Tag Archives: medieval

Missa Charles Darwin: The Chicken or the Egg?


darwin

This is one unusual disc, not specifically due to the musical content actually but rather its back story.  Gregory W. Brown is a composer with a significant body of work to his credit.  He also happens to be the younger brother of author Dan Brown.  Yes, THAT Dan Brown, of DaVinci Code fame.

Now, at first glance, one notices that the CD states, “as featured in the Novel ORIGIN by Dan Brown.”  This reviewer’s initial assumption was that this music was written subsequent to the novel as a sort of “tie in”.  Well the fact is that the music preceded the 2017 book by some six years and was heard by the author who then incorporated it (initially unbeknownst to the composer) into a chapter of his novel, ORIGIN.

So what we have here is a sort of “tie in” but, more importantly an inspiration in part for the work which now incorporates it.  This reviewer has only read a brief summary of the elder Brown’s novel, enough to understand that one of the themes in the complex web of the story includes characters who are against organized religion.  This Missa Charles Darwin (2011), structured in the classical (or should I say, ecclesiastical) manner but incorporates texts from Charles Darwin’s writings into the conventional Latin texts.

Like his brother Dan, Gregory feels free to incorporate things heretical.  The fight between the Holy Roman Catholic Church and supporters of Darwin’s theories is well known and indeed ongoing.  By incorporating Darwin’s words amongst the ecclesiastical proclamations and adorations of the mass texts Brown creates a sort of philosophical critique to both provoke thought and entertain.

His choice to utilize a vocal quartet and his harmonic choices gives this work the ambiance of medieval and renaissance mass settings.  The younger of the Brown brothers utilizes a mix of past, distant past and present to create a sort of philosophical fiction not entirely unlike the techniques in Dan Brown’s novels.  The music is very listenable and never trivial.  It simultaneously transports the listener to the mystical feeling of an unnamed Cathedral in the 14th or 15th Century as well as to the 19th/early 20th Century science v. religion squabbles that plague us still.

Comment must be made about the beautiful presentation of this recording.  It is a box containing the CD and cards containing both art work and texts.  Included is a nice a photo of the two brothers.

Not having yet read the novel it is difficult to say with certainty what impact the music ultimately has on the experience but, like soundtracks that enhance the experience of a given film, this finely crafted music can only add to the experience.  Of course both novel and music will be able to stand alone on their individual merits.

This writer is given to wonder if further collaborations between these two may happen and the next Robert Langdon story might be heard in an opera house.  Go for it guys!

 

 

Advertisement

Far Famed Tim Rayborn Takes on the Vikings


Close your eyes and listen intently in the darkened hall.  From the back of the hall comes first a growling gutteral sound in an unfamiliar language.  This is followed by beats on a drum and the sound of a rattle.

Slowly the primitive creature comes up the center aisle growling, chanting, reciting and playing his drum and rattle moving slowly towards the stage and into view in the light.

He is seated on the stage and continues his chanting, speaking and playing.

He is playing unfamiliar instruments and telling unfamiliar stories.

There is both precision and passion in his playing and reciting.

Tim Rayborn is a resident of Berkeley, a multi-instrumentalist, singer and performer, familiar to local audiences in both his solo performances and with his group Canconiér.  His area of focus is authentic performance of music and poetry of the middle ages and before.

But how does one determine the authenticity especially as one goes further back in time and finds fewer records and accounts of how these performances sounded?  In the pre-concert lecture Mr. Rayborn spoke of this project, ‘The Far Famed Ones-Music and Poetry of the Vikings’.  He told the audience that there are no scores of this music and, like the languages in which the poetry was written, we have only the barest clues as to how these things must have sounded some 1000 years ago.

The clues, he explained, come from archaeology, linguistics and a few extant bare threads of oral tradition…there are pieces, an immense puzzle that some scholars say can’t or shouldn’t be solved.  But Rayborn asserts that these puzzles, if not able to be completely solved, are worth time to approximate the answers.

In a very real way this music, this performance is entirely new comprised of minimal facts, educated scholarship, conjecture.  No one can ever know what this body of work sounded like without travelling back in time to hear it.  Failing that we have the laborious work of Rayborn and his fellow scholars attempting to piece together an approximation of this work, not unlike the re-creation of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (albeit without the attendant dangers)…a few pieces of evidence held together with educated guesses producing something new, an opportunity to hear these reconstructions of music and ritual as it may have existed those thousand years ago.

viking01 (18)

The stories and poetry, like the music are very different from what we think of when we use those terms today.  The performance of these poems integrating music were a medium of entertainment and communication in a pre-literate society.  They varied greatly from one performance to the next dependent on the performers choices.  Even the musical instruments varied in style and construction.

In a sense, all performance is an approximation.  Any musical score or performance text require interpretation and vary from one performance to the next dependent on the artists’ choices.  But choices are more limited in work whose performance practices and directions for performance are more completely communicated and understood.

With this work Tim Rayborn reaches further back than almost anyone has into the darkness of the dark ages to attempt to illuminate some portion of these traditions that would later evolve into poetry, prose and musical compositions.  The Viking Age lasted from the 790s to the Norman Conquest of 1066.  And while history knows this era for its battles and plunders it was not devoid of culture.

Rayborn is an affable, genial man who is first a serious scholar and a performer second.  He speaks with great precision leaving as little ambiguity as possible as one finds with serious academics.  His joy and enthusiasm, love for this work combine with that scholarship to make his performances a riveting experience.

He described this performance (January 27th, 2013) at the little church hall in Albany as a ‘work-in-progress’ evolving over time, being tweaked with each new performance to reflect the scholarship and the instincts of the experienced performer.  Rayborn is part scholar, part musician and part actor.  He is as serious, precise and joyous in each of these endeavors.

Following the opening comments there was a brief intermission which led into the performance without interruption (as the performer requested) of all the pieces on the program.

What followed was an integrated program of performance, poetry, song and music making of perhaps one hour’s duration.  There was drama and humor in this entertaining mix.  The audience sat respectful and engaged to the end when Rayborn stepped out of character to acknowledge the conclusion.  And the far-famed ones came just a little bit closer.

The audience stood applauding loudly this ‘new’ old music dredged from the darkness of the ages like relics recovered from a peat bog, and restored as best as anyone can to most closely resemble what they originally were.  What was once thought lost to time has now been restored.