If you know absolutely nothing about medieval music, perhaps it brings to mind images of weary monks singing gloomy Gregorian chants, or wannabe troubadours congregating at a Renaissance fair. Harder to imagine is half a dozen Swatties singing in Italian about orgasms. Welcome to the Early Music Ensemble, one of the newest classes born from the Fetter Chamber Music Program.

The Fetter program allows small groups of students to audition to form their own, small music ensembles. If accepted, they are given a coach from the Music and Dance Department and funded for a full semester, culminating in a final performance. This semester, one of these groups is the Early Music Ensemble, led by Professor James Blasina.

“I think it’s a very important opportunity for students to do music like this. Early music is still very influential today, in anything from pop to Western classical music …For example, you can’t understand Bach if you don’t understand Gregorian chants,” explains Professor Blasina.

Reuben Gelley Newman ’21 first heard of the Ensemble from a friend and has developed a deeper appreciation for Early Music since joining. “I love music and sang some madrigals in high school chorus…[medieval music] doesn’t get as much attention as more modern classical music from the traditional canon…people don’t do it as much, so it’s mostly smaller groups where we know each other better.”

Having a small, close group is essential to the early musical experience. As Professor Blasina explains, “[Much] early music wasn’t meant for performance, it’s really used in private or religious contexts, so we’re deliberately a smaller group. [Secular music] was often sung in private contexta— you might have a few after dinner drinks, gather up, and sing these polyphonic songs called madrigals. They often deal with romance and sex, sometimes very frankly.”

Madrigals do not fit in with what we might imagine as Early Music- they are fun and playful and very often sexual.  Natasha Nogueira ’18, a member of the Ensemble, recalls one particular madrigal sang by the Ensemble. “[The madrigal] talks about dying a thousand times but it’s actually about orgasms — [it’s] very weird and fun to be singing that. My favorite is maybe ‘Sumer is icumen in’ (‘Summer is coming,’ in Middle English.) I heard it as a kid on a CD, and I’m really excited to be singing it now. It’s a kind of music everyone can enjoy.”

Gelley Newman’s favorite is based on a Latin poem, written to commemorate the death of Lorenzo da Medici. As Gelley Newman explains, it is “…a very sad song of grief and mourning, the only one of the repertoire that’s sad…there’s something very powerful in its evocations of grief, dark and mysterious.”

Professor Blasina’s favorite also deals with mourning – a Monteverdi madrigal recounting the grief of a lover at his beloved’s grave. “There are sonorities in these madrigals you don’t hear again until the 19th century…it’s anachronistic in the best way. Another great one, not part of our repertoire, is a Monteverdi duet aria, L’incorazzione di Poppea, the story of Nero and Poppea. It’s so beautiful, but we know the end of their story [Nero allegedly beat Poppea to death while she was pregnant], so it’s also creepy.  So you’re left feeling very uncomfortable. And it would have been sung by a female singer and a castrato, with very similar voices, so that opens the door for lots of gendered interpretations.”

Grief, love, lust, discomfort, all are brought to life by the Ensemble. It’s a far cry from what one might associate with the “Dark Ages,” and overturned my own preconceptions about Middle Ages culture and arts. The Early Music Ensemble’s final performance is scheduled in April; the campus and Swarthmore community is invited to come and experience how music over seven hundred years old can reflect experiences and emotions essential to the human experience.

Emilie Hautemont ’20

Janis Siegel, a nine-time Grammy winner, seventeen-time Grammy nominee, and founding member of the vocal group The Manhattan Transfer, will perform at Swarthmore College this Sunday, February 11th. In addition to her success with The Manhattan Transfer, she has also led a successful solo career, releasing almost a dozen albums that have garnered consistently high critical and popular praise. While working with The Manhattan Transfer, Siegel established herself as a dynamic songwriter as well as a skilled vocalist. She wrote five charts for the acclaimed Vocalese and seven charts for the Grammy-winning Brasil, as well as the charts for “Why Not?” and “Sassy,” both of which earned the group Grammys. In 1989, after recording and touring with The Manhattan Transfer for more than a decade, she released Short Stories with jazz pianist Fred Hersch, which Jazz Times ranked “among the most graceful, thoroughly heartbreaking efforts of the modern era, thanks to her rich, emotive vocals.” In 1993, she and the other members of The Manhattan Transfer received honorary doctorates from the Berklee School of Music, and in 1999 they were among the first class of inductees into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame. She continues to tour with The Manhattan Transfer, as well as with her own band, and teaches master classes while remaining an active member of the music scene. Her recent projects have spanned several genres, from participating in improvisational vocal performances to curating CDs that feature such vocal legends as Lisa Fisher and Kellylee Evans.

