Guy Windsor
I’m here today with Alix Evans, who has a Master’s of Music in Historical Performance from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University. And she’s a professional performer and teacher of historical music, founder of Falsa Musica, and has even fenced rapier in the SCA. So we do have a bit of plausible sword relatedness. So without further ado, Alix, welcome to the show.
Alix Evans
Hello, thank you for having me.
Guy Windsor
Whereabouts in the world are you?
Alix Evans
I am in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is like a little suburb just north of DC, kind of conveniently located between DC and Baltimore. So I’ve got access to both cities. Originally, I’m from Austin, Texas. And we’re going back there later today for the holiday.
Guy Windsor
All right, lovely. So we caught you just in time. Now, I, of course, know exactly where you live. Because I have stayed there several times. So the first question, which is not on the list, so this is a totally unfair question is, is David’s workshop still tidy?
Alix Evans
It is still tidy! And he’s using it so much more.
Guy Windsor
I thought, well, maybe I’d need to scold him if he’s not used it.
Alix Evans
No, no, quite the contrary.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. Glad to hear it. So, back on topic. How did you get into historical music?
Alix Evans
Well, I’ve always been into music. I come from a very musical family. And I’ve been singing for as long as I can remember. Historical music specifically caught me when I was in my early to mid-20s, I was at a graduate program, which I did not complete. Not the one that I needed to complete for Slavic literature, and it was a bad fit. And at the time, I was also fighting swords in the SCA. And there are these people in the SCA, who we call bards. And those are the people who tell stories and sing songs and play instruments and stuff like that, and being very musical I was interested in what they were doing. And I noticed that what they were doing was sometimes good and sometimes a lot of fun, but it very rarely sounded anything like what medieval music probably sounded like. It sounded like you know, folk music or Celtic music maybe or sometimes, you know, Boy Scout songs that you might sing around a campfire, but I don’t think that this is what troubadours actually sounded like.
Guy Windsor
Okay, I have a quick question. How do you think troubadours should have sounded? And how did you know that what you were hearing in the SCA was not how it should be?
Alix Evans
I just thought that it was implausible that you could go to a Boy Scout camp and hear the same types of music that were being sung 1000 years ago. I knew that music had changed a lot, right? The music that was sung in the 1600 and 1700s is not the same music that’s being sung in the same form today. So why would that be the case for music that was sung in 1200? I did not have a very good idea of what it should sound like. So I decided to figure out like, what would this sound like? Today, there’s a lot of really great historical music being made in the SCA. At the time, people would discourage me from pursuing it, they said that, well, music in the Middle Ages sounded really weird. And it’s not something that a modern audience would enjoy. It would sound bad. They used a lot of buzzy instruments, and it’s just weird. And that just made me want to pursue it even more. And as I said, I was in this graduate program that was not a great fit. So in order to distract myself from all of that, I spent a lot of time in this wonderful academic library, pawing through books of music theory and music history, trying to figure out what it might have sounded like and then I discovered some ensembles that were doing their best to recreate the sound of what it might have sounded like. And the rest is history. That kind of hooked me.
Guy Windsor
The rest is literally history. Okay. I have a couple of questions. What made Slavic literature a bad fit and what gave you the courage to quit it?
Alix Evans
Those are good questions. I majored in Russian as an undergrad and loved it. I just spent all my time learning a fun language and reading great literature. And then after undergrad I became a teacher. I was teaching middle school which was a lot of fun and very rewarding in a lot of ways, but it was getting boring. Just because of the content of what I was teaching. I thought if I had to just teach the steps of the writing process for the rest of my life, I’m going to go insane. I need to do something that’s a little bit more cerebral. A little bit more intellectually challenging for myself. And so I thought, okay, like, what do I like to do? What am I good at? Russian, let’s do more of that. But then once I got to Slavic literature at the graduate level, I don’t know, there was a lot there was pressure to publish, and to come up with ways of looking at the literature that no one had come up with before. And for some people, I think that works really well. For me, it felt a little bit artificial. And it wasn’t a good fit. It was a great fit for some people. It’s a good program, everybody in the program was lovely. It just wasn’t what I wanted to do. What gave me the courage to quit actually was sort of having an off ramp. So my husband, then boyfriend, was in law school, graduated from law school, in the middle of the recession, there were no jobs, and he took the Foreign Service exam and passed and got into the Foreign Service. And I was like, what are you doing, I don’t want to follow you around being a housewife to a diplomat for the rest of my life, this is a terrible idea. But then he explained to me that like you can take the Foreign Service exam too, and they will do their best to post us in the same place. And at the time, that was true. They’re no longer really doing that so much. And so I took the Foreign Service exam, and I also passed and so I had this opportunity to go and do really interesting work in a part of the world that I was really interested in. Eventually, they sent us to Ukraine at a very interesting time in history. And I guess that’s what gave me the courage is just having something else really cool to do.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so you quit your master’s degree in Slavic studies to go into the State Department. And I should maybe point out for listeners that the husband we’re talking about is David Biggs, who has actually been on the show, and I’ll put a link to his episode. So if you want to hear about the whole State Department thing from his perspective, they can they can do that.
