This post reports on an open, free online multi-track recording project, presented by OPERA OMNIA Moscow, coming out of an online workshop on Medieval Improvisation organised in collaboration with the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London. Thank you to everyone who took part: this article is one way of showing appreciation.

Participants from all over the world (see below) sent in their improvised tracks, which were mixed into the sound of a medieval Conductus. The workshop and recording-project are linked to the International Baroque Opera Studio’s training production of LUDUS DANIELIS, planned for the end of August 2020. As always, that production will be Historically Informed not only in the musical approach, but also in the staging. You can follow OPERA OMNIA on Facebook.

Here is a video of the Workshop.

Here is an illustrated video discussion of  Performance Practice questions for Ludus Danielis, with clips from the 2011 production in Copenhagen.

Here is a video summary of  Medieval Improvisation Techniques for Conductus.

And here is the final audio/video multi-track mix of the Gaudentes project.

Additional links to various sectional mixes are below.

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Ludus Danielis

The Play of Daniel, Ludus Danielis, was created in the late 12th century at Beavais Cathedral in northern France, and notated in the early 1200s in the Egerton MS 2615, now in the British Library. William Smoldon, who edited it for the Plainsong and Medieval Musical Society in 1960, described it as a ‘medieval opera’: academically, it would be categorised as Liturgical Drama. The work was made famous in the USA in Noah Greenberg’s operatic production, premiered in Washington’s National Cathedral in 1958, which gave many spectators their first experience of Early Music. [In another context, I’m honoured to be a recipient of the Noah Greenberg prize for musicological/performance collaboration.]

Whilst the Play certainly is medieval, and does have all the ingredients we would expect to find in opera – script, music, action, plot, drama, characters, costumes, illusion, pathos, humour, entertainment – it can only be understood in the context of its liturgical setting. As the monks chanted the long night-office of Mattins, suddenly a chorister interrupts the service and sparks off a participatory drama in which clerics and children act out to lively popular melodies the Bible stories of Belshazzar’s Feast, the Writing on the Wall and Daniel in the Lions’ Den.

Daniel is of course saved from the Lions, who devour the Evil Counsellors instead. The prophet foretells the coming of Christ, and an Angel announces the glad tidings of Christmas. The Angel’s music was the finale to earlier dramas too, and it neatly leads into a joyful Te Deum, picking up the thread of the liturgy again.

So ‘this medieval opera’ takes it narrative from the Bible, has clerics and choristers as actors, and the cathedral itself as stage and scenery. Most likely, the Bishop’s seat became the Throne for King Belshazzar.

Certainly, it was tripudium – a party. The rubric (liturgical instructions written in red ink) requires a monk to dress as the Queen, the apparent ‘murder’ of King Belshazzar, a running race between two monks in the role of invading soldiers, and the prophet Habakkuk to be dragged by the hair of his head to bring refreshment to Daniel in the Lions’ Den, as well as the Lions (presumably played by young choristers) eating up the Evil Counsellors (senior clerics). When messengers (probably the teenage Sub-Deacons who managed the whole production) were sent to find Daniel (perhaps the Choirmaster), we can readily imagine an extended game of Hide & Seek in the darkness of the Cathedral. In the long nights of early January, there was plenty of time…

Nevertheless, all this fun was for a sacred purpose, celebrating yet another feastday in the exhausting cycle of Christmas holy days. For this special day, there was lively enaction of colourful Bible episodes, helping to teach youngsters to know their Saints, understand their Latin, and comprehend the complex doctrine of Old Testament prophecy and New Testament gospel, which the Play presents from the divine perspective of a ‘now’ that unites Past and Future in the eternal Present.

Modern-day History of Emotions studies help us understand the psychological function of this (carefully ordered) foolery. The ceaseless round of the Daily Office, singing psalms, reciting scripture and chanting prayers even through the night, intensifies with Advent’s rich music and liturgy, long dark nights of solemn chant with little to eat during the traditional fast. Then comes Christmas, with a blaze of candle-light and even longer services, singing joyfully all day and all night, and continuing with celebrations of saints’ days all week.

