root salad
Stef Conner From the Unthanks to singing in ancient
Sumerian. Tim Chipping isn’t phased at all… I
t’s typical. You wait years for a former member of The Unthanks to make an album based on ancient Mesopotamian texts in collaboration with two harpists, one of whom owns a reconstruct- ed 4500-year-old gold lyre. And then they do. The Lyre Ensemble’s debut album The Flood is like nothing you’ve heard before. Unless you were born in the 4th millennium BC. Perhaps not even then.
In 2008, after excelling in both classical and jazz, Stef Conner was unexpectedly recruited to fill the piano stool of Rachel Unthank & The Winterset (as they were then). But when the band’s MD Adrian McNally first answered an advert for Stef’s services she assumed it was for wedding work.
“Something about the tone of his email made it sound like he was looking for some- one for a function band! But when I heard their music I was on the phone to him straight away saying I really want to do this. I never expected to be in that kind of band until I was in it. And now I feel that folk music is even more a part of who I am than classi- cal. It’s been so important to me ever since.”
And that explains her latest project with instrument builder Andy Lowings and producer Mark Harmer, in which the trio has created the first ever CD of new songs sung in Sumerian and Babylonian. Wait a second. No it doesn’t. How did you become interest- ed in a music that doesn’t exist?
“Because I was interested in another music that doesn’t exist,” Stef attempts to explain. “I was really into Old English poems and they have a musicality in the way that lots of oral poetic traditions do, because the formulaic quality of something that isn’t written down is musical. Just as folk songs have little formulas like ‘As I rode out’ or have floating verses; it’s exactly the same in lots of ancient literature.”
“That was where it started. I wondered what it would sound like if you heard the Beowulf bard singing to you in the mead hall. One thing led to another and then I was in Mesopotamia.”
Which came first, the lyrics or the lyre?
“The Gold Lyre of Ur that Andy plays has been around for a long time.” Literally 4500 years…
“It’s been around for more than ten years. I was put in touch through someone who has a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon lyre.”
Why did you feel the need to stress that this was new music?
“I was foreseeing what the criticism might be when this album came out. Like,
‘Why are you singing music from ancient Babylon? You’re not from there!’”
Ancient cultural appropriation?
“Exactly! I knew that if we made an album of ancient Babylonian poetry sung with reconstructed instruments that it would be assumed it was reconstructed music, which it wasn’t.”
And yet these peculiar proverbs, odes to love and epic tales aren’t wedged into a contemporary setting. One could imagine they might have sounded like this.
“We took most of our inspiration from what is known or believed to be true about the old music. But it was all filtered through our own subjectivity and intuitive judge- ments. Andy travelled around Africa, partic- ularly Kenya and Eritrea, collecting lyre playing techniques. The players claim that their tradition is descended from ancient Mesopotamia. A lot of the time when West- ern European people play ancient lyres they’ll do this arpeggio thing. But what Andy discovered correlates with what the mediæval musicologist Benjamin Bagby has said, which is it’s more likely to have been riff- and pattern-based because of the way that lyres are constructed.”
H 17 f
ow do songs and instruments from an ancient alien culture tally with your stated passion for English folk music?
“When you asked why I was emphasis-
ing that The Flood was new music I realised that I felt the need to justify making music from a place that I don’t come from – some- thing that could be labelled inauthentic. That’s a really important argument that I’ve been having with myself. It was at the root of my identity crisis when I was with The Unthanks and they were singing these beautiful Northumbrian songs. What made them beautiful was their total immersion in the culture. So I’ve been asking myself, ‘Why make music that is so remote from where you grew up?’ And what made The Unthanks so interesting is that while they were cele- brating their own culture they didn’t limit what they did to that. There’s something that goes much deeper than who you are and where you come from. If you look at an empathetic experience, some description of the human condition that you can relate to, if you find that connection with something in another culture, then that to me is mean- ingful. That to me is real authenticity.”
www.stefconner.com F
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