BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Hannah Lane describes herself as a member of the “new generation of Australian HIPsters”.
The harpist isn’t talking about your typical top knot style hipster (though we do love a good top knot – who doesn’t?). She is telling us she is committed – no, obsessed – with Historically Informed Performance practice. Hannah is an early music specialist, which means that when we see her perform in her Ensemble 642 with Nicholas Pollock, we will be witnessing her perform music from centuries ago, close to the way it was performed centuries ago.
Hannah, who plays baroque triple harp, and Nicholas Pollock, who plays every string instrument under the 17th Century sun, launch their concert series with Song of Songs in Carlton this week. The pair’s program will feature excerpts from a newly discovered manuscript from the era, as well as a premiere of a new Italian Baroque style work by scholar Elam Rotem. Hannah tells us everything – seriously, everything – about Ensemble 642 and its HIPster philosophy.
So what’s Ensemble 642 all about?
Ensemble 642 comprises myself on baroque triple harp and lutenist Nicholas Pollock on theorbo, baroque guitar, archlute, baroque lute, gallichon, cittern and…well, his instrument collection is ever-expanding. But I like to joke that I still have more strings than all his instruments put together!
We play ‘early’ music, which usually refers to European music composed in the early modern period (1400-1800). Our instruments were most widely used in the period from the late 16th — early 18th centuries, particularly in the practice of basso continuo. This is the fascinating art of improvising harmony and counterpoint on a bass line in order to support and create a dialogue with the upper voice/s, which could be vocal and/or instrumental. This brings me to our name!
The numbers ‘642’ denote a shorthand used in basso continuo practice to indicate the notes to be played above the bass line. This is known as ‘figured bass’. We chose this particular figure as a name because the combination of pitches make a rather crunchy dominant harmony, which we really enjoy playing! You will hear this chord many times in our performances as it is prevalent in the music of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Why did you form the group?
A major impetus for forming 642 in early 2016 was our shared desire to explore the art of basso continuo for our instruments. It felt like a natural pairing since our instruments were often used together in the 17th Century and really compliment each other in terms of sound and musical function. In case you haven’t already noticed, we’re also both extremely nerdy and we love to spend hours debating how to ornament a cadential figure, or reading through 17th Century manuscripts, so it also felt like a natural fit on a personal level.
We’re really lucky that there are some fantastic musicians in Australia who like us, have chosen to devote themselves to Historically Informed Performance practice, in particular to the study and performance of Baroque repertoire. The instruments we play are rather rare in general but particularly in Australia. I think we’re two of only a very few young early plucked-string specialists here, so I’m glad we ended up living in the same city!
How did you come about the idea for your Song of Songs concert?
Our concert programs are usually motivated by a combination of the desire to perform a particular work or repertoire and the desire to create an opportunity for collaboration with particular musicians. In this case, the repertoire in question was early-17th Century sacred Italian music for voice and basso continuo and we wanted to collaborate with the soprano Roberta Diamond, who has a particular interest in this area.
I met Roberta at an early music festival in Italy last year and (conveniently for us!) she recently returned to Australia at the end of 2016 after completing studies in the United Kingdom. We had performed some works of this genre in a concert in 2016 and were attracted to the beauty, sensuality and intense emotion present in the Latin texts of the poems from the Hebrew Bible known as the Song of Songs, which were set to music by composers such as Claudio Monteverdi and Giovanni Paolo Cima. We discovered that there was a tradition of setting these texts in Baroque music and we are fascinated by the tension between religious emotion and eroticism in the poems and how this is represented musically.
You’ve described the poems as ‘erotic, ecstatic, complex’ – can you talk us through what some of these poems within your music are about?
The Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon or the Canticle of Canticles is a collection of love poems from the Hebrew Bible. They are ancient texts and there is still much debate over their exact date of composition, which has been theorised as between the 10th and 2nd centuries BC. The poems feature both male and female narrators, sometimes in dialogue as lovers.
