Publications: PMP Magazine: Feature Articles

From Archive to Stage: Discovering Early Music
By Heidi Waleson

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Richard Stone, Emlyn Ngai and Gwyn Roberts of Tempesta di Mare (photo by Bill Cramer)

Orchestras, opera companies and ensembles that play music written in the 18th century or later can usually look to commercial sources for their performance materials—scores, parts, and the like. But historical performance groups, many of which specialize in seeking out music that has not been heard for centuries, have a tougher job.

Their sources are not publishers or music libraries, but microfilm, rare book collections, and scholars, and their finds often require considerable work before the parts can be placed on the music stands. The Philadelphia Music Project has been a regular partner to Philadelphia-based ensembles in helping to finance the research that makes such programs unique. And three such ensembles—Tempesta di Mare, Piffaro, and Philomel—have found that the wonders of modern technology, specifically the Internet and music notation computer software, can now make the research piece of the historical performance equation a lot easier to tackle.

For their 2008–09 season, Tempesta di Mare, a Baroque orchestra, and the Philadelphia Singers, a choral ensemble, decided to explore a collaborative program. Gwyn Roberts, co-director of Tempesta, recalls, “We got together to talk repertoire with the Singers’ music director David Hayes, and we agreed that it would be neat to do Bach’s Trauer-Ode because it’s off the beaten track, and it showcases instrumentalists and pulls the vocal soloists from the choir. But what to pair with that? We wanted something unusual.” Tempesta had enjoyed performing Great Choir of Heaven, an ode by John Blow, in an earlier season. “So with David’s permission, I went off to research Blow odes that used an instrumental ensemble that would be compatible with the Bach.”

Naturally, there is no complete edition of Blow odes, so Roberts started “poking around” in journal articles. She soon hit pay dirt: a 1965 article in the journal Music and Letters that was a chronology of court odes by Blow, along with their instrumentation and the location of their manuscript sources. She also found an essay by Bruce Wood, chairman of the Purcell Society and one of the foremost authorities on Blow and Purcell, which looked at musical influences on Blow from Italy and France. “It included a couple of hand-transcribed excerpts from one particular ode, With Cheerful Hearts, that showed him doing interesting things with rhythms and using vocal soloists with instruments, in a little one-upmanship with Purcell,” Roberts says. The piece, a New Year’s ode for 1690, had the right instrumentation—Roberts checked that with Wood’s Blow article in Grove and the 1965 chronology article.

The next task was to find the music, and to see if the ode had ever had a modern performance— if not, Tempesta could take credit for the modern premiere. The catalogue in Music and Letters placed the manuscript at the Royal College of Music in London. This would have meant a transatlantic loan, but Richard Griscom, music librarian at the University of Pennsylvania (and a recorder player in the Penn ensemble that Roberts directs), told her that the Penn library has the entire RCM collection on microfilm—159 reels of it. Roberts also contacted Bruce Wood at Bangor University in Wales, and his graduate student, Susan Pollock, who is in the process of transcribing and editing Blow’s odes. Neither knew of any modern transcription or performance of the work.

Once the particular microfilm containing the manuscript was found at Penn, lutenist Richard Stone, Tempesta’s co-director, took over. He scanned the microfilm into a data stick, brought it back to his home computer as a series of JPEG files, and then transcribed it into his music notation software. “It was unusually easy to read, and pretty complete—I only had to make up five or ten bars of missing counterpoint,” Stone says. Then, voilà—Roberts and Stone listened to it in a computer-generated rendition—probably the first “performance” in about 300 years.

Roberts and Stone are delighted to be performing Blow, whose output has been much overshadowed by that of his more famous contemporary and friend, Purcell. Roberts explains the historical reason for the disparity: money, and the Protestant asceticism of William and Mary. William was spending the treasury on war with the Catholics in France, so most of the musicians at court weren’t being paid. That included Purcell, who found work elsewhere, including the theater. But the court needed Blow, who was the organist and choir director of the Chapel Royal. “He was one of the few with reliable employment,” Roberts says. The sinecure was a double-edged sword, however: William disliked musical excess of any kind, so Blow’s compositions were mostly simple verse anthems with organ accompaniment. “For big occasions, like this New Year’s ode, he was allowed to stretch himself to do something special.” Purcell’s more elaborate and varied oeuvre produced more enduring fame, even though he died much younger than Blow did. But Blow will have his moment: on January 31 and February 1, 2009, Tempesta and the Philadelphia Singers will perform the 20-minute work, With Cheerful Hearts.

