BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Violinist Lizzy Welsh will perform at Castlemaine State Festival this month.
She will perform music composed by bad humans.
Music and Murder will showcase “problematic” composers from history including Tarquinio Merula and Carlo Gesualdo — the former having committed acts of “indecency” against singers in his choir (after which he threatened to sue the church so he could still receive his pay); the latter having married his cousin, then murdered (and mutilated) her and her lover.
These aren’t facts you’ll always find in your program notes at a live concert. Often, the music is presented independently of the composer’s narrative. But not for Lizzy.
We chat with Lizzy about her Harken Well duo performance Music and Murder, as well as her concert And the Light Shines through Darkness, which focuses on rare early music (possibly composed by nicer people than Gesualdo, pictured below).
Lizzy, great to chat with you. So you’re heading to Castlemaine, hey? Tell us about your events.
I’m actually heading back to Castlemaine. I grew up there and still have family there, so it’s exciting to be coming back to do the festival this year!
I will be presenting three concerts with two of my ensembles. The first is with Outlier, my renaissance/experimental duo project with Chloë Smith. We’ll be presenting all new works that we’ve written for the festival. I hope this will be a really interesting opportunity for audiences to see renaissance instruments used in a new way.
The second and third concerts are with Harken Well, my early music project with Laura Moore. We’re being joined by four excellent guest musicians over our two performances to present a variety of works from the 16th and 17th centuries.
My own artistic practice focuses on the intersection of the old and the new, and I think these three performances present a good cross section of that.
Let’s talk about Music and Murder, which the festival website describes as focusing on “problematic” composers. Why did you want to shed light on the music of these terrible historical figures, Merula and Gesualdo?
I programmed the Music and Murder performance foremost because I think the music is great! However, I was also interested in how much I can enjoy the music while also knowing that the composers were bad people.
It’s also fascinating how society as a whole deals with the art of people who, although they made incredible music, we know had a terrible impact on the people who were around them.
I don’t really see the concert as shedding light on the music of these terrible historical figures: the music of Merula and Gesualdo is programmed quite frequently today, so the music itself is known. Rather, I wanted to shed light on the fact that, although this music is beautiful and enjoyable, the people who wrote it were not.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t enjoy this music — it’s amazing, and I personally love playing it and listening to it. But, for me, I think it’s important to also recognise the reality of the people who wrote it.
How do you envisage your event will help shape or change audiences’ views about how we engage with the works of artists who are “bad” humans?
The way society engages with the art of bad people is complex and individual. I invite our audience to experience the music, and come to their own conclusions about the impact the character of the composers has on that experience for each of them individually.
To an extent, we’re let off the hook with these composers as they are all long dead and there’s no way of them, or their estates, benefitting financially from our consumption of their music. For me, that makes the ethical question of whether I can enjoy the music a lot simpler.
As a musician, how have you felt in practising the music? What will be going through your mind as you perform it, knowing about the circumstances in which the works were written?
I don’t think it’s possible to say the precise circumstances this music was written in, however tumultuous the rest of the composers’ lives might have been. What we do know is that they certainly wrote amazing pieces. When I play this repertoire, I enjoy the beauty of the music and the complexity of human existence, which great music conveys.
I find it fascinating to consider how different the lives of European composers living in the 16th and 17th centuries were to the lives we are living today in Australia, but the music still reaches us emotionally.
Moving on, your And the Light Shines through Darkness will feature some lesser-performed composers from the 17th Century. Can we hazard a guess that these folks are a little…nicer?
Well, we aren’t aware that Schmelzer, Buxtehude and Erlebach (whose work we’re playing in this concert) did anything as terrible as Merula and Gesualdo. But I guess we can’t know how nice they were from this distance. What we do know is that their music was incredible, and it represents what was happening stylistically in Germany in the late 17th Century. This was a really significant time in Western art music, as it paved the way for composers such as J. S. Bach.
What’s the message you’d like to share through this event of 17th-Century music?
These composers were part of a musical movement that has become known as Abendmusik, named after the concert series set up by Franz Tunder in Lübeck in the late 17th Century. The Abendmusik tradition produced some of my favourite music of the Baroque era, and it shaped the compositional voices of the high-baroque German composers who followed in its footsteps, but it isn’t as well known, despite its quality.
The original Abendmusik concerts were presented to the public for free. This was written as music for the people, and I think that rings true to this day.
Is there anything else you’d like to add when it comes to the way audiences approach your appearances at the Castlemaine State Festival?
I welcome the audiences at Castlemaine State Festival to come to our concerts with open minds and open ears, and to experience all the different styles of music we’re presenting!
See Lizzy’s concerts in the Castlemaine Town Hall as part of the Castlemaine Music Festival. She’ll perform Outlier on March 24, and with her duo Harken Well in two following concerts: And the Light Shines through Darkness on March 25, and Music and Murder on March 26. Full info and bookings on the festival website.
CutCommon is pleased to be an official media partner of the Castlemaine Music Festival.