Siegel helped usher in a renaissance of American vocal-based music. Her early work with The Manhattan Transfer came at a time when jazz music was primarily an arena for instrumental musicians. Siegel’s powerful vocals on The Manhattan Transfer’s first records forced people to rethink this assumption, while her solo career cemented her place as both a preternaturally talented vocalist and as a versatile songwriter. Through the years she has influenced not only jazz music, but vocal performance in general. She attributes this partly to one of the unchanging, transcendent characteristics of music: “I think people will always respond to emotion and to great songs sung well,” she says. “And I think the vocalists in particular will always be in demand. There’s nothing that approximates the human voice. In the end, when you come down to it, people want to feel something.”

Don’t miss Janis Siegel this Sunday, February 11th at 7:30pm in Lang Concert Hall.  She will perform with pianist John DiMartino, bassist Gerald Veasley, and tenor sax Andrew Neu, who is also Director of the Swarthmore College Jazz Ensemble. The event is free and open to the public. She will also be giving a master class in the Lang Concert Hall at 3:00 pm on the same day, and will be performing with the Swarthmore College Jazz Ensemble in April.

Gabriel Hearn-Desautels ’20

Music major and biology minor Rachel Hottle ’18 considers herself to have taken “a liberal arts approach to music,” exploring many musical skills and concepts instead of sticking to just one. She plays both the flute and piano, and sings in the Swarthmore College Chorus, Garnet Singers, and Grapevine acapella group. She also composes music herself, including a piece based on Emily Dickinson’s poem, “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark,” that was performed in the Swarthmore College Chorus concert last fall.

Hottle has found inspiration in female composers and songwriters. “I was trained in classical flute and piano but most of the composers of classical music tend to be dead white men,  which was not the most inspiring thing for me growing up,” she said. “It’s hard to look up to Mozart as a young girl. So I play primarily classical music but I draw my inspiration from Joni Mitchell, Carole King, [etc]. I really look up to female singer-songwriters.”

Her interest in the gender imbalance present in classical music has stayed with her throughout her time at Swarthmore, influencing her senior recital. “My initial idea was, ‘I wanna do a recital that has only music by female composers,’ but I have since discovered that that’s kind of difficult since there aren’t a lot of female composers,” Hottle said. She instead adjusted her plans to feature “mainly non- dead white men” in her recital.

Hottle’s senior recital will be “a little more eclectic than most senior recitals,” according to her, including singing, flute, guitar, duets with friends, and a song from Grapevine. “Playing with other people has been an important way that I’ve connected with people outside of your typical social interactions,” she said. “One of my closest friends who graduated, we would just hang out all the time and sing and play the guitar and just harmonize together.”

She has cultivated this love of group music-making since she was 12, when her church asked her to play piano to fill a gap in their ensemble.

“I think that was pretty central to my musical formation, being forced to do things that were a little bit beyond my ability,” she said. “I had to improvise on the fly and learn how to be really flexible, which I think really helped me in group music-making.”

After leaving the tight-knit Swarthmore community where she participated in so many ensembles, Hottle plans to study music cognition in a graduate program. She will also continue playing music as well as studying it.

“Regardless of what I’m doing, I definitely want to keep playing after I leave Swat and I’m not sure how that works in the real world…are there community groups that you can join? Do you just hang up flyers saying ‘who wants to jam with me?’ I don’t know.”

Bayliss Wagner ’21