Traveling Musicians in the Middle Ages

October 14, 2023 01:05:48
Traveling Musicians in the Middle Ages
SalonEra
Traveling Musicians in the Middle Ages

Oct 14 2023 | 01:05:48

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Hosted By

Debra Nagy Hannah De Priest

Show Notes

How did Medieval artists get exposed to new music, pick up new skills or instruments, and develop their artistry? Guests Allison Monroe (Trobár) and Liza Malamut (Newberry Consort) share performances from a program that explored 14th and 15th century Medieval “Minstrel Schools,” where musicians from across Europe gathered to exchange ideas, repertoire, and more.
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Episode Transcript

[00:00:02] Speaker A: You're tuning into Solanira, a series from Les de Lys that brings together musicians from around the world to share music, stories and scholarship with a global audience of early music lovers. I'm Deborah Nagy, and this is the first episode of our fifth season, traveling musicians in the Middle Ages. I recently had the privilege to perform in a collaborative program by Cleveland based medieval ensemble Trobar and Chicago's Newbery consort that creatively reimagined the journey of medieval minstrels to international assemblies that fostered exchange of ideas, instruments, and music. Following a route from Paris to Brussels with various stops in between, the concert offered a window into the lives of professional musicians who sought what we would call continuing education opportunities. Musicologist Rob Wegman has collected information on so called minstrel schools that occurred nearly annually from the beginning of the 13 hundreds through at least the middle of the 15th century. Musicians got time off from their employers, and the season of Lent was a convenient, relatively quiet time in the year, and they traveled by both land and sea from England, Germany, and Spain to host cities in northern France. Having arrived at the annual school, a minstrels agenda could include recruiting new musicians for their employer, purchasing new instruments, keeping up with artistic and technological changes and trends, and notably, learning new songs. As Wegman points out, we can only imagine some of what went on there. Certainly there were opportunities for mentorship, networking demonstrations, and probably even musical contests. In this episode, we'll feature live performances from a March 2024 Chicago performance from Trobar and the Newbery consort while we explore the idea of medieval music and musicians traveling across time and space to learn and evolve while building community. In a moment, we'll talk with our special guests, Allison Monroe, multi instrumentalist extraordinaire and artistic director of Trobar, and Liza Malamut, a sack butt and sly trumpet specialist who directs the Newbery consort, about their own aha. Moments when they had the opportunity to work with treasured mentors on medieval music such that those pivotal experiences inspired further study and practice. [00:03:43] Speaker B: Want me to make money. [00:03:57] Speaker C: Off? [00:03:57] Speaker B: I mean money, mighty body. [00:05:01] Speaker D: Welcome, Liza. Welcome, Alison, to Solanira. Before we jump into talking about minstrel schools and talking more about that program, I am curious what was the most inspiring or impactful opportunity that you had personally to be exposed to or to learn about medieval instruments or repertoire? [00:05:23] Speaker C: I had been playing some medieval music at case with you, for example, and you are a wind player, so I learned a lot from you. But there's nothing like standing next to someone who plays your instrument. And so the first time I experienced. That was Ross Duffin brought Shira Kamin in to case western, and we did a italian trecento program, and we had been working on it for, you know, half a semester. And she came and started playing with us, and suddenly it was like all the lights went on and I understood what was possible and how I could actually make music and how there's so much more that's not on the page. She was doing so much more than I realized was possible. So that was a really formative experience for me. [00:06:17] Speaker E: For me, my first experience with medieval music came at the Madison early music festival. I'm a trombone player and a sock, but player. But I had never before played this instrument, which is the slide trumpet, and it's the predecessor to the trombone, the medieval grandparent of it. It has only a single slide, and the entire instrument sort of telescopes back and forth over it. And this was a really wild experience for me. I borrowed my teacher, Greg Ingalls slide trumpet, and in fact, I actually dropped it. So props to him for still considering me as a student. After that, it's kind of hard to find opportunities to play medieval slide trumpet in the United States. So that was a really lucky experience. [00:07:09] Speaker D: Well, that was a great segue to my next question, which is, what kind of challenges may have you encountered, you know, on your quest to develop skills or repertoire with regard to these earlier repertoires? [00:07:23] Speaker E: As you might imagine, not a whole lot of people are doing this repertoire, especially in the United States States. So aside from, you know, a few opportunities, at least, for me, to play medieval slide trumpet at workshops, there's not a whole lot of other opportunities, and there are very few even college programs