[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign this is Hannah DePriest welcoming you to the second podcast exclusive of Les Delisa's 20242025 concert season. This episode focuses on 14th century avant garde, a concert of medieval music performed live in November 2024.
So buckle up listeners. We're going all the way back to the 1300s. This was a high point in the intellectual life of Europe when scholars at new universities reintroduced the work of classical thinkers and pursued cutting edge approaches in mathematics and philosophy. While today we may often think of the medieval period with its grand Gothic cathedrals, in fact the Catholic Church's grip on scholarship and art was slackening during this time, much due to the cynicism around the political infighting that resulted in the great papal schism from around 1378 to 1418.
By extension, the 14th century composers represented in this period program felt free to explore their craft from a radically new perspective. Instead of adopting the traditional viewpoint of music as divinely inspired, they sought to reconcile music with the physical properties, both observed and hypothetical, operating in the natural world.
Composers working in a style that we today call ars subtilior, or the more subtle art, sought increasingly to conceive of music and time not in relation to the Holy Trinity, but with respect to mathematical abstraction. They invented new musical symbols to express their ideas, or sometimes used old symbols in profoundly new ways. The result of this freedom of thought and increased secularization was music that fearlessly explored rhythmic complexity and flirted with the limits of what is possible in performance.
The artists featured on this program include Artistic director of Ladali, Deborah Nagy on recorders, Doucen harp and voice Scott Metcalf of Boston's Blue Heron on VL and Gothic harp, tenor James Reese and mezzo soprano Sophie Michaud.
Today we'll hear recorded highlights from the concert and insights from Deborah about the history of the program and the esoteric allure of Augenmusik. Before we get to my interview with Deborah, let's hear Guillaume Machaut's Ma FA est mo comment? Or in English, My End is My Beginning.
[00:02:31] Speaker B: Sa.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: Well, that was some truly beautiful singing from Jimmy Reese there. Deborah Nagy. Now I'm delighted to speak with you. Can you tell us why in your program notes you describe this piece we just heard by Machaut as a musical palindrome?
[00:07:47] Speaker B: Absolutely.
It is just that there are actually you'll you heard on the recording three separate voices. You heard Jimmy Reese singing the texted voice Ma fint My end is my beginning.
[00:08:04] Speaker C: There it is.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And then you also heard actually me Playing harp on what is the tenor, which is not really the slowest moving voice, but it is the lowest sounding voice. And you heard Scott Metcalfe playing V L on what is a third voice that is unnotated. So, you know, Jimmy sings my end is my beginning. And what you hear Scott play is actually Jimmy's music backwards.
And how. How the tenor voice work, which I'm playing on the harp, is actually a musical palindrome. It's half the length of the other music. And the first half of the song of this rondo is, you know, is one bit of music. And the second half of the rondo or the B section for that tenor part is that same music now backwards.
[00:09:05] Speaker C: Yeah. That sounds like a math problem more than a musical piece. And I'm just wondering, when you look at the original score, I mean, does it come with instructions like, how do you. How are you supposed to puzzle this out?
[00:09:19] Speaker B: Well, the fun part about these pieces is that the instructions are the song text which reads, my end is my beginning and my beginning, my end and tenor. The part I'm playing on the harp, truly, he says, my third part moves in retrograde three times only. And so ends.
My end is my beginning and my beginning, my end. So there's sort of a riddle just baked into the song text about how to perform it.
[00:09:50] Speaker C: That's fascinating. So not a love song per se, unless you love math.
Unless you love wordle.
But it's this, I feel like it speaks to this kind of.
I'm a puzzle fan myself, but this sort of.
This delight that has gripped us for centuries of setting ourselves puzzles and endeavoring to solve them, and this has that like added layer of. Then you get to perform the solution.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: Yeah, there's absolutely that. And the other thing, you know, I mean, it is a certain kind of math problem, but as a puzzle person knows, if you're going to have all of these sort of like disparate pieces moving at different rates of speed or overlapping in certain way, the fact of the matter is it's like very consonant. There's very little dissonance.
