Gregorius: The Holy Sinner

How did Medieval German aristocrats satisfy their appetites for long stories about beautiful, wealthy and tragic fictional characters of their own time? What were the themes which motivated the best storytellers, and how might they have gone about fashioning a real ‘performance’. How did music and the voice figure into this world of noble entertainment, where a given story might require a dozen long episodes to be told in full, in an age which did not know widespread literacy and long before printing?

The members of Sequentia, taking their own work with Hartmann von Aue’s ‘Gregorius’ as an example, discuss and demonstrate how music serves his story, using both voices and instruments. We examine how a flourishing courtly audience ca. 1200 devoured this and other noble stories, always as live performance and only later through reading, leaving the living transmission in the hands of dedicated minstrels (Spielleute) who were the beloved entertainers of their time. Our reconstruction raises question about orality in the Middle Ages, and about musical sources, and how we come to know and use those sources in our retelling.

Vocalist, harper and medievalist Benjamin Bagby has been an important figure in the field of medieval musical performance for over 40 years. Since 1977, when he and the late Barbara Thornton co-founded Sequentia, his time has been almost entirely devoted to the research, performance and recording work of the ensemble. Apart from this, Mr. Bagby is deeply involved with the solo performance of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic oral poetry: his acclaimed performance of Beowulf has been heard worldwide and was released as a DVD in 2007. In 2017, he was awarded the Artist of the Year Award by REMA, the European Early Music Network. In addition to researching and creating over 75 programs for Sequentia, Mr. Bagby has published widely, writing about medieval performance practice; as a guest lecturer and professor, he has taught courses and workshops all over Europe and North America. Between 2005 and 2018 he taught medieval music performance practice at the Sorbonne – University of Paris. He currently teaches medieval music performance at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany.

Jasmina Črnčič is a singer from Maribor, Slovenia. Drawing on her rich experience in choral and theatre work as well as a classical formal education, she now specializes in the performance of music from the Middle Ages. She is a member of the critically acclaimed ensembles for medieval music Sequentia and Per-Sonat, and devotes much of her time to developing new pedagogical approaches which are especially suited for the study of the music of the early/high Middle Ages. Jasmina is currently a faculty member of the International Course on Medieval Music Performance of Besalú.

As a member of the Slovenian ensemble Carmina Slovenica she has performed in numerous staged and concert productions both as a part of the vocal ensemble as well as a soloist at many festivals and concert venues around the world (New York’s Prototype Festival, Melbourne Festival, Operadagen Rotterdam, Radialsystem V Berlin, Holland Festival, Ruhrtriennale, and others). She is based in Ljubljana, Slovenia

Lukas Papenfusscline, a.k.a. leiken is a singer and performance-maker based in Brooklyn, NY. A specialist in both medieval and new music, their practice fuses these disparate worlds exclusively through collaboration and frequently explores queer spirituality, identity, and ephemera. A sought-after vocalist for concert, opera, and theatre, leiken has performed all over the world alongside iconic artists such as Ran Blake, Sequentia, Eve Beglarian, and Four Larks. Their extensive performance experience has brought them to legendary venues like the Getty Villa Museum, Carnegie Hall, Hong Kong's Queen Elizabeth Stadium, the Théâtre du Chatelet, and the Hirschhorn Museum. leiken also loves fermentation, textiles, and swimming.

Sequentia is among world’s most respected and innovative ensembles for medieval music. Under the direction of Benjamin Bagby, Sequentia can look back on more than 45 years of international concert tours, a comprehensive discography of more than 30 recordings spanning the entire Middle Ages (including the complete works of Hildegard von Bingen), film and television productions of medieval music drama, and a new generation of young performers trained in professional courses given by members of the ensemble.

Sequentia, co-founded by Bagby and the late Barbara Thornton, has performed throughout Western and Eastern Europe, the Americas, India, the Middle East, East Asia, Africa, and Australia, and has received numerous prizes (including a Disque d’Or, several Diapasons d’Or, two Edison Prizes, the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis and a Grammy nomination) for many of its thirty recordings on the BMG/Deutsche Harmonia Mundi (SONY), Raumklang, Glossa and Marc Aurel Edition labels. The most recent CD releases include reconstructions of music from lost oral traditions of the Middle Ages (The Lost Songs Project), including 9th and 10th century Germanic songs for the Apocalypse (Fragments for the End of Time), the ensemble’s acclaimed program of music from the Icelandic Edda: The Rheingold Curse, as well as the earliest-known European songs (Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper), medieval liturgical chant (Chant Wars, a co-production with the Paris-based ensemble Dialogos), and most recently, Boethius: Songs of Consolation. Sequentia has created over 80 innovative concert programs which encompass the entire spectrum of medieval music, giving performances all over the world, in addition to their creation of music-theater projects such as Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum and the medieval Icelandic Edda. In 2017, Sequentia's 30-year project to record the complete works of Hildegard von Bingen was released by SONY as a 9-CD box set. The work of the ensemble is divided between a small touring ensemble of vocal and instrumental soloists, and a larger ensemble of voices for special performance projects. Recent projects include a version of the 14th -century Roman de Fauvel, staged by Peter Sellars, and presented in co-production with the Théâtre du Châtelet (Paris). After many years based in Cologne, Germany, Sequentia’s home was re-established in Paris in 2001.