A Worcester Lady mass

We re-contextualize the music: none of the music was composed to be a part of a concert programme or indeed for the kind of audience that we perform for. One of the crucial matters for contemporary female singers wishing to perform medieval music is that we cannot in any way be historically authentic (however much we might wish to be), partly because of the historical marginalization of women by the church. The music presented in this particular programme would most likely have been sung by male voices in the middle ages, which means we create a sound for which there is very little historical evidence. We know however, that nuns had the same liturgical agenda as their male counterparts and that they sang monophonic pieces in their convents. We might never get to know to what extent women sang polyphonic music, or how much polyphonic music was available to women, but there are manuscripts from sixteen convents in Europe which contain two and/or three part pieces, which suggests that women probably sung polyphony if it was accessible to them.

Today we assume that the women and men who sang and listened to sacred vocal music in its original context were connected to religious establishments and convinced of their Christian religious lifestyle. Unlike our medieval forebears, modern medieval music performers and their audience are not necessarily religious. Today anyone can sing the music, whether they are religious or not and there are probably as many individual perspectives on spirituality as there are performers. Likewise, the listeners of today are free to make up their own minds about how they relate to and connect with spirituality.

It is impossible to know what this music would have sounded like in the middle ages, and therefore impossible to re-create a medieval vocal sound. We have no recordings or precise descriptions regarding sound or singing techniques being used, and we can only refer to small amounts of written instructions for singers (which were mostly built on complaints about the sound and singing the medieval writer had recently experienced) rather than constructive advice. The most problematic issue when interpreting a medieval source (apart from the fact that most of us have to have the medieval Latin translated to us) is that the norm (what was obvious at the time) is to us unknown. There is of course a huge amount of medieval iconography, but deriving a sound from a picture can be even harder than from a text. And, if we succeeded it would of course be impossible for us to know…

There is a lot of guesswork in medieval music performances. The members of Trio Mediaeval feel that performing medieval music today gives us the freedom to let our imagination and ideas flow, as though we are creating contemporary music. We have chosen to use the lack of original information to inform our performance in the present. The trio also likes to present contemporary music alongside medieval music, and we did not despair when we found out that there was no Credo to be found in the Worcester manuscripts. Instead, we immediately saw the possibility of including a contemporary Credo, and asked Gavin Bryars to compose the piece. He also contributed with a Benedicamus Domino specifically for this programme. The final piece in the programme, Ave Regina Gloriosa (also called Lauda 7), was composed for the trio in 2003. Gavin Bryars has used C13 Italian Laude texts (to date there are 37 of them), extrapolating on the anonymous monophonic originals, sometimes adding lines and textures but retaining the ancient outlines.

We live in a world that has gradually become more or less dependent on constant information. For this particular programme, we have chosen to provide our audience with a minimum of textual information, and instead present a sonic (and visual) experience where the music is free to speak for itself. There are many reasons for this decision. Firstly, the literal translation might do little justice to the original text. It is hard to know how much (if anything) of the original meaning is relevant or amenable to communication in the new context: the medieval listeners’ appreciation of the Latin texts was inevitably very different from that of the present audience. It is inevitably the case that we incorporate our modern reflections into the medieval texts whether we want to or not. Secondly, there is a danger that the texts and translations channel the listening and restrict the listeners´ own creativity.

Tonight, every listener will appreciate the music and its context differently, bringing their own individual expectations to the occasion. We will all experience English medieval and contemporary music, but perhaps the most obvious thing which we all have in common is that we are alive, here and now in the present.

Text: Anna Maria Friman