Alix Evans
See if our stories line up.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. So did you enjoy working in the State Department? What was it like?
Alix Evans
I did. Our first post was in Ottawa, Canada, which was lovely, because it’s Ottawa, Canada. And it’s full of like, wonderful people. And it’s easy to make friends. And it was great. We were doing interesting work. Our second post was Kiev, Ukraine, which was also amazing. Kiev is an amazing place full of lovely people. We were there during Euromaidan, so we were not bored.
Guy Windsor
What’s that?
Alix Evans
It was around 2015, 2014 – 2015, when there were all the protests and the Yanukovych regime was sort of overturned. This is when Russia annexed Crimea and moved into the Donbass, sort of the prequel to the unrest that’s going on at the moment in Ukraine. Anyway, so all these protests are happening, a couple of blocks away from our apartment. It was an exciting time. And all of your postings in the Foreign Service are like two to three years. So I was there for three years, and then we came back to the US. It was great. It was a lot of fun. I did a lot of really good work. Once we got back to the US, it was difficult to find postings in the same place for me and David, so we were going to have to go abroad again, and you have to go abroad again at a certain point, we were going to have to split up. At that point, though, Roxanne was like two. And so it was just becoming increasingly unacceptable for us to be separated. So we took civil service jobs that would keep us in DC for a while.
Guy Windsor
So you went from the Foreign Service to the Civil Service, but still in the State Department. But then you ditched your career at the State Department to go study. I’m noticing a bit of a pattern here like, you start something then after you get to a certain point, there’s actually there’s other things better. And honestly, knowing when to quit is a superpower. So what made you decide that studying at the Peabody was better than going to the State Department?
Alix Evans
Mostly I think I was just getting bored at the State Department. I mean, and it’s not like I was getting bored and so I started fishing around for something to do. Music is something that I had been trying to do in an avocational sort of way the whole time. I had been getting a little bit frustrated because it was difficult to do music at a particularly high level while also having a full time non-musical job and not a particularly high amount of expertise in music, I was just sort of self-taught. All my knowledge of music theory and things like that was just what I had managed to teach myself. So, as I was getting more and more bored at the State Department, I would find myself wistfully looking at the websites of graduate programs in historical music, and wistfully looking at the websites of ensembles that I might be able to join if I had more of a background in music and things like that. And so then, during the pandemic, I don’t know, I just kind of decided to go for it, with a tremendous amount of support and encouragement from David, I don’t think that I would have been able to convince myself that I could do it if it weren’t for him. Both in terms of like, being good enough and also in terms of like, am I going to financially ruin my family? He crunched a lot of numbers in a very reassuring way, and was like, no, go for it. Do it, do it. So I did. No one was more surprised than myself when I got in. And so then I just jumped off the cliff and did it. You asked what gave me the courage to leave my first graduate program in Slavic literature. And I think that that really didn’t take a lot of courage. Because I had that off ramp. This felt more like jumping off of a cliff. Because even though I did get into a very good program, I was not fully convinced that I could hack it in this program. And then I was not fully convinced that I could hack it after the program as a musician, because I mean, so many talented musicians don’t make it work. It’s just really tricky. So that that was much more of a leap of faith.
Guy Windsor
And one which seems to have turned out pretty well.
Alix Evans
So far so good. Yeah, I had a wonderful experience at Peabody and things are going pretty well, now on the other side of it. So yeah.
