George  Weinberg-Harter

San Diego Arts

Asteria Performs Courtly Songs of the Late Middle Ages

"Flower of Passion - Thorn of Despair"
By George  Weinberg-Harter
Posted on Jan 13 2008
Last updated Jan 15 2008

The Burgundian courtly songs of the late Medieval period (the 15^th century, verging on the Renaissance) were a refined and subdued genre of music, as stylistically circumscribed and specialized as the later Renaissance madrigals or mid-20^th century doo-wop songs.

These were not performed, as music is now, for public pleasure and private profit. The peasants of the time had their own rough folk traditions of bawdy ballads and raucous dances to bagpipes, tabors, and such, to which on festive days (of which the Middle Ages provided many) they danced "until their noses bled," in R. Crumb’s colorful phrase. But these gentler Burgundian love songs luxuriated privately for an elite few in what Shakespeare (writing of the same period in "Richard III") called "the lascivious pleasings of a lute." They were supercivilized romantic numbers, sung behind castle walls for select aristocratic audiences, limited to the highly artificial conventions of chivalric and courtly love, and describing in measured lyrics the pleasures (mainly of longing) and the pains (mostly of denial) in such courtly courtings – with those two extremes not greatly separate in emotional range.

The fourteen or fifteen numbers, performed in this concert by the duet known as Asteria, under the auspices of the San Diego Early Music society, were written by a handful of composers – with the lion’s share the work of the renowned Guillaume Dufay (1400-1474), along with his almost as greatly esteemed contemporary Giles Binchois (1400-1460), and by Robert Morton (1430-1460), and the remainder by lesser known or anonymous artists.

The lyrics employed by these composers are mainly French (with one German exception, "Ich will zu Land ausreiten" by Johannes Stahl), and most of them written in the fixed verse forms common to the language, culture, and period. Seven of the concert pieces were composed to thirteen-line rondeaux, and two set to lengthier ballades. Most of their lyrics employed very few rhymes – often only two – and Dufay’s "Adieu ces bons vins de Lannoys" only uses one rhyme or near-rhyme throughout its fourteen lines: borgois, amoye, joye, galois, and so forth. (Though I suppose the vocalization in song of the usually silent vowel would really make these closely related masculine/feminine rhymes.)

Those prosodic repetitions, along with the recurring lines and refrains usual in these poetic forms, as well as the stanzaic patterns (tripartite in rondeaux), helped inform the musical shapes of the songs, together with the skillful and smooth polyphonic texture typical of Dufay and his musical school.

Soprano Sylvia Rhyne along with tenor and lutanist Eric Redlinger perform music together as Asteria (a name derived either from a pick of several legendary Greek heroines or else the star sapphire). Their two voices, gorgeously muted to the soft dynamics of Redlinger’s accompanying lute, blended perfectly in the intimate and resonant acoustics of the La Jolla Episcopal church’s traditional architecture.

When not interweaving the pair’s deliciously softened and harmonic voices, supplemented by the lute’s own delicate voice, the program was varied somewhat by solo numbers, and even by the occasional reading of apt French verses and their translations. Rhyne’s quietly passionate solo performance of the long ballade "Dueil angoisseux, rage desmesuree" ("Anguished grief, rage beyond measure") was perhaps the emotional pinnacle of this concert. This music was by Binchois to a ballade text by Christine de Pisan (1364-c.1430), a remarkable woman writer of the time.

Rhyne and Redlinger’s physical presentation proved as charming as their ancient music. They made an attractive couple – he hunky, she willowy – dressed in a more or less medieval manner. Rhyne sometimes carried a little book in the shape of a red heart (rather like a box of chocolates) from which she might read. They would form little tableaux of appropriately picturesque poses, redolent of miniature manuscript paintings of the period, and they often exchanged what looked to be admiring and devoted glances, quite suitable to the sense of their texts and emotions of the settings.

Their soft and gentle music, though it might prove much of a muchness to the uninitiated, went down smoothly as E-Z listening (though culturally far more beneficial and uplifting, of course) and is also available at their website on CDs

DOWNLOAD PROGRAM PAGE ONE HERE

DOWNLOAD PROGRAM PAGE TWO HERE

Venue :St. James by-the-Sea, 743 Prospect Street, La Jolla

About the author: George Weinberg-Harter George Weinberg-Harter has been active in San Diego theatre since childhood, appearing in many local stage productions as well as doing graphic art for them. He has helped start theatre companies, authored and co-authored a number of plays produced locally and is a co-founder of the Fellow Calligraphers of San Diego. He is a member of the Actors Alliance of San Diego, the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle, and the San Diego Press Club, which has presented him with its 2007 First Place Excellence in Journalism Award for Drawing or Illustration.
More by this author.

Share this article

Subscribe to Arts

 · 

Comments

Be the first to comment on this article.

(1)sandiego.com, Inc. invites comments in which readers can respond freely and anonymously if they wish. Comments submitted by readers will be rejected that are deemed by the editors to be damaging to the future of this web site.
(2)Comparison is made from the IP Address identity of the computer placing the posts. Some networks share these addresses between users.