Ancient music to be performed at Corelli workshop
A modern take on a song dating back to the 1700’s is touted as the showpiece in a two-day workshop exploring Baroque music and the cultural legacy of European composer Arcangelo Corelli.
Arcangelo Corelli by Stifts- och landsbiblioteket i Skara on flickr
Global Corelli begins today at the School of Music and includes a talk by ANU ethnomusicologist and performer David Irving, on a piece called A Malay Song.
It will have a distinct Malay sound – what Irving describes as the “Italian of the East” – because it has qualities that Europeans considered to be very similar to the sound of Italian music.
“There’s a lot of similarity in the kinds of soft consonants and the singing vowels of Malay and so it sounds very Italian-like,” says Irving.
“The music itself sounds like what you would hear in a Baroque opera in Rome in the late 17th century. But you get this Malay text set to it. And when you put everything together, you get an example of an inter-cultural composition.
A Malay Song was actually a poem written by Captain Thomas Forrest in the late 1700’s and he put it to a melody that was composed by the name sake of the workshop, Corelli.
Irving says Forrest performed the composition before the Sultan of Aceh. The Sultan often invited him to come and chat with him and to play his flute and sing, and it seemed he liked this song that Forrest had put together.
“So we’re presenting this modern performance of it which is going to be quite unusual I think.”
The workshop is about re-discovering the sounds of the 18th century, Irving says.
“So for instance, my violin is all strung in gut and I play the kind of bow which is in the style of the early 18th century, and we phrase very differently from the way a regular symphony orchestra violinist would play.
“These are the kinds of instruments that Forrest would have been familiar with, and we project our interpretation based on what we know of what was available to him at the time.”
A Malay Song will be performed twice during the workshop, at 12:30pm on Tuesday as part of a Lecture-Recital at the Global Corelli and then at 7pm Tuesday night. The 7pm performance, at Llewellyn Hall, is open to the public.