An Interview With Frederick Renz
By Royal S. Brown
On a fine afternoon this past May, I drove up to the spectacular Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It is at this imposing site that New York's Ensemble for Early Music, which includes both vocalists and instrumentalists, and the Grande Bande have been in residence since their inception. Strolling past free-wandering peacocks amid various graystone buildings on the lushly foliated grounds, I entered the cathedral by a side door and descended into its basement, where various types of performances are often given on the dirt floors. Finally, I found the cavernous office of Frederick Renz, a native of western New York and the Ensemble for Early Music's Director. A harpsichord student of the renowned Gustav Leonhardt and a performer for six seasons with the celebrated New York Pro Musica, Renz founded the Early Music Foundation, the Ensemble's parent organization, in 1974 following the disbanding of the New York Pro Musica. During this past season's subscription series at the cathedral, the Ensemble for Early Music gave a concert they called "Istanpitta: A 14th Century Dance Band," featuring performances newly edited by Renz of fourteenth-century Italian dances from the Visconti Manuscript. That concert has resulted in a recording, entitled Istanpitta, of course, and featuring percussionist Glen Velez, that has just appeared in Lyrichord's Early Music Series. Sitting amid an improbable array of old instruments, manuscripts, and electronic equipment, Renz spoke to me about his career and his recent undertakings.
F.R.: I did my undergraduate work at the State University of New York at Fredonia, in western New York, and I was going to do a teaching degree. In my freshman year, I was exposed to a faculty concert with faculty members who had gone to Europe on sabbaticals. Each of them became interested in the Baroque equivalent of what they actually taught. The string-bass player came back with a gamba, the pianist came back with a harpsichord, and the clarinetist came back with a recorder! They did annual symposia, and that year it was Bach, because they had all those wonderful instruments. Up until that time, I had had no inkling about this kind of music and performance. But by the end of my freshman year I was hooked. During my junior year, there was a year-abroad program. I signed up, and I got to Europe. We stayed in Antwerp for a semester and became heavily involved in everything old—the cathedrals, the printing presses.... Anyway, I thought that if I went to Europe, I was going to get one of those harpsichords, just as the Fredonia professor had. And so I got a cheap little harpsichord and brought it back with me. But there was no harpsichord teacher at Fredonia, where I had been studying piano. So when it was time for graduate school, I hunted around for a harpsichord teacher. I found one at Indiana University. But the first year I went, 1962, the teacher was on sabbatical! They didn't tell me that. So I started a choral-conducting degree. When the teacher—Marie Zorn, who recently died—came back, I started to study with her. But it turned out she was from the Landowska school, which involves a kind of piano technique. So I spent several years kind of waiting out the draft. I got a couple of master's degrees, one in choral conducting, another in harpsichord, and then I started a doctorate in conducting. I got drenched in the Landowska style. On the Pleyel harpsichord, the keyboards are very close to each other, so that you can actually do things like play the melody on one keyboard and the accompaniment on the other. And there were seven pedals, so that you could do crescendos, decrescendos, and things like that. But it seemed like a dead end. There was something missing. Meanwhile I had joined a collegium at Indiana University conducted by John White, a history teacher, and my interests began to go back earlier and earlier. Up until that time it was all Baroque, but I began to work backwards. Then Gustav Leonhardt did a recital. I went and was moderately impressed . . . I had no idea one way or the other. But at the reception afterwards John White whispered to me, "You've got to get a Fullbright with this guy." I got the Fullbright, which involved auditioning for Albert Fuller, among other things, and began to study with Leonhardt during the 1968-69 school year. I lived in a windmill with two other keyboardists. And then all of a sudden I realized that, "Oh, there's another way of playing the harpsichord. This actually feels good. I can go someplace with it. " And so I dumped all of the Pleyel stuff. But at least after all that practicing I had pretty good fingers, and I was able to make the transition. And I got exposed to the new wave of early performance—Harnoncourt, the Kuijken brothers. Then John White, who was the Interim Director of the New York Pro Musica, wrote me. He didn't like the harpsichordist he had and asked me whether I wanted to come and be the harpsichordist for the Pro Musica. Now, the whole idea was that I was going to tie up all my doctorate work while I was abroad. But one has to be terribly disciplined. And so I said, "O.K. I won't do my orals, I'll go straight to New York!'' The first few years in the Pro Musica I would be out on these three- and four-week tours. I was supposed to take my studies with me, but it didn't work. Somebody should have pushed me along, now that I think back on it. When the New York Pro Musica folded in 1974, all the musicians in the group wanted to keep going. So most of us banded together, and it became the Ensemble for Early Music. The original musicians are all gone now, and the Ensemble is now all young players, except for me!
R.S.B.: What's the difference between the Ensemble for Early Music and the Grande Bande?
F.R.: The Grande Bande does seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music. It's a Baroque orchestra of original instruments. The Ensemble goes up through the really early Baroque. There's a little crossover in composers such as Monteverdi.
R.S.B.: You've also done a lot of work with medieval music drama. Can you tell me more about that?
F.R.: Pro Musica, as you know, did The Play of Daniel and The Play of Herod. They also did one Easter play while I was involved with them. It's medieval opera. It's a wonderful vehicle. You're not just playing medieval music, you're getting into costume and you're trying to duplicate medieval staging, medieval scenery, medieval ambience....
R.S.B.: Tell me about "Istanpitta" and how that whole project came into being with Lyrichord.