to study that repertoire around here. [00:07:45] Speaker C: Yeah, it's. You do have to be self motivated, and I'm not great at self motivation. So, yeah, it was putting myself in situations early on where I could get to play with people. [00:07:58] Speaker D: Right. So what I'm hearing is that these kind of pivotal, important, impactful experiences came from opportunities to interact and play with and be coached by and influenced by more experienced performers or master performers and mentors, you know, and the access to instruments or other people doing this music is part of the challenge of learning and growing as an artist. I want to think about how that is relevant to the topic of our episode, which is minstrel schools and these sort of professional development opportunities for exchanging music in the Middle Ages. How might these sort of, both opportunities and challenges have been shared by our medieval counterparts? [00:08:48] Speaker C: So we have an advantage, which is that we do have written sources and we do know how to read music. This was not the case for a lot of people in the medieval era. For them, the way to learn, even just the tunes themselves, was to study with other musicians. So it was very much an apprenticeship type, type of pedagogy. In order to get new ideas on what else you could do or what other types of repertoire you could play, you had to be exposed to other musicians because there's no. Obviously, there's no recordings, there's no YouTube to check out what's happening, you know, even a few towns away, much less across several countries. So it's these gatherings that are sources of inspiration for new music making. A. [00:09:41] Speaker E: The reality is we also study with teachers in a sort of apprenticeship like style. And then similarly, the way that we learn is by being welcomed into these communities, whether it's workshops or working with other like minded students who are just really into it. So it's a similar sort of community sharing, even if it's done at this point with different mediums. [00:10:06] Speaker D: Liza, I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about the original title for this program just called I sing a new song, and what's behind that name. [00:10:16] Speaker E: On the one level, it's quite literal. Medieval minstrel schools were places where you went to literally learn new songs or melodies or tunes to sort of bring back to wherever it was that you were going to be performing them, where your home was on a couple of larger levels. The words I sing a new song, it's a phrase that probably comes to a lot of people's minds because it's in various psalms. And the title is not religious. It was not meant to evoke religion, but nevertheless, the phrase kind of speaks to music as something that's this very powerful entity. And at that time was powerful enough so that hundreds of individuals traveled these pretty hard journeys to study it every year. And it was also important enough for their employers that they would devote quite a few of their resources to enable their musicians to do this. Similarly, we also learned new songs, as you said, deborah, we were all learning together for this collaboration, and we presented them to audiences who also were able to learn from us. So it's kind of, in my mind, a sort of multi tiered situation, very. [00:11:33] Speaker D: Circular in a way, and it's a nice reference to community as well, the way that you explain that. The next piece that I'd love to share was from near the beginning of this program, and it's an estampie on the tune. Clavus pungens. And Alison, I think this was your arrangement. Can you talk a little bit about the origins of this and how the performance ties in with the idea of minstrel school? [00:11:58] Speaker C: So. So we sort of organized this concert on several levels. It was organized geographically and also chronologically. So it sort of began in circa 1300 Paris. We know that in Paris there was no known single menstrual school like these schools that happened yearly, but it seems highly likely that it happened. There also were smaller, seemingly more regular minstrel schools. There's references to people running what seemed to be sort of more year round singing schools. So. And there was a really active guild. It seemed like a great start for our journey. So my idea about this piece is that perhaps the Romanda faux vowel, it's sort of in the air, and some of the music seems to be collected from known music, and some of it seems to be new pieces. And my idea for this particular piece is that what if it's based on existing melodies and then was added to. So I basically took the untexted portions of this conductus. It's a single voice, one line of music. So I took some of these untexted moments and said, what if this is an existing piece that this person drew a musical phrases from in order to create this other piece? So. And then I put it in the form of an estam p, a dance. You repeat each little section two times, once with a sort of an open ending, something that feels unfinished, and the second time with a closed ending, something that feels more finished. [00:13:43] Speaker D: So let's listen now to this estampi, created by Alison, inspired and lifted from the beginning of the 13 hundreds from clavus punjans. Enjoy. [00:14:20] Speaker B: Sadeena, Sadeena. Sadeena, Sadeena. [00:16:28] Speaker F: Thanks for listening to today's episode of Solanira, which features performances from a March 2024 performance by