Getting medieval

Zorgina's timeless vocal splendor

by Michael Caito

Rebecca Bain, Ellen Santaniello, and Ruth Eiselsberg

The jet lag still clings days later as the three members of the Zorgina Vocal Ensemble gather in Fox Point to discuss matters medieval and contemporary. Ellen Santaniello, the Queens native who's performed with numerous Rhode Island-based ensembles before recently moving back to New York, Canada's Rebecca Bain and Austria's Ruth Eiselsberg last stopped here two Christmases ago. The last time we spoke was in '95, just before they recorded their debut CD, Polyphonics (Ohmnibus), a century-spanning work which sonically captured their uncanny ability to mesmerize in a live setting. Whether singing a cappella versions of Macedonian folk songs, English madrigals or an assortment of pre-Renaissance works, the trio have now re-channeled energy from their successful, if diverse, individual careers into Zorgina.

As jet lag waned with the assistance of Ben &Jerry, the trio -- poised on the verge of international recognition courtesy of recent recording and management deals -- discussed their past, present and future.

Q: Who set this tour up?

Bain: The Austrian Department of Foreign Affairs sponsors this agency which promotes Austrian cultural export.

Eiselsberg: We applied for a grant as representing Austria's non-existent early music scene. Seriously, we don't have one professional early music vocal group.

Santaniello: So they're sending us to America and Canada.

Q: What have you been doing individually since last tour?

Santaniello: Living in New York City, trying to get studio and professional work in music . . . pop and jazz, some original, some Neapolitan songs which I'd done with the Providence Mandolin Orchestra.

Q: A tough struggle?

Santaniello: Not struggling yet, but at least now I know what I'm up against, whereas before when I was living here I didn't. Actually it's been a quiet little life, teaching and singing.

Bain: I now live in [eastern] Germany, the ex-communist country which is still very different. I work a lot with several other groups, especially one in France called Mora Vocis, also [performing] vocal music of the Middle Ages. There were men involved (smiling)but we got rid of them.

Q: They're dead now.

Bain: [Zorgina's] repertoire seemed to work best with basically equal voices. What's different about Zorgina is we do polyphonic music, we do profane music, but with [Mora Vocis] we did sacred music, mostly monophonic. We did a lot of Hildegard [von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum] last year, for the 900th anniversary [of her birth]. Ialso worked with [the Germany-based ensemble] Sequentia a lot, and that was only Hildegard. We did two concerts in Boston last year, a major tour. For medieval music, anyway, it gets no bigger.

Santaniello: They played Royal Albert Hall, Lincoln Center.

Bain: It wasn't just a concert. Hildegard wrote this "opera," a staged, sung play with one spoken part, which was the devil. Lots of people, very expensive. Big leagues.

Q: Intimidating?

Bain: Well, of course. If you've been studying medieval music to get into the professional world, you've known Sequentia for years, and they're who you look up to. But they're just people, and really nice people. I don't know if you heard that Barbara Thornton, one of the two people who direct Sequentia, died last year during the tour. There were four tours, each lasted all of a month, so that was most of my last year. We didn't get to Africa or South America this time, but did go to Australia.

Q: Ruth, wasn't it your brother Wolf who helped with the CD?

Eiselsberg: He was the recording engineer and co-producer. Ihave a country home in the north of Austria, and there we would go to record. It was lots of work to produce the CD, but also exciting and good to learn. The next CD we don't have to do by ourselves, and that's good. Ihave this band with my brother, this one a cappella group doing self-composed pop music. Another band of rock and jazz, but none of these exist any more. I'm focusing only on Zorgina, since I'm also doing their European management now. So, managing and preparing for the next CD, learning to speak Italian.

Q: The separation has helped, then?

Bain: We've had at least three tours a year. We've seen each other a lot more recently. Sometimes we when we get together after we haven't sung for three or four months, the first thing just works. So maybe working on other projects actually helps. But there has been a general improvement.

Santaniello: We're scaring ourselves. We had a moment after a concert in Vienna last year, and you know how self-critical you get when you hear yourself recorded. But we had no idea it was that good. It wasn't a gradual thing that climbed steadily over the last year. We jumped a level. Or two.

Bain: We're also getting better at performing. That's as big a part as rehearsing and getting the music ready and singing in tune. Writing and choreographing, being comfortable with how things are going. It's hard to imagine an audience sitting there for a whole concert of just three singers with music they've probably never heard before.

Santaniello: Especially our newer stuff, material on the next CD. It's later medieval/early Renaissance from the 14th and 15th centuries. It's complicated . . . not like some little tune you hum.

Eiselsberg: And we were looking desperately for a label to produce the CDand distribute it. But we have that . . . it's an East German label.

Bain: He mostly records local musicians, but he has a contract with Harmonia Mundi, so you can buy [the next CD] in Japan. And they're well-known . . . they're small but have gotten reviews in some big magazines.

Eiselsberg: It's important to have this be all over the world so everybody can get it everywhere.

Santaniello: Producing your own work is interesting in its own way, in that you have a lot of artistic freedom and you make all the decisions. And that's great, but you just don't get international distribution.

Eiselsberg:The great thing was he wouldn't tell us what to record and what to do.

Bain: We've yet to see how it will go, but we have friends who've recorded with him and know it's always gone well. He also wouldn't let us do something we weren't ready to do. He comes from a big, very famous musician family.

Q: Why focus on these two centuries on your second CD when the first spanned many?

Eiselsberg:That was more of a demo . . .

Santaniello: . . . a mix of all styles . . .

Eiselsberg: . . . all the things we could do, so we hoped our knowledge would come [through] out of that.

Santaniello: The [first] one was chronological, from the earliest medieval polyphony through 15th-century madrigals through Balkan folk music at the end. This next CD is the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

Bain: Very little music after these centuries is for only three voices, before it turned into that thing we now know as bass, tenor, alto, soprano and then some . . . the orchestra and the choir. That doesn't interest us. What interests me about medieval polyphonic music is that it's very intimate. You just can't do it in a big group. When the Renaissance begins depends on different musicologists. Some say Dufay was Renaissance, some say medieval. In the medieval period they tried new things that became popular later in the Renaissance, though Renaissance people still considered them "old-style."

Eiselsberg: Though the 14th-century music we do is really avant-garde music. They were experimenting with three-part . . . what is possible, what can you do?

Q: All music then was essentially aristocracy-sponsored or Church-sponsored?

Bain: It's true, you wouldn't have any of the music if you didn't have courts . . . some rich duke or king or whatever upper class [existed] in a feudal society. A musician's job was to get hired by some court, and they couldn't just pick up the phone and say, "Could you be in Berlin tomorrow?" It was more like, "Can you be in Berlin next year?" Then you'd get on a horse and go. Somebody pays you and tells you what to compose, and that's been true forever. Look at Bach. He wrote so much music because he had to.

Santaniello: One of the interesting things about this period in history was there was a major transition, at least in Italy, between the Church having all the money and power. There was certain level of privatization, especially in northern Italy, where private lending became the primary source of funding, which led to that much more secular art being made in every genre of the arts. Everything wasn't always about God.

Q: And thus artists got more leeway.

Bain: Absolutely. There was a movement in France in the late 14th century, and they called themselves Les Fumeurs -- the Smokers. A lot of people originally interpreted that as meaning they must've smoked dope or opium or whatever they had, and that was why they were "funny." Iagree with scholars who says the word had many meanings, smoke in the sense of humours, or as they say today when someone is passionate there's smoke coming out of their ears. These people were challenging the status quo, the beatniks of the era.

Eiselsberg: For one thing, this CD won't be a scientific treatise and hard to listen to at all. It's the most beautiful love songs. The stuff is gorgeous. It's just not obvious.

Santaniello: It's above all beautiful, even if some is incredibly technically difficult and sometimes we're singing in completely different meters. Mathematically, [the songs are] absurdly difficult to count but once you get 'em, there's an amazing series of sounds moving underneath.

Eiselsberg: The most complicated pieces probably don't work best with three voices, but a voice and two instruments. [Many] of the songs we do have never been recorded and performed with three voices, and we find it interesting to do. You have to remember, in that time instruments were very expensive . . . and rare. We'll record the CD in August, we hope, and the earliest it could be in stores is three months later.

Q: So the program at St. Martin's is taken from that CD?

Santaniello: No, the program's called "Non Mi Lassar Morire!" -- "Don't Let Me Die!" -- it's all love songs, and most of them are really tragic. I was actually researching some Petrarch this week, and there's this one poem that describes the whole thing and says it all. It was along the lines of, "When I'm happy, I don't write." There aren't a lot of happy love songs in the world.

Bain: It is very comparable to today's situation in songwriting, basically taking some kind of pleasure in your pain. The "hurts so good" model. In the 15th century that was the aesthetic.

Santaniello: I think our current pop culture is still working with that model of 14th- and 15th-century Italy. It's never been different.

Zorgina perform a program titled "Non Mi Lassar Morire!" on Friday at St. Martin's Church in Providence, sponsored locally by Stone Soup Coffeehouse and presented with the support of the Austrian Cultural Institute, New York and the Austrian Embassy, Ottawa. Call 781-0061.

STARS & BARS. Madama Butterfly pulls into Vets on Friday, courtesy of the New York City Opera, whose recent traveling opera fare has ranged from fair to very good.

That was bassist Ron from Camellia jamming with Gordon Gano and the Violent Femmes last week. He later wrote, "I was lucky enough to play 'Faith,' which is off of their Blind Leading the Naked . . . the wondrous Horns of Dilemma played along . . . it was truly one of the greatest things in the world for me . . . a real dream come true . . . it also shows that the Femmes can still remember how tough it was starting out . . . they made quite an impression on the local band members that were there." Cool.

Chick Graning note:new songs at chickgraning.com and also deltaclutch.com. Outtaspacebye.