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'The Orlandos hadn't met the Tuvans when I spoke to them, but were confident they'd find common ground, since this is the strategy they employ as a way of drawing in audiences to the forbidding medieval music they specialise in. Forbidding is my word, not theirs: as tenor Angus Smith points out, composers such as Steve Reich, Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell-Davies are now ploughing the same melodic furrow of the monks of Notre-Dame, 800 years ago. "We don't like to programme early music in isolation – we like to find ways of giving it a resonance today," says Smith. "And the music of medieval Notre-Dame is, in many ways, similar to the music being written today"' - from Michael Church's Independent preview of the East Neuk Festival in Scotland.
The festival includes a premiere by Tarik O'Regan whose Scattered Rhymes, inspired by Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame, featured in my recent 'Mixing it' post and the CD of which provides my header graphic. And mixing it certainly does draw audiences, a very healthy number of the East Neuk Festival concerts are sold out.
More from the Notre Dame composers here.
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Mixing it is the way forward- Pierre Boulez did it in his Domaine Musical concerts in Paris in the 1950s when he played Bach, Machaut and Dufay alongside Stockhausen, Maderna and Cage, Stravinsky did it in 1960 when he recomposed three of Gesualdo's madrigals for instruments, David Munrow did it in 1975 with The Art of the Recorder which put music from the Middle Ages alongside Britten and Hindemith, the Hilliard Ensemble did it in 1993 when they added jazz saxophone to Morales' Officium defuntorum, while in 2000 Kent Nagano did it in Berlin by programming Mahler with Ockeghem, and confirmed that mixing it really is the way forward by selling the Philharmonie Hall out.
Now The Orlando Consort, Paul Hillier and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir are doing it with a new release that mixes choral music by Guillaume Dufay and Guillaume de Machaut with twenty-first century works by Tarik O'Regan and Gavin Bryars. The main juxtaposition is Tarik O'Regan's 2006 Scattered Rhymes which is followed by the fourteenth century masterpiece that inspired it, Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame. And in the brave new world of the download even the performers mix it. Paul Hillier and his Estonian choir only perform for 16 minutes on a 61 minute CD. If you want Paul Hillier just pay to download the first track.
The marketing of this new Harmonia Mundi release also indulges in some gentle mixing, with the sleeve proudly proclaiming Production USA. Now I know my friends in Sequenza21 land are territorial but is Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh, Scotland really in the U.S.A? Well I suppose the team of producer Robina G. Young and Soundmirror Inc engineer Brad Michel are from the States, and, as expected, they do a great job of delivering a credible soundstage enhanced by the church acoustics. When all is said and done Scattered Rhymes is an important new work (it reminded me of Joby Talbot's superb 2006 Path of Miracles, which cannot be bad) and 30 year old Tarik O'Regan is mixing it in all the right places with posts at Cambridge (England), Columbia (New York) and Harvard. And most importantly mixing it is a great way to reach new audiences.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
