Listening to Lassus

Can music from 500 years ago ever be relevant? 
Should we speak words from the past or our own? 
What is the best way to ‘listen’ to each other?

Musician and actor Aminita Francis, documentary theatre-maker Miriam Sherwood and eight singers from Echo collaborate in order to ask questions of the classical music industry and discover the power of communal singing. 

‘Listening to Lassus’ is a music-theatre performance that features 16th century choral performance alongside spoken word and improvisation, taking the music of composer Orlande de Lassus as its starting point in an exploration of the act of listening and singing together. 

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The 16th century composer Orlande de Lassus is remarkable for a number of reasons: he wrote over 2,000 works in his lifetime; a ridiculously prodigious work rate. He was very widely travelled, and spent time in England, Italy and Germany, alongside his Franco-Flemish roots. This meant that he wrote in all of the most famous secular and sacred vocal genres of the time; the Italian madrigal, the French chanson, the German lied and a huge number of motets and masses. Despite being exposed to instrumental music from a young age, he chose to only write in vocal genres throughout his life, and his music spans the gamut from outrageously bawdy secular texts to sublime religious text settings. 


When Lassus was 20  he moved to Rome, where he lived for four years. In the 1550s, various genres of Italian music thrived in salons where groups of writers, poets and composers met to discuss each other's works and circulate them before being printed.



The salons acted as host to a kind of 'group improvisation', where writers and composers were both readers and producers simultaneously. Taking inspiration from this way of working, our Listening to Lassus piece involves live improvisation, in the room, not only from the singers but from our collaborators and audiences.



COLLABORATORS


Aminita Francis is an actor-devisor and vocal artist whose practise revolves around using the human voice to tell stories. She specialises in song, beatboxing, spoken word, rap, live looping and vocal processing, and she plans to work with the singers to encourage them to use the full capabilities of the human voice in rehearsal and performance, alongside devising improvisations as a group. 



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Miriam Sherwood's work combines a type of very creative documentary style theatre drawing on social history, and an informal presenting style that blurs the line between performance and presentation.