Public Research Seminar: Singing Very Early Music
Royal Birmingham Conservatoire - Workshop 2
200 Jennens Road, B4 7XR
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Public Research Seminar: Singing Very Early Music – A Case Study in Archaic Lyric Poetry
No melodies survive for the songs of archaic Greek lyric poets such as Sappho and Alcman. Yet we know their words were sung to the lyre, often danced, and passed down through generations without musical notation. How can a singer give voice to evidence this remote? In this seminar, Stef Conner reflects on her practice as a singer specialising in ancient texts, shaped by many years of collaboration with classicists, archaeologists and fellow performers. She reflects on the fraught process of striving towards an approach in which the speculation needed to 'sound out' such fragmentary evidence is tempered by appropriate caution, yet given enough freedom to bring the songs to life with a vitality to complement the richness of the words. The ideal is to be neither hamstrung by a positivist reading of the sources nor adrift in romantic musical fantasy, a balance that continues to feel ‘just out of reach’ as her personal understanding of the sources evolves.
Stef Conner is a composer and singer whose work is shaped by research into ancient, medieval and traditional song, and moves between the classical, (very) Early and folk music worlds. As a performer of very Early music, she has sung with Sequentia (dir. Benjamin Bagby), including in the Roman de Fauvel (dir. Peter Sellars) at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, and Words of Power at the Utrecht, Vancouver, New York and Boston Early Music Festivals. With Barnaby Brown, she performs as Lotos Lab, using performance to test interpretations of fragmentary evidence for ancient music. Lotos Lab has appeared on BBC Radio 3’s Early Music Show, at the British Museum, and on Apollo and Dionysus (Delphian). She is Lecturer in Music at the University of York and a former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Huddersfield.
Running time approx. 90 minutes