Famed Vocalist to Perform Beowulf at Georgetown
February 21, 2012
World-renowned vocalist Benjamin Bagby has been performing his interpretation of the Old English epic Beowulf for over 20 years. On February 23, 2012, he brings his unique retelling of the poem to Gaston Hall at Georgetown University.
“Wherever there’s a strong medieval studies department there’s usually a lot of interest in oral poetry and in the reconstruction of lost oral traditions,” said Bagby, who was invited by the Medieval Studies Program of Georgetown College. “I know that Georgetown is very well known for its medieval studies.”
Bagby has been interested in the famous tale of heroes and monsters since he first read it as a child. At the time he believed Beowulf was an example of medieval literature. As he came to understand, however, the tale is anything but textual.
“It’s a performance piece,” Bagby explained. This fact is lost on most Westerners, he said, because “we’re very much in a culture that values writing and documents and literature, but that’s a relatively recent phenomenon,” he continued. “In most cultures of the world, stories are transmitted orally and are only written down later on. That’s the case with the Beowulf epic. It was probably transmitted for hundreds of years orally before being written down by Christian monks in about the year 1000.”
Beowulf can be a challenge for modern audiences to absorb. Aesthetic differences in linguistic and musical composition from the Middle Ages can put emotional distance between people and the story. Bagby is especially concerned with preventing such a disconnect, as his performance incorporates not only authentic Old English—a feat achieved by few if any stagings of Beowulf worldwide—but also uses harp, “a quintessentially medieval instrument with roots in antiquity.”
Bagby keeps Beowulf accessible to contemporary audiences by using a screen during his performance to translate whatever he says or sings. He also believes viewers are open to experiencing the legend in a wholly different context.
“In many ways, modern audiences are interested and open to new sounds and unusual sounds. We no longer have a kind of typical classical music audience that’s not interested in hearing anything but classical music,” Bagby said. “The sounds of the music are strange sometimes for people because it’s a different harmonic system and the sense of time is different. But I think anyone who enjoys looking at a medieval manuscript, for instance, would just as easily enjoy listening to medieval music.”
Co-founder of medieval music ensemble Sequentia, Bagby is able to sing “in all the old languages of Europe”—Latin, Old German, Old French, Old English, Old Provençal, and sometimes Italian. In order to stay true to Beowulf’s original dialect, he trained for years with Anglo-Saxon coaches who helped him perfect the pronunciation and metrical structure of the piece, which uses “all kinds of sounds we don’t make anymore.”
Bagby also studied the storytelling traditions of cultures around the world, especially in Asia and Africa, to understand the ways in which they represented space and time through instrument and voice in narratives.
He has been so meticulous in creating his vision of Beowulf—and continues to be, as it “constantly evolves”—because the poem holds an immortal place in the canon of world storytelling.
“It has something for everybody. It has a monster haunting a people; an old king who’s powerless to defend himself and his people; an ambitious young hero who is hungry for glory and travels abroad to do some incredible deed of heroics to prove himself. It has elegies, deaths, and humorous episodes. It has stories within stories,” Bagby said. “It’s absolutely the most important story in the English language.”
—Brittany Coombs
The performance will be on Thursday, February 23 at 7:30 p.m. in Gaston Hall. Click here to purchase tickets.
Top: Photo by Hilary Scott. Bottom: Photo by Gilles Juhel, © 2009. All photos courtesy of Benjamin Bagby.
