Music: Exploring a Lost Continent

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The Waverly repertory also includes more ambitious staged works. For Le Roman de Fauvel, a 14th century satirical fable about an ass who rises to rule the world, they use sets, elaborate masks and costumes. At times they expand their forces to the 23-member Waverly Waits in order to present large-scale compositions. It is a practice Jaffee would like to step up. He believes that the custom of performing early music in small groups is like representing the repertory of the 19th century solely through chamber music. "They had their equivalents of the Medici Philharmonic too," he says.

The Waverly owes its existence, in a sense, to two highly unlikely and unwitting patrons: Arthur Godfrey and an unmusical Greenwich Village landlord. It was Godfrey's ukulele playing that first prompted Jaffee, a furrier's son, to begin strumming the guitar as a boy in Brooklyn. Later, while studying musicology at N.Y.U., he met Kay, a pianist whose landlord had forbidden her to practice in her apartment. She took up the recorder as a consolation, and Michael experimented with accompanying her on the lute. Inspired by Noah Greenberg's pioneering New York Pro Musica, they "roped in a few friends," and the Waverly Consort—named for Waverly Place, a street that runs past the N.Y.U. campus—was born.

In its first seasons, the group could scarcely fill a hall in New York. Now their annual schedule of 59 concerts includes 17 appearances in New York, all of them sold out. Their four LPs on Vanguard and Columbia, while hardly rivaling the Boston Pops, have broken out of the confines of the specialized early-music market. In addition, they are moving into national television. They have video-taped four 20-minute recitals of music by such contemporaries of Shakespeare's as Dowland, Byrd and Weelkes, for inclusion in PBS's Shakespeare series starting this month. "The potential audience for this music goes far beyond even the usual classical audience," Jaffee insists. "It is immediate and unpretentious, with roots in popular traditions. People have gotten over the feeling that they need a Ph.D. to listen to it. And at that, our performance practices are still 99% conjecture. What a fantastic sound it will be once we really figure out how to do it."