Chicago's Newberry consort and Cleveland medieval ensemble Trobar. In a moment, we'll return to our conversation with Liza Malamut and Alison Monroe. But in the meantime, I hope you'll consider making a tax deductible gift in support of Solanira. With your support, we can continue to collaborate with engaging guests from across the country and around the world. You can support Solanira by subscribing to this podcast and by [email protected] your donations make every episode possible. Thanks again for supporting Les Delys and Solanira by listening and subscribing to this podcast. [00:17:21] Speaker D: Welcome back, Liza and Alison. I thought that Sdomp was so effective, and it was fabulous to have this kind of medieval big band, if you will, with lots of different instruments and sounds and colors. One of the particular features, and a real special treat for this program was to have this fabulous organetto player, Gabriel Smallwood, and I know he was playing on a very beautiful instrument, which is owned by the Newberry consort. Liza and Alison, whichever one of you would love to start off talking about, you know, maybe about how the instrumentarium was thought about and collected for this. [00:18:01] Speaker E: Program, I guess I'll start and talk about sort of the windy aspect of this. So one sort of very basic thing that we generally tried to separate, because they would have done so, was separating the loud instruments from the soft instruments, the louds being the sham, the slide trumpet, the bagpipes, and the soft instruments being the vl or rebec and the organetto and the recorders. You generally wouldn't have had two of them playing at the same time. We also had a couple moments, which probably those who came to the live show and watched our video noticed, where we did have them mixed. And we had some pretty fun and fascinating discussions about sort of why we did that in those cases, some of which revolved around even they broke the rules. [00:18:52] Speaker C: I often am only working with soft instruments. I mostly am sort of in the strings, voices, harps, type of a world. So this was fun to have this problem and get to enjoy, enjoy the colors. [00:19:09] Speaker D: Well, the next piece that we're going to hear is a virtuosic stamp in two voices from a late 14th century source that's called the Roberts Bridge codex. And, Alison, I wonder if you can talk to us about why you chose this piece and also the particular instrumentation. [00:19:26] Speaker C: So the Robert Bridge codex is this interesting codex that has a small section of pages with instrumental music, and it has two and part of another estampi. And then it has three motets, which are usually a vocal genre, but these are what we would call intabulated. They're sort of, they have ornaments all written in, within the structure of the original vocal piece. And these pieces are all written in keyboard tablature, which is its own unique type of tablature. It's a sort of a shorthand where some of the notes for, especially the right hand, are written out, and then for the left hand side, it also has some rhythmic values in the shapes of different notes, but underneath are written the pitches of the names of the notes. So, like it says, f, a d, etcetera. So this is a style of sort of a shorthand notation usually used by keyboard players. And so we think, therefore, this is a keyboard manuscript. It makes sense that it would be. And it's from mid to late 14th century. The SMPs in this follow the general form that I mentioned. For the last piece, you have a new section of material. They called it a punctum. It's a little point of music. And then it gets repeated. And the first time you end with something that feels unfinished. So you have to go back and do it again. And the second time you come and you finish with something. It's called the CLo or the closed. The closed ending. And then you do that with new material. In these particular pieces. There's more complicated repeat schemes than that. So it goes back to other points. And then you get your open ending. And then it goes back to that point again. And then maybe the next punctum goes to a different point that you were at previously. So it's a really complicated and it's easy to get lost. Repeat scheme. And these are written in two parts, as you were saying. So it's possible they would have been played on an organ. A big enough organ that you can have two hands. But it's also possible that a small organetto could play it. In this case, we had an organetto playing the top part. But it can't cover the bottom part as well. It doesn't have a big enough range. [00:22:00] Speaker D: And also not if he's operating the bellows with his hand. [00:22:03] Speaker C: Left hand, correct? [00:22:05] Speaker D: Yeah, right. [00:22:06] Speaker C: If you have some kids that in the back, like pumping some bellows, it works out fine. But we didn't do that, Chad. Labor laws. And so he was pumping. And so therefore we needed to tenor. And it makes sense to have a sustained instrument as the tenor. Because there are all these moments where you want sort of held tension on long notes. As it turns out, there's a bunch of pictures of VL and organetto players playing together. This repertoire would have been the kind of thing that could have been heard. Minstrel schools, for one thing, there were organ players. Like at the court of Burgundy. There was a really famous organ player, Jean Viset. The king of Aragon wrote to the Duke of Burgundy and