“I felt Miller Theatre needed to do things that were not being done in New York City,” says former director George Steel. “One of the things was obviously new music—in the kind of concerted, focused way we ended up doing it—and the other I thought was early music. You could see Beethoven piano sonatas with some regularity in New York, but the rest were in much shorter supply.”
Now in its 22nd year of programming, the Miller Theatre at Columbia University has carved an enviable niche for itself in the field of early music, regularly offering performances by the likes of the Tallis Scholars and Le Poème Harmonique. Now officially under the directorship of Melissa Smey (she was acting director from the time of George Steel’s departure in 2008), early music continues to flourish at the Miller—one of the first companies to fully embrace the genre and offer regular, dedicated programming.
A trained countertenor, Steel originally formed vocal ensemble Vox in college to fully explore the canon of his youth. “There really weren’t enough great singers in the early music style to put together a first-rate ensemble,” he explained of his first exposure to New York as a young singer. When he inherited the Miller, he turned it around from a relatively unknown, uptown performance space into a sophisticated venue offering rare chances to hear everything from sixteenth-century sacred works to pieces where the ink was still wet (part of the successful Composer Portraits series). Being an Ivy League-associated theater, there was also a greater emphasis on keenly designed offerings with intent and intellect.
“Our programming is about collaboration with the artists and about making something that is a unique and interesting opportunity to hear and experience,” says Smey over tea at a coffeehouse near campus. “George kind of invented the programming. It’s about working really closely with musicians and with composers and with directors to create these performances.”
Such a tenet applies to both of Miller’s chief exports, early and modern music, drawing several interesting parallels between the two genres—parallels that don’t escape Smey and have been used to help further the two genres. “There’s a spirit of adventurousness that pervades both, because both things are from a niche—outside the common of what is known, what is generally done,” says Smey.
As a result, audience members more often than not feel comfortable with trying the new or unknown: They can have honest reactions without feeling beholden to the standard receptions that more common works generally receive. While Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 has been getting a healthy amount of playtime in its quadricentennial year, how often can concertgoers hear Josquin des Prez’s O bone et dulcissime Jesu, John Taverner’s Magnificat, Philippe le Chancelier’s Ave gloriosa virginum regina, Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger’s Toccata secunda arpeggiata, or an entire evening of works by Tomás Luis de Victoria (all on the Miller’s early music schedule for this season)?
For singers, as well, performing early music has also become rather liberating. “Early music in [early] recording can sort of sound archaic and studied,” says countertenor Geoffrey Williams, a member of the vocal quartet New York Polyphony. “But I think, right now, folks are starting to peel away some of the layers of choral tradition that have affected music and have really made it more of an individual thing even within an ensemble.” Williams and his New York Polyphony colleagues (tenor Geoffrey Silver, baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert and bass Craig Phillips) have taken a fresh approach to their repertoire, performing a Miller-esque mix of old and new works and considering themselves a string quartet for voices—an apt analogy.
“We’re certainly not a period vocal ensemble,” he adds. “We’re not trying to re-create a sound [when] nobody knows exactly what it sounded like anyway. We’re trying to take the notes on the page and make them sound as beautiful as possible. We don’t want to compromise our singing for the sake of musicology.”
It is also this unorthodox sensibility of playing around with texts—texts written long before any opera aria or Lied—that has contributed to early music’s increasing popularity among vocalists. Conservatories like the Juilliard School are now instituting programs of study devoted entirely to the genre. “I think that really cemented it. It’s kind of accepted. They’re going to be teaching it in the academy, which means there’s a validity there,” Smey says.
And while this means Baroque performance studies are gradually becoming mainstream, earlier music is still gaining steam in the academic world—especially in America. “Young singers will always gravitate to where the interesting and challenging music is to be found, the juicy roles, the greatest stage directors, conductors, the most secure employment, not to forget public and critical recognition. And in Europe, at least, Baroque opera has gone mainstream to the extent where this is now reality,” adds Benjamin Bagby, director of Sequentia. “For earlier repertoires, we are a long way from this situation.”
Yet the focus on even the later period of early music puts the genre closer and closer to a tipping point for Medieval and Renaissance practices to fully flourish. Bach and his contemporaries can be heard everywhere in New York from Miller to Lincoln Center to Greenwich Village nightclub (Le) Poisson Rouge. Artists like pianists Simone Dinnerstein and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, and the International Contemporary Ensemble are also working to bridge the gap between the modern music scene and the Medieval and Renaissance periods in innovative ways, forming a brave new-old world of sorts. “We no longer fear that the old instruments we have reconstructed will not live up to our expectations, and we demand all the virtuosity, interpretive brilliance, insight, and transcendence that one would expect to find in any highly developed musical art,” says Bagby.