Piffaro, the Renaissance Band, also specializes in finding unusual music to perform. However, one of its programs, scheduled for the weekend of December 19–22, 2008, will be built around a find that does not include any music notation. The roots of the project go back several years, explains co-director Robert Wiemken. “I live next door to a fellow who used to curate rare books in the Free Library of Philadelphia, and he told me that the Library had a 16th-century manuscript of French noels (Christmas carols). I thought it would be fun to build a project around it, and get the library involved.”

Piffaro, the Renaissance Band (photo by Andrew Pinkham)

The resulting concert is to be a multimedia event, in which Claudin de Sermisy’s Missa voulant Honneur will be performed interspersed with sung French noels drawn from the manuscript and dramatic vignettes that reflect the scenes depicted in it. Piffaro, a wind ensemble, will be joined by four singers and two mimes for the project. The concept, which is based on liturgical practice of the period, brings a rustic, peasant element into the sacred aura of the mass, and into the sacred space.

The manuscript, a small (7x10 inch), plain-bound volume dating from about 1520, has only texts and pictures. There are a few suggestions about the tunes to which the various noels might be sung, but there is no music in the book. Joan Kimball, Piffaro’s co-artistic director, who has been working with the document, says, “It’s definitely a rather rustic manuscript. The illustrations are done in water color, a rather light wash, and the hand is in script. Towards the end of the book, the writing deteriorates considerably—it looks like it must have been a different hand—and is hardly legible.”

The texts are rustic too. A modern translation from the old French of one of them, Or vous tremoussez, (“Stir yourselves now, shepherds of Judea”) reads, in part:

Donald and Jester and Puddinhead
have jumped up to run to the place
Where the Messiah is born.

The child is as sweet as a bird on the branch,
So with the milk from my nanny-goat Garoche
I made him a cheese.

Hurtaoult gave him a mound of butter,
Tienvrine gave him a bale of straw,
Floquet gave him his cheesecake.

The illustrations reflect those simple sentiments. Kimball says, “What I find so wonderful about the illustrations are their naturalness and charm. There are scenes depicting everyday life—a sheep shearing, a pig slaughter for a feast, dogs, cats, goats. There are a number of depictions of musical instruments, including some of the ones that we play in Piffaro—shawm, bagpipe, recorder, pipe & tabor, hurdy-gurdy. There is a delightful picture of a bagpipe-playing pig! There is only one religious illustration in the whole book—a nativity scene on the opening page.”

Piffaro plans to use about half a dozen of the noels in the performance, choosing appropriate music for the texts. “The texts are fun and upbeat, and the popular tunes to which they were set were prob-ably very familiar to the audience, in contrast with the ordinaries of the mass,” Wiemkin says. “We conceive of it as a midnight mass taking place in a little parish church somewhere, not a grand place like Notre Dame de Paris. The forces that would perform a mass like this would depend on the size and wealth of the cathedral or monastery—there could be many more singers than the four we are using. This one strikes us as being intimate, and we’re setting a stage where the two elements—the intimate mass and the little vignettes—don’t contrast so much.” The wind band itself is a given in these church settings. “Large, acoustically live spaces lend themselves to the immediacy of attack of wind instruments,” Wiemkin says. “Bowed strings depend on the developing of the sound, and that is not characteristic of Renaissance polyphony, but of a later Baroque style. Cathedrals used wind bands well into the 17th century.”

Kimball and Wiemkin have pursued various kinds of scholarly work for the program, some involving the manuscript itself, and some exploring the practical traditions of the period. Figuring out the tunes is another task. Since only a handful of the noels specify the music to which they are to be sung, the artistic directors have had to search out appropriate music. “Some is monophonic; some is polyphonic, with three and four-voice textures,” Wiemkin says. “We’ve been delving into this larger repertoire, trying to align text and music. I’m also researching liturgical practice, using collections of cathedral archives—Penn has a pretty good collection of them, or we can get them on library loan. You can find out who the performers were from records that give accountings of personnel and how much they were paid. Sometimes there are even written records of the event, some with pictures and brief descriptions. Sometimes we know where the vignettes were placed in the mass.”

The mimes, a man and a woman, will devise their parts based on the noels that are chosen. “We’ll probably build some scenes that draw on the influx of peasants into this otherwise educated, sophisticated environment,” Wiemkin says. They plan to have “generic” costumes that reflect the period but are not actual reproductions. Piffaro is also planning to put together a booklet with translations that includes images from the noel manuscript—possibly even creating large cutouts of some of the images with which the mimes could interact. “We thought about projecting them, but that becomes a three-ring circus,” Wiemkin says. “We decided to keep it to two rings, and focus more on the music. We’ll put the music in context, and use the manuscript as basis and springboard for presenting the program.”

