ARTS RICK JONES VOICES OF FIRE AND ICE
Christianity arrived in Iceland 1,000 years ago with the first human inhabitants. Its distinctive treasury of sacred music has intriguing echoes of these beginnings
M
usic of ancient Christian beauty arrives from Iceland this winter, packed in the suitcases of the 12- voice choir Carmina which fulfils
a date at the Spitalfields Festival in London on Wednesday 15 December. Its founder, the musicologist and bass Arni Ingólfsson, spoke to me one November afternoon from Reykjavik. After pleasantries about the weather – “very dark at the moment, but we do get long summers”, he said a little for- lornly – we discussed the music. The choir has made a speciality of singing
excerpts from two unique, mostly sacred song collections which managed to survive what Iceland calls its “dark ages” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when a long series of devastating earthquakes and volcanic erup- tions caused widespread social upheaval. “Like Eyjafjallajökull?” I suggest, referring to the volcano which blew its top at the start of 2010. “That caused little damage,” replies Ingólfsson. “But it brought Europe to a standstill!” “Yes, but in the eighteenth century we are talking about the complete destruction of the country’s infrastructure. A nation that had kept pace with European cultural develop- ments went quickly downhill. Schooling was suspended. People became practically illiter- ate. They could no longer read the songs and for almost 200 years music was passed on only orally. The later of the two collections we sing from, Hymnodia Sacra, was compiled just before the era of volcanoes began. It rep- resents the last link with the past in Iceland.” Hymnodia Sacra was written down by a
Lutheran priest, Högnason, in 1742 on the eve of his posting to a remote island parish south of Iceland. It contains 110 of his favourite songs, hymns in most cases, written as what Ingólfsson calls “a sort of manuscript iPod – it was his personal playlist. It’s the largest sample of Icelandic music-making from this time that we possess and it’s the last glimpse of a tradition that was about to die out”. All that is known of Högnason is that he was musically educated, remained in his island parish and died in 1795 at the age of 82. He passed the hymnal on to an old school friend who in turn bequeathed it to
Iceland’s National Library in Reykjavik. The other collection which the choir sings
from, Melodia, is in the Arnamagnaean Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, the coun- try which governed Iceland from the sixteenth century until 1944, when the latter became a republic. The manuscript was created around 1660 and contains 220 mostly reli- gious pieces of both a pre- and post-Reformation vintage with a mixture of Latin, Lutheran and Icelandic texts. Some of the pieces date back to Iceland’s
Christianisation in AD1000. Monasteries at Hólar and Skólar established ties with England, Ireland and France. In the eleventh century, Bishop Jon Ogmundsson (died 1121), a singer, recruited a Frenchman to teach the choristers. Iceland’s first and only saint, Bishop Thorlak (died 1193) studied at Paris and Lincoln. There exists an almost complete office to be sung on his feast day. Later, Bishop Laurentius Kalffson (died 1331) ordered a review of singing practices, forbade duplum and triplum harmony and restricted church singing to plainchant. Gregorian singing con- tinued in Iceland until well after the adoption of Lutheranism at the Reformation. Certain items are Icelandic adaptations of popular pieces from mainland Europe, such as the 1548 song by Didier Lupi, “Susanne un jour” which is a highlight in the London pro- gramme. The story is included in some versions of the Book of Daniel and tells of a married woman who said she would rather die than commit adultery with two corrupt elders who had propositioned her. Daniel intervened as she was being led to execution on trumped-up charges and insisted that the elders be interviewed separately, their differing accounts condemning them. “Pilgrims brought these pieces back,” explains Ingólfsson. “We have an account of an Icelander making the treacherous journey to Jerusalem in 1413. On the way back he also visited Compostela and Montserrat, where he tells of seeing the black statue of the Virgin. To have travelled so far in those times must have been some journey.” How does the music sound, I ask, trying to picture the monkish intoning amid spouting
Carmina, the Icelandic choir performing at London’s Spitalfields Festival on 15 December
geysers. “The Melodia pieces are almost all modal plainchant,” says Ingólfsson. Many of the songs are inflected by folk melody and Ingólfsson detects throughout a tension between popular appeal and priestly purity. Meanwhile, the idealistic Lutheran Högnason wrote out the songs in Hymnodia Sacra as single-line melodies, but Ingólfsson has traced the original polyphonic sources for perform- ance. “They have a peculiarly melancholy tone,” he says. “Many people comment on this. The words have many themes, but lulla - bies teaching the suffering of Christ are common, as are lyrics regretting the unhappy state of the world.” I wonder whether Iceland’s dominating
natural environment has much presence. “There is a sense of impending doom in those contemplating the raw geography of the world,” says Ingólfsson. “In view of the impending eruptions and tremors, these obvi- ously seem prophetic.” Ingolfsson founded his choir in 2004 after
he returned to Iceland from studying music - ology at Harvard where he researched the early music of his country. The choir records on the Smekkleysa label associated with Björk and the Sugarcubes, Iceland’s most famous musical exports. Their recording of a selection of Hymnodia Sacra (Smekkleysa Records, SMK 74) songs was a record of the month in Gramophone magazine during 2009. “It’s been really exciting, a great adventure. Most musicologists don’t have the luxury of trying out their findings on their own choir. However, apart from the satisfaction of recreating history and fulfilling the demands of musicology, the fact is, the music itself is so extraordinarily beautiful,” says Ingólfsson. “That in the end is what it’s all about. The pursuit of beauty.”
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