How early can early music be? The American medievalist Benjamin Bagby is
the co-founder and driving force behind Sequentia, an acclaimed ensemble that
performs little-known music from the 10th to 14th centuries. The group has
specialized, for example, in the work of 12th-century composer Hildegard von
Bingen. No one knows exactly how Hildegard's music sounded in her own day, but
her works are at least notated in a way that renders them accessible to
musicians today. But how do you perform still older music that was part of an
oral tradition, and for which only the words survive?
You have to be not only a musician but an archeologist of music, and Bagby is a case in point. In recent performances of Anglo-Saxon and Viking epics at the Perth International Festival of the Arts and across the globe, he has been exploring the misty origins of the Western musical tradition. Edda, for example, is an ensemble music-theater piece based on Icelandic texts which preserve the earlier Viking epics of gods and heroes; his latest version concentrates on the familiar story of Sigurd (Siegfried) who slew the dragon and gained the gold of the Rhine. (For a review of Sequentia's new Edda recording, click here.) Beowulf, which he performs next on 3 and 4 April in San Diego and 8 and 9 April in the Philadelphia area, is a one-man show in which Bagby recreates the art of the bardic storyteller, accompanying himself on a 7th-century lyre while declaiming the tale of the Anglo-Saxon hero who slew the monster Grendel.
How does Bagby reconstruct the music, instruments and performing styles of over a thousand years ago? In part, by bringing a vast range of scholarly skills to bear on his projects. During his ensemble's visit to Perth, Bagby discussed his methods with andante contributor Sandra Bowdler, herself an archeologist at the University of Western Australia.
Sandra Bowdler: I'm interested to hear about the archeology of your musical performances, starting with the instruments, perhaps.
Benjamin Bagby: The instruments have been a key factor in reconstructing Eddic performances. Some more than others: I think the key instrument was the reconstruction of the lyre, or early harp, simply because we know that that instrument was something used by singers, or bardic storytellers. It has a direct link to vocal performance as we know from Beowulf and other poems. So the reconstruction of that instrument is particularly important for the musical structuring of the poetry, and luckily for us there are numerous surviving fragments of such harps. Of course the most famous one is from the Sutton Hoo ship burial ...
SB: ... which people may have seen in the British Museum.
BB: Yes, although people probably don't know that the pieces of the harp from Sutton Hoo were not sufficiently large enough to re-assemble it with 100 percent certainty. The original reconstruction was a triangular harp; it was assumed that it must be a harp like an Irish harp. Then in the course of comparing that instrument with other similar finds they realized that it probably was a frame harp, more like what we call a lyre, and so the design of the reconstruction was then modified, based on another instrument similar in type and in a similar burial site from southern Germany in a place called Oberflacht. The Oberflacht instrument was found in larger pieces, of course nothing survives intact, but large enough to really understand the size and shape of the instrument, if not the details. I always draw the parallel with the question, "What color were the dinosaurs?"
Tuning that instrument was crucial to finding a plausible modal musical
solution based on what we know about string instrument technology. And it helped
very much to find the core around which the rest of the pieces and the rest of
the instruments could function.
The next instrument to come into consideration was the flute, [for which we looked at] swan-bone flutes with only four holes found in early Germanic burial sites. This is unique to certain kinds of tuning systems, and that was a big job for my flute-playing colleague Norbert Rodenkirchen. The guy who made the flute was Friedrich van Huene, a very well known Baroque flute maker. This was a new challenge that he came out of retirement to accept.
The fiddle is the latest instrument to make an appearance on the scene. The particular instrument we use is based on a drawing in a manuscript dating from the early 11th century. It would have been a new instrument, imported from overseas; we don't have any depictions of fiddles from earlier than the 10th century. There are theories about bowed instruments which generally place their origins in central Asia — the idea of playing a bowed instrument was something originally related to a horse culture, a culture of peoples who ride on the plains, and not to ship-building and sailing cultures. The fiddle eventually found its way to the coastal areas; by the 12th century it was extremely well-known and certainly the dominant instrument to go with the harp.
SB: To go back to the lyre for a moment, how do you arrive at a tuning for it?
BB: Basically I looked at how small harps are used in other cultures in the world, and at what a seventh- or eighth-century traditional musician would have at his disposal in terms of tones. You can make some basic assumptions: for instance, it has six strings [and] they're all the same length.
Two basic tuning systems [are possible]. One would be a tuning system based on the idea that the highest string and the lowest string are at one end and another end of the instrument, not in the middle, and there's some sort of sequence going from high to low. Then you say, "Okay, how far should the highest string be from the lowest string in terms of tones?" What we know about string technology would then lead us to say it's probably not going to be more than one octave — you need a very, very thin string to have more than an octave and so I decided that the highest string and the lowest string are one octave apart. That's a big decision because it solves all kinds of problems instantly.
If you tune [the remaining four to make] various harmonic intervals from those two strings, the next most perfect intervals — in all musical cultures in the world — are the perfect fifth and the perfect fourth, which are universally heard as being harmonious. So you're tuning a fifth up and a fifth down, and you wind up with a fourth up and a fourth down as well; that automatically tunes the strings one, three, four and six.
Strings two and five are what I call flexible tones — they're not rigidly controlled. But one, three, four and six are fixed in an octave/fifth/fourth tuning and that's what I'm using for the Edda. For Beowulf I use a similar tuning but strings two and five have other pitches to yield other modes.
SB: We've got the instruments, and the tuning; then there's the music itself.