One of the aspects I find most interesting about these texts is that they are a strong representation of female sexual desire, which is unique within the overtly patriarchal Biblical writings. For example, one of the poems included in various musical settings in our concert is Adjuro vos filiae Hierusalem, in which a woman describes her fervent search for her lover through the streets of the city at night and upon finally finding him, takes him hastily into her bedroom before revealing that this was all a dream and imploring the daughters of Jerusalem: ‘Do not arouse my love until it is time’. The poems written from the male perspective are also striking in their representation of female beauty as something incredibly strong and awe-inspiring.
Another setting we have included in this program which is written from the male perspective is O quam pulchra es:
O how beautiful you are,
My lover, my dove,
My beautiful one,
Your eyes are those of doves
Your hair is like flocks of goats,
Your teeth are like rows of oars.
Come from Lebanon, come, I will crown you.
Arise quickly, arise my bride
Arise my precious, my spotless one,
Arise, come, because I languish in love.
I think this unique perspective and frank expression of desire means that these poems still resonate profoundly with us today, whether you decide you want to read them as a religious allegory or as erotic texts – or both! The Italian Baroque musical settings of these texts heighten the beautiful imagery of the poems and the emotions they express through an equally intense form of musical expression.
The concert will premiere the Carlo G Manuscript in Australia. What is the story behind this manuscript and its discovery? Why did you want to perform this?
We are so excited to be performing music from the Carlo G Manuscript for the first time in Australia, over 400 years after its composition. The story goes that around 15 years ago, this manuscript, which is Italian in origin, appeared at a jumble sale in Vienna and was purchased for the bargain-basement price of 60 euros. A music student in Vienna wrote a thesis on it in 2007 and a scan of the manuscript was uploaded online; you can currently download it from IMSLP! Then the manuscript was sold at auction to an anonymous buyer so it once again disappeared from the world – but fortunately, we have the digital copy. The identity of the manuscript’s author remains a mystery since his surname is illegible due to a smudge!
I came across the Carlo G during a random internet search a couple of years ago and it piqued my interest because it is one of the rare examples of early 17th Century music that provides note-for-note the parts for the singers and the organist. This is an absolutely fascinating and valuable source for performance practice, because music from this period does not provide all the information you need to perform it within the notation. For one thing, early keyboard and plucked string players are mostly working with basso continuo parts, which provide a bass line from which we must extrapolate the accompaniment. So this manuscript gives us insight into how we might create a stylistically convincing accompanying part for early 17th Century Italian liturgical music.
Then there are many unwritten conventions such as complex ornamentation for singers and instrumentalists, which would have been improvised for the most part but in the Carlo G Manuscript they are written out. When it came to including the Carlo G in our Song of Songs program, it turns out that this manuscript contains a number of settings of these poems. In this concert we are performing all the settings of the Song of Songs for solo voice and organ accompaniment from the manuscript.
For the most part, we have arranged the organ accompaniment for baroque triple harp and theorbo but in some pieces there is also lute tablature included, which gives us further clues as to the stylistic and musical possibilities for plucked string accompaniment from this period.
You’re also working with Elam Rotem, an early keyboard specialist and composer whose music is contemporary but inspired by Italian Baroque. How do you approach the juxtaposition of new and old as a HIP performer?
Firstly, I should contextualise this by saying that Elam Rotem has become something of a hero in the HIP/early music world. This is in large part due to his brilliant website and YouTube channel Early Music Sources, which is a collaborative effort between Elam and a number of HIP musicians and scholars based in Basel, Switzerland. He published an excellent critical edition of excerpts from the Carlo G Manuscript, which he has made freely available on IMSLP. We are using this for our performance and then we thought it would be fantastic to perform a piece by Elam for the first time in Australia alongside the Carlo G since Elam has also composed vocal music setting texts from the Song of Songs, although his compositions use the original Hebrew texts.
I would say that performing Elam’s compositions does not really ask us to confront the juxtaposition of old and new because Elam is completely fluent in the musical language of the early 17th Century and he is writing in this style. If you heard his compositions you might not identify them as a contemporary work: rather, you’d think it was a piece by one of Monteverdi’s contemporaries. However, that said we are really not used to playing music by a composer who is still alive. So we have found ourselves asking a lot of different questions to the ones we normally ask about Elam’s intentions for the composition. It has been a very interesting process!