The accumulated social tensions of sleep deprivation, intermittent nutrition, and overwork, all within a strictly disciplined and hierarchical single-sex institution could be released, under control, in a party that was not chaos, but ordo: a form of liturgy, literally keeping order, maintaining the social and mental health of a religious Order.

Producing the Play

I first produced Ludus Danielis in the 1970s, in Guernsey’s Town Church, the Cathedral of St Peter Port, performed by members of the church choir. This production thus had something of the medieval group dynamic of a set of teenage choristers within the small community of a religious institution, and featured the many processions in which the historical action bursts out of the confines of the choirstalls to occupy the whole building.

The Harp Consort’s CD recording in 1998 was inspired by Margot Fassler’s research into popular traditions of the Feast of Fools, in Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony (1992), which showed connections between medieval party-games and Biblical episodes enacted in the Play. The Kalamazoo publication (1996) of Critical Essays on the Play included a monochrome facsimile of the MS and a neutral transcription (which however followed all previous editions in assigning the wrong octaves to the Queen’s speech and to Daniel’s lament, see below.)

Our recording project also established the outline of a historical informed pronunciation of c1200 northern French Latin, guided by Harold Copeman. With a superb ensemble of instrumental and vocal soloists, we extended to the whole group the techniques of medieval improvisation I had developed playing harp and psaltery in Paul Hillier’s Trobador and Trouvère recordings.

This concept of ensemble improvisation was taken even further in The Harp Consort’s Edison Award-winning CD (2003) of written and improvised polyphony from the closely related repertoire of Gautier de Coincy’s Les Miracles de Notre Dame.

In 2007, The Harp Consort’s musical approach and my processions-production combined with director Akemi Horie’s exquisite Japanese minimalist design for performances in Kings College Chapel, Cambridge and Southwark Cathedral, London.

Many of the same cast performed in a fully HIP production in York Minster for the 2008 York Early Music Festival, broadcast live by BBC Radio Three. A BBC sound engineer followed our processions around the church with an array of microphones mounted cross-wise on a long pole, like some kind of high-tech crucifer. In place of the usual pre-concert talk, we taught audience members the basics of medieval improvisation in the splendid acoustic of the Chapter House.

By 2011, we had added a lot of detail to the historical action, and developed a new dramatic ‘frame’ for a production in collaboration with Ars Nova, Denmark. To the essential elements of processions and partying were added medieval gesture, including St Benedict’s seven postures of prayer, and better stylised, more sharply defined movement styles for monks, courtiers and soldiers. See Schmitt La Raison des gestes (1991).  Medieval art provided inspiring images of powerful gestures, for example when Darius commands that Daniel be brought out of the Lions’ Den, and the Evil Counsellors thrown in!

A possible gesture for “Danielem educite, et emulos immitite!”

As the audience entered, the endless chanting of the year-long liturgy was already in progress, and at the end of the play, kings and queen, soldiers and courtiers faded back into their daily lives, under the strict control of monastic discipline. As one of the cast commented: “Game over.”

In a resonant acoustic, we found that just three multi-instrumentalists from The Harp Consort (plus a sinfonye-playing Daniel) could provide all the support and variety of colour needed for the entire choir.  I made a new edition, and thought anew about questions of pitch and pitch relations. This project also marked the first performance in modern times of Daniel’s famous Lament, in the written octave: all previous editions had transposed it down an octave.

In this medieval Psalter, God hands down from heaven musical intervals, perhaps even specific pitches, to bell ringers, to King David and to more lowly instruments. Ladders represent hexachord scales.

In 2014, the production came to the Galway Early Music Festival, with St Nicholas’ Church as the venue and the church choir as the core cast. So once again there was that sense of medieval community and, for the first time, the show involved a large number of youngsters, who brought wonderful energy to the performance. I will never forget one of the junior choristers leaping to grab the scholar’s hat off the head of one of Belshazzar’s none-too-clever Wise Men, played by the Choirmaster, nor the sight of some two dozen young Lions waiting to devour the hapless Evil Counsellors.

Enargeia – the emotional power of detailed description

In that same year of 2014, Max Harris’ book on Sacred Folly re-assessed source materials for Feast of Fools practices, downplaying the extent of louche behaviour and emphasising the religious message behind all the dramatised action. Harris re-interpreted Fassler’s work on medieval games and religious ordo as a response to secular New Year celebrations in the city, rather than as a reaction against depraved behaviour in church.