[00:10:46] Speaker C: The brief is more complicated than the solution, ultimately.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:10:51] Speaker C: Talked a little bit about the way that it would have looked on the page and from what you're saying, actually, like, it would have looked really straightforward. Maybe even just one line written out with the text and then you deduce all the other parts from that.
And I think that a lot of us, when we hear medieval music, my mind immediately goes to like, what are. What are the musicians looking at how did they find this music? What did the original look like? How is it? Read this. Really interesting part of this tradition is this idea of Augen music, which is music that is as beautiful or interesting to look at as it is to hear. Obviously this is a podcast, famously not a visual medium, but can you talk to us a little bit about this aspect of medieval music and the beauty of the book and of the score?
[00:11:42] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, you know, there are a variety of different kind of presentation pieces, you know, that are meant to delight the eye, hence the Augen Musik that you referred to a moment ago. And the next piece that we're going to hear is Tout par Compart Suis composi, which means that with a compass I was composed.
And it's also, you know, a kind of wacky piece. It exists in only one source, which is also sort of interesting. And Tout par Compat is a really famous piece for how it looks, and it is a real presentation piece. It was sort of actually kind of tacked on to the beginning of the one manuscript that it survives in, which is the Codex Chantilly, which is very important source of 14th century avant garde music. In this book, it is literally written in a circle as though, you know, all the, you know, staff lines were literally drawn with a compass. And the text of this piece, as I said, was sort of describes how it looks with a compass. Was I composed in this circle, as befits me?
Then it also goes on with some directions as well, you know, to sing me more correctly, Behold how I am disposed.
And it goes on. It says, three times in total, by your count, you can chase me joyously. If in singing you have true understanding, then with the refrain, with the compass was I composed.
[00:13:22] Speaker C: Oh, it's a canon.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: It is a canon.
And the upper two voices, which are sung by Sophie Michaud and myself, are a canon that presents the whole text.
And it's a rondo form. Interestingly also, not only is the music written in a circle, but also on the page in the four corners are more circles that have like the rest of the rondo text and other sorts of directions in them. So it's really cool. The other thing that's interesting about late 14th century music, you've talked about the kind of experiments with rhythm and all this stuff, but there's also this visual element and to experiments with notation. So not only are there traditional looking, say, black notes, there are also note heads that are, you know, void or empty in the middle. Then there are red notes and then There are red notes maybe that have stems on either side and all of these different ways to experiment with notation.
[00:14:38] Speaker C: It'S worth saying, of course. Yeah, like the, these sort of musical riddles are popping up in these incredibly beautiful treasured sources. Long, long, long before there was any kind of consensus within Western music making about how to notate music. There was no printing press, there was no, there was no like one way of doing any of this stuff that kind of introduced a layer of translation work in making editions.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: Absolutely. The making of modern editions, which is really the only way to see all the music at the same time, if that makes sense. Because these are all written individual parts. There's no such thing as a real, as a score per se. Where you can look at things vertically and how they line up is definitely a matter of translation. And with any translation there is, let us all admit, something, something sometimes intangible that is lost, you know, and even, you know, taking, you know, something that is very complex and, and giving it bar lines which we sometimes try and avoid or, you know, or you have with this music sometimes parts that are in, in different meters and, and it can be far more complicated and in a way far less elegant. A solution to, to kind of make that all work in a, you know, a modern computerized, you know, music engraving program.
[00:16:21] Speaker C: But it does make things like rehearsal a little easier when you can all say, and we will commence at bar 12.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: There is that, you know, and sometimes it's like, well, we, if we had but world enough in time to, to approach, approach things exactly the way they did, which is to say, you know, with only the original source in front of us.
It might take a lot longer, but it would be interesting.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: Let's give a listen now to that magical circle shaped score Tout pas compas. In this recording you'll hear Sophie Michaud and Deborah Nagy singing along with James Rees Tenner and Scott Metcalfe on the Gothic Harp.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: Sa Jesus.
Tune in on February 10, 2025 for the premiere of Enterprising Women, a new episode from Solanira that shines a light on two women composer performers from mid 18th century, Elizabeth Turner and Elisabetta de Gambarini.