Sitting on the other side of the spectrum (and Miller’s 2010-11 season performers roster), Smey praises Sequentia for bringing “a musicologist’s devotion and care—an academic’s devotion—to the study and the knowledge of what they are doing.” Founded 33 years ago, Sequentia follows a different path to the core of early music in the twenty-first century, which Bagby describes as an “area of historical performance practice which, unfortunately, still circulates some stale musical platitudes common in the 1970s—and which still accepts a level of vocal and instrumental ability which would simply not be tolerated by our colleagues performing Bach or Monteverdi.”
While the bar for education in Baroque practices has been considerably raised, Bagby considers standards for medieval practices to still be at a lower level. And though the niche may be too small—or, as Bagby puts it, the stakes too low—the number of Medieval specialists under the “early” umbrella has risen over the past 40 years.
For proof of that, look no further than Stile Antico, which has released three excellent recordings for Harmonia Mundi in the past 18 months (Song of Songs, Sheppard: Media Vita and Puer natus est, an album of Tudor Christmas music) and joins the Miller roster this season. “I’ve never seen a group of 12 musicians so on it. They were all plugged into the same hard drive [or] brain,” says Smey. “So it wasn’t like a string quartet with the first violinist as the leader. All of them, moment to moment—it was shifting who was the leader.”
Such opposing performance practices—New York Polyphony’s string quartet approach and efforts to be unbeholden to musicology versus Stile Antico’s eschewal of a string quartet feel and Sequentia’s dedication to musicology and academics—further the fact that the rules are not written in stone for early music. “I feel like the approach to it has evolved,” says Smey. “I think people are less rigorous about how it should be performed and received.” However, one thing that most groups and performers can agree upon is that, for their performances, context is everything.
“We consider the acoustic we’re singing in [as being] the fifth member of the band,” Williams explains. And while Miller itself is a pretty intimate space, the series makes use of spaces like the Church of St. Mary the Virgin near Times Square and, in George Steel’s case with Vox, on-campus sites like St. Paul’s Chapel, the palazzo-inspired Casa Italiana, and the Rotunda.
“Acoustic matters a huge amount,” says Steel. “You look at Lincoln Center, which has all kinds of wonderful spaces, but has no ideal space for performing Renaissance polyphony. Which is a remarkable statement, but true.”
Certainly being outside of a theater proper and inside a church—where the music was originally intended to be heard—is a more inviting environment for both performers and audiences. The devotional, meditative aspects of the music in such a setting—one that, unlike the traditional concert hall or opera house, is more or less devoid of class structures—make it more of a visceral experience than an academic stimulant.
“The more of a foothold that you can give to people to help them feel welcome and to help them understand, it is really important,” says Smey. “Ultimately it’s not just about getting audiences in your theater. Ultimately it’s about the serving and performing arts more broadly and developing new audiences for classical music.”
For singers as well, the notion of venues and space in early music provides unique opportunities. “Geoffrey [Williams] had a really interesting chat with us,” Smey adds. “We were talking about the church as an instrument that they’re playing. . . and how the selection of the venue is just as important as the selection of which tenor they’re going to use. It matters so much. In the chapel of St. John the Divine, they had different spatial arrangements of the four of them because they had to balance how they wanted it to blend and how they wanted it to sound, so where they positioned themselves was so interesting.”
Such considerations were all but unheard of 40 years ago, and while in the United States they are still the exception rather than the rule, New York is the host to a slow but steady chain reaction. Even without an ideal performance space, Lincoln Center has booked groups like Ensemble Basiani and the Tallis Scholars for Mostly Mozart and its inaugural White Light Festival. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has continually presented groups like Chanticleer and the Waverly Consort around Christmastime, but the programs have begun to gain higher profiles and extended programming throughout the city. And composers like David Lang offer rich and vivid contemporary works like The Little Match Girl Passion for Ars Nova Copenhagen as further developments to the repertoire. To place the Miller at the center of all this may seem unfair to other companies also working to propagate the art form; however, there is something to be said for its brand of presentations.
“There is nothing which can be compared to singing in a series which has an informed and partisan programming genius behind it, in which one feels part of an ongoing intellectual and musical dialogue with a dedicated and demanding audience,” says Bagby. “This is one of the pleasures of performing in such a series as the Miller’s.”