Guy Windsor
Historical music is a bit like historical martial arts in that there’s this thing people used to do. And there are written records of it. But it’s not an academic thing. It is a physical practice that people did, and which existed in time and in space. And once the performance is over, the music is gone. So you have the same sort of problem that we do, of how do we recreate this? And how do we know when we’re getting it right? And one of the advantages that we have, of course, is that if my interpretation of this particular parry doesn’t work, and I keep getting hit in the head, I know there’s something wrong with it. Whereas you could be making this god-awful noise that is completely wrong. But without any objective getting smacked in the head when it’s wrong. How do you know? How do you set about reconstructing historical music?
Alix Evans
Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. The first thing you need to do is really just sort of immerse yourself in the music theory of the time. And also just have a really solid grounding of modern common practice era music theory, the theory of the music that we’re all used to hearing. Because what you will wind up doing is you will wind up recreating music in the way that you are used to, you will subconsciously sort of apply your own assumptions and your own understanding of music to a troubadour song from the 1100s, for instance, and if you know about old music theory, and you know about contemporary music theory, or common practice music theory, you’ll be able to tell when you’re doing that, and you’ll be able to take a step back and be like, whoa, whoa, they weren’t using thirds like that. Let’s not strum tertian chords on a guitar under the song. That’s probably not what they were doing.
Guy Windsor
They didn’t have a rhythm section either.
Alix Evans
Well, I mean, that’s a good question. They had drums. They had dances, so they had rhythm. And a lot of this music, they didn’t notate the music with any indication of rhythm. So that there’s the question like, was this sung rhythmically? Or was this sung in sort of free flowing non metrical sort of way? And there are so many questions that we just can’t answer. And the only way to sort of get an answer is to try things a bunch of different ways and see what sounds good, right. See what works. But unlike in swordplay, where you have a very objective, I got hit in the head, that doesn’t work. I hit this guy in the head that does work. Something might work to me. As in it sounds good to me, but it sounds good to a very different set of ears than it was originally intended for. Because I have grown up with this common practice era music. I am used to different things. So even when you get to a point where it’s working, that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s how it sounded.
Guy Windsor
We do have that same thing. If I throw you on the ground in a particular way, it may work. I may be able to make it work. But just because it worked doesn’t mean that is exactly what was intended in this particular version of the book. So, things can work out, we do get we do get historical false positives, something may be martial, may be effective, but not actually be what the author intended in that particular moment. So we have a similar problem there.
Alix Evans
The goal for me and for a lot of historically informed performers, I think, is not really try to get as close as possible, try to recreate the historical performance, but try to learn as much as you can about historical performance practice and about historical music theory. So that you can recreate something that could plausibly have been that performance. And in so doing, you are creating something completely new. To me, the value of recreating these historical performances is unearthing very old ways of doing things that are new to us, right? If we are immersed in common practice era music, we’re going to write a lot more music that sounds exactly like everything that’s been written. You see this in the SCA, the reason that so many people write songs that sound like folk songs and boy scout songs is that that’s what they hear all the time. And so that’s just what comes out.
Guy Windsor
That’s what music sounds like to them.
Alix Evans
Yeah. And so, when you make the decision to immerse yourself in something very different, like 12th century troubadour music, then you are giving yourself access to an entirely new toolbox. And then you can bring that into your own music. If you’re writing music for the SCA, you might be writing in English, you might be writing about, some King in big air quotes, who lives down the street from you. But you can bring those new modalities into your music and your music is going to sound super cool, because it’s not the exact same thing that everybody’s always hearing. Or if you are doing music for a concert, it’s going to sound interesting and fresh and compelling. Or if you are a composer, and you’re just trying to write something brand new and awesome, you can write something in Phrygian mode, or you can play around with non-metrical writing or rhythmic modes or something like that, and infuse your music with something that works, but is not the same thing that everybody’s using.
Guy Windsor
Now, most people listening, do not have any training and historical music. So I’m going to ask you to define a few terms that you’ve been throwing around, for the benefit of the lay listener. Okay, firstly, what is common practice era, precisely? I think I know what it means, but I’m not sure. I may be thinking something completely different.