Produced in collaboration with Langer Initiative, a research and advocacy organization promoting music by women across all time periods. This episode features new world premiere recordings by Les Delices of select songs by Turner and Gambarini, plus live performances of Turner's harpsichord lessons by scholar performer Paula Maust.
We're also joined by Alison Desimone for a fascinating conversation that will expand our understanding of the roles women played in the creation, performance, and consumption of 18th century music.
[00:20:50] Speaker A: Let's jump back into my interview with Deborah Nagy. Before we were speaking about the problem solving medieval composers did to elegantly and efficiently notate rhythmically and texturally dense music. But that wasn't the only kind of music that was being written and enjoyed. In fact, the next piece we'll hear is very different. Deborah describes it as simple and beautiful with lots of harmonies in thirds and fourths that are still very palatable and enticing to our modern ears.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: Yeah. The piece that we are about to hear is called Esperance qui en manquer Somba. And interestingly enough, it exists in 11 different sources, which is kind of unheard of. Not only do we think that we've lost a lot of music over time, naturally, but it's just rare. You know, only some of the most famous, famous music, like music by Michaux, for instance, would at this time travel this far and wide to make it into sources really from all over the continent. It's really sweet sounding. It is really beautiful. It probably is 1410 or even 1420, which is to say we've leaked into the 15th century. The reason that we chose it, however, for this program is that it does exist in manuscripts along with much more complex music. And also there is something kind of backward looking about it, if not stylistically, at least in its text, where it quotes actually a little bit of Machaut from his famous Ballade from the Remed de Fortune, which is called Enamera du Seville. So Esprance quille Moncoeur, which we'll hear in a moment, was basically at the start of a set that was called Circles of Influence. And so that is the connection that Esperance Quillemonquer quotes.
[00:22:57] Speaker C: Can you talk a little bit about Maestro? And thinking about his level of influence, you're talking about composers generations later being aware of him and writing music that is self consciously quoting him. But this is, as I said, it's before the printing press, it's before all of these modern ways of building a reputation and disseminating your artistic work. How do you. How did this happen for Michaud?
[00:23:28] Speaker B: Well, Machaut is such a fascinating character. Well, first of all, he has friends in high places, but he is also the first person, he's a poet and composer, to essentially create his own collected works, I think in at least four copies over the course of his lifetime. So, you know, it's one of the few cases in which we can say, like, yeah, we. We have all this music by this one person and you can even trace chronology and.
And that music travels. We can listen now to Esperance Qui monqu. We're actually going to hear this song twice, first sung by Jimmy Reese and accompanied by two harps. And then afterwards, we're actually going to hear a creation of my own, really an arrangement of Esperance Kiamon Kerr. I mentioned that it was a really famous song and appears in like 11 different sources from all over the continent, and I wanted to make a instrumental version. So you'll hear me play Divisions Ornaments on Esperance on recorder with Scott playing harp.
Sa dam sa king sa ma.
[00:31:10] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of Solanira, which features excerpts from a live performance by les Delys in November 2024. In a moment, we'll return to our conversation with artistic director Deborah Nagy. But in the meantime, I hope you'll consider making a tax deductible gift in support of Salanira. With your support, we can continue to collaborate with engaging artists from across the country and around the world. You can support Salanira by subscribing to this podcast and by
[email protected] your donations make every episode possible. Thanks again for supporting Laetalisse and Solanira by listening and subscribing to this podcast.
Now back to my interview with Deborah. She's just about to introduce the next piece we'll hear, Science a Nous l'an Amie.
[00:31:56] Speaker B: This is a super wacky piece. It's called Science n'a nule Animi, which translates roughly as science has no enemy but ignorance.
So this is a really, I think, pertinent message that holds true, you know, 600 years later.
And it's a very funny song being a ballad. It has three verses. And the way that ballads work is that they also have a repeated line of text, usually at the end of each verse.
And in this case, the repeated line of text translates as something like whoever shouts hey avant. Which we translated as hey there. But it's sort of like kind of listen to me, hey the loudest. Well, I guess they're the one who will be heard.
