Sequentia

A pastime in Middle ages music shared by two graduate learners on the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland was the building blocks for one of the very most effective and innovative early music performing ensembles from the twentieth hundred years. Benjamin Bagby and Barbara Thornton fulfilled in 1974 and created the ensemble Sequentia in 1977, naming the group following the series, a central poetic and musical type of the Large DARK AGES. Sequentia is continuing to grow right into a touring and documenting trend, with over 20 albums to day, movies for both tv and self-employed filmmakers, trips to six continents, and honours like the International Compact disc Reward Frankfurt, the Deutsche Shallplattenpreis, the Edison Reward (Netherlands), a Disque D’or (France), a Grammy Honours nomination, as well as the Innsbruck Radio Reward. The flexible ensemble, initially located in Cologne, Germany, proceeds its established design of innovative study, creative encoding, and pure musical virtuosity, wanting to bring alive various musical customs of tenth- to fourteenth hundred years European countries. In 2002, the group re-located its foundation of procedures to Paris. The lineup of Sequentia adjustments based on the needs of every particular system. The core contains vocalist and harpist Benjamin Bagby, and vocalist Barbara Thornton until Thornton’s untimely loss of life in 1998; additional core members possess included middle ages fiddlers Margriet Tindemans and Elizabeth Gaver, and vocalist Suzanne Norin. Sets of singers, many of them worldwide soloists within their personal correct, comprise Vox Feminae and Sons of Thunder, the women’s and men’s ensembles of Sequentia. Both of these sub-groups fulfill intensively every year in Cologne and Boston, leading workshops and finding your way through the existing tour/documenting task. Since their inception, Sequentia offers incorporated instrumental overall performance, including a panoply of handcrafted reproductions of stringed tools appropriate with their repertoire. Among the countless musical repertoires taken to existence by Sequentia is definitely that of Hildegard of Bingen, who they possess consistently presented. Along with Christopher Page’s ensemble Gothic Voices, Sequentia may take credit for the resurgence appealing in Hildegard’s music, you start with their 1982 documenting of her passionate morality play, the Ordo Virtutem. Recently, Sequentia produced some recordings encompassing Hildegard’s total functions, culminating in a fresh creation of Ordo Virtutem in 1998, the 900th wedding anniversary of her delivery. Other repertories within their catalog are the music of Philipe de Vitry, some Medieval Spanish music, and a reclamation of Medieval Nordic music, like the Icelandic Edda cycles and Benjamin Bagby’s single recitation of Beowulf, as well as the Rheingold Curse, predicated on the Icelandic Edda. A continuing motif is normally their concentrate on the dental custom root the music they strategy; this network marketing leads to a tension on text messages, linguistics, primary notation, and improvisation within known guidelines. Each task begins with comprehensive and often innovative scholarship or grant, covering all areas of linguistics, notation, musical evaluation, and performance procedures. For instance, the Edda task started with Bagby’s intense study from the medieval Icelandic text messages aswell as current ways of Icelandic folk epic recitation, and analysis by Gaver in to the Hardinger-fiddle custom. All the time, their goal provides gone to reach and deeply internalize a modern knowledge of the modal personality from the repertoire, viewing melodies even more as constellations of orally-transmitted modal gestures than as linear occasions. This internalization informs Sequentia’s vocal functionality, and, moreover, the type of their instrumental improvisations. The ensemble is well known for its quality full-voiced, open-throated performing, with evocative shaping from the text messages.