Reliquie Romane: Discovering the Lirone's True Role through its 17th-Century Roman Repertoire

Summary

The lirone is a truly remarkable bowed chordal instrument. Bizarrely designed and tuned (with 9 to14 strings), it makes an unearthly sound most appropriate for grief and lamenting. Invented in 1505 by a pupil of Leonardo, Atalante Migliorotti, it reached Rome just after 1600. By then its repertoire was beginning to show clear signs of the new Baroque style, in which the excesses and exaggerations of the counter-Reformation were in full force.

I began playing the lirone in 1980, when I was virtually its only exponent. Today there are dozens of ensembles in the world who feature the instrument, but who carelessly splash its special colour around, so much so that its effect has become almost banal.

In 2007 I was awarded an AHRC fellowship to research the lirone, its repertoire and its cultural setting. Since then I have investigated historical sources and, most importantly, all positively identified repertoire for the lirone in order to decipher unfamiliar performance indications for dynamics, phrasing, ornaments and harmonies, as well as to find clues about Italian prosody and rhetoric. I have also been able to expand the repertoire considerably by applying principles from the identified works to select new repertoire, and I have investigated how best to use the lirone within the dramatic unfolding of the musical narrative.

I have amassed a huge collection of manuscripts (funded by the Southampton music department), mainly from the Vatican Library. They contain over 1000 cantatas, many of them written by Luigi Rossi and Marco Marazzoli, prominent composers of several of the identified works. The material has had to be carefully sifted to identify music appropriate to the instrument. I have already transcribed and edited music, texts and translations for 14 cantatas; these will provide the basis of our first recording, and are to be published by Edition Baroque in Bremen.

This has been a tremendously exciting endeavour, from which I have drawn a wealth of material based on subjects from the ancient world and early Christianity. Works on Artemisia the Greek queen, whose excessive grief turns into a monstrous nightmare, the miserable and aging Helen of Troy, and Mary Magdalen, who struggles in solitude with her penitence, are but a few of the incredible treasures waiting to see the light of day. The remarkable poetry is the work of many distinguished Romans, several eminent cardinals, and a pope.

In order to create my own convincing performances of this repertoire, I have founded an ensemble, Atalante, which has a number of projects planned, all under the series title of Reliquie Romane. The first is a Purcell Room concert in October 2009 as part of a South Bank Centre early-music weekend. Following the concert we will record the material for the innovative new record company committed to effective marketing of their CDs and artists. Beyond this, there will be a second recording in the spring, related videos and several more concerts.

Concert promoters and recording companies cannot cover all the rehearsal and artistic preparation time that this music requires. For this reason I am making the request for a small practice-led grant to fund two substantial rehearsal periods, travel and accommodation of foreign artists, instrument hire and moving, rehearsal-space hire, a share of the video costs and administrative assistance.

As wonderful as the music is, there are barriers of language and culture to overcome for it reach a wider public. Opera benefits from full staging and surtitles, but chamber music does not. For this reason our concerts will be semi-staged, with subsequent video recording of musical excerpts to illustrate the laments' rich narratives, to help market the CDs on the internet, and to enhance my lirone resource web pages, which will be linked to my Southampton website.

Professional singers and instrumentalists committed to early music should benefit enormously from this research. It will help to expand and improve their repertoire and programme building, and open up new possibilities for creating rich and varied continuo sonorities. I can name three professional organisations that have already asked me to collaborate with them as a result of their interest in my research: the English Concert, Les Arts Florissants and the Catacoustic Consort (USA).

Student and amateur performers will benefit through my workshops, music editions, articles, lecture-recitals and of course recordings and concerts. For those attending concerts and listening to recordings, well-presented programmes with good written material (notes and translations) will expand their musical awareness and appreciation.

For practising musicians my research will make accessible new repertoire and a wealth of ideas for accompanying vocal music, with richer and more varied continuo combinations. Musicians will also have important performance-practice questions answered, and of course lirone players themselves will acquire practical information through user-friendly editions, prefaces, articles, programme and recording notes, and website materials. Music editions will be available on the internet, in university libraries, and commercially at exhibitions and through music retailers.

Finally, those cultivated individuals interested in a range of arts and disciplines and who consider music more a vehicle for conveying the narratives of civilisation will especially benefit from related museum and gallery exhibitions as well as from concerts and recordings. A suggested event could be built around Artemisia to complement scholarly work on the French Artemisia tapestries completed in the 17th century for Caterina and Maria de' Medici. The musical narratives of Dido, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy and, particulary, Mary Magdalene would make excellent points of departure for examining different perspectives on the same characters through different mediums and at different periods. Another idea might be to create an event around the heroines of the Vatican collection and those same ladies in the 15th-century Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan; to compare and contrast social attitudes and changing versions of the same story or legend.