Harris singles out The Harp Consort’s recording of Ludus Danielis for special praise, and also recommends another version in which the singers are accompanied only by ‘discreet percussion’. Whilst I’m grateful for his kind words about our work, it must be pointed out that there is no logic in allowing drums rather than harps! The rubric specifically calls for harpers, but not for drums.

Drums are mentioned in the sung text that describes King Darius’ entrance Ecce Rex Darius. ‘Look, here comes King Darius with his nobles; and his court resounds with happiness and partying…. Let all celebrate as the drums resound: the harpists strike the strings, and musical instruments resound to herald him!’ The usual assumption in historical drama is that stage action represents, within the limits of practicality, what is spoken/sung in the script/libretto.

Indeed, this is the period principle of Enargeia, by which detailed verbal description (often signalled with Ecce!, Ecco! Siehe! Behold! etc) creates mental images for the audience, the emotionally affective Visions described by Quintilian. To the spectators’ ‘imaginary puissance’ is added the visual detail enacted by the performers and the aural effects of appropriate tone-colours of speech, music and stage noise. All this unites (according to Rhetorical Decorum) and combines to ‘move the passions’ with Energia, the spirit of emotional communication that links mental and physical responses to emotion. Visions and sound-effects produce emotional Affekt; performed details of enargeia produce emotional energia. Following this principle, in Ludus Danielis we would expect to see and hear drums, harps and other musical instruments in Darius’ procession; clapping and dancing at Belshazzar’s Feast.

With an unconvincing argument relying on 20th-century Anglicanism, Harris considered rejecting the principle of Enargeia. But this would rule out the drum, whilst the rubric confirms the presence of harps. And any medieval hierarchy of liturgical and clerical instruments would begin with bells and King David’s harp, and descend to via fiddles and sinfonyes to lowly wind instruments and drums. See Christopher Page Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages (1987) [sadly, this is out of print, and I could find no online access or purchase options: try academic libraries].

Medieval hierarchy of instruments: King David, crowned in gold, sits with his harp on a golden throne; a lowly piper sits on the ground.

In short, for Ludus Danielis harps are obligatory, and drum-only makes no sense at all.

Controversy

Two crucial questions about Ludus Danielis remain controversial. Did instruments take part at all? And, to put it simply, how much fun did the monks allow themselves?

At a Medieval Events conference in Budapest in 2015, the standard of music-scholarship was woefully low, and I was disappointed that the chairman of the Daniel session gave – as if with authority – simplistic answers, “no” and “not much”, to these deep questions. Perhaps he was still following the musicological mood of the 1990s, or had too hastily skimmed Harris’ conclusions, but it must be said that he offered neither academic arguments nor historical evidence.

And there is evidence. The rubric of the Egerton MS clearly requires harpists. Statim apparebis Darius Rex cum Principibus suis venientque ante eum cythariste et Principes sui psallentes hec. ‘Suddenly King Darius appears with his nobles, and the harpists and nobles come before him ‘psalming’ like this.’ Psallentes (which I translate literally as ‘psalming’) suggests singing and playing instruments associated with King David the Psalmist: harps and psalteries. The real-life Norman tradition of medieval harpists striking the first blow at battles (read Wace on Taillesfer at the Battle of Hastings) supports the identification of cythara specifically with Harp.

The Egerton rubric also gives ‘stage directions’ for many other actions that would be unthinkable within the normal order of the liturgy. So we may well ask: in an enactment that includes pretending to kill King Belshazzar, a monk dressing up as the Queen, and Counsellors being utterly devoured by Lions, would it be utterly out of the question for King Darius’ harpers – we know they are there – actually to play? The notion that the harps are silent stage props seems out of keeping with the straightforward and energetic (one might say, enargetic) story-telling required by the rubric throughout.

Furthermore, it can be argued that psallentes is an instruction for singing to instrumental accompaniment. For King Belshazzar’s procession, the rubric is different: Dum venerit Rex Balthasar, Principes sui cantabant ante eum haec prosam. ‘When King Belshazzar comes, his nobles sing before him this prose’. Prose and singing for one King, psalms and harpistry for another?

