May 1, 2025
An interview with Christopher Preston Thompson and John Bradley
~ John Thiessen, Executive Director
UPDATE: Carmina Burana sold out for the May 10 performance and the performers enjoyed a lengthy standing ovation from a thrilled audience! Congratulations to Concordian Dawn and Polyhymnia!
On May 10, GEMS ensemble Concordian Dawn and the New York choral ensemble Polyhymnia will co-present Carmina Burana at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. While most people are familiar with Carl Orff’s famous 1935–36 setting of 24 poems from the 254 found in the manuscript from Benediktbeuren, Concordian Dawn and Polyhymnia will feature 15 of the poems as set to 12th and 13th century songs. The manuscript of Carmina Burana (“Songs from Benediktbeuren”) is beautifully preserved in the Bavarian State Library with the entire collection digitally accessible.
GEMS caught up recently with Christopher Preston Thompson and John Bradley, the directors of Concordian Dawn and Polyhymnia, to discuss their special collaboration. I started by asking Christopher about what is involved in reconstructing the music for Carmina Burana, as the poetry comes from a variety of authors and locations, with only a quarter of the manuscript containing adiastematic unheightened neumes (i.e. small graphic indications of the direction but not the pitch of notes).
Christopher: When I think about reconstructing the music, geographic origin matters less than finding correlative transmissions with musical notation in other manuscripts. The Carmina Burana manuscript has no music in it, just little visual reminders as to what the melodies were. While it’s possible to make stylish reconstructions from these neumatic markings based on one’s sense for contemporary performance practice and comparative analysis with source material from the same time frame, we do have more specific musical notation to draw from in sources like Florence 29.1, St. Gallen Codex 383, Wolfenbüttel 1099, etc. So that’s the starting point for reconstruction.
John Thiessen: Because the music comes from different locations, is there is a set of principles you use for textual pronunciation?
Christopher: We have a pretty standardized German Latin approach that we use, as we can’t really get to the possible regional inflections the original performers used. But that is always informed by what sounds good. If something is fussy to the extent that it obscures the performance, then it’s not generally worth it.
John Thiessen: Concordian Dawn and Polyhymnia will perform 15 pieces from Carmina Burana. Have you organized your selections thematically?
Christopher: Yes, there are five themes — “Patristic Toxicity,” “Love, Sex and Jealous Gossip,” “Good and Evil/Money and Power,” “Fortuna and the Court of the Gods,” and most appropriately for the end, “Let’s Drink.” The first piece on the program is Bulla fulminante (CB 131) in which the papal bull spews oppressive toxicity that obscures truth. One of the things we see running throughout Carmina Burana is true, genuine outrage at the church having strayed from its core values to become a hypocritical institution which mistreats people. The other pieces in the first set deal with injustice in other power structures, including the courts.
John Bradley: When we thought about this program a year ago, the timeliness didn’t occur to me. When I read through the translations again at the beginning of the rehearsal period, I realized how on point this material is relative to current events.
Christopher: The second group’s songs on “Love, Sex and Jealous Gossip” deal with love, not just for another person, but for one’s country and community. One of the songs, Dulce Solum natalis patrie (Sweet Soil of my native land, CB 119) is about being exiled from the community that the first-person subject loves because of (one can assume from implied context) a love that is either forbidden or, at least, unrequited. This was a real danger in the middle ages; loving a person of higher social status than one’s own, for instance, often came with dire consequences, like exile or death. Another piece on the program, L’amours don’t sui espris (The love who inspires me) by Blondel de Nesles (1155‒1202), is a trouvère song which must have been fairly popular in the 13th century, based on its repeated transmission. A contrafacted version of the melody, adhering virtually exactly to the trouvère song, is used as the basis of the polyphonic conductus, Procurans odium (The Slanderer’s plot, CB 12) which is in Carmina Burana. There is an intertextuality that exists between the two pieces. The trouvère song is about one’s love for someone that transcends obstacles, and the polyphonic contrafact in Carmina Burana deals with slander from external sources who lie about the lovers and attempt to sow discord in their relationship. The couple is only strengthened, however, by the slanderer’s attempts to tear the two apart. These two songs will be performed back-to-back.