said, please send Jean Viset to my court because I want to hear him play. And please send his book of Estampidas. So he had a notated book of dances in a similar form to this that were apparently for a keyboard. And how did you know about that? He probably knew because his musicians were going to these minstrel schools. [00:23:16] Speaker D: Let's listen now to retrove from the Roberts Bridge Codex. [00:23:30] Speaker B: Sadeena. Sadeena. Sadeena. Sadeena. Sadeena. Sadeena. Sadeena. Sadeena. [00:30:13] Speaker D: Welcome back, Liza Allison. I wanted now to dig a little bit further into the idea of traveling musicians who are arriving at the annual conference, or I. Minstrel school. In the case of this program, where was everyone headed and what route did you choose to explore? [00:30:31] Speaker E: Alison and I did a lot of reading and a lot of digging to try to figure out where our minstrels were going to go. And one thing that really helped us was an article that included a list of all of the known minstrel school locations throughout Europe. So what we ended up doing is finding a route that took our minstrels from their home in Paris on a sort of direct path to Brussels, with thoughts in other cities along the way where minstrel schools would have been held, such as Valenciennes Cambrai, and because minstrel schools were held during Lent, which was a time during which musicians were. They were just less busy because the season was more somber and there's less need for their employment, we also fit our show to sort of revolve around this season. So it's punctuated by various important liturgical moments. [00:31:30] Speaker D: The next piece that I wanted to dig into is a piece called Maria Matrem, which is from a spanish manuscript called the libre vermelle, or the Red Book. I do know the libre vermel a little bit, and one thing that I do know about Maria Mattram is that it doesn't resemble in any way the rest of the music in that book. So, Alison, I wonder if you could just describe Mariame Matrem for us and your conjecture about how it might have ended up in the Libra Vermel. [00:32:02] Speaker C: So, yeah, the Libra Vermel is a manuscript that, again, has just a section with music. I think there's ten pieces, and for the most part, they are monophonic, which means single lines of melodies. There's a few two part pieces in this, what we call polyphonic multi voices, and they are in a very sort of a more simple two voice counterpoint where you're just sort of going back and forth between concords and harmonies. This piece is radically different from all of those because it's, first of all, a three voice piece. Second of all, it's basically in the form of a virile, which is a french dance form. It's written out. So when you first look at it, you kind of don't realize, oh, this is a virile, but it is basically a virile form. And so that means there is a refrain, a bit that you go back to. So that's unusual for this. Only the top voice is texted, and they move at slightly different rates of note values. So the top voice is much more active and is very much a melody, accompanied by these two lower voices that act just like french and polyphonic music at the time, where there's a tenor, which does certain things at cadences, and then there's a contra tenor, which has a different role. So, yeah, why is this? There is a very good question and one that I have pondered before, and I like this idea. Once I found out that John of Aragon and some other, also spanish kings and spanish monarchs sent their musicians to these minstrel schools. So we know that spanish musicians were coming frequently, especially from Aragon, this sort of northern area right near Montserrat, which is where the libre vermel comes from. And so it makes a lot of sense to me that this is the kind of thing that either they heard at one of these minstrel schools and they brought back, or they heard something like this at minstrel schools and they created their own piece in a similar style. [00:34:17] Speaker D: I think that's a really compelling idea. And it's true that it's this piece that kind of looks or sounds or in some ways acts like a french three voiced chanson. And so we're going to hear in a moment, mariame matrim from the libre vermel. And this is sung by Karen Weston, soprano. And you mentioned Alison a moment ago, the tenor voice, which is played by me on the ducen. And you're playing the contra tenor or the part that goes against the tenor on the. Let's listen. [00:36:20] Speaker B: Niko ji koni mari amdae hash atomity his us morning across. Jesus marijenne. [00:40:07] Speaker D: Welcome back. Thinking again about music and musicians who are traveling, there was also a bunch of music from german sources on this program. And for this performance, you drew from a 15th century songbook that's known as the Loch Hammer Lederbach. And the next tune is called Wachauf. [00:40:29] Speaker C: So this is a tune that the earliest occurrence that we have it appearing in is in the works of Oswald von Wolkenstein, who is this rather unusual german composer. And he had a very idiosyncratic style for a lot of his works that we think he himself composed. But he also borrowed music a lot. And many of those pieces we have identified in other sources. And so we can see this is a piece that he definitely borrowed because it appears in all these other sources as attributed to some other composer or something. In this case, this piece. We don't know from any other earlier sources or