Later in 2015, scholars opposed to what has been dubbed the ‘English a cappella heresy’ sent me references to use of instruments in medieval churches, many of them associated with liturgical enactments for particular feasts. Unfortunately I can’t cite these references here, because my notes from these years were lost when my laptop was stolen in 2018. So I’ve started that search again. In the meantime, Daniel Leech Wilkinson The modern invention of medieval music (2002) explains how and why the topic of instrumental participation occasioned such passionate scholarly and artistic disagreements.

Widening our gaze beyond the narrow question of musical instruments, it is very difficult to define in detail what behaviours, normally proscribed, would have been permitted, even required, for this unique outburst of medieval religious energy. We may never know what actually happened. But the investigative lens of History of Emotions Studies focuses on a different question: how did it feel for those medieval monks to participate in this Play? Fassler’s and Harris’ work shows that there was a social and artistic tension between dramatic shock and religious awe, between tripudium and ordo. There is no doubt that, whatever it was that happened back then, it must have stretched the limits of monastic habitus.

Certainly therefore, a bland or discreetly tasteful performance is inauthentic. As Harris writes: “a little controlled disorder can sometimes enhance rather than diminish devotional effect…. the Play of Daniel was inspired, at least in part, by the same creative impulse [as in other less complex plays] to employ ludic means for devotional ends”. Circa 1200, the novices’ religious duty was to enact immorality and violence, as part of the sacred ritual and of their religious instruction. In medieval dramas, as in any school nativity play today, someone might have to play an evil character, notably Herod. In such a role, you are required to behave badly. So were the actors playing Belshazzar’s courtiers and Darius’ Evil Counsellors.

To appreciate Ludus Danielis, modern-day performers and audiences need to perceive the sanctity of the regular liturgy, the ludic energy of the Play, and the tension between these two elements. It is not enough for them to read a learned article about the Daily Office or Feast of Fools celebrations: they should feel the impact of this collision of values. A HIP production has to search for ways to convey an experience of what was appropriate in the medieval cathedral, and (more challengingly) what might have been appropriately inappropriate!

For the upcoming production with OPERA OMNIA, I hope to explore further another paradox of this ‘medieval opera’. There was no ‘audience’ at Mattins in medieval Beauvais. For a liturgical drama enacted in the middle of the night in early January, there might not even have been any lay congregation. Most probably, Ludus Danielis was a participatory ‘happening’, in which the entire monastic community took part, singing the well-known melodies, joining the processions, taking on the ‘chorus’ roles of courtiers and soldiers, even if they did not play a principal character. In previous productions, I invited audience members to imagine themselves as time-tourists, visiting medieval Beauvais and witnessing the extraordinary events there, one certain night of the year. But perhaps the audience can themselves become medieval monks, and feel the shock of transforming themselves into courtiers and soldiers, and the indescribable emotions of returning to the ceaseless daily round of prayer when the Play is over.

This video illustrates and expands on some of the performance practice questions discussed in this article.

Conductus

Many medieval liturgical dramas feature a procession. The episodes dramatised in Ludus Danielis are punctuated by no less than eight formal processions accompanied by music: for King Belshazzar, the Sacred Vessels, the Queen, Daniel, the Queen’s exit, Daniel’s exit, Darius’ invasion, and Daniel’s re-entrance. In addition the Wise Men have to make an entrance, and the rubric suggests considerable comings and goings of messengers, Habbakuk’s flying visit to the Lions’ Den, and the Evil Counsellor’s repeated spying missions, going to and fro between Darius’ throne and Daniel’s house, wherever these might have been located within the cathedral.

When clergy had to move solemnly around the chancel, for example to the position for reading the Gospel, they would process as a group. Latin conductus is the past participle of conducere, from con = with, and ducere = to lead. Conductus was a way to sing with clear rhythm that would unify everyone’s steps. Conductus poetry was written with short lines and strong, regular metrics, suiting this kind of rhythmic singing.

Once the rhythm was stable, it became easier to improvise additional voices over the written melody, and the words remained clear, since the independent voices moved in the same rhythm. So conductus became a particular type of polyphony, usually in two or three parts.

