While travelling back and forth between Kidderminster and Swansea I listened to a great deal of music and a sizeable proportion of that was medieval music. One CD struck a chord with me and got me thinking. It was a performance of Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion by Adam de la Halle. This is a thirteenth century dramatic work by a French musician, who probably wrote it in Naples and who might have visited London, but only at the very end of his life. Robin and Marion is a romance between a shepherdess and her lovers, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the archer of Sherwood forest except for an uncanny similarity of names.
The first thing this performance gave me, quite unrelated to the music or the text, but building solely on the associations of names, was the possibility of a plot for an opera based (I have to say somewhat loosely) on the life of Robin of Nottingham. This is only the fourth plot for an opera that I have thought through in any detail and that I believe would work on stage. It also provided an opportunity to find a home for an idea I have carried around with me for many years about how to rework the Batman narrative based on the possibility of gay leather culture (and once again the link is solely in the name ‘Robin’, but somehow it seemed to work). I am not going to outline that plot here because, you never know, I might someday actually get around to writing the thing.
My sconed thought was one that I often have when I am listening to music that catches my attention. I wanted to try and work out how it worked, what was going on, how the structures and the sub-structures worked. In practical I wanted to see it written down, to see the music in a visual form so that I could see the patterns that it made on the page and so that I could understand it more fully.
I learnt to read a score at an early age. Both my parents were conductors, of their different choirs or orchestras, and I sought out the scores of works by Shostakovich and Stravinsky that particularly inspired me as a teenager. I loved just working through the score and imagining the sound, or even just looking at the visual impact of the score on the page. It was at this structural level, among the shapes and the lines that I felt that I could really get inside the music. Scores still fascinate me (as do maps for the very same reason) and with medieval music, as with other complex, or unfamiliar, music, such as African drumming for example, I really want to see the shapes it makes on the page, to freeze it into a static image, to fully understand what is happening.
David Fanshawe talks somewhere, in his account of African Sanctus, of going down to the local music library and ordering the score. I am sure these things are now more widely available online if you only know where to look.
The problem, of course, is that the ‘score’ the actual written form of medieval music such as Robin and Marion, while no doubt being both fascinating and beautiful in itself, undoubtedly bears very little resemblance to the performance. As with African drumming the performers bring so much to the final form of the music that any ‘score’ or written version must be a distant shadow of the actual music I am listening to.
What is required, of course, is the expert tuition of somebody who understands how this music works, both the performer and the scholar, somebody who has spent a lifetime getting inside it and understanding the nuances of performance, what is possible and what is not. To fully understand it, of course, I must become that scholar, perhaps even that performer, but that is an almost impossible dream, even more impossible than the possibility of writing an opera based on Robin Hood.
What really fascinates me, however, and what brings these two ideas together, is the possibility of recreating something in the form – I don’t want to use the word ‘style’ – of the original medieval song cycle as the basis for the music in the opera. I love the idea of reworking these ancient forms, and even those of different traditions from around the globe and making them available to modern audiences. Stravinsky and many others have done this, but the results still appear surprisingly classical, albeit that we know instantly that it is ‘modern’, that it is Stravinsky. I dream of going one step further, but I still do not really know enough to be able to make it work.
What this involves, as I conceive it, is to get fully inside the music, to understand its inner workings, the repetitions, the transformations, the constructions, for want of a better word its ‘deep structure’ (as understood by Levi-Strauss and others). Only at that point, when this is fully grasped, would I want to build a new piece drawing on the same structural elements, that worked in the way the original medieval (or other) music worked, but drew on contemporary, or at least entirely original melody and musical forms. This is not, in my own head, about harmony. The reworked piece would have an entirely ‘other’ harmony, a long way perhaps from its medieval original. It might, however, be about ‘mode’ if that is the basis upon which the original is structured. It is fundamentally, however, about structure, and about reworking that structure with new material to make something original. Just as the plot of the opera is about taking the structure, and particular allusions or images, of original and diverse narratives, and reworking them in an entirely different context, without ever loosing the original, to shock and surprise, and I would hope to delight, the contemporary audience. We can but dream….
Martin Stringer Quartet 