Programs

Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper

Introduction

What did secular European song sound like one thousand years ago? Who were its singers and what instruments did they play? Where, and under what circumstances, have their songs survived? Can we ever hope to reconstruct music from such a distant age? These are the questions which led to my initial search for the lost songs of a performing musician whose name remains unknown to us, a search which now culminates - or at least pauses for reflection - in this program: Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper.

Almost one thousand years ago a collection Latin and German song was copied into a manuscript by Anglo-Saxon monks in the Abbey of St. Augustine in Canterbury. The original source - or sources - has long since disappeared, but the manuscript copy has survived to this day, and is now found in the library of Cambridge University. Although we will never know what its exact origin was, one thing is clear: many of the songs copied by the monks come from the milieu of learned, aristocratic churchmen in the Rhineland, where cities such as Cologne, Mainz, Worms and Speyer were centers of culture and power in Germany at the turn of the first millennium. In addition, it is striking that many of the song texts from this collection display an intimate working knowledge of music, the voice, and instruments, especially the harp (cithara, lira) and even the flute (tibia). When considering possible sources of the Canterbury collection, the evidence points strongly to the performance repertoire of a learned "citharista", a bi-lingual harper/singer from the Rhineland, whose songs delighted not only aristocratic bishops and their courts, but also powerful abbots, secular nobility (inlcuding the Kaiser’s court), and the young clerical intelligentsia of those bustling river towns with their imposing cathedrals. Here we have the songs of a professional entertainer whose audience was expected to pay for his services (and he might easily have been joined on occasion by another minstrel from the ranks of the itinerant players, or even a poetically-inclined clerical cantor). Our program combines some of the earliest-known musical manuscripts of European song with reconstructions from the Canterbury manuscript, to give a glimpse into the deliciously subtle, long-lost world of an unknown Rhineland harper and his sophisticated audience.

Program Archive

Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper

Upcoming Concerts

19 June 2010
Montalbâne Festival, Germany
Fragments for the End of Time

24 September 2010
Cité de la Musique, Paris
The Rheingold Curse

See full concert schedule

News

Early Music America Annual Award

Early Music America, the national service organization for the field of early music, has announced the winners of its 2010 awards recognizing outstanding accomplishments in early music. Benjamin Bagby will receive the Howard Mayer Brown Award for lifetime achievement in the field of early music. The awards will be presented at the EMA Annual Meeting and Awards Ceremony at the Berkeley Early Music Festival on 11 June 2010.

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In September 2009 a new film about the life of Hildegard von Bingen, directed by Margarethe von Trotta and starring Barbara Sukowa, was released in Germany. More

Interview with Benjamin Bagby

WNYC, New York Public Radio, aired an interview with the ‘Beowulf’ performer, B. Bagby. Listen to the show

Beowulf on DVD

Benjamin Bagby’s legendary performance of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf (part I) recorded live in Helsingborg, Sweden.
Visit the Beowulf website