Doesn’t the idea of performing a brand new piece work against the concept of Historically Informed Performance practice? What are your thoughts?
I think what Elam is doing is actually further embodying and putting into practice the experience of music-making in the 17th Century, where there was not such a big division between performance and composition as there is today. Rather, musicians were also co-composers, so being a musician during the Baroque period encompassed much more than simply being able to play an instrument well.
For example, one of the goals for a basso continuo player today would be to have the skill to improvise a complete composition in real time because this is what they did! So I think what Elam and others like him have done is a natural progression and really enlivening for the HIP movement. I often think about how for me, a lot of music from the 17th Century is so alive and present; I feel an intense connection to it and am profoundly moved by its energy and emotions and this is what I want to try and communicate with audiences. Elam’s music literally is ‘present’ but it is also a window into the past. I think it is a very intoxicating combination and also so important in keeping these compositional techniques alive and giving audiences the opportunity to experience them in new ways.
Why are you committed to HIP in the contemporary era?
I love the energy, intellectual curiosity, passion, and desire to share information and knowledge, which seem to me to be strong characteristics of many HIP musicians. The HIP movement really took off in the 60s and 70s so it has these revolutionary, experimental, anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment roots, which I think make it very appealing in today’s political and social climate. Although, of course, it is a whole industry now so it has become the ‘establishment’. That’s why I think the digitisation of print materials and the open-source and creative commons aspects of digital culture are one of the really exciting and positive aspects of HIP today, because we can share information so freely – as Elam Rotem has demonstrated – as opposed to keeping knowledge bound to institutions.
At Ensemble 642, we’re committed to HIP because it makes the experience and process of music making so much richer for us and hopefully for the audience too! We really live and breathe the music that we play and we want to share this profound love with others, in the hope that even just a tiny bit of it will catch on and we might transport one person out of the everyday, or enable them to experience a sense of beauty in a new way.
On a personal level, once I understood that I had these incredible tools and resources at my disposal, which enable me to perform and experience this music in a way that feels more meaningful and compelling to me – as well as giving me access to the treasure trove of early repertoire – I couldn’t go back.
What do you enjoy most about early harp repertoire?
I should point out that the term ‘early harp’ is used to describe many different kinds of harps before 1850, which makes it a fascinating area. My primary instrument is the baroque triple harp also known as the arpa doppia, since it is an Italian instrument, so I’ll talk a bit about the repertoire for this harp.
Firstly, I love playing a basso continuo instrument because it gives me incredible creative freedom and endless possibilities as owing to its inherently improvisational nature; no one performance is ever the same. I enjoy collaborating and playing with lots of different musicians, so being a basso continuo player facilitates this. Various music theorists from the early 17th Century refer to the arpa doppia as a ‘perfect’ instrument. This is because the range and chromaticism of the instrument allows it to function as both a ‘fundamental’ instrument, providing the fundamental bass, and an ‘ornamental’ instrument, which can play counterpoint and diminutions. In practice, this means that depending on the repertoire and the other instruments or voices I am playing with, I can perform various musical roles within the ensemble.
I particularly enjoy early 17th Century Italian repertoire both for solo and ensemble playing. This is when the instrument flourished so a lot of repertoire from this period feels very natural to play. One of the most famous pieces for the arpa doppia is a solo part written by Claudio Monteverdi for this instrument in his opera L’Orfeo from 1607, which is an amazing work in its entirety, as are his other compositions. This year marks the 450th anniversary of Monteverdi’s birth and I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in some fantastic Monteverdi projects, which makes me very happy!
What advice would you give to other young HIPsters?
Play everything, read everything, listen to everything, see everything. Exercise your critical faculties and keep asking questions, always. Keep an open mind. Be curious!
See Hannah in Ensemble 646 at the Song of Songs at 7pm, 12 May in Medley Hall, Melbourne. The group will present the Australian premiere of music from the Carlo G Manuscript. Tickets $10 student/$40 adult (includes a glass of pinot noir) via Trybooking or at the door.
Images supplied.
