Sequentia - Doom & Gloom With Glee
Saturday, August 02, 2014
The year 1000 of the
Incarnation of the Lord was dawning when my brothers set out on the roads of
this world. The nocturnal shadows had not yet withdrawn from the ground, and
they were already descending the promontory where the monastery was situated. With
their mules laden with crucifixes, statues of enthroned Virgins, loaves of
bread, cheeses, honey and water for the journey, they forded the swollen stream
and took the first path they came upon on their left, eager to publish the signs
of the Last Judgment throughout the villages of the kingdom.
Vision 1 The Lord of
the Last Days – Visions of the Year 1000 by Homero Aridjis
On Friday night
Benjamin Bagby and Norbert Rodenkirchen of the now Paris-based Sequentia, armed
with ancient instruments (replicas) new to me performed Fragments for the End
of Time. The program at UBC School of Music’s intimate Roy Barnett Recital Hall, presented by Early Music Vancouver was all about doom, gloom and corpses burning for eternity in hell. There was
no element of hope except that if you were one of those lucky ones to be born a
saint then you could skip it all and not
worry about it. In that first millennium after the birth of Christ many thought that ending of the world was close at hand. Sequentia explored that preoccupation in both pagan and Christian cultures of the western world.
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| Before the Apocalypse - Benjamin Bagby, Matthew White & Norbert Rodenkirchen |
Unfortunately (and
paradoxically fortunately, too) we are not saints and some of us (me) who were
raised as Roman Catholics are attracted like lemmings to anything related to
the apocalypse.
Watching this duo,
Bagby reminded me of actor Robert Duval playing a funeral director, and
Rodenkirchen was a Teddy Bear version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin luring
children to their deaths, I was transfixed by their performance. Bagby sang,
acted and performed with great drama, while Rodenkirchen played on his swan-ulna-bone flute with a smile on his face. I could have easily been lured
to jump over the cliff with glee!
The 75 minute
performance, with no interval, ended in applause. I was sitting next to EMV
Board President Sharon Kahn. I whispered to her, “Do we want more doom and
gloom?” Thankfully Bagby and Sequentia (which Bagby founded in Basle
with Barbara Thornton in 1977) knew when to quit. And they did.
At this point you
might suspect that I was not too happy with the performance.
You would be
completely wrong.
This kind of stuff
clears the air of that sometimes unwanted sweetness and the banality of social
networks and life in the 21st century.
In fact I am now going
to re read (inspired by Sequentia), The Lord of the Last Days – Visions of the
Year 1000 by Homero Aridjis, my Mexican poet/novelist friend. As a Mexican (and
I lived in Mexico
for 18 years) he and I are obsessed (the right word) with death, destruction,
gloom and doom. It is all natural and inevitable. No amount of Air Miles points
will change that.
Aridjis was a shrewd
man who opted to publish the edition in English in 1995 (originally published
in 1994 as El señor de los últimos días, visions del año dos mil) knowing there
would be an interest in such a novel as the 20th century came to a
close.
Today, Monday, could
be the last day of the world. Perhaps tomorrow, Tuesday, the Virgin without sin
would appear in the firmament. And perhaps the day after tomorrow, the radiant
dawn of the new millennium would shine over the world. Each day the miracle we
had never seen could happen, the miracle we hope for would happen on earth each
day during the last thousand years. …García Cabezón ordered the ram’s horn to
be blown so that the knights, clerics, cotters and all others who wanted to do
battle with the emissary of the Evil One might come to join us.
The Lord of the Last Days - Homero Aridjis
It was difficult for me
to pin down exactly Bagby’s performance. Is he a singer, an actor, a slam poet,
a troubadour of old, or what? I could not even secure his voice. I had to ask
Liz Hamel, recorder musician, a soprano or mezzo (she is one or the other
depending on the day) and now a deacon of the Anglican Church. She told me,
Bagby is a baritone.
The name of the
musical group, Sequentia and the calling of their pieces sequences had me in
total ignorance. They seemed to be some version of early Gregorian Chant (but
definitely not quite). They seemed to be religious and in Latin. They seemed to
expand or transfer from purely religious to mythical lore and thus into other
languages, languages not of the church.
I had to look it up in
my musical reference book for dummies, The Oxford Junior Companion to Music,
Second Edition 1979 and upon reading the definition I was not much the wiser:
Sequence: The
repetition of a short passage of music at another pitch. In the following hymn,
the soprano and the bass parts are repeated three times – ‘sequentially’.
The short definition
then added that there are two kinds of sequences, real and tonal. The example
given below is a tonal sequence, because the repetitions are not absolutely
exact, semitone for semitone.
Flummoxed I decided to scrap
further investigation as to what is a sequence and I state here that Sequentia’s
Fragments for the End of Time was a riveting performance in which the two
players in some moments took me to a medieval plaza Sunday fair where I was an
unwashed commoner rapt to listen to a story perhaps after a passion play. And
at other times, in the smallish Roy Barnett Recital Hall I was Charlemagne
himself, surrounded by my courts listening to Alcuin tell me that like Michael
the Archangel I was singly responsible for defeating the dragon ( an a myriad of
snakes) for the redemption of mankind.
The last sequence of
the evening was A felir austan um eitrdala or the ‘Prophecy of the Völva, from
the Old Icelandic Edda (Iceland
10th century).
At one point after all
the doom, gloom and destruction of all singers of the previous sequences I
thought this one was going to end on a positive note:
She sees com up earth
out of ocean once again green. The waterfalls flow, an eagle flies over, in the
hills hunting fish.
Sér hon upp
koma
öðru sinni
jörð ór œgi
iðjagrœna;
falla
forsar,
flýgr örn
yfir,
sá er á
fjalli
fiska veiðir.
But it was not to be:
Then comes the shadowy
dragon flying, glittering serpent, up from Dark-of-the Moon hills.
As she flies over the
fields he carried in his claws: corpses.
Þar kemr inn dimmi
dreki fljúgandi,
naðr fránn neðan
frá Niðafjöllum;
berr sér í fjöðrum
— flýgr völl yfir —
Niðhöggr nái.
Nú man hon sökkvask.
I left the hall entertained but sober and making the resolution to myself of perhaps at this later date of my life that I must become a kinder person. I felt sort of like leaving the confessional purified (if only temporarily).
Addenndum:
Dear Mr. Waterhouse-Hayward,
Thanks very much for your mail and for the
interesting blog entry about our concert. We always enjoy performing in Vancouver. The festival
had asked specifically for a programme about the Apocalypse.
In your blog there seems to be some
question about the definition of 'sequence'. If you consult a good music
dictionary (such as the Harvard Dictionary of Music) you will see that the word
'sequence' has two definitions. One, which has nothing to do with medieval
music, involves a technique of melodic repetition at different pitch levels.
The more significant definition, from the medieval term 'sequentia', refers to
a musical and poetic form which was extremely important at all levels of
musical practice between the 9th and 13th centuries. It is this second definition
which relates to both my ensemble's name and the vocal/instrumental pieces
designated as 'sequentia' which we performed on our programme.
Thanks again for your kind words.
Best wishes,
B. Bagby
