medieval.org
2CDs, 1994: Teldec "Das Alte Werk" 4509-95521-2
2CDs, 2008: Teldec "Das Alte Werk" 2564 69765-9
(2 LPs, 1976: Telefunken "Das Alte Werke" 6.35 319 EX)
Carmina Burana I
Carmina Burana II
CARMINA BURANA
Reflections from Thirty Years Hence
The Carmina burana,
manuscript Clm 4660 of the Bavarian State Library, is the most famous
of all collections of medieval Latin and Middle High German poetry. In
1847 it was identified by its first editor, Johann Andreas Schmeller, as
having once been in the library of the monastery of Benediktbeuren, and
so the manuscript came to be known as the Carmina burana, Songs
from Benediktbeuren. While it may have been the property of that
monastery at one time, it did not originate there but came from an
unknown, undoubtably monastic location (both Seckau and Neustift in
Tyrol have been suggested) as a result of Napoleon's secularization of
the monasteries. It is best known today for its rich collection of love
lyrics, student songs and religious poetry written in Latin and in many
cases German (in a dialect identified with the region surrounding
Neustift in Tyrol). The Carmina burana is familiar to the musical
public as scenic cantata by Carl Orff, a work composed for solo voices,
chorus and orchestra employing selected texts from the manuscript
organized into scenes. The present recording from the early 1960s
constituted the first serious attempt to reconstruct the original
medieval music of these songs about 25 years after Orff's composition.
The Beginning of the Project
Having decided to attempt the transcription and performance of the songs contained in the Carmina burana
manuscript, an idea which, if I recall correctly, had its genesis in
remarks by Andrea von Ramm, I turned to the job of collecting the
necessary material. The manuscript was then (1960) as now in the
Department of Manuscripts at the Bavarian State Library, but when I went
to see it I was told it was too valuable for me to see, let alone use. I
told the curator, himself a scholar and respected administrator, that I
knew that a facsimile edition was being prepared, that I paid my taxes,
that this manuscript was public property and that I wanted to work on
it. I was told I could not come in there and put a pistol to his head
and make demands and, besides, I was not even allowed to know that there
was a facsimile edition being prepared. ("Das dürfen Sie gar nicht
wissen" were the words which I still remember clearly today). I believe I
even requested the intervention of the cultural advisors of Bavaria and
Munich. Finally, I was given permission to obtain photocopies of
specific folios that I identified, but no continuous sections of the
manuscript were to be copied. I was never allowed actually to see the
manuscript itself. This indicates the situation then facing scholars and
musicians who attempted to gain access to material in major European
libraries (this situation still obtains in some libraries both inside
and outside Germany and is a serious obstacle to progress).
The
manuscript is small and rather elegant. The music is written in
staffless neumes above some of the poems. This notation very imperfectly
determines pitch and rhythm, but because many of the pieces can be
found in other manuscripts that are more clearly notated, transcription
is possible.
In 1960 the essence of any music was thought to be
contained in the written score, while today we would readily argue that
in much music the details of the score are of far less importance than
the details of the performance, something we have learned as the tools
of ethnology now begin to be employed in historical musicology.
The Reconstruction
Our
main task was to create an historically informed performance style,
which respected both artistic merit and historical performance. There
were no known models to follow. Having had an opportunity to become
somewhat familiar with music of the Middle East and South-East Asia
which is largely a monothematic music, I recognized that monophonic
music was not primitive nor in any way artistically inferior to
polyphonic music. Rather than being music of the composer this was music
of the performer, and this single impulse led to the creation of
idiomatic instrumental accompaniments for the songs. Much was new in
moving away from harmonic-contrapuntal accompaniment models to idiomatic
instrumentalisations of melody. Among novel features were the use
(common in non-Western music) of a small drum as a chamber-music
instrument rather than as a purveyor of rhythm and the deployment of
many medieval instruments such as the lira, vielle, rebec, 'ud (= lute),
citole, chitarra Sarazenica, small medieval harp, psaltery, small
keyless flute and medieval shawm that are now common but were still
relatively new at that time. The instrumental preludes, interludes and
postludes invited the performance of the whole song (in 1960 it was
unusual for every strophe of a song to be performed, since it was not
the song as a whole, but only the individual melody that was deemed to
constitute the "music", with the result that the melody was rarely
repeated more than once.) The basic rule of instrumental performance
that governed the way in which we performed medieval music was that
everything we played must be individualised and that it should be easy
for the performer in question to play. Articulation is the really
important key to phrasing. A string instrument has a tuning which
determines what notes will be played. The bow or plectrum demands a sort
of choreography which, when it is set upon the strings will result in
some useful and appropriate sounds (according to the tuning), and these
sounds are not derived from any theory of consonance or counterpoint.
