Music: Exploring a Lost Continent

• Share

Come hear the sackbut, shawm and Medici Philharmonic

The period before Bach was long the Atlantis of musical history: an entire realm sunk into oblivion, remembered only in legend. The poets, painters and architects of the time—roughly the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance—had been gloriously gifted; it stood to reason that the musicians had been too. Yet there was scant record of what their work sounded like. The scores that survived were in archaic, sometimes cryptic notation. The original instruments—for instance, the sackbut, a precursor of the trombone, and the shawm, a sort of oboe with a cold—often were found only among museum relics or glimpsed in old paintings; even when they were reconstructed, few performers knew how to tune or play them. But in the past few decades there has been a revolution in early music. Dozens of scholarly, dedicated ensembles have sprung up to try to reclaim Atlantis, not in the spirit of archaeology but of art, by reimagining it. In the U.S., no other group approaches the task with more style and verve than the Waverly Consort.

Now in its 15th season, the Waverly consists of six singers and four instrumentalists. They take the stage in modified period costume, the men in loose peasant blouses, the women in simple long dresses. Their performing delightfully blends the contrasting austerity and amiability of early music. Over the drone of string tones, plangent woodwinds pipe and trill, punctuated occasionally by bells or the shiver of tambourines. The singers spin out long, pure lines, immaculate in pitch and virtually free of vibrato. There are intricate madrigals, courtly love ballads, ribald drinking songs, solemn liturgical anthems, sprightly dances. Between numbers, Director Michael Jaffee, 41, may look up from his lute and chat engagingly to the audience about the music. The whole effect is blessedly unfussy, with none of the chilly fastidiousness of those early music groups that bear their authenticity like a penance.

Jaffee and his wife Kay, 42, who is the group's specialist in recorders, call the Waverly "a mom and pop operation." She does the research, he does the arranging. "Even in modern notation," Kay explains, "a piece we select will typically be nothing but a melodic line, with no sharps or flats, no tempo or dynamic markings—just a clue." How to flesh out the melody, how to pace it and color it, when to use voices and when instruments, and even where a touch of improvisation might spark things along: these are decisions Michael makes. He plans the Waverly programs around a theme. Their annual December concerts in a 12th century Spanish apse at the Cloisters range over medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Christmas selections. Recently, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they encompassed "The Gothic Era." Next week, at Lincoln Center, it will be "The Music of Spain, 1250-1550."