At major feasts, singers would return to their home town, bringing with them the latest polyphonic ideas from Notre Dame de Paris and the Paris University. And the region around Beauvais was famous for Trouvère lyrics and for Gautier de Coincy’s transformations of popular songs into religious conductus in Les Miracles de Notre Dame. In this atmosphere of experiment and creativity, it is highly plausible that singers introduced unwritten polyphony into the conductus processionals of Ludus Danielis.

As historical models for such improvised polyphony, surviving written sources are almost certainly intended for performance one-to-a-part. We can only speculate whether the singers of Ludus Danielis reserved certain passages for duos or trios (the classic sound of Parisian early polyphony), if one or two soloists provided improvised discants over the massed voices on the written tenor, or if there was a rich heterophony of simultaneous improvisation, unified by the note-against-note syllabic style and strong rhythm of conductus.  The raison d’etre of the event, dramatising Bible history and religious doctrine, keeping sufficient order whilst enacting appropriate inpropriety, suggests that limits might have been stretched in this area of performance, as in others.

In our May 2020 workshop, we rehearsed the essential period techniques: parallel organum in octaves and fifths and a constant drone. Jerome of Moravia’s fiddle treatise suggests that one can create a harmony for occasional notes, otherwise remaining on the written tune. [Note that this is quite different from an alternating drone, in the fashion of Irish ‘double-tonic’ tunes] We rehearsed typical movement at cadences, with a dissonant third or sixth resolving to a consonant fifth, unison or octave.

Jerome of Moravia also suggests a more demanding option, providing a harmony for every note of the written tune, i.e. a entire new polyphonic voice. We practised ways to do this using ‘fifthing’ – moving from unison towards a drone fifth, or parallel fifths, and back to unison; and by contrary motion, ‘mirroring’ the contours of the written melody.

We discussed the use and abuse of thirds, and attitudes to dissonance/resolution generally. Historical examples show that a lot of passing dissonance seems to have been accepted, sometimes even at the ends of intermediate phrases.

Here is a video summary of medieval improvisation techniques for Conductus.

Free, open, online multi-track recording project

For the recording project, I provided as a backing track a neutral harp-solo version of the second Conductus Danielis, which has the appropriate incipit Congaudentes – rejoicing together. Each participant listened to this track on headphones, whilst recording their own performance around it. Some played in duo, some sent in multiple tracks, one singer recorded 7 independent tracks. The project was free and open, and everyone who submitted a track had their work included. The list of participants is below, and I thank them all again!

Here is the same Congaudentes chorus, from The Harp Consort’s 1998 recording.

Here is the backing track for the May 2020 multi-track project, in case you would like to practise with it.

Participants came from many countries. Some are internationally known, one made her first ever recording for this project. This authentically reproduces the situation in c1200 Beavais, where experienced singers of polyphony and senior clerics sang alongside the young choiristers who presented the show.

The standard of all the tracks was remarkably high; all the more so, if one bears in mind that individual performers did not hear each other until the whole thing was mixed and uploaded. In the following report, I attempt to offer some academic analysis and helpful comments, without exposing anyone to personal criticism or undue individual exposure in what was from beginning to end an ensemble project.

Recording yourself and listening critically, and repeating this process intensively, as one does in a professional CD recording, creates a very steep learning curve. I greatly appreciate the work of record producers who have guided me through this process, and I would recommend it to any student or professional who is keen to improve, at whatever level.

For this project, in the course of many, many hours of audio and video editing, I listened to every individual track several times, and also heard how different combinations of soloists fitted together. All of the improvisations were plausible and fitted well with the stylistics we had studied, and there was a delightful variety of individual approaches, all with a lively energy appropriate to the context within the Play. The following comments are therefore from the perspective of a listening editor.

There were in the end 56 audio tracks (Audacity) and 38 video tracks (Nero video) to be mixed. For anyone else who might be contemplating a similarly large-scale multi-track project, I would recommend the technique that I fell upon only at the end, when I needed a technical fix. Trying to manage more than 30 video tracks simultaneously, my video editing software and/or my laptop had slowed to a crawl, and I could no longer review the results of my edits reliably. So I mixed 7 video tracks into one block, which I rendered as a single track. I should have done this from the outset for both audio and video mixes: group the tracks into  blocks by sections (high voices, low voices, bowed, plucked and percussion instruments) and mix each block first. Then mix just 5 blocks into the final print.