Alix Evans
So if you think about classical music, that’s basically common practice era music. It’s like classical, romantic, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner. And is it also kind of, I don’t know, I people might dispute this, but I think it also sort of encompasses folk music and some kind of contemporary pop music. It’s built on tertian chords, which means “Do Mi So Fa”, you got your chord. And everything is written with this scaffolding of chords underneath it that kind of make the music make sense. So basically, common practice area music is the way that we’re used to working.
Guy Windsor
And it dates from sort of 18th century onwards. What is this Phrygian something or other? I can’t read my own handwriting.
Alix Evans
We are used to music being in a major key or a minor key, so major is like Do Ray Mi Fa So La Ti Do. Minor is Do Ray Me Fa So La Tay Do, it sounds kind of dark. It sounds spooky. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods, you had eight of those scales, right. And so Phrygian is one of them. Phrygian is the gnarliest and I have got my keyboard right here. So I’m going to just like play it real quick. So it’s like the minor scale on crack, right? It’s like very crunchy, starts off with like a semitone. A very, very small interval. And so that’s something that like people hardly ever write in Phrygian today, it sounds crazy. But Hildegard of Bingen, that was her favorite mode, she wrote in Phrygian all the time, and it sounds super cool.
Guy Windsor
So what’s the difference between mode and key?
Alix Evans
That’s a very complicated question. A mode is really like a scale. I don’t know, I might take a pass on that one, because it’s really difficult to explain. But you could think of a mode as a scale. And when we talk about a key, we’re really talking about either major or minor.
Guy Windsor
My understanding of key is, it’s got this many sharps or flats. And so you know what key you’re playing in, like, G major is a particular key. But that’s also to me in my head, because I’m a trumpet player. Not really, but I have been a trumpet player. That is also a scale. And if you’ve got the key, and the scale, how is a piece written in a particular key different from a piece written in particular mode?
Alix Evans
I am thinking of modes as they were used in the middle ages. And there are a couple of differences. One, these days when we talk about a key, we’re referring to major or minor, those are two of the eight modes.
Guy Windsor
So, okay, so major is a mode, minor is a mode and within any given mode, you may have different keys. Okay?
Alix Evans
Yes, and then you can transpose that mode, you can have like D major, or G major F major, right, which you can also do with like Phrygian, and Dorian and Lydian and all those other modes, but in the Middle Ages, no one would have said this is written in G Phrygian. Because they didn’t really have the concept of fixed pitch, right? If you looked at if you looked at a piece of music, you might see a C clef that tells you this line on the staff is a C, but that doesn’t really they didn’t really mean C as in like, this note is always a C. Like if you if you saw an A, A did not mean 440 hertz, like it does now. It meant it meant ah, yeah, that’s the first note in the Ionian scale. So they weren’t really thinking about transposing in a specific way. G Phrygian wouldn’t have meant anything, you just sing Phrygian at a comfortable key that works with all the instruments you have. And then that’s Phrygian.
Guy Windsor
It makes sense to not define them that specifically, when you don’t have a standard. I mean, no one was producing standard tuning forks back then. So you have no way of establishing standard pitch.
Alix Evans
They had organs, which you weren’t going to be tuning organs all the time. So you would just tune your instruments to like the town organ. And in the Baroque period, when they start to talk about standard pitch, you have different pitch standards, radically different pitch standards in different parts of Europe, because of whatever the major organ was.
Guy Windsor
The same was true with clocks. Actually, Ken Monschein did his PhD on the ringing of bells in medieval Paris, it’s amazing. It’s all about basically how these different churches would ring for Vespers or whatever at their own particular times. And this guild of I don’t know, people who made armoured mail, for example, their apprentices would knock off when this particular church rang this particular hour, but it wasn’t supposed to be an objective, sort of Swiss chronometer absolute sort of measurement of objective time. It is just so that everyone understands that it is now that time because this particular church has rung these particular bells. And so, the notion of standardized time didn’t come about until the railways because that way you could get a clock that had been set in London, for example, and taken on the train to Edinburgh, and it would still be telling approximately correct time so they could set the clock in Edinburgh based on the clock in London. So that’s a relatively modern idea. So what we’re talking about is the exact pitch will vary depending on what is around you at the time and it will vary from place to place. So the standard key to singing a song in Paris might be different to the standard key for singing that same song in Florence.
