Transcription

• Alma

  Excuse me, could you tell me where Coloquio 6 and the Ministers of Pastime are playing, please? Oh, they're in the same place. Great, thank you so much. Uh, yes, yes, I have my seat. Just a moment. Here it is. Right, Alma. Focus and pay close attention to how these two ensembles build their concert.

• Speaker

  hEEElp! We're starting an ensemble - An audio guide for emerging early music artists.

• Alma

  My name is Alma. I'm 25 years old. I play violin in an early music ensemble and every stage, every step we take together throws up another lunch of questions. That's why I decided to turn to the people who can help us move forward. When we tried to build our first concert program and sat down with our post-it notes with the rest of the ensemble, we realized we could not agree on anything. I talked about it with Albert Herrera from the Ministers of Pastime and Carolina Guedici from Colloquia 6, and they suggested I join them here. at this festival, so they could tell me their own story.

• Speaker

  Episode 2. From Idea to Concert.

• Alma

  Thank you so much for inviting me. The concert was brilliant, well done. Come on Alma, pull yourself together. You're going to come across as a groupie. Think about your questions. So, as I was saying, we have no idea where to start with our concert program. It's all over the place. How do you go about it?

• Carolina Guiducci

  Yeah, it just happens. Like, we normally have an idea. Principally it's based on a composer. or on a piece that we want to play. And then according to that, we build something around it. So for example, now we're playing a program based on Amalia of Saxony, which was a German princess, which was also a composer. And we wanted to explore her music that was, it's not recorded. There's almost no scores of her. So we didn't know how her music sounded. And we built like a whole program around her. So we play music that was famous in her time, Rossini. We play music by her teacher, which was Carmaria von Bebel. She did a trip to Spain, so we also play some Spanish music that she might have heard during the trip. So in the end, I don't know, we start playing one piece that we are interested in, and then we find something around it that connects to the other pieces.

• Alberto Jara

  I think programs in general, music for me, comes from... My experience of both listening to albums and also to listening to concerts and throughout my own experience, for instance, trying to understand what are they trying to say? Am I coming into a room with different paintings? Is there an idea linked in? Is this just the artist, a concept? I think there's a point of, for me, inspired on narratives. So trying to create a narrative, trying to build a story, there's two ways of it. Trying to find how there's an emotional impact, you know, how you can start slower and build up or you can begin with a bang and... How do you end a concert? Do you want to end with a hug? Do you want to end with a big explosion? But then at the same time, do you want to actually tell a giving story? One of the programs that we do is regarding three composers in the court in Vienna, but we don't begin chronologically, we begin at the end, in medias res. So we like this idea of actually, we begin in the ending, but... Then we tell the story from the beginning.

• Alma

  But how do you know you have a concert program and not a playlist?

• Carolina Guiducci

  It has to be balanced, the music. It has to have contrast. It has to be interesting. For us, we always try to have some kind of connecting idea behind it. Not just like, okay, we like this music, so we put it together. But we feel there has to be something extra musical. And I would say that... What distinguishes it from a playlist is the experience around it. So all the extra musical things that you can add to a concert. So we talk a lot to the audience, we often play among them, so we have always this element of surprise. We tell a bit about the context of the music or we do something with another art form. So we have a project with animation. So we always try to find an extra musical... Idea, which in the end is what will connect more to the audience and distinguish it from just being nice music.

• Alma

  And do you think about what the audience expects or what promoters want?

• Carolina Guiducci

  We play what we want. And I think if you enjoy it and you have an idea and you're convinced about something, the audience will get it too and the promoter will be convinced too. So in the end, we don't adjust because we think, oh, they might like this. We choose what we like and we bring this. as a message.

• Alma

  Thank you, thank you, both of you, really. I'm heading back to my seat for the Ministers of Past Times concert. See you later

• Speaker

  hEEElp! We're starting an ensemble - An audio guide for emerging early music artists. A podcast produced by the Collective Risette, as part of the European project Sustainable Emerging, co-funded by the European Union and coordinated by the Cultural Encounter Centre of Ambronay.