And the interesting thing is that the heavant appears in all four voices of this piece. And so we all decided to sing. And the funny thing about the Heyavant is that it doesn't even agree, you know, is it heavant with a major third or is it he avant with a minor third? So this kind of alternates in this funny way. And so there is this, like, jostling and this disagreement and this kind of noise, basically, that happens at the end of each verse, which ties in with the, you know, the unfortunate truth that sometimes the loudest voices, whether they're speaking truth or not, are the ones that are heard.
Jesus.
[00:37:49] Speaker C: So, Deborah, we have been enjoying performances by you, of course, along with Scott Metcalfe of Blue Heron, who you have had a long relationship with, along with tenor Jimmy Reese, James Reese, and Mezzo's Sophie Michaud. This troupe of, under the auspices of Lady Elise, traveled to Hawaii last season to present this version of this exact program that we then brought to Northeast Ohio and are now bringing to you in this podcast. Can you tell us a little bit more about making music with this team?
[00:38:25] Speaker B: Oh, it's such a blast. They're so fun. It's always wonderful to work with Sophie, who is, of course, a native French speaker, even though we're working in 14th century French, which has its own peculiarities. And I like to think of it as having sonically a very special tang.
You know, she transmits these texts in such colorful and. And beautiful ways. I think of Jimmy, you know, first of all, he has high notes for days. He sounds fabulous. Of course, we're playing at a rather high pitch. We're playing at A equals 465 or thereabouts, which is a half step above modern pitch. And, you know, he's singing high A's all the time, which are actually B flats, and it just sounds, you know, at 440 at Modern Pitch, and it just sounds effortless. So that is an incredible joy. And he's a fantastic storyteller, as you can hear. So there's so much color and as well as lightness that's possible.
And it's great to do this with Scott. You know, he brings also so much knowledge of late medieval French, both of meaning and pronunciation. It doesn't matter how many times we've done this program, there are always things to reconsider and discuss about the texts, because in some cases, sometimes they are compromised or garbled in the sources with strange spellings or verbs that no longer exist today. And is that verb related to voir, or is it related to Ali? Or is it related to. I mean, we're literally having these discussions. And then Scott, of course, plays viol and harp, and it's interesting, you know, Scott and I both play harp, but we play very differently. And I just, you know, love some of the, you know, different high chords that he picks out and it's, it can be quite magical. So it's great to return to this program. I love this group of people who are a lot of fun.
[00:40:35] Speaker C: Well, we're gonna end this podcast with the with the same piece that ended the concerts, and it feels a bit like a party piece.
[00:40:45] Speaker B: I think that it's always a good idea to end, hopefully, to be honest. And I think people also need hope more than ever, as it turns out. You know, on November 24th, when we recorded this program for the podcast, you know, it was right after the daylight savings, a time change as well. So, you know, it's suddenly dark and cold and miserable. And the text of this piece, je voila bon temps. I see the good times coming or good times ahead is of course it's looking forward to springtime and to a time of renewal and the leaves returning to the trees and the opportunity to have a fre start.
Sa Ra Sa.
[00:44:21] Speaker A: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Solan Era. This episode was created by Executive Producer Deborah Nagy, Associate Producer Shelby Yaman, and me, Hannah DePriest, scriptwriter and special Projects manager. For this episode, I spoke with Les Delis Founder and Artistic Director Deborah Naked. Support for Solanira is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the Ohio Arts Council, and audience members like you. Special thanks to our 14th century avant garde program sponsors, Charlotte and Jack Newman, and our artist sponsors Deborah Malamud for Sophie Michaux and Ursula Kornichuk, artist sponsor for James Reese. Thanks also to our Solaniera season sponsors Deborah Malamud, Tom and Marilyn McLaughlin, Greg Nosen and Brandon Rood.
This episode featured musical performances by Les Deles. Huge thanks to our audio engineer, Andrew Tripp for his recording work at our live concerts. Please subscribe and leave a review on whatever platform you're listening on. It really helps the show from all of us. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