I asked participants to record (audio/video) a clap synchronised with a click on the backing track, but in the end this was not really needed. The quickest way to synchronise audio tracks was by playing them simultaneously, and lining them up by trial and error. And the quickest way to synchronise video to audio was also by ear, using the audio track associated with each video simultaneously with the full audio mix. Once the tracks are synched, you can lock them and silence the individual audio tracks to leave only the proper audio-mix.

Since everything was synched to the original backing track, the major limitation of Audacity for ‘classical’ audio editing, that you cannot easily drop-in patches from alternative takes of slightly different duration, was not a factor. Most of the problems I had to fix were temporary disturbances of rhythmic precision, and Audacity’s sophisticated “change tempo without changing pitch” function allowed me to make the necessary adjustments.  As I often find in live music-making, rhythmic precision is a very high priority, and good rhythm leads to confidence and to improvements in other performance variables. This is especially relevant to Conductus, of course.

For anyone who hasn’t tried it before, it’s surprisingly difficult to keep precisely together with a backing track heard through headphones. So I make no criticism of those who needed a helping hand during audio editing: all of us who ever made a CD are eternally grateful to the skills of professional producers. With the advantage of ‘hindsight’ and repeated listening, I noticed that some performers maintained ensemble by ‘checking in’ with the backing track every so often, for example at phrase-breaks, but sometimes drifted apart for a while in the middle of a phrase. This suggests that the operating strategy was attention-switching between listening and playing, rather than continous monitoring while playing.

I did not find this problem with vocal tracks, which might indicate that the sound of the harp’s backing track was easier for singers to hear, contrasting more with their own sounds, than for instrumentalists.

I also used Audacity’s ‘change pitch without changing tempo’ and reverb functions to transform Tanja Skok’s small frame drum into a mighty medieval battle drum.

There were two pairs of performers who sent duo tracks. I’m very happy that they could enjoy the chance to make music in company, during this time of social distancing, and this was an important element of our project, reflecting also the medieval performers’ celebrations of community spirit as they met, some of them perhaps only once a year, in Beauvais. But – obviously – if there is any moment when a duo track is not precisely together, there is no way to re-align the two individuals in post-production! This is a problem regularly faced by editors trying to clean up live performances, where the sound of one instrument spills onto another player’s microphone. As far as possible, editors want to have each instrument/voice isolated on its own track, even though project directors prefer to have happy participants!

There were few problems of tuning that showed through seriously, once everything was aligned and everyone was playing, though I discreetly faded out a couple of murky moments. Where tuning was off, a common feature seemed to be notes stopped further up the fingerboard of bowed and plucked instruments with necks (with or without frets). Open strings, index and middle stopping fingers were noticeably more reliable than ring fingers and pinkies. There are many factors here: finger position, fret position, string quality, as well as the bowing/plucking action.

In spite of the challenge of – sometimes quite adventurous – improvisation, most of the invented material was delivered accurately. The most difficult moment is between phrases, where, in addition to all the usual demands of solo performance and ensemble music-making, one has to decide what to do next and get fingers/voice to some newly invented note, precisely on time. This is an area I would focus on, in face-to-face rehearsal of live ensemble improvisation.

This connects to another element that can only be practised in real-time ensemble work: overall texture. Ideally, each performer should be assessing the culmulative result of all the improvising, and adjusting their own contribution accordingly. Is there enough basic melody? Too much drone? Enough high, mid-range and low? Is it too bland, or over-complicated? Such monitoring and adjusting requires enough rehearsal time for a group to learn to work together, to communicate and negotiate not by discussing, but by singing/playing and listening.

Ms 638 Paris 1244-11254

The plethora of multi-track projects that have been created during the current health crisis make an interesting contribution to the study of rhythm in Historically Informed Performance. Suddenly, principles of steady Tactus and reliable rhythm have become practical, even essential. Even though we cannot work together in real time – perhaps, because of this – listening has become more important than watching a conductor. Paradoxically, we are also more aware of the emotional power of making music as a group, since we cannot actually meet.

