Wedding Ritual #12: Rebecca Bain
Rebecca Bain
was introduced to this blog via Maria Beadell's ritual, in which Maria selected Ensemble Belladonna's recording of Miri it is while Sumer Ilast as her 'borrowed' work. I contacted Rebecca as a member of that ensemble and invited her to share a creative profile of her own - and, here we are! This is the first such chain link we've forged through Wedding Ritual - hopefully the first of many more.
Rebecca Bain is the Artistic Director of Ensemble Scholastica, a female vocal ensemble based in Montreal whose goal is 'to share with listeners the beauty and intricacy of medieval music, particularly the medieval liturgical traditions that are at the very root of Western music'. I am delighted to play a small part in that mission by facilitating Rebecca's ritual here. Introducing Rebecca Bain's old, new, borrowed and blue works, in her own words:
Something Old
"I am a specialist in the performance of medieval music. So, most of my work is on “something old” (though I do also sing other genres, including contemporary music!). Here I could not decide between something from the beginning of my career, and something that is on the oldest side of the old music I perform. Hence, two somethings old.
"My first selection is taken from a live recording of the final concert of my Master’s Degree at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland. Per quella strada lactea was composed by Johannes Ciconia (1370-1412) as an ode to his patrons, the Carrara family of Padua. In this performance you hear a voice (mine) and a medieval fiddle (also me). I perform as a solo duo, or a self-accompanied singer, not unlike many an actual medieval musician. Caveat: I hope you can bear with the quality of the pre-digital recording (this 'something old' is from the dark ages of technology, ie. the 1990’s)…
"My second selection for something old is indeed a very old piece. Rex celi Domine is one of the oldest surviving polyphonic pieces in Europe. We first find a fragment of it in the 9th century musical treatise Musica enchiriadis, where it serves to illustrate what was the brand-new art of polyphonic composition. This live recording is from Ensemble Scholastica’s performance at the 2013 edition of the Festival Montréal Baroque. It was during my second year as director of this women’s vocal ensemble, which remains one of the very few Canadian ensembles to specialize in early polyphony and chant.
"For the benefit of music history nerds, I include here, in addition to the audio, an image from one of the surviving manuscripts of the Musica enchiriadis. It is indeed the piece that we are singing. Musical notation has come a long way! As has polyphony. Our recording will no doubt sound strange and somewhat “primitive” to most of your ears. We tried to image how exciting it must have been for 9th century monks, to be allowed for the first time to create something new out of the old liturgical chant. We actually had to reconstruct part of the piece, which was rather fun. The manuscript gives you the principles and the example and asks you to complete it. Just like a school textbook. Polyphony 101 circa 890 AD."
Something New
"This year, in the middle of the pandemic lockdown, Ensemble Scholastica released its second album, Saints inouïs / Astonishing Saints, with the ATMA Classique label. For this wonderful project, we teamed up with the founder of our ensemble, musicologist Pascale Duhamel, to be my co-director. Pascale and her colleague Sylvain Margot had recently unearthed a lost sacred repertoire of 12th-century French songs; our first concert of this program in 2019 was thus a premiere many centuries in the making! For my “something new”, I chose the Marian responsory Priusquam in utero from the album. Not only is it hot off the press and given new life after a long dormancy, but for this piece, we sing a revamped version. That is to say, we elaborated it – essentially added a second voice to the original monophonic chant – in the quasi-improvised style that was popular during the 12th century. The duo features the voices of myself and Luce Chamberland, followed by Angèle Trudeau on the solo verse, followed by the full ensemble as the song finishes in plainchant.
"For those interested in learning more about the Saints inouïs project, I am also including a short video we made to launch the album (in lieu of the launch concert we could not give in the time of Covid). It features interviews with myself, Pascale and Sylvain, and in the background, our premiere performance of the material."
Something Borrowed
"Here I wanted to go in a completely different direction and pay tribute to an amazing Indigenous artist. Tanya Tagaq borrows from a variety of musical genres, including from her own Inuit culture – most notably in her use of throat singing – to create haunting and powerful performances that are both experimental and that speak to the Inuit experience. Her work challenges the listener to engage, rather than to sit and listen passively. I chose a live video (because she is an amazing, inspired performer) of her song Retribution, the title track from her 2016 album. Not for the faint of heart, this album is very political and explores the theme of rape – rape of women, rape of the land. As we now all ponder the climate change dilemma, we would do well to remember that indigenous peoples were the best custodians of the earth, until Europeans stole the land and began raping it for profit. Tanya Tagaq reminds us that the earth is something borrowed....
“Our mother grows angry,
Retribution will be swift.
We squander her soil and suck out her sweet black blood to burn it.
We turn money into God, and salivate over opportunities
to crumple and crinkle our souls for that paper, that gold.
Money has spent us,
left us in small boxes, dark rooms, bright screens, empty tombs.
Left investing our time in hollow philosophies
to placate the fear of our bodies returning back into our mother…”
Something Blue
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