Benjamin Bagby: Detailed Biography
Vocalist, harpist and scholar Benjamin Bagby has been an important figure in the field of medieval musical performance for almost 25 years. After musical studies in USA (Oberlin Conservatory) and Europe (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis), he and the late Barbara Thornton formed the Sequentia ensemble in Cologne (Germany) in 1977. Since 2003 he lives in Paris.
The years 1977-2005 have been almost uniquely devoted to the work of Sequentia. Mr. Bagby, often in collaboration with Barbara Thornton, created over 65 innovative concert programs of medieval music and music drama, giving performances in Western and Eastern Europe, North & South America, North and West Africa, the Middle East, Japan, Korea, and Australia. In 1981, the ensemble began to release the first of many LP's and CD's which encompass the entire spectrum of medieval musical practice. Many of these recordings, including the complete works of Hildegard von Bingen (8 CDs) have received prizes, including the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis (for Vox Iberica, 1993), two Netherlands Edison Awards (for Hildegard von Bingen, 1987 and 1998), a French Disque d'Or (1996), the CHOC of Le Monde de la Musique (2002) and Diapason d'Or (1995 and 1999). Sequentia's best-selling CD, Canticles of Ecstasy, has sold more than 500.000 copies worldwide and was nominated for a Grammy Award as best choral recording. For all of these recordings, which were researched and assembled by Bagby and Thornton, the accompanying booklets are legendary for their rigourous scholarly quality, with great attention to detail, to the sources, and to the work of philologists (such as Peter Dronke, Pierre Bec, Heimir Pálsson and Ulrich Mueller) who collaborated on the textual editions. In addition, Sequentia projects witnessed collaboration with musicologists such as Leo Treitler, Edward Roesner and Richard Crocker. Two of the most recent CD releases of Sequentia, Edda: Myths from Medieval Iceland and The Rheingold Curse were based solely on the research of Benjamin Bagby, reflecting his interest in oral poetry and the use of traditional music in reconstructing ancient modal vocabularies. The newest Sequentia CD, also based on Bagby’s research, Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper was released in 2004 on the BMG/DHM label, and features numerous reconstruction of songs from the 10th and 11th centuries.
In addition to the Edda (performed as a theatrical production 1995-7 in Scandinavia, North America and Africa under the auspices of the Goethe Institute), Sequentia's other music-theater projects have included Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum (West German Television, 1982 and subsequent tours in 1984, 1986, 1990, and 1998-9); the Cividale Planctus Marie; the Bordesholmer Marienklage (West German TV, 1992); and Heinrich
von Meissen's Frauenleich (Frankurter Feste, 1987 and recording 1990). The Edda project continued in 2001 with performances of those Eddic poems which later formed the basis of Wagner's ‘Ring’ cycle. For this project, Mr. Bagby collaborated with the stage director Ping Chong, in a project commissioned by the Lincoln Center Festival and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Sequentia performs worldwide, developing 3 new programs during each 2-year period. In addition, the ensemble has been dedicated to teaching intensive summer courses in medieval music. The most important of these is the 2-week course taught almost yearly (since 1984) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Of the more than 200 musicians who have attended this course over the years, more than 20 have gone on to become either associate members of Sequentia or performers of medieval music in their own ensembles. The ensemble has also received research grants from the Siemens Foundation (Germany) and from the Volkswagen Foundation (in association with the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbuettel).
Apart from the small ensemble work of Sequentia, Mr. Bagby devotes his time to the solo performance of Anglo-Saxon oral poetry; an acclaimed bardic performance of Beowulf is an ongoing project, with 7-20 performances yearly worldwide. Mr. Bagby has been commissioned by the Lincoln Center Festival (NYC) to perform a major portion of the Beowulf epic in 2006, and a DVD production is being planned for 2006.
He also directs the Sequentia men’s vocal ensemble for the performance of medieval liturgical polyphony and chant. In 2001, the men's ensemble joined forces with the men of the Finnish Radio Choir (Helsinki) to perform and record liturgical chant from the Codex Calixtinus. The major project for the men’s voices in 2003-4 was a collaboration – entitled Chant Wars – between Sequentia and the Parisian ensemble Dialogos (dir., Katarina Livljanic), with performances in Europe and a North American tour in February 2004. The CD of this program was released by Sony-BMG (DHM label) in 2005. Also in 2005 the women’s voices of Sequentia – in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Krone und Schleier’ in Bonn & Essen – released a CD of vocal music from women’s cloisters in medieval Germany (released on the museums’ own label).
In addition to reseaching and writing more than 65 program books for festivals and concert series, and writing (or co-authoring, with Barbara Thornton) more than 25 CD booklets, Mr. Bagby has written about performance practice, with articles appearing in Early Music, in the Performer’s Guide to Medieval Music (IU Press) edited by Ross Duffin, the Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis, and in a forthcoming collection of essays about performing medieval narrative (ed. Evelyn Vitz and Nancy Regalado, NYU). As a guest lecturer and professor, he has taught courses and workshops at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, the Autunno Musicale (Como, Italy), the Modus Centrum (Oslo), Amherst Early Music (Tufts University), Wellesley College, the University of Texas at Austin, Northwestern University, the New England Conservatory of Music, Sarah Lawrence College, St. John's College (Santa Fe), Duke University, Stanford University, the Studio Alte Musik (Berlin), the Royaumont Foundation (Paris) and the Stary Sacz Festival (Poland).
In 2000 Bagby was a guest speaker at New York University’s Medieval Studies Program, and he spent a semester as a visiting Krieger Fellow at Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland); in 2001 he was invited as Patten Lecturer at Indiana University (humanities and School of Music), a humanities lecturer (together with Ping Chong) at the University of Michigan, and he taught a medieval music course as guest professor at Illinois Wesleyan University (Bloomington, IL). In 2003 he was awarded a Fortieth Anniversary Fellowship by the Religion and the Arts Initiative (Center for the Study of World Religions, in conjunction with the Music Department) of Harvard University, where he and Katarina Livljanic spent 6 weeks in residence developing the program Chant Wars.
He is currently on the music faculty of the Université de la Sorbonne / Paris IV, where he teaches in the master’s programme for medieval music performance.