Words by David C. Obenour
Context is such a crucial element in how we experience music. While sonically it can immerse a listener, so much is left not known without considering the context of the composer, the performers, and the world in which it was created. Separate those realities across the span of centuries and it’s easy to misinterpret or be given an altered or distorted translation.
At the suggestion of Another Timbre’s label head, Simon Reynell, modern composer James Weeks and the players of Apartment House have given us a refreshing new context in which to appreciate Early Music through the works of Gombert. Self-titled for the Renaissance composer (1495-1560), the album features seven motets and a chanson – arranged for instruments – with reflective contemporary works contributed by James Weeks. While this is certainly once again separated from the world and surroundings of Nicolas Gombert, the recording does give a new and exciting framing in which to appreciate the music. To understand our ongoing, though different, attempt to capture context within sound.
Off Shelf: Can you talk a little about your love of early music? Where does it come from and what about it still resonates with you now – or resonates with you now differently?
James Weeks: I’ve been immersed in it since childhood – I was a chorister and we sang tons of 16th-century music at a high standard – and it’s still my constant companion in my working life, alongside contemporary music. For example, I’ve just this week finished editing an album with my ensemble EXAUDI of Renaissance chromatic repertoire, and I’m about to spend the weekend leading a workshop on music by Orlando di Lasso.
It completely infuses my musical imagination, the sound of it but also the techniques and ideas, the aesthetics of it – it’s the soil I’m planted in as a musician. I’ve come to realize this more and more as the years pass – actually, I only really need this ‘early’ music and the music of the present and recent past. Which is not to say that my own music sounds like Lasso or Gombert or whomever, though sometimes I do like to incorporate echoes of their soundworlds in some pieces.
OS: In your interview with Simon Reynell – who initiated this project – you and Simon both talked about the crossover between contemporary and early music. What do you see as the common ground between these approaches some 500 years later?
JW: Of course, we haven’t defined what ‘early’ music is but… even if we focus on one era, say the 16th century – Gombert’s own time, we have to be careful of misreading / romanticizing its otherness based on its sheer temporal distance from us. For instance, a lot of 20th-century responses to medieval and Renaissance music, from both composers and performers, were based on treating it as a kind of alien music from another time, or world, which resonated with the way Modernism thought about itself. And of course there was a fondness for going back to archetypes – the ancient things – as kind of ‘purer’ forms of expression, the well-springs of art, which I have to confess I’m not immune to either… but when you get to know this music you realize that it was not at all alien to the people that made it. It’s just as messy and real and rooted in the immediacy of their world as our music is in ours.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that I don’t know how to define that common ground you mention today. Other than I think a certain desire to avoid the kind of 19th-century romanticism that still dominates mainstream Classical music aesthetics, and a desire for more clarity, particularly harmonically. Another parallel could be between the various avant-gardes in the 15th and 16th centuries – Ars subtilior, Renaissance chromaticism, seconda pratica, etc. – and modern avant-garde and experimental tendencies. Both delighting in innovation through theory, speculation and fantastical intellectual / artistic flights of imagination… those sorts of currents in early music are endlessly stimulating to me.
OS: You also asked Simon why he chose Gombert, did his response resonate with you? Why did you take on this project centered around the works of Gombert?
JW: To be honest I didn’t know Gombert’s work all that well but I had the gist and was keen to take the opportunity explore his work further, as much as anything else. I can never resist the chance to make work alongside or responding to early music, so it was an easy decision! And the idea of recording with Apartment House was obviously a big incentive as well.
OS: Did spending so much time with this source material give you a different appreciation? How so?
JW: For Gombert, definitely. I had to get right in amongst the notes when I was arranging and typesetting the pieces for instruments, and it’s always fascinating seeing how a composer’s mind works, putting the polyphonic texture together, adding line to line in his own particular way. They followed stylistic rules of course but everyone works within them slightly differently. With Gombert the weave of lines is so dense and the imitation so integral to the technique; I also had a strong sense of the strict limitations he placed on his own idiom, compared to what other composers working at exactly the same period were doing. His pieces are extraordinarily self-similar and the texture never lets up from start to finish – that’s not true of everyone writing at the time.
OS: I was really struck by how Simon related that much of early music currently being performed is completely removed from the strife of the world. Do you also feel that way? How do you feel you were able to contextualize these works within a more contemporary and relatable music framework?
JW: The creation and performance of art works generally take place at a slight remove from the realities of mundane life, don’t they? Even those ‘fusions’ of art and life attempted by Cage, Fluxus et al. They’re acts of contemplation and are not part of that strife of living? Even as they reflect on it? But I think it would be unfair to all of today’s early music performers to say that they operate in some carefree vacuum of aesthetic hedonism! Particularly, works with text often reference suffering. Especially in a religious context, and are still part of the rituals of the church – whether or not one wants to be involved with all that, of course – but I think still offer meaningful catharsis even in a secular context. So I don’t quite think that, though I totally understand what Simon means. In making my arrangements I didn’t consciously try to make them more contemporary or relatable, to be honest, I just trusted that the transposition of them onto instruments would work its own magic.
OS: Do you think that different context brings Gombert’s music back to its truer roots or is this an altogether different reframing?
JW: Not really, it’s just a different way of seeing it, a different angle, from which you can see other, previously hidden depths within the work. I suppose what was so nice about the project was that the instrumental versions kind of sanded-off the patina of vocal blend that a choral performance always has, and let us appreciate them as it were without their religious vestments on. I think that is what Simon really wanted to hear and I think we got that.
OS: You also talked about how you didn’t include dynamics for the arrangements for Apartment House. Was there anything about their performance that went a different way than you had envisioned? Or maybe exemplified a different aspect?
JW: No, not really! I suppose I was more pleased with some of the combinations of instruments than with others, but ultimately I liked the fact that I’d decided each piece would have a subtly different arrangement of instruments and parts, and that made it kind of honest, as if we weren’t hiding any angle from the cameras!
OS: Can you talk about your interludes interspersed throughout the album? How were you connecting to that era and how were you separating from or evolving within it?
JW: Well, I used particular sonorities, harmonies, freezeframed from moments in the Gombert. Mostly passing harmonies that you wouldn’t really notice in performance but actually, to my mind, give the music its soul, somehow. And then the idea was to use explore those little shafts of beautiful harmony, just sitting awhile with them, turning them over and over, repeating and recombining them among the instruments. There’s hardly any material in them: they’re like static moments of meditation in the middle of this flowing sea of Gombert. It was important to me that they stood alone as pieces in their own right, not just as connectors from one Gombert piece to another, and I think they would work outside of that context. With the title ‘media vita’ (‘in the midst/middle of life’) they are meditations on temporality, time passing, middle age. I’m 46 and I thought deeply about them.
What arch were you trying to pull together as an album? Were there any unique considerations for this music and how it played out?
JW: Certain tracks struck Simon and me as starting and ending ones, and I did actually compose my pieces to go between specific Gomberts, though that didn’t quite happen as planned in the end – which turned out fine. We also had to ensure that the Cantus or top lines of each Gombert piece were played by different instruments on adjacent tracks, for aural variety, and then we just made a sequence that seemed to flow nicely. We were very much on the same page about this.
OS: Can you talk to the album art that accompanies the album? Even if you were less connected to that aspect, how do you see that as further establishing the setting and understanding for listener?
JW: I think that spiky, leafless tree is such a strong image – using Breughel obviously draws us into the Renaissance world, but the close-up of the tree, and then the pained figures around it, force you to look again. It’s like a jolt of electricity that connects this remote time to our own.