Alix Evans
Yeah, exactly.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, standardisation is a weird thing. We just get so used to it that it’s kind of weird to think that this wasn’t standardised. Okay, now, you’ve been referring quite a bit to 12th century troubadour music, okay. A troubadour is someone who goes from place to place singing songs, correct?
Alix Evans
Not necessarily. So the troubadours were a musical movement that happened in the south of France, from the year roughly 1000, through the end of the 1200s. And they wrote in Occitan predominantly, so not in French, everybody thinks they’re French, but they weren’t really. And they were a pretty diverse set of people. I mean, you did have people who would be musicians who travelled from court to court, and making their money that way. But you also had people who were sort of stationed at one court and paid very well by a nobleman there. You had people who were actually the nobleman. You would have like a count who would be considered a troubadour because he wrote amazing poetry and set it to music. You had some monks, you had some noble women, who were troubadours. I think this is the largest body of poetry that exists from medieval Europe by women is the poetry of the trobairitz, or the female troubadours. So it wasn’t just sort of like wandering minstrels, although there were some wandering minstrels. It was all kinds of people.
Guy Windsor
What defines a particular piece of music or poetry as troubadour?
Alix Evans
Basically coming from that period during that time. Sort of South of France, written in Occitan, in the couple of centuries surrounding the 12th century. And there are some sort of distinguishing features in the poetry, it tended to be syllabic. So you wouldn’t have a regular meter you would just have, this line always has 10 syllables, who knows where the stress will fall, but it’s going to have 10 syllables. It was strophic. They wrote in verses, so it wasn’t like Beowulf, where it’s just like a wall of text, you had verses and set to music. We don’t they don’t all have surviving melodies, but we think that they all were.
Guy Windsor
Because I’m always looking out for the listeners on the show, because you know, they are my people. Is there any chance we could get a clip of some of actual troubadour music from you to stick at the end of this episode? So people would know what we’re talking about.
Alix Evans
Absolutely. I’m not going to sing anything for you today, because I’m getting over a cold, but I can definitely say yes.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so we’ll stick that on at the end, so if people want to listen to some 12th century Troubadour music they can do that. That’d be brilliant. Thank you. We’ve been talking a lot about historical music, and you’re throwing around words like Strophic and Phrygian, and whatnot.
Alix Evans
I wish everybody understood how cool it was. But I also I think that some people have the idea that when they go to hear a performance of historical music, they’re going to hear the way it sounded in the 12th century. And I wish people understood that we’re never really going to know what it sounded like, we can do our best. But as a result, what you are hearing is something that, in a sense, is much cooler, it’s the performers that you’re listening to are sort of co-composers of this music, like collaborating with these long dead composers and songwriters to create something that by necessity is new. It’s like a new composition every time. And I think that’s really cool.
Guy Windsor
I think that’s also true for historical martial arts. Even if we get the choreography of an action exactly the same, and I think that is possible because some of these sources give us really precise instructions, we’re still coming at it with 21st century nutrition, 21st century health care, 21st century ideas of health and safety, 21st century ideas of what swords are and how they work based on the 20th century movies we would be watching. I mean, it’s never going to be the same because we can’t create the entire context in which it originally existed. And as soon as you take it out of its context, it has to change. And that really bothers some people, it doesn’t actually bother me at all. I would much rather be actually creating my own new thing than just copying things other people have done. So other than your own work, obviously, can you think of any depictions of historical music that listeners might have come across that you would think worth their time?
Alix Evans
Yeah, so Benjamin Bagby and his ensemble Sequencia are great. And one of the things that’s so cool about them is they do really old music, like really old music. A lot of early music ensembles specialise in Baroque music or Renaissance music, there are comparatively few ensembles that specialise in medieval music. But Sequencia does not just medieval music, but they’re trying to like recreate Viking in Old English music and old Norse music, stuff that wasn’t written down. Like, it’s one thing for me to take a troubadour manuscript that, like, I don’t know what the rhythm sounded like, but I’m going to do my best and kind of co-compose something. But they’re taking things that like, you’ve got the text, and you know that it was sung, and you have an idea of what instruments might have been used, but you don’t have any music that was written down. So they are just straight up composing music to go with this, but they’re doing so in a way that’s very deeply informed by the writings on music theory that existed surrounding the text that they’re using. So it’s really cool. And they’re also just really good at it. And it sounds great. And there are some other ensembles in in Europe that are doing really good things. There’s Magister Petros in Spain, here in the US, there is an ensemble called Alchemy, based in New York. There’s another ensemble Trobar that I like a lot. There used to be an ensemble here in DC called Aya and they haven’t completely folded but they’re much less active than they used to be.