contemporaneous sources. But it looks not so much like his style. It looks like something he's possibly borrowing. And he also. He would frequently borrow something and then write another part for the piece. So it seems like he's borrowing this tune, which is in the lower part. And then he's writing this elaborate instrumental part above. In this piece, what we decided to do is we sort of layered and versions. There are two versions of the tune in there. The first time, it's just this lower voice, this melody, the part that has the text. And so we did that first. That's the first thing you'll hear is that with a sort of improvised drone changing, drone, proto tenor thing, which we came up with in the rehearsals. And then the next thing you'll hear is Oswald setting. And then it has this instrumental part above, which appears in Oswald's sources. And then the last part you'll hear is an instrumental only version, which is found later in Loch Hammer, which is probably a keyboard piece. And so we did it in a similar way to the Roberts Bridge Retrov estampi, where Gabe played the top part on the organetto and I played the tenor on Vl. As if you got to hear the same tune coming from different parts of an encampment where all these minstrels are all playing the same song, but in different styles. [00:42:48] Speaker D: So. Right, you know, this version, here's what I can do with it. And here's your keyboard player who says, here's what I can do with it. Let's listen. [00:44:21] Speaker B: I see the sadeena. Sadeena. [00:45:51] Speaker D: Welcome back, Liza and Alison. I'm going to move us along with the idea that we've kind of been to the minstrel school and our. On our way home. The final pieces on the program are also the latest, chronologically dating probably from the very end of the 15th century. And the first of two pieces that we'll hear in a moment is a song called en des PI? Des faux en vieux, which actually lists the names of several women. What do we know about women's involvement in professional music making and or in the minstrel school? [00:46:33] Speaker E: Well, I think one thing that Alison and I both got excited about sort of independently of each other and then talked about in the planning of this program was that was the evidence that there were indeed women minstrels during the time that this program represents. And, in fact, they held leadership roles. And one of the examples of this is there are, I think, eight women who signed the charter for the Paris Minstrel Guild. And we have their names, which is just a really, really incredible thing. We do know that there were more men minstrels than women minstrels. But the fact that we have this evidence is really exciting, because it tells us not only that there were women doing this, but that they were very good at it. Almost certainly, there were many more women who were doing it whose names we don't have. What interests me particularly, and is the question that at least I've not yet been able to answer, is there were a lot of wind playing minstrels during this time. And, in fact, a lot of the eyewitness accounts and records that come from the minstrel schools discuss playing of shams and loud instruments. And I find this fascinating because for women, that was kind of taboo, that whirly wasn't, like, a super acceptable thing to be doing. They thought it was unseemly, you know, for women to be playing like shawns and sly trumpets and stuff. [00:48:05] Speaker D: Really sticking anything in your mouth. [00:48:07] Speaker E: Yeah. Yes, pretty much. So it's just a really interesting thought experiment to think about the fact that we know there are women minstrels. We know there were minstrel schools where wind players were playing. So what are the possibilities there? So that's something that I continue to sort of mull over in my mind. [00:48:27] Speaker C: So we did this piece on Dep, as you mentioned. I also liked, because it had these women's names. And one of the women who signed the charter in Paris, her name was Alipson with a P Alip son. So as soon as I saw that there was an Alison in the song, I was like, well, we have to do it. And this source that I drew it, that piece from, is this interesting book, or chansonier, called the Bayeux Chansonnier. We wanted a big, exciting number to end with, something that would be appropriate for everyone to participate in, and that would be a bit more rustic. It's such a cool book, and I want to spend more time with it. It's extremely beautiful, beautiful illuminations. So someone took a lot of time to write these down. So as I found that piece, I got really excited about it. And then I discovered, only a few pages later, this other tune, be von Macomera, which is a really fun, silly text. It's from a female point of view. Who knows whether women actually wrote it. It could be, you know, men being worried about what women are singing about. Basically, the text is, come on, girls, let's drink a. We decided, in this particular performance of it, to sort of imagine at a party how you might have performed this. If you have singing, you can't have the loud band at the same time because you would never really hear the singers. So our performance goes back and forth between verses accompanied by soft instruments. And then moments where the loud band jumps in and joins on the refrains where you kind of imagine the whole tavern joins in. So it would be loud enough that it would be fine. [00:50:17] Speaker D: Let's listen now to the really, what was