F.R.: Fred Bashour and I go back a long time. He was a keyboard player and took a lesson or two from me. He got into engineering, and I found that out and got him to do our first recording, Christmas in Anglia. We put it together on spec and tried to sell it, and Nonesuch lost it for about a year. But then they needed a Christmas record, they found it behind a radiator, thought it was great, and released it. Then Fred put a bug in the Nissim brothers' ear at Musical Heritage, and we did something called So Quick, So Hot, So Mad, an Elizabethan album, and something called Salacious Chansons. I had a kind of a dirty-song period before I wrote my real novel! Not too long ago we did, through Fred, the Monteverdi Vespers for MHS. Then Fred, who is very interested in early music, got together with Nick Fritsch at Lyrichord, and we became a part of the Early Music Series.
R.S.B.: What exactly is "Istanpitta"?
F.R.: IstanPEEta! It's an Italian version of the estampie, which is a medieval dance. There's a large manuscript—I've forgotten the number of it—that's from north Italy from around the late fourteenth century. It contains vocal music by Bologna, Landini, and a few other northern Italian composers. But there's a whole section that has fifteen monophonic dances. And so I thought, "What a great project!" We'd been doing certain of these dances through the year, we'd developed some nice instrumentations. Why not do the complete Istanpittas from the manuscript? People like the complete "thing" these days. And why not use Glen Velez? They're very stylized, almost symphonic in a way. Istanpittas are rather long, some maybe ten minutes in length, which for medieval music is long. I equate them not just to utility dance music but to something more akin to a Stan Kenton kind of arrangement! For some you want to get up and start swinging around, for others you can just sit back and listen, to see how the melodies are expanded and ornamented. Some musicologists believed that this is very Eastern-sounding, relatively speaking. Most instrumental music was not written down, as the instrumentalists didn't read music as a rule. They played gigs and memorized their stuff. People who sang vocal music were usually upper-crust courtiers, and they could read. So it's already kind of odd that the dances take up so much space in a valuable parchment manuscript. Did they write it down because it was something different, perhaps idiosyncratic of something written south of the Mediterranean? Did some courtier play an instrument and want to leave some of those lowly musicians' dance tunes written down? Or were they really so good that somebody felt they had to be written down? There are usually four to seven parts, and each part has an open ending and a closed ending. It's a wonderful mapping. Anyway, Nick thought it was a great idea, and away we went.
R.S.B.: Does the manuscript indicate any kind of instrumentation?
F.R.: No. Nothing. You use support information. Italian art from the 1390s offers all kinds of depictions of dance musicians playing at functions. And so you learn from the combinations you see, although you have to see enough of it so you can say, "Well, that picture is total fantasy. They would never really play those instruments together. That's probably just kind of a documentation of something where they put all the instruments in one spot just so you could see them." But you do see other combinations of instruments that crop up regularly. You work from that and build on it. They didn't do consorts of instruments, as they did in the Renaissance, where they had a family of viols or a family of recorders. They tended to mix and match more in the Middle Ages. But they had what they call "soft" instruments and "loud" instruments, soft instruments being lutes and flutes and that sort of thing, loud instruments being shawns and bagpipes and slide trumpets. The percussion is informed imagination. You read some poems from the period. Boccaccio talks about instruments and who plays. Inevitably, there's always somebody playing a tambourinelike instrument for the dance. To support the pictures and the poems, you do a little ethnic hunting in the Mediterranean region. Given the possible Eastern element, one hunts around with that in mind, looking into Arabic instruments and how they're used. Glen has done a lot of research on ethnic instruments. There is also a tradition of tambourine and percussion playing in southern Italy, and we also drew on that.
R.S.B.: In this era when Gregorian chant is suddenly selling millions of CDs, do you see a connection between our new-agey tendencies and the increased interest in music from the distant past?
F.R.: It's not cut and dried. I think the same kind of curiosity is happening now that happened in the 50s and 60s. People were hearing early music. You can argue that it's a reaction from the plastic world of the 50s, going back to nature and roots and archaeology. The whole idea of getting back to basics and where you come from. I think today there's a new twist that reflects a need for spiritualism. You're not getting Gregorian chant in church, you're not getting the incense, you're not getting the ritual. It's a search for ritual, I think. So I think this chant thing is not totally a musically aesthetic need. It's a way to meditate, to get into other levels. And some forms of early music are getting sucked into that. There's a group called Anonymous, four women singers who don't specialize in chant but more that kind of angelic stuff that people can equate with music of the spheres, the ethereal. That's what's hot right now. Who knows what's next.
R.S.B.: What is your next project?
F.R.: We're doing volume two of this recording. I decided to do the complete set of Istanpittas, which leaves about thirty minutes on the second CD. It turns out that there's a set of French Estampies, and a couple of leftover English ones, and they take about thirty minutes. And so we're going to do the complete medieval dances that were saved. The next thing I'd like to do is an album that features either just the vocalists or a mix of singers and instrumentalists. Maybe the obvious thing is to do a Christmas album. Besides the recordings, I'm doing a project in August with the Grande Bande. We're going to perform at Wolf Trap and re-create Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks with the full original forces—nine trumpets, nine horns, three pair of timpani, over a dozen oboes, six bassoons, and the string contingent to boot, although it's not clear whether he used them. Not only are we using the original instrumentation, we are building a temple that's not quite of the expanse of the original for which Handel wrote the music, because that took several months to build. And we're utilizing authentic fireworks. The wonderful hook is that the same company that designed this show for us is the lineal descendent of Ruggieri. We do the Water Music too. And then we do Handel one better by using a computer to choreograph a recording of our performance of the music with the fireworks.
FANFARE
September/October 1995
|