These
performances provided a new and experimental approach to medieval
music-making but they also opened the door to much mindless imitation
and incorporation of folk and exotic paradigms that really had no place
in serious historical performance. This led to the creation of a
parallel pseudo-historical performance style in which good musicians
made use of early music with no thought at all for historical practices,
but created a new music, not folk, not exotic and not historical, but
fun to play and to listen to.
The Medieval Performance Climate in 1960
In
the early 1960s early-music specialists greatly concerned about the
details of the melodies: the ambiguity of right notes versus wrong notes
was regarded as being similar to the ambiguity that exists between fact
and fiction. At that time we did not easily accept as we do now, that
there could be multiple versions of a piece of music, each with equal
artistic merit and historical credibility. There was no clear
understanding regarding the details of instruments and their playing
techniques, so important in devising an improvisatory performance style.
Indeed, very little was actually known about medieval instruments. No
one performing medieval music at that time was willing to trust the
performance paradigms of the Middle Ages, everyone employed instruments
from more recent times and applied modern "quality control" to
performance standards, believing that it was more virtuous to make a
beautiful sound (whatever that may be) than to select interesting notes
to play. Although an important original source for historical
performance was readily available, we did not recognize it: I am
thinking of the whole complex of medieval rhetoric. At that time we were
just beginning to understand to what extent the characteristics of an
instrument condition the tonal picture. When we stopped projecting
Renaissance musical characteristics back into the Middle Ages we made a
great leap forward: our new models were found in selected practices from
South-East Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, music based upon
monophony and instrumental applications growing out of a serious
aesthetic theory which in very general terms could be applied to Western
music. We never directly imitated Eastern music, but passed what we had
learned through what might be termed a "Western filter" in an attempt
to recreate the lost art of medieval instrumental performance. We
postulated the necessary existence of preludes, interludes and postludes
as parts of a song's performance, and because there were no models we
turned to the East for guidance. That was what we thought we were doing.
Looking Back
It
is surprising to me now to reflect on that work of thirty years ago and
find so much there that I still feel is right. Today I might be less
lavish in the use of instrumental sounds in accompaniments, I would work
out rhythms rather more in terms of language than of the dance-like
meters of the later music that is in all our bones. I would integrate
far better the preludes, interludes and postludes that certainly belong
to the performances but that should never overbalance them.
Post-medieval performing practises inevitably get in the way and prevent
the performer from realizing either the aesthetic of the medieval
performance or what might be termed the macro-rhythm of the rhetorical
exposition (the priority of cadences and phrase beginnings). I am not
sure that we recognised that then, but today this problem remains
clearly in focus. The world of medieval performance was tiny then in
comparison to now and meant that modern performers of medieval music
worked in isolation. Had it not been for the farsighted record producers
who persuaded their companies to invest in projects such as this one,
who knows where it would have ended.
I still recall the recording
sessions in the old AEG studio in Munich in those early days of
stereophonic sound. The hall itself was small and had a very poor
recording acoustic — a far cry from the magnificent big stone spaces of
the Middle Ages. We sang and played with the youthful confidence in
musical decisions which were based to such a large extent upon instinct
and insight. While I have returned to that repertory and to that source
many times in the intervening years, no leaps since then have seemed as
long or as high as that one.
Thomas Binkley
2 LPs, 1976: Telefunken "Das Alte Werke" 6.35 319 EX
2CDs, 2008: Teldec "Das Alte Werk" 2564 69765-9