Guy Windsor
Speaking of ensembles, what is Falsa Musica?
Alix Evans
So Falsa Musica was sort of a pandemic project. And it was in the middle of the pandemic. You know, choral singing was one of the big things that was supposed to be very dangerous.
Guy Windsor
Well, you’re breathing on each other.
Alix Evans
And the way that you breathe when you’re singing you are by design taking the air as deep into your lungs as you possibly can. And then you’re expelling it with great force at each other. So it was a little bit sketchy.
Guy Windsor
Dangerous from a viral perspective.
Alix Evans
Right. Yeah. And so everybody was housebound, choral singing was not happening. Singing with other people on Zoom is terrible, because there’s lag and it doesn’t work. But it occurred to me that one of the few repertoires that does kind of lend itself to online singing with each other is medieval monophonic music because a lot of a people think that one of the accompaniment techniques was sing the music over a drone, which is just sort of like a held note. And so me and a number of people would get online, we would learn a piece of music from the Middle Ages, and when I say monophonic that means it just has a melody, like all we know is just like one melody, there’s no harmonies there’s no like four part.
Guy Windsor
I was going to ask.
Alix Evans
So we’d get online, we would learn this piece together, we would practice it on mute, and then we would sort of take turns droning for each other while somebody’s singing the melody over it. And we would sort of split the melody up so everything would get a chance to sort of sing and be accompanied and accompany the drone. It was fun.
Guy Windsor
If the drone doesn’t have a rhythm they don’t have to come in on time, so the lag doesn’t matter.
Alix Evans
Exactly. Very historically informed and yet on Zoom. It was a lot of fun.
Guy Windsor
Do you still do it?
Alix Evans
No, no, we all keep in touch but we’re all singing with real people in real time now.
Guy Windsor
Which sort of brings me on to my next question. How do you make a living as a historical musician?
Alix Evans
Well, I’m not at the point where I can say that I’m making a living exclusively as a historical musician. I think a lot of musicians who are historical musicians never get to the point where they’re making music exclusively with historical music, or where they’re making a living exclusively with historical music, certainly some do. But I make a living through a combination of teaching about historical music, teaching, just straight up voice lessons, a lot of my voice students are singing Broadway stuff, or opera or things like that, and performing a combination of historical music and whatever other people want me to perform. So I have a church job where I’m a section leader in a local church choir. And so I get paid to go to rehearsals and church services every Sunday. And sometimes we sing like some Tudor anthems, but a lot of it is not remotely historical. And I’ll do solo gigs, which may or may not be historical, I recently sang the mezzo solo, in a beautiful, beautiful Requiem Mass, by living composer Gary Davison. And it was just gorgeous, non-historical, but it was great. So, it’s what they call a portfolio career where you don’t have a job, you have a bunch of jobs. Yeah, some of them will be historically oriented. And some of them won’t. But you know, they’re all fun.
Guy Windsor
It’s a bit like that teaching historical martial arts for a living. Sometimes I’m teaching in person, regular seminars, or individual lessons, or whatever. And there’s writing books about it, either academic books or practical books. And then there’s the online courses, which are practical historical martial arts. So it’s closer to being always historical martial arts, but I’ve actually also started mentoring some people who want to make a living doing related things, like for example, stage combat. And they are hiring me to kind of provide accountability and suggestions and guidance or whatever, for creating their business. Again, teaching an obscure skill. So other than the specifics of the skill itself, the structures are all the same. Like you teach in person and you create products, like online courses, or books or whatever else to make money, but also to generate other work and that kind of stuff. So, yes, portfolio careers, that’s probably a good way to describe it. Okay, so you’ve not finished your Slavic Studies degree, and you quit the State Department. So you’re actually quite good at having an idea of I want to do something different and then acting on it. So what is the best idea you haven’t acted on yet?