BB: The main preparation for the Edda was several research trips to Iceland, [where I studied] tapes from the 1950s and '60s of the oldest people chanting the oldest known songs. When listening to these recordings, I'm struck by the fact that many of the songs sound like 18th- and 19th-century ballads; they have a very pronounced harmonic sense to them. You could easily make a piano accompaniment; they're in a kind of tuning system that would go with the piano.
Then there are other songs that are absolutely weird, and modally not identifiable in a typical 19th-century aesthetic, and with a tuning system that is sometimes very strange, especially as regards the use of thirds. In listening to those tapes I took copious notes, musical notes, and I saw that [the tuning] had a vocabulary of musical gestures. From that I was able to abstract typical movements or typical gestures which identify that mode, in a kind of deconstructive process. Then I was able to reconstruct new sentences using those vocabularies. I don't feel that these pieces have what we would call melodies, in the sense of a song; they have a mode.
SB: You do all this research yourself, then you have to convey that to your fellow performers?
BB: That's what they get in rehearsals. They have the text, and I teach them the modes and the gestures, and then we work through the text very methodically.
SB: Are they classically trained singers?
BB: Oh yes, they have to be. It's very demanding vocally
SB: They're bringing their Western techniques and you're training them in another kind of singing.
BB: They are singers who have also sung other kinds of music. I would never, for instance, hire an opera singer. These are all singers who have made a career singing early music or even medieval music; they're very aware of the demands of this repertoire; they don't have what I would call operatically trained voices in the sense of loud, heavy, big vibrato — things we associate with operatic singing. They are simply very good singers, with a true sense of how the text should function within that mode.
SB: Did you choose the Sigurd story from the Edda because it would be familiar to audiences who know it from the Siegfried story used in Wagner's Ring?
BB: I actually chose it because it's one of the most important stories in
the Edda collection. There are more poems in the Edda dealing with
the Sigurd story; the others, the Helgi poems, are much more fragmentary. Then
there are all the ones about the gods, which we did in a previous Edda recording in 1995.
There might be some familiarity, but the audience will also have the wrong kind of familiarity: they'll remember it from 19th-century caricatures; they'll have an image of Brünnhilde, with the horns and the rest of it, which is horribly wrong. Brynhild is actually a terrifying supernatural being, not a lady in a horned helmet. I'm always telling people that Vikings didn't wear horned helmets.
SB: So am I. Are you thinking of further exploration of the Edda?
BB: Well, it would be a third project. If I were to do another one it would have to be disconnected pieces, which don't necessarily form a tale. Certainly some of the poems about Loki would qualify for that. I'll have to see. My Icelandic collaborator is very interested in doing that but it's going to be a few years. Right now I'm concentrating my energy on the Beowulf project, assimilating the rest of it — all of it, enough for a five-hour complete telling.
SB: Tell me about the translation of the Beowulf poem used in your performance. Some have wondered why you don't use the Seamus Heaney translation.
BB: The translation that I use for Beowulf is not a published translation. I couldn't use Seamus Heaney's translation because ours is fragmentary, and Heaney would never allow that. You cannot give a translation of every word I'm singing: the titles would be changing every two seconds, so you have to pick and choose, you have to summarize. And the translation actually intends to be as neutral as possible, not poetic, not beautiful, just pure information, so people can concentrate on the performance and not on reading [the supertitle screen].
SB: For your performances of Edda here [in Perth], your regular singer, Lena Susanne Norin, was ill, and you had to draft Katarina Livljanic and teach her how to sing in Old Norse.
BB: She had two days to do it. We were doing it on the plane to Singapore. There's not a score for the Edda — there's a recording, but there's no score. So I had to make a score for her. We started working on it in the airport in Paris.
SB: Do you use standard music notation for this?
BB: No, it's more like a sketch notation. I finished the score somewhere between Singapore and Perth, and then she had a very short time to learn it. It has no rhythms written up, for instance — the rhythm is in the language. That was quite a challenge, the first time we had ever made a score for any of these pieces.
SB: Will you publish it?
BB: Never! Why would I want to do that?
SB: It would be interesting to see what other people would make of it.
BB: It's like with jazz: you don't want to buy a score of jazz, you want to listen to jazz.
SB: Speaking of jazz, to what extent are you improvising in these performances?
BB: It's never free. It may seem very free, but it's never free. For one thing, we have the language and structure of the poetry, and this is extremely fixed. And then we have the mode, which is also very particular, very clear in its shapes and forms. And yet no two performances are [exactly] alike. Same goes for Beowulf.
SB: Was your ethno-musical research for the Edda strictly in Icelandic music or did you investigate other regions as well?
BB: I was very much informed by what I could still find out about Icelandic music, but also about music in the Faeroe Islands and in other Baltic cultures that have remained a little bit on the sidelines of European history. I mean places like Karelia, the Finnish-Ugric cultures which share a remarkable amount of musical characteristics with what I would call the Viking world cultures, knowing as we do that the Vikings were great travelers.
When you look at folk cultures all around the subarctic region — Siberia, Alaska, Greenland, even the North American indigenous cultures and the Siberian Tuva — they all have the use of the shamanistic drum and these similar modes. I think that's not a coincidence; I think it's a musical DNA which was distributed widely over a huge swathe of the northern hemisphere. Just as people moved into Australia from other places, people were moving into new landmasses over land bridges that have since disappeared — and I think they brought with them those kinds of musical ideas. But I'm not an archeologist, and what would you use to prove something like that? It obviously falls under the rubric of historical imagination.
SB: Without imagination, archeology is a very boring subject.
BB: Somebody's got to decide what color the dinosaurs
were.
If you would like to respond to this
interview, please write to letters@andante.com.
