Updated Sunday, 10:30 am: Please note that this event has been rescheduled to 5 pm (same day) to accommodate a 3 pm memorial service (at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center) for Leslie Stark, who died on Friday, July 17.
It’s a period that perhaps catches our imagination more than any other in history, with prequels from the Dark Age myths, foremost the court of King Arthur, and culminating in the High Middle Ages between 1100 and 1350. For the nobility, it was a time of battling infidels in bloody fields outside Jerusalem and then, back home, unable to forgo warrior games, jousting in the castle keep. For the ladies it was dawn Mass in private chapels, embroidery, gossip, plucking at lutes, and plinking harpsichords.
It is often said that for the common folk, tied to the feudal system of raising a portion of one’s livestock and crops for the local duke, life was hard. And yet many days were set aside for fun and games. Not counting Sundays, there were 56 official holidays a year. If we count Sundays, the total of days off comes, of course, to 108. Economists are fond of pointing to this mania for dancing on the greensward and drinking hard cider as the reason the medieval economy remained flat, but a reasonable overworked, frantically neurotic, modern-day person might ask, “So what? Bring back the 108 holidays!”
Our fantasy movies and novels borrow heavily from these times, so clearly our imaginations strain to roam outside those castle corridors, gazing across hills and dales at church spires, villages of thatched roofs, a tinkle of sheep’s bells, and the sound of a flute wafting on the first wave of the mistral, the heavy wind that sweeps up into Southern France from North Africa.
It’s the flute that perhaps lures us most poignantly into those alluring times. Count Orsino famously opens “Twelfth Night” with the line, “If music be the food of love, play on!” If we wish to dwell, even momentarily, in medieval times, it’s the music that carries us afield.
On Sunday at the West Tisbury library, coming up on its sixth year of performance, a group of accomplished musicians — Richard Mahoney on lute, Nan Elliot and Ed Merck on recorders, Lisa Esperson on percussion, with tenor Jason Wang and poetry readers and singers, a.k.a. troubadours John Alley, Joe Eldridge, Brian Ditchfield, and Gaston Baddasz — will carry us back nine centuries.
Recently the MV Times caught up with Troubadours organizer Paul Levine, retired Harvard science professor, at his and his artist wife Marie-Louise Rouff’s home in West Tisbury. Also on hand was writer and recorder player Ed Merck, also of West Tisbury.
“No one can really know what this early music sounded like,” explained Mr. Merck. “There was nothing notated on the page, so we’re just guessing here. You know how jazz players jam? We’re jamming with medieval instruments.” Mr. Levine, who often consults with Medievalist scholar Marisa Gomez, Stanford professor, said the latter cites the early music group led by Gerard Zuchetto as possibly achieving the most traditional sound in its recordings.
Mr. Levine, having spent many three- and four-month holidays in the small town of le Pardou, south of Avignon, fell in love with the culture of troubadour and trobairitz (women performers) poetry and music. “This land known as Occitania extended from the Atlantic, east through France, south to Spain. The language was an ancient dialect called Occitan, and it’s still spoken [as Provençal] by 400,000 people in that wide area.”
Mr. Levine explained that while poems and songs of high chivalry and romantic love are high on the list of Occitan music, the troubadours also produced sketches of political satire, humor, and outright ribaldry. Troubadours also found ways to sneak in oblique criticisms of the Catholic Church.
The performers had patrons, and they traveled extensively; part of their value to audiences was the news they carried from far-flung lands. From Andalusia and the Middle East, they brought back history, beautiful objects, elegant manners, and Arabic poetry (think Omar Khayyam and Rumi).
A vital part of the troubadour road show were the jongleurs, who danced, conjured, told stories, performed acrobatics, and lent support on vocals and instruments. “We are all jongleurs,” said Mr. Merck, which had the ring of philosophical import.
For those of us who adored the play and movie “The Lion In Winter,” the movie starring Peter O’Toole as King Henry II of England (1133-1189) and Katherine Hepburn as his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204), banished to “castle arrest,” it’s the latter’s name that remains the most famous of the troubadour period. It’s not lost on scholars that the queen’s grandfather, William IX of Aquitaine, was the first known troubadour.
Some historians dismiss Eleanor’s influence as pure myth on the order of Camelot, but to this powerful queen is attributed the fabled Court of Love, in which aristocrats, artists, and thinkers sat as informal jurists before whom injured lovers presented their cases. The jury both assigned blame and at the same time searched for more skillful modes of achieving true love. Their favorite question: Can [romantic] love exist in marriage? The verdict: Likely not. Out of these possibly fictional courts, the troubadour tradition of poetry and song was said to have arisen.
Sunday’s concert will take us back to those times on a magical tour of what they might have sounded like, with fragments of poetry such as “Since I have returned to Provence/ And it is pleasing to my lady,/ I certainly must compose a joyous song.”
Has anyone said that to you recently?
Come hear the words and the musical notes from centuries-old melodies, as the jongleurs treat us to their “food of love.” The art of the troubadours died out around the time of the Black Death in 1348, but it returns this coming Sunday, June 19, at 5 pm at the West Tisbury library. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Paul Levine at plevine@stanford.edu or at 508-693-2072.
