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Gregorius: The Holy Sinner
January 15 @ 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
Early Music Vancouver at Green College
Benjamin Bagby and Sequentia
Coach House, Green College, UBC and livestreamed
Wednesday, January 15, 5-6:30 pm
How did Medieval German aristocrats satisfy their appetites for long stories about beautiful, wealthy and tragic fictional characters of their own time? What were the themes which motivated the best storytellers, and how might they have gone about fashioning a real ‘performance’. How did music and the voice figure into this world of noble entertainment, where a given story might require a dozen long episodes to be told in full, in an age which did not know widespread literacy and long before printing?
The members of Sequentia, taking their own work with Hartmann von Aue’s ‘Gregorius’ as an example, discuss and demonstrate how music serves his story, using both voices and instruments. We examine how a flourishing courtly audience ca. 1200 devoured this and other noble stories, always as live performance and only later through reading, leaving the living transmission in the hands of dedicated minstrels (Spielleute) who were the beloved entertainers of their time. Our reconstruction raises question about orality in the Middle Ages, and about musical sources, and how we come to know and use those sources in our retelling.
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Vocalist, harper and medievalist Benjamin Bagby has been an important figure in the field of medieval musical performance for over 40 years. Since 1977, when he and the late Barbara Thornton co-founded Sequentia, his time has been almost entirely devoted to the research, performance and recording work of the ensemble. Apart from this, Mr. Bagby is deeply involved with the solo performance of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic oral poetry: his acclaimed performance of Beowulf has been heard worldwide and was released as a DVD in 2007. In 2017, he was awarded the Artist of the Year Award by REMA, the European Early Music Network. In addition to researching and creating over 75 programs for Sequentia, Mr. Bagby has published widely, writing about medieval performance practice; as a guest lecturer and professor, he has taught courses and workshops all over Europe and North America. Between 2005 and 2018 he taught medieval music performance practice at the Sorbonne – University of Paris. He currently teaches medieval music performance at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany.