Freethought Music: Cantus Buranus

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By Butter ⋅ August 9, 2009 ⋅

Back in May the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, in conjunction with IPFW and the Fort Wayne Children’s Choir, performed German composer Carl Orff’s setting of the Carmina Burana, a piece I love for reasons I explained, alongside a little history of the piece, in a previous post. (At that link you can watch a performance of the piece by the University of California–Davis.) As a brief review:

The piece is Orff’s setting for orchestra and choir of 24 of 228 poems found in a Bavarian monastery in 1803.
The poems were written by wandering scholars of the 12th and 13th centuries, when university traditions in Europe were just beginning.
The poems are secular and display liberal and irreverent attitudes toward the institutions and mores of the day.

Nonecclesiastiacal artistic voices from medieval Europe are valuable and, I think, fascinating. And they still have an enormous potential to serve as the inspiration or template for modern works. As evidence, here’s today’s freethought music: a live performance by my favorite German band, Corvus Corax. They specialize in incorporating elements of the authentic sound of “profane” (i.e., folk) music from the era, perform it on period instruments (especially including bagpipes), and then spice it up with crazy classical or gothic stagecraft. The result is sort of a head-banging medieval hoedown:

Introductory text reads: “The medieval minstrel group Corvus Corax devoted itself to the ambitious project of setting to music the medieval Carmina Burana manuscript. The band found artists from Cottbus, Prague, and Zagreb to be enthusiastic collaborators. More than 170 musicians and singers cast their spell over the audience.”

Dulcissima. Unknown poet, 12th or 13th c.

Ave, formosissima, gemma pretiosa!”

Dulcissima!

Vidi florem floridum, vidi florum florem,
Vidi rosam Madii cunctis pulchriorem,
Vidi stellam splendidam, cunctis clariorem,
Per quam ego degeram lapsus in amorem.

Quid plus? Collo virginis brachia iactavi
Mille dedi basia, mille reportavi,
Atque sepe sepius dicens affirmavi:
“Certe, certe istud est id, quo anhelavi!”

Hail, most beautiful, thou precious jewel!

Sweetest!

I saw a blossoming flower, I saw the flower of flowers;
I saw a rose of May, prettier than all others.
I saw a shining star, brighter than all other stars;
Thereby I shall spend my life, though love be decayed.

What else? I embraced a maiden,
Gave her a thousand kisses, was given a thousand in return,
And swore again and again:
“Certain, certain is this, that I long for her!”[*]

The performance is so simultaneously awesome and silly that it’s hard not to fall in love with it. (It probably helps that I’m a sucker for a centurion.) This song, “Dulcissima”, is from their most recent big project, Cantus Buranus, an opera consisting of a resetting of eleven of the Carmina Burana poems. “Dulcissima” is one of these.

The orchestra is particular to the opera; most of their other works are just them. See, for a more sedate example, their version of the Palästinalied (“Palestine Song”), a Fifth-Crusade recruiting song from ca. 1220 by German poet Walther von der Vogelweide that, despite having a theocratic political purpose, is at least kind of ecumenical by the standards of the day, recognizing Muslim and Jewish claims as kind of legitimate-ish—just not getting God’s favor in His current spin of the who-gets-the-Holy-Land-today wheel. (Unto Ashes’ gentler dulcimer version is beautiful too.)

One of Corvus Corax’s other projects is Tanzwut (“Dance-rage”), where they add guitars and perform original industrial and metal stuff—with the bagpipes always still prominent. Three members of Corvus Corax are now permanent members of Tanzwut: Corbus Rabensang, Wim, and Teufel (the one with the horns). The videos of Meer and Nein Nein give you a good taste of what they’re about.

Anyone else know any groups doing this kind of Ren Faire/medieval-folk-rock schtick at anywhere near this level of awesomeness?

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[*] I translated from the German translation at magistrix.de that was made by user Verlan. Take it as a rough guide to the meaning of the poem; some nuances probably didn’t survive both translations.

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