Adams House Musical Society

The Adams House Music Society showed Wednesday evening that it is not hard to draw 250 or more people and hold them engrossed throughout two informal and informative hours of music taken from the 12th to the early 16th centuries. Such an event would have flabber-gasted the composers; most of the pieces were written for the private entertainment, either between dinner courses or postprandially, of small groups of nobility. Impresario John Hollander, a Junior Fellow, chose a representative group of thirty-six short pieces, mostly from the first volume of Professor Davison's rich Historical Anthology of Music.

For countless reasons it today impossible to recreate exactly the sounds that met medieval and early Renaissance cars, but this in to wise invalidates the attempt. Even so, the listener may not have an easy time of it. The various musical styles and the language of the texts are relatively unfamiliar (the singers wisely read an English translation of the texts before each vocal piece). The instruments used are now obsolete and belong to what wee called "low instruments"--the lowness referring not to pitch but to decibels--in this case, the recorder, lute, viol and clavichord, all of which had minute expressive range. The music, furthermore is mainly of an intimate sort designed to be heard at close range, not from the rear of a long hall. Nevertheless, the evening was a great success form the standpoint of both performers and audience.

Concerts of old music tend to elicit in the performers a misplaced picty that results in a persistently dragging tempo. With the sole exception of a 12th-century hymn to St. Magnus, no piece on the program suffered in this respect.

It is important to realize that all medieval dances, save a handful, exist only as a single line of notes with no further indications. The group chosen was played, as intended, by whatever instrumentalists happened to be available, in this case Gillian Adams and Chester Pearlman, recorders; Mary Davidoff, viol; and John Hollander, lute. The added improvised percussion parts for hand drum, tamborine and triangle were totally authentic. The players also performed two of the earliest polyphonic instrumental pieces.

The fourteen solo songs, sung by soprano Anne Hollander, tenor Frank Davidoff and baritone Robert Simon, included examples of medieval French minstrelsy, with their German, Italian and English counterparts, plus accompanied songs by such later masters as Machaut, Dufay and Binchois.

Simon Excels as Soloist

Top laurels must go to Simon, who was in perfect voice, with ne'er a hint of a rough-edged tone. His diction, in four languages, was always impeccably clear. I was particularly impressed by his singing of the medieval Sainte Marie, Alonso de Mudarra's Triste estaba, and Oswald v. Wolkenstein's Der May. The last is one of the oldest descriptive pieces, wherein the calls of many birds are imitated at great speed, in the manner of a Gilbert & Sullivan patter song.

Of the four clavichord pieces played by Edward Dunham III, the last three were delightful. The first was dull but interesting as an historical curiosity, for it is the earliest extant keyboard music (dated c.1325). Dunham demonstrated that the clavichord can produce all the dynamic shades from very soft to very, very, very soft. He underlined the informality of the evening by puffing a pipe in time to his playing.

The remainder of the program featured works for vocal ensemble, in which the three singers were joined by Barbara Benjamin, soprano. (The absence of a bass singer is explained by the fact that real bass parts do not occur before the end of the 15th century.) Among these songs was Henry VIII's O My Herte, which showed that the King was a better master of vocal than of marital harmony.

The juxtaposition of two works--one from the School of Worcester and the other by Dunstabe--served to point up the great differences between the medieval and Renaissance approach: the former was sturdy and barbaric, the lines being forced into a rhythmic strait-jacket with a witting unconcern for beauty of sound; the latter was smooth and euphonious, with emphasis on serene arches of sophisticated simplicity.

The Music Society preserved a semblance of the appropriate coupling of the evening's music with eating by serving refreshments to the audience after the concert.