the closer for the concert? This pair of pieces on des PIs, the faux en vieux and beauvoird. [00:50:36] Speaker B: Sadeena, Sadeena, Rainy Jesus, Sadeena. If we want it, only come up with a little way. Rainbow Winter. [00:56:32] Speaker D: Welcome back. And again, I really want to thank both of you for creating this beautiful program. And I was really honored to be a part of it in March of 2024. It was really inspiring to spend a week with everybody. Like I said, it was an opportunity also for me to learn and be inspired by what people are doing. And to fantasize about what minstrel schools might have been like. And also to have the opportunity to consider what a contemporary minstrel school or professional development opportunity of that sort could be like. Alison, you shared with me that Trobar actually dreams of creating their own minstrel school. And I wondered if you have a sort of two minute elevator speech for what that would look or feel like. [00:57:24] Speaker C: So basically, it's my dream, but I hope that Trevor would become the host. It wouldn't be our minstrel school, it would be America's minstrel school. To bring in as many medieval musicians from this country as we can. Basically, in an effort to get people excited about playing this repertoire, about preserving this repertoire, about getting young players to get. To come alongside all these great people. I imagine this as a mutual learning opportunity. We're all in our own separate pockets. And I just want to have a space where we can come together and find out what we're all doing, hear about each other's research, hear what other people are doing musically. And then at the same time, to welcome people who know less about this. And maybe haven't gotten to perform this music into that process. So that they get inspired to continue. So that's sort of a long, long vision in the short term. I am excited that Trobar is going to have our very first apprentice this coming year. We're piloting a new idea. We have a grad student who we asked to do it for this time in the future. We'll have an open application, stay tuned. If you're interested in becoming an apprentice in the future. [00:58:46] Speaker D: Liza, do you have any final reflections on this program or the future of learning medieval music in North America? [00:58:56] Speaker E: Yeah, I think what I would say is to reiterate what a great learning process this was for me specifically. I learned so much from Allison and you and the other musicians that we worked with, and I feel that it really enhanced what I already loved about this music. But it also gave me the opportunity, frankly, to play it. It's very rare to have that opportunity as a brass player. And something that I have noticed with medieval musicians is their welcome of people into the community. And that's something that early music in general, everybody is so generous and giving with their time, and it creates this wonderful, it's this situation in which we're always kind of greater than the sum of our parts. Alison, I really hope that that minstrel school happens because I think it sounds fantastic. [00:59:51] Speaker C: Absolutely. Mark your calendars. It's in our five year plan. I don't know exactly when, but. [00:59:58] Speaker D: Well, thank you again so much also for sharing this work and this music and your passion with our audience at Salon era. Thank you, Liza. And thank you, Allison. [01:00:09] Speaker E: Thanks, Deborah. [01:00:10] Speaker D: Thanks, Deborah. Let's finish now with a party piece called ho, ho, ho, where the refrain celebrates all these different instrumental sounds. Trumpets, drums, harp, citron. And it's equally celebratory in performance. Thank you. [01:01:02] Speaker B: Don't really what is up with. I think it won't be love. It's in love. It is a Sunday. I if I don't even know when. We. [01:03:12] Speaker F: Drawing inspiration from a range of non western musical traditions as well as historical events, Solanira shines a light on artists doing fascinating work that centers cultural exchange in east meets west. Premiering December 9, 2024. Members of east of the River Dahna Moore and Nina Stern join indian american soprano Videta Khanix and thai american violinist Salini Amawat to share recent work that thoughtfully bridges both time and traditions. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Solanira. This episode was created by me, executive producer Deborah Nagy, associate producer Shelby Yaman and Hannah Dupriest, our script writer and special projects manager. Our guests were sackbut player and director of Chicago's Newbery Consort Liza Malamut and medieval string specialist Allison Monroe, artistic director of Trobar. Support for Solanira is provided by the National Endowment of the Arts, Cuyahoga arts and Culture, the Ohio Arts Council, and audience members like you. Special thanks to Arthur Rotatore for sponsoring this episode and to Kenneth Bay and Sarah Steiner for their sponsorship of our guest artists, as well as to Solanira's season sponsors Deborah Malamud, Tom and Marilyn McLaughlin, and Greg Nosen and Brandon Rood. This episode featured musical performances by Trebar and the Newbery Consort. A 1 hour filmed version of this episode is available at Salamira, where you can also get full performance details and learn more about the music and information shared in this and any episode. Please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps the show.

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