|
The musical group was founded around 1968 as a platform for my ideas about recreating medieval music in general and early
Spanish music in particular. (Though the X in the full name stands for 'the tenth', the short name is 'Alfonso X,' pronounced
'ex.') The original members included Duane Thomas (my right-hand man) and David Dunn (fiddler extraordinaire). The number
of players has varied over the years from three or four to around a dozen. At one point we even had a women's vocal group,
playing tambourines and dancing in Mediterranean style.
The phrase 'string band' in the full name of the group comes from American folk music circles. It describes the style
of ensemble that arose out of the early days of radio and recording when individual rural performance styles were beginning
to be blended into each other in urban settings. More importantly, even nowadays, it implies a tradition where individual
players, who do not necessarily practice together, share a repertory, stylistic elements, and attitudes toward performance
and can come together to perform with creativity and spontaneity. Many of you will see the model of the folk festival or fiddle
festival in this, as was my intent. I wanted to retain, or recreate, that flexibility which I believed would emphasize the
improvisational nature of early music performance. And even though we were a group which did practice together I wanted us
to sound as if we did not. In addition, as time went by, and members of the group went their separate ways, I wanted to establish
a framework within which we could maintain our music-making skills, so that when we did come together our individual evolutions
would create even more spontaneity.
Training mostly classical musicians in improvisational attitudes like this was not easy. I started from the specific to
the general: I gave each of my performers long listening assignments in ethnic versions of their instrument. I used to say
that I locked David Dunn in a room with his rebec and records of gadulkas, rebabs, and old time fiddlers and told him he couldn't
come out until he had mastered it all. I didn't really have to do that: he took to it naturally. Our first big concert was
for the American Musicological Society meeting at UCLA in 1970. August Wenzinger was there. He came up to David after the
concert, raving (in his thick German accent), 'vere did you learn to play rrebec like dat? Dat's ze best rrebec playing I've
ever heard in my life!'
My original dream was not to train classical musicians to play improvisational music but the other way around. I envisioned
an institute bringing together traditional musicians from around the world who played modern versions of medieval instruments.
I would have Spanish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian bagpipers; shawm players from Morocco, Serbia, and Iraq; lute and psaltery
players from the Middle East; Persian and Indian dulcimer players; long-necked lute players from Turkey, Iran, and Central
Asia; end-blown flute players from Bulgaria, Turkey, and Iran; harpers from East Africa and Burma; fiddlers and recorder players
from all over. And then I'd start on the singers, but I'd limit myself to the Mediterranean: Spain, Morocco, Sicily, the Balkans,
and the Middle East, with maybe an extension into the Caucasus. Once I had them all together I would take particular ensembles
and teach them one of the Cantigas, orally. Then stand back. I confided this outrageous dream to Mantle Hood one day. His
response: 'Why didn't you do it?'
I hasten to add that I do not believe that any combination of Morocco, Sicily, Bulgaria, Syria, and Iran, stirred or shaken,
would produce 'Medieval Spanish Music,' any more than Rope, Snake, Wall, and Fan can create an Elephant. The intent is to
let traditional musicians who have mastered the techniques and capabilities of their respective instruments bring those elements
to explore the possibilities of the remaining musical skeletons from the Cantigas.
The chances for relative success would be enhanced by two factors: instrumental and musical. Most of the medieval Spanish
instruments, and all the important ones, have close descendants still being played around the Mediterranean. Clearly, much
has changed in seven hundred years but the instrumentalists themselves, with their idiomatic techniques, are as close to their
ancestors as we will ever get. That is not to say that organologists could not work with the traditional musicians in a joint
project to more closely approximate the physical instrument. But, as I constantly remind my coworkers, instruments don't make
music, people make music.
The second area, the musical, is like unto the first. I do not pretend that Andalucian music in the Maghrib today is the
same as that heard by Ziryab or Ibn Bajja. But the cultural, philosophical, and musical context is part of the same tradition
along with their melodic and rhythmic attitudes. Again, musicologists could work together with modern Andalucian musicians
to reconstruct archaic styles and repertories, stripping away, for instance, Turkish chromaticism dating from the renaissance.
Let us be frank: we have lost too much information to ever be certain that we could fool a medieval musician who arrived
from a time machine that he was listening to his own music. It seems to me the best we could do would be for him to accept
it as 'music' and attribute it to 'those crazy guys over the mountain,' or Germans, or Saracens.
|