John Thiessen: Will the listener readily hear the musical similarities?
Christopher: Most likely. In the pre-concert talk, I will parse this out. The trouvère melody is exactly the same as what’s found in the polyphonic contrafact. The added voices are imitative and drawn from the main melody, recurring in various formulaic segments. So, the polyphonic voices are drawn completely from the melody. The material is recycled in an exquisitely beautiful, self-referential piece.
John Thiessen: The third set is entitled “Good and Evil/Money and Power.”
Christopher: Yes. It begins with Fas et nefas ambulant ferre passu pari (Right and wrong walk with an almost equal pace, CB 19) reminding the listener that good and evil walk together, and we must be discerning in regards to where we direct our focus and resources. The good and evil set is paired with songs about money, which is almost treated like a god, granting power and informing (justly or unjustly) processes of the law.
John Thiessen: The program continues with a set of pieces on fortune and finally ending with a drinking song to send your audience out into the night, and perhaps a neighborhood tavern! Will the two ensembles perform all the works together?
John Bradley: Concordian Dawn will perform about a third of the pieces on their own with the remainder performed by both groups together. We are so excited to have Carmina Burana be the first collaboration between us.
John Thiessen: Concordian Dawn has expertise in medieval repertoire, while Polyhymnia usually performs later music from the 16th century. How did you begin working on music from that period?
John Bradley: I got tired at looking at bad transcriptions of pieces that were always in the wrong keys for modern choirs, and out of necessity, discovered that I could actually read 16th-century notation! In 2008 I sent an email to a wonderful man named Florian at the Vienna State Library to get a copy of Jacob Vaet’s (1529–1567) Missa Ego flos campi, on Clemens non Papa’s gorgeous motet. He was so enthusiastic that I was interested in something in their collection that he overnighted the entire set of parts from the c. 1550 manuscript. And so, I edited it. My area of expertise is 1520–1600 so this Carmina Burana project is outside the box for me, but I’ve known about it since I was in the 10th grade, when I played in the percussion section for the Orff version. At the time I was drawn to poetry from a very teenaged perspective, suggestive content, etc., but it has stuck with me over the years. I have encountered the Orff piece several times in my adult life. And then in the 1980’s, I picked up the New London Consort recordings and it was not your parents’ version of medieval music. It was rock and roll. It just grabbed me and I’ve wanted to perform it ever since. But how do you do it with a group that’s used to 16th-century church music? You have to say OK folks, everything we know about performing elegant church polyphony is thrown out the window. This is not what we are used to, but let’s have some fun.
I saw Christopher’s group do one of the GEMS Midtown Concerts and I thought, wow, they’re great. Maybe Christopher won’t think I’m an idiot if I asked whether we could work on this together. Concordian Dawn has incredibly proficient soloists and some of the stuff sounds good when you have a really rambunctious choir behind it. So my pitch was: you bring the soloists. I’ll bring the rambunctious choir!
Christopher: Yes, and my specialty is in 12th to 14th century music. I do a lot of transcription work from Medieval manuscripts, so this was a very good pairing.
John Thiessen: Earlier, Christopher mentioned a general approach to pronouncing the texts from Carmina Burana. How has Polyhymnia adapted?
John Bradley: The singers in the choir have really embraced the medieval German Latin pronunciation, it’s not too far off from the Renaissance pronunciation that they know, but there are a few interesting differences. They are keeping each other on their toes.
John Thiessen: Can you give me an example of a particular pronunciation?
Christopher: Well, the word “qui” which we typically pronounce as “kwee” in Italianate liturgical medieval Latin would be ”kvee” in Germanic medieval Latin. Also, initial s’s in words that are followed by a vowel are voiced.
John Bradley: Other examples are bright e’s and Minnesota o’s. The choir really likes singing the o’s that way.
John Thiessen: Christopher, maybe you can invite Frances McDormand to the pre-concert lecture and she can do Marge Gunderson from Fargo!
Christopher: We’ll have to ask her agent!
John Thiessen: This has been fun, and I want to thank you both for joining me. GEMS wishes Concordian Dawn and Polyhymnia much success on your Carmina Burana co-production, and I hope this will be the first of many such collaborations.