At the original happenings of the medieval Play (for a liturgical action without audience, I shy away from the word ‘performance’), there would have been no modern conductor, also no renaissance/baroque tactus. The misura technique of early polyphony, where a singer on the slow moving tenor-part, standing at the back, taps on the shoulder of a fast-moving cantus-part singer in front of him, is also impractical during processions and dramatic action.

But in Conductus all the singers pronounce the words simultaneously, even if some improvise polyphony. [And by the way, as a practical point, instrumentalists have to find a way to play on the move, for all these processions around a cathedral-sized building.] Meanwhile, the beat is given by everyone’s feet, shuffling, walking, dancing or marching (according to character roles) in procession.

The other meaning of conduct (pronounced with the accent on the first syllable), as a noun signifying the way one behaves, is also present in the medieval French word conduis. In the context of processions, this recalls psalm verses about ‘walking with God… not in the way of the ungodly’. In the Miracles, Gautier de Coincy endlessly explores connections between similar-sounding words with different meanings, and multiple meanings of the same word, so that continual repetitions of a certain sound become a hypnotic mantra, leading the mind into a semantic maze of meditative suggestion. In Ludus Danielis, the way to behave, the way to walk, the way to ‘do conductus‘ in every sense, varies from one procession to another, as the monks embody Belshazzar’s courtiers, the Queen’s handmaidens, Daniel’s co-religionists, or an invading army.

For a HIP staged production, there is much work to be done in exploring the connections between character, movement, text and music for each procession; as well as in presenting the dramatic action of each scene, once the actors have reached ‘centre stage’.

Links

Full ensemble final mix with video

High voices

Low voices

Plucked strings

Bowed strings

Tutors

Giulia Amoretti x 7 with video

List of Participants

OPERA OMNIA TUTORS

Anastasia Bondareva [Russia]

Xavier Diaz-Latorre [Catalunya]

Ekaterina Liberova [Russia]

Tanya Skok [Slovenia]

Wolodymyr Smishkewych [Republic of Ireland]

Evgeny Skurat [Russia]

Andrew Lawrence-King – Director [Guernsey]

[*track = audio only, no video]

WOMEN’S VOICES

Giulia Amoretti – voice x 6, *voice [Russia]

Anastasia Bondareva – voice [Russia]

Lyubov Denisova – voice, *voice [Russia]

Olga Domagatskaya – *voice [Russia]

Alexandra Grebenyukova – voice, *voice [Russia]

Ekaterina Liberova – *voice [Russia]

Daniela Rico – *voice [Mexico]

MEN’S VOICES

Aleksandr Grebenyukov – voice [Russia]

Andrew Lawrence-King – *voice x 2 [Guernsey]

Timur Musaev – *voice [Russia]

Evgeny Skurat – voice [Russia]

Wolodymyr Smishkewych – “Daniel”, voice x 3 [Republic of Ireland]

BOWED STRINGS

Barbara Ceron – Harp x 3 [Mexico]

Alexandra Maglevanaya – Bass Viol x 2 [Russia]

Daria Maglevanaya – Medieval Fiddle x 3 [Russia]

Patricia Ann Neely – Medieval Fiddle [USA]

Wolodymyr Smishkewych – Sinfonye [Republic of Ireland]

Olga Zhukova – *Treble Viol [Russia]

PLUCKED STRINGS

Hannah Brockow – Irish harp, *Irish harp x 5 [Canada]

Barbara Ceron – Harp x 3 [Mexico]

Xavier Diaz-Latorre – Medieval lute [Catalunya]

Julia Grab – Rebec [Russia]

Atsuko Kunishige – *Medieval harp [Japan]

Andrew Lawrence-King – Harp, *Harp [Guernsey]

Ekaterina Pripuskova – Mandolin x 2 [Russia]

Evgeny Skurat – Medieval harp x 2 [Russia]

Boris Steinberg – Ud [Russia]

PERCUSSION

Xavier Diaz-Latorre – Tambourine [Catalunya]

Tarkviniy Gramsci – Darabuka [Russia]

Tanya Skok – Frame drum [Slovenia]

The OPERA OMNIA training production of Ludus Danielis for the International Baroque Opera Studio is planned for August-September 2020. At the time of writing, we still hope to be able to go ahead.