Benjamin Bagby and Sequentia: Storytelling and Music 800 Years Before Netflix

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?

Vocalist, harper, and scholar Benjamin Bagby, and his medieval music ensemble Sequentia, taking their work with Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius – The Holy Sinner as an example, discuss and demonstrate how music serves Aue’s story, using both voices and instruments. They 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. Their reconstruction raises question about orality in the Middle Ages, and about musical sources, and how they come to know and use those sources in their retelling. 

This event is presented in partnership with Penn Live Arts and the Department of Music.