Keyboard Music Video

[Tonja Witcraft]

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Corina Marti, Lecturer of Medieval Keyboard Instruments at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, discusses the process and pedagogy of reconstructing lost medieval keyboard music in this interview with Vox Humana Editor Christopher Holman.

Corina, many thanks for agreeing to this interview. As Lecturer of Medieval Keyboard Instruments and Medieval Recorder at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland, you hold perhaps one of the most specialized faculty positions for all of keyboard academia. To begin, could you talk about your musical training? Did you study piano from an early age? When did you take up the organ and harpsichord, and what attracted you to them?

Then I got really into baroque music, and then renaissance, and finally I started wondering what came before that. And that brought me to the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis to study after I had finished in Lucerne. At that time, there was almost no information about early keyboard, but there was some knowledge about medieval wind instruments, so I majored in medieval recorder, and I started to do my own research on early keyboards. Over that period, I learned that there was an original clavicytherium in London. I went to look at it and did more research, and I then won a competition and finally had the money to actually commission a new clavicytherium. From there, I went on to clavisimbalum [the ancestor of the harpsichord], organetto, and so on.

The only real surviving medieval stringed keyboard instrument is that clavicytherium in London. But it's not completely original because it was restored in the nineteenth century; but apparently the original plectra were made of talons, not quills, which is incredibly lavish. There are some very old organs in places like Oosthuizen and Rysum, but the organs are all tuned in meantone, which for early medieval music is fairly painful to my ears. Most of the information about other medieval keyboard instruments comes from iconography.

According to writings from the time, we read that the most important keyboard instruments were clavicytherium, clavisimbalum, clavichord, and organetto (every angel in the middle ages seems to play them!). Some scholars try to argue that because there are fewer images of the clavisimbalum than the organetto, that the organetto was more popular, but that's difficult to say definitively, as the vast majority of sources are lost.

We've talked about small medieval keyboard instruments, but what about the massive Blockwerk organs in large churches and cathedrals? Are you aware of any efforts to reconstruct such an instrument?

Sadly, no. It would be fascinating and a great contribution to our knowledge of these instruments if someone were to reconstruct a famous medieval organ. We recently had a study day for medieval organ at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis to try and inspire interest in these kinds of topics. To construct medieval keyboards, there is such little information, and we shouldn't copy a modern reconstruction, and especially try to get rid of fairy-tale ideas about medieval instruments and music.

That medieval music and instruments have to be functional for our time. Many people want something that is pitched at A=440 [modern piano pitch], and that's too low for so much of medieval music. The other thing I hear people say is that they want an organetto that can play everything from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. But music changed so much over that period. Another misconception is that we have to use Pythagorean temperament [a tuning system that favors pure open fifths, rather than thirds like in meantone] for all medieval works, and that everything should sound very static or heavy. Or that medieval instruments weren't sophisticated and are rough around the edges.

How do you approach performance practice in this repertoire, and what are some of the major sources we can consult when trying to play late medieval keyboard music in a historically-informed way?

The first questions are "which instrument" and "which octave", and the answers usually depend on the rest of the ensemble's makeup. You can use a keyboard instrument to play one voice or all the voices, or just as an extra accompaniment like a harp. You have to find your musical color, language, etc. Organetto is like a gift from heaven because it's so good to accompany singers.

How do you approach ornamentation and musica ficta [pitches that lie beyond the six-note hexachord system; for modern performers, this most commonly refers to whether a leading tone is performed as a sharp or natural when not explicitly notated in a score] in medieval keyboard works?

We can get ideas about ornamentation from the music, especially Codex Faenza. In many medieval writings, even when the author is talking about mundane things like food or daily life, they often say that everything has to be "well-measured", but that means something different to everyone. You look in the music that you have, and then it's your taste as to how much ornamentation you add. Some colleagues do very little, some do much more than me, and it's all okay. Here is an example of the kinds of ornamentation that I often add:

For decisions on musica ficta, I think it's better to start with the primary sources, and then look at what musicologists say about them. The trouble with the former, of course, is that the same authors will say conflicting things in different sources. One also has to be aware that musicologists always have their own biases. All that informs your musical taste. But some composers or sources are clearer than others. Machaut, for example, had very clear ideas, and he notates many things that I would never do if he hadn't explicitly written them down. There are many good editions nowadays that you can work from, but many are often based in the modern aesthetic of everything being very neat and tidy (which medieval music often isn't!), and some editorial decisions often appear to be rushed.

You recently recorded some of the Tabulatura Ioannis de Lyublyn (c. 1540), the largest collection of keyboard music written in tablature in the world (available here on iTunes and here on Spotify). Could you tell us about this project?

The Tablature is the largest of its time, but because they are nearly all very small pieces, most haven't been recorded. To give the recording some structure, I tried to group the little pieces into suites, just to give the possibility to bring this music back to life. I use a Renaissance harpsichord, and some have criticized that, saying the music is for organ. In my opinion it works on many keyboard instruments, and I thought it would be nice to have the sound of the harpsichord for this music. The facsimile is not easy to read, so I used an old but very clean edition by Adolf Chybiński (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1948) for a few pieces, and then played from the facsimile for the rest. I'm not sure why this music is so close to my heart, but it is, and mainly I just wanted to bring this music back to life, and to show that there was more happening in the early Renaissance beyond Italy.

She has appeared with numerous early music ensembles and orchestras (including Hesprion XXI, Coro della Radiotelevisione Svizzera Italiana, and Helsinki Baroque Orchestra) and is artistic co-director and founding member of La Morra, an award-winning Late Medieval and Early Renaissance music ensemble which "never fails to keep the listener's attention alive" (Gramophone).

Her ongoing research into aspects of the repertoire and reconstruction of late medieval and early renaissance keyboard instruments and recorders has contributed substantially to the present-day revival of these instruments. She teaches the next generation of early music performers at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland, and in masterclasses worldwide.

Just started teaching myself to play the keyboard. I'm trying to use one-finger chords now, but not sure how long I am supposed to play the chord for. Is it over the whole bar or bars of music or just the first note the chord letter (say C or G) is mentioned at the beginning of the bar?

There seems to be some confusion based on the comments under the question. The term keyboard in this case is a synthesizer, that means an instrument with lots of sounds, often several hundreds of sounds and lots of different styles for the rhythm box.

On such a keyboard the "one finger chords" is a standard option. You start the drum machine and then you press a key with one finger on the left side of the instrument and the chord is played. Like press C and you get a C major chord played in the style you have chosen.

Now the question is about whether the chord should be continued the whole bar. Yes, the normal thing is that the chord is continued until a new chord is indicated. You don't need to keep pressing the key, the chord will continue until a new key (for the next chord) is pressed.

It is called "one finger chords", but as soon as you want other types of chords you need to press more than one key, like C7 is C and B pressed at the same time. But as long as you stick to plain major chords you only need to use one finger.

...a lead sheet with only melody and chord symbols, the convention is to play the chord until a new chord symbol is given. Often the chord changes are one or two per bar. Sometimes you may see the note N.C. meaning no chord.

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