Alix Evans
So my answer might be a bit of a cheater answer, because I’m starting. I’m in the very early stages of starting to act on it. And that is founding an ensemble that’s going to focus on medieval music. It’s called Ignota.
Guy Windsor
What does that mean?
Alix Evans
There’s a whole story there. So Hildegard of Bingen, very famous 12th century nun, composer of crazy cool music. She was an abbess, she was sort of like in charge of a convent, two convents, actually. And she, because she’s crazy, invented a language for her the nuns in her convents to use. It was like a team building thing, I don’t know. And it was called, it was called the Lingua Ignota, which means the unknown language. And so my ensemble is called Ignota sort of as a nod to Hildegard, who is an incredibly influential composer, for me. But also because what excites me about this music is uncovering unknown and unfamiliar ways of making music and sounds that might be unknown or unfamiliar to listeners. And then bringing them to the audiences and saying here, isn’t this cool?
Guy Windsor
And can you give us an example of such a such a sound?
Alix Evans
Well, it’s sort of like what we were talking about with modes, right? The Phrygian mode sounds crazy. The idea that monophonic song, so song that’s just a melody, can sound good with absolutely no accompaniment. So there’s a school of thought, the main proponent of whom is Christopher Page, that high style troubadour songs were sung with absolutely no accompaniment, no instruments, just the singer. That’s it. And some people think that this is also true of liturgical church music. So like what Hildegard would have written. No accompaniment, just the voice. And I don’t know, this isn’t this is to me a compelling argument, but not a conclusive argument. I feel perfectly free to apply musical accompaniment to troubadour songs. But it also sounds really good without accompaniment. So I do it that way too, sometimes. And so as an example, when I was at Peabody, the voice department would have departmental recitals, like once a month, where voice majors could volunteer to perform for the rest of the department. And you go out there and you’re there with your collaborative pianists. And you both bow and piano starts playing and you start singing and that’s what everybody expects to happen. So one time I decided to sing some Hildegard and I just walked out on stage by myself. And everybody was like, oh, no, something’s gone terribly wrong. And then I just started singing this crazy Phrygian melody right. And everyone was like, “Woah”. It was completely not what they expected. It was completely different than what anyone else was doing. And it was really cool. It was great. So that’s a different way of doing things than people are used to.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so it’s an ensemble though, right? There’s not always going to be a voice on its own. So what kind of music will you be producing?
Alix Evans
Right, so it’s going to be a combination of accompanied and unaccompanied music. So I’ve got a couple of instrumentalists, I have got a really wonderful recorder player, I’ve got a really wonderful string player, I play the harp. And then I have a growing roster of incredibly talented singers. So we’ll be doing some pieces that have instrumental accompaniment, we’ll be doing some pieces that are strictly instrumental, we’ll be doing some pieces that are just voices singing together, and then we’ll have the occasional piece that’s just one person performing by themselves. In a given program, no one’s going to be performing in every single piece. Everyone gets to sit down and drink some water every now and then. But there will be a lot of different combinations.
Guy Windsor
You’re going to make actual live concerts. Are you also going to be like recording stuff, running a Patreon, stuff like that?
Alix Evans
We will be making some recordings. Right now, I am applying for some grants to help us make kind of just a couple of really early recordings to use sort of for publicity purposes. And eventually, I don’t know if we’re going to have a Patreon. I am kind of in the early stages of planning a Kickstarter campaign to fund early recordings and concert series. And if that comes to be before this is published, I will shoot you a link.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, even after it’s published, shoot. I will blast out to the mailing list. Because our audiences overlap considerably, I think, people who think it’s cool to recreate ancient skills. My last question. The million dollar question literally. Somebody gives you a million dollars to spend improving historical music or martial arts or whatever, some historical practice worldwide, how would you spend the money? Where do you think it needs to go?
Alix Evans
I was thinking about this. There are some scholarships and programs and things like that, that exist to help people with tuition, be it like affording to study at a school or, you know, Lord Baltimore’s challenge that David runs, has some scholarships to help people afford to come without getting a break on like, admission, registration, whatever they’re calling it, the money you pay to get in. I would take that money and I would fund some kind of scholarship fund that not only covers tuition and registration costs, but any sort of incidental costs related to the study of swordplay, so that could be equipment.