Harpsichordist and musicologist Bruce Bekker, co-founder of the chamber ensemble/chamber orchestra Philomel, likes to devise programs with context, and the 300th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin in 2006 provided a perfect opportunity. “I wanted to share Franklin’s deep commitment to music,” says Bekker, who is especially interested in colonial Philadelphia in general and in Franklin in particular. “He has an amazing roster of identities, and very few know of him as a music lover. In the year that we celebrated him, all the others were being trotted out. I wanted to acknowledge his interest in music, his personal theories about it, his likes and dislikes.”

Julianne Baird and Philomel

Philomel’s 2005–06 concert series, a collaboration with soprano Julianne Baird, thus featured three concerts built around music that Franklin would likely have heard at home in Philadelphia and abroad in London and Paris. The music was interspersed with readings and talk, exploring Franklin’s experience and understanding of music. In addition, Philomel offered several salon concerts in historical spaces like the Physick House, where Franklin and his friends might have gathered, in an effort to replicate the intimate experience that such concerts might have been.

Philomel also produced Benjamin Franklin’s Musical World, a CD featuring highlights from the series. A lively compendium of music that Franklin knew and loved, and works that were played during his time, ranging from Scottish tunes and popular cantatas by James Oswald, to works by such composers as Thomas Arne and Luigi Boccherini, the CD is an important permanent documentation of Franklin’s era, a historical look at an aspect of the period and the man that has otherwise been largely overlooked.

To research the Franklin program, Bekker went hunting for Franklin musical references in letters, diary entries, and the like. “A good deal of what I did might be called sifting, looking for needles in haystacks,” he says. “It was fascinating, because often there were things in plain sight that had not been pursued because biographers who were Franklin scholars didn’t have an awareness or interest in what things meant musically.”

Bekker found a lot of material at the American Philosophical Society and online. Biographical information about Franklin is easily accessible, and once Bekker had a lead he would pursue it. For example, he says, “Franklin wrote a letter making fun of a particular piece by Handel. That was fairly straightforward—I just had to find the piece, and find it in the edition Franklin was referring to. Music by Handel is pretty readily available, but Franklin would have had access to less than complete scores than we have today, so that lead involved conferring with a colleague who collects 18th-century printed material that would have been given to audiences at that time.”

Bekker feels that his research provides the audience an unusual level of context. “There’s a letter by a young American visitor describing entering a small room in Paris where Franklin is present,” he says. “If you connect that with descriptions of salons of the period, it gives listeners a special kind of engagement—you hear music that Franklin heard in salons; then you hear this American’s shock and awe at the vibrancy of life in high society Paris. It adds a dimension that you can’t get from straight program notes.”

Finding the music itself can be tricky, however. The “Franklin in Philadelphia” concert, which featured works by unfamiliar composers, was a puzzle that took some sleuthing to put together. “One of the frustrating things about researching the music of colonial Philadelphia is that we don’t have printed programs,” Bekker says. “There were advertisements of concerts, but if there were printed programs, they don’t exist anymore. There probably weren’t any—it was a convivial environment, so things were probably introduced verbally. The advertisements give names, but you don’t know if it’s the performer or the composer. Or it might say a sonata by Haydn, but which Haydn, and which sonata? You have to connect different pieces of the puzzle so that you can make strong conjectures about precise pieces.”

Philomel’s themed concerts—which usually have Bekker doing research two or three years in advance—have included a look at music and manners at the court of Louis XIV (the music was refined, the manners, less so), and another about Rembrandt’s Holland. One recent program, a look at the genesis of public concerts, which occurred in London at the end of the 17th century, was, Bekker says, a kind “upstairs/downstairs program” called “An Armchair Pub Crawl.” The music was played in a performance space above a tavern, so Philomel interspersed the music with sometimes raunchy tales of tavern life written by Ned Ward, a tavern owner and writer. “The music was not as refined as that of the French court, but it was certainly more refined than Ned Ward’s stuff,” Bekker says. “Giving the audience a sense that public concerts were actually invented was intriguing to us. When things go way back in time, they start to have a kind of magical aura. We really like to bring things back to life in a way that is true to history and more engaging.”

Heidi Waleson covers opera for The Wall Street Journal and frequently contributes to music publications such as Early Music America.