06-Nov / Tis now dead Night CD / 1 COMMENTS

 

Time is a running boys and girls- time is a running! The lutenist Earl Christy and I are a little less than a month away from recording our ‘Tis now dead Night’ CD, our crowd funding campaign has reached 85% by now, and rehearsals are in full swing. I can’t wait to record this beautiful repertoire and share it with you all- but for now, I’m enjoying every minute I spend working on Coprario and Campion’s ‘Songs of Mourning’.

 

Quite early on in my studies I felt a very strong connection to the English lute song repertoire. Diving into text and word painting was so fascinating to me, that no matter how many times a melody of a song was repeated, the story came out fresh and new.

 

This genuine need from the repertoire was so clear to me, that I was pretty shocked, when I heard one of my old professors claim that actually the strophic Elizabethan Lute Song repertoire was an inferior genre, rhetorically speaking. As example he pointed to the melody, that, according to him, was usually composed to fit the first stanzas, ignoring the hammering/ hacking- in singers will struggle with to fit the rest of the stanzas.

 

Digging more into treatment of text of the time, and the preparation process singers would have gone through, made me realize just how exquisite and brilliantly written Elizabethan lute songs are. The text for one almost has a life of its own. Beyond meaning, it already has a rhythm, a melody, weight and lightness, variety of colors and a wide range of dynamics. Composers at the time (of whom some were also known poets) were fully aware of that. They did not sloppily hammer words into melodies- but rather created a form which thrives, touches and makes so much sense, when the music of the composer and the music of the poet come together.

 

To make the most of the two worlds of both composer and poet, I’ve been introducing declamation into my every day practice routine. I’d really like to share that with you, and show you how I do it. Maybe I should even video it, to give a clear idea of my preparation process. Let me know what you think. Are you with me on the whole music and text thing? Would you like to see a video of me giving a glimpse of my work process? I’d really like to know. Till next time!