Guy Windsor
Why swordplay? Why not music?
Alix Evans
Because the thing you sent me said historical martial arts?
Guy Windsor
That’s because I have a template and I didn’t quite edit it as much as it should have been edited. So yeah, by all means historical martial arts, but you told me you don’t do swords very much anymore.
Alix Evans
I got to the point where I had gotten interested in music. And I didn’t have enough hours in the day to pursue to skills that require regular, frequent practice in order to just maintain and tread water, much less get anywhere,. But if I’d had a nanny, I probably would have. Okay, well, my idea would be, I don’t know, I mean, this, you could apply this to music students to is to fund some sort of some sort of fund to help people with those sort of, if I could throw money at this thing in my life, then I could afford to do this thing. To be frank, one of the reasons that I was able to quit my State Department job and go to Peabody is that I was married and still am married to somebody who still worked for the State Department and had a good job. And so we had a financial cushion, that I could jump off that cliff, and a lot of people don’t. But even if you’re not jumping off of a cliff, it’s hard to justify going out to study swordplay every week, if you don’t have childcare, or if you have to pay extra for equipment that’s going to fit you because it’s harder to find. There’s been a lot of talk about how to how to encourage more diversity and participation, both in swordplay and in historical music, but also just classical music in general. And I think that it’s not just a matter of access in, like, am I allowed in this space? Can I afford this program? But can I organize the rest of my life in such a way that I can participate?
Guy Windsor
What do you think the main barriers are?
Alix Evans
I can only speak for myself as a somewhat privileged, white American woman. For me it was time, particularly once we had a kid, it was just how much time can I spend away from home without being a burden on my co parent? And David is an incredibly involved father. Oh my god, he leaned in so much when I was in grad school, he’s been great. But when we were both working for the State Department, back before the pandemic, when working from home was not really a thing. It was always sort of a negotiation. Like, who gets to be away this night, who gets to be away this night? How many nights for each, because we both had things that we wanted to pursue, and there just weren’t enough hours in the day to go around. And there just wasn’t enough money to throw at babysitters to make it work. So for me, it was a matter of time.
Guy Windsor
And the way the money solves the time problem is by hiring other people to do the things that otherwise you have to do.
Alix Evans
Yeah, you can throw it at a babysitter or throw it at a maid service or throw it at one of those meal delivery services. So you don’t have to spend as much time cooking. I mean, time is money, right? If you have money, you can throw it at something that’s going to save you time. That’s just kind of the way it is.
Guy Windsor
So just thinking about the barriers to entry for someone who has little time. It’s quite inefficient to hire a babysitter for one person to attend, for example, an event. It would be more efficient, maybe to have a creche at the event itself.
Alix Evans
Sure. Yeah.
Guy Windsor
Is that such a thing with historical music? Do you have weekend events and things that that would benefit from this fictional million dollars being spent for creche services?
Alix Evans
Maybe. I mean, like regular rehearsals and things like that. You might have one person in your ensemble who needs a babysitter. But there are early music festivals that might take a week or two or a weekend. And it’s entirely possible. I think one of the barriers there, one of the things that I’m sure makes people reluctant to do this is just the liability of being in charge of somebody’s kid. I would imagine you would need to get all kinds of insurance and background checks and things like that, that might make it less efficient than we might imagine.
Guy Windsor
So you need what you need is the Mannerheimin Liitto, which is an organisation in Finland, which is like, okay manna, Mannerheim was the head of the Finnish Army. He was also President of Finland at one point, he was the basically the architect of Finland’s defense against Russia during the Second World War. So he’s like, the closest sort of figurehead type person, as Churchill is to Britain, Mannerheim is to Finland, but more so because Finland, as an independent nation has a much shorter history. And he was right there at the beginning of it. And later means, like Union, and it doesn’t sound like a particularly like, child related thing. But actually, what they do is they provide qualified babysitters for parents of young children, so they can do things like get back to work or whatever else. Yeah, Finland is the promised land of having children. So basically, what we’re talking about, actually, is using this money to set up the American equivalent of the Mannerheimin liitto. That’s an interesting use of the money. Well, thank you so much for joining me today Alix, it’s been lovely to see you again.
Alix Evans
Take care.
