tomato plants from the bucket under the drippy shower head and the neighborhood rodents eat the impatiens (and even I'm beginning to think they look so green and tasty) and thoughts turn all Frank Herbertish...Well, could be worse. Those moron Trojans are about to drag that ugly horse thing through the gates of the city. Not that that wouldn't serve as an apt metaphor -- "irrational exuberance", as they used to say in the financial sector, back when they were thought to have gotten over it -- but thankfully there are other venues for that vein of commentary. Still, wouldn't it be funny if it turned out we're all Agamemnon?

 No.

But while we're on the epic subject of Epic subjects...

The disclaimer up front should be that the Thirdfloorian delegation is a sucker for anything that brings that Old Norse textbook down off the shelf (I was wanting the infinitive of "grat", which they do a lot of both in The Rheingold Curse and also in Scottish muckle sangs, including one of our recent enthusiasm). And I'm a fan of Benjamin Bagby's theoretical Beowulf reconstruction, not just for its historical/performative element but also because it's fun. (Especially the part where Grendel noms the Ring-Danes, which has a certain appeal for any Godzilla movie-loving ten year old. Which I was, once.) The Rheingold Curse is, likewise, a theoretical reconstruction, involving a lot of philological rooting around in Icelandic print and sound archives and the archaeological record of northern Europe, with an ear out for current trad sources like Icelandic rimur and Faroese chain dance ballads, presumably like this one (Regin Smiður being the rough equivalent of Mime):



The end result is a selection of poems that together tell the story with which any Wagnerite will be reasonably familiar: a prophecy, a hero, a gold hoard, a ring, dwarves and dragons, a valkyrie, a guy with a hall and a sister, betrayal, revenge, murder. Plus House of Atreus style infanticide/cannibalism. Also, a snake pit (incl. commentary on proper heroic comportment when confronted with same) which Wagner should totally have left in.

Sequentia scored the piece for three voices, reconstructed Germanic lyre, medieval fiddle (very much on the hardingfele end of the fiddle spectrum), wooden flute, bone flute, and frame drum.  It begins with the high pitch of the bone flute (sounding something like a willow flute) and a calling of the listeners to order that's not far off a kulning. Then it's the creation story, with pre-creation one-voiced and creation two. Once the Ask & Embla preamble is done, the real story begins, and ends -- you know how it goes -- as it began, with two-voiced prophecy and a bone flute.

 I'd love to talk about the details more, but I don't trust my memory at ten days' remove, and here's where we run into something fantastically rare in this on-demand world of ours: the inaccessibility of an out-of-print recording. If you really want an experience from the Days of Yore, never mind the mead hall...