Zoë Vandermer

If Love Be the Food of Music

Zoë Vandermeer
Harpa Journal No. 3, 1997/98 Winter edition

To bring original or historical characters to the stage with music, text, songs, drama, and costumes requires not only resolve and self-dependent thinking, but also lengthy and serious preparation.

Examples of this include Harpo Marx, Nancy Thym as a wandering harper-maiden, Judit Kadar, Susanne Weinhöppe, and the American singer and instrumentalist Zoë Vandermeer.

We asked Ms. Vandermeer to tell us about her career and her latest stage production with spinet and harp.

Sitting behind my computer one afternoon a few years ago, I realised that I was at a juncture. Was I going to -exclusively pursue the corridors and pathways toward an operatic career singing Lucias and Queens of the Night, or would I take a sidestep and leap down a spiral of uncharted territory?

I took the leap. I created a one woman show "If Love Be the Food of Music" whose title is derived from one of Purcell1s songs:"If Musick Be the Food of Love".

When I was a small child, I wrote poetry, composed the music, sat at the piano playing the tune with one hand, my other hand wrapped around a toy flute, blowing as best I could, alternately singing the tune, while my feet tapped a matching rhythm on a cardboard box placed under the -piano bench!

Years of choir, piano lessons, dance lessons, voice lessons, playing flute in the high school concert band, painting, creating a variety of projects, including a study of costume when I was twelve, and finally getting my own harpsichord when I was seventeen, led up to a period of composition study at the Manhattan School of Music, later followed by studying voice at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, where I then graduated, having been a scholarship recipient and winner of several prizes.

I have always loved singing with instruments of different kinds and was inevitably drawn to Baroque music. I studied treatises both instrumental and vocal, analysed performance interpretations of those treatises, and experimented through my own solo concerts where I accompanied my own singing. Harpsichord provided the opportunity to learn how to realise figured bass, learn the many clefs, several tuning systems, old fingering, and styles.

This information proved fruitful, particularly once I began to learn the Baroque triple harp. Having wanted to learn the harp ever since I was a child, I began, finally, about seven years ago with a Lyon and Healy five-octave "Troubadou" harp with levers, which later was exchanged for a three-and-a-half-octave folk harp with levers (nylon strung) made by Dusty Strings.

As much as I loved the folk harp, I felt continually frustrated with not being able to play the chromatic music I was drawn to, and yet, I had no real desire to acquire a double-action harp, even though I love its sound. I was led to historical harps and found the answer in the chromatic harp. It took some time to accustom myself to the differences in string distance, low string tension, how to position my fingers in-between the strings to play the chromatics, use of the thumb-under technique, and the old fingering technique of "good" and "bad" fingers, which I had already come to understand in my harpsichord playing.

Yet with all of the challenges of this provocative instrument, I have never looked back. At this point, I will quote from my show

"On one hand, ever gentle Patience sat, on whose calm bosom I reclined my head, and on the other, silent Contemplation"...
However, many questions about vocal style and technique were still unanswered.

My search, strangely enough, led me back into the nineteenth- and twentieth-century repertoire where, with a new outlook, I was constantly amazed with what I found and its relevance to the Baroque repertoire, particularly the singing styles prevalent in the teens and twenties of this century.
A rigorous pursuit of opera followed.

Still, I wished for a form of expression where I could unite all of my interests. I didn't think it was possible until I created this show. A tragic music-drama, it lies somewhere between theatre and concert.

Throughout the show, I "am" Jenny Barsanti, singer and actress at Covent Garden, (daughter of composer Francesco Barsanti), who in turn creates the fictitious character "Anne", an old woman exiled to an insane asylum, who relives her bleak story of love, revenged and lost. In the drama, presented in a series of flashbacks that eventually catch up with the present, Anne's sense of remorse and self-hate completely overwhelm her, and her only freedom from inner torment is to continually relive the past in a changing state of trance moving from vivid, to ecstatic, to manic, to dull, and even to dream.

She attempts to confront her doubts and fears, only to discover that she is too weak to move beyond her own shadow.

The music for the show is an answer to my desire of many years to join "classical" and "folk" music into one event, thereby exhibiting their similarities as well as their differences. To this end, I sing, play the spinet (a copy of a sixteenth-century Florentine instrument made by Gary Blaise ) and Baroque triple harp (a copy of a Mersenne harp from 1636 made by Tim Hobrough ), weaving the emotional content of the story through selections from the Scots Musical Museum (the Philadelphia edition ), a haunting late eighteenth-century Scots Gaelic song, a Handel minuet, Rogniono's 1591 version of "Ancor che col partire", a few lovely songs in the "Scottish/Baroque" style by James Oswald 1743, formalised versions of Scots tunes arranged by Francesco Barsanti 1742, Luigi Rossi1s "Gelosia", etc.

I am also including a couple of pieces from an original late eighteenth-century manuscript I found during my tour in August 1997, that features contemporaries of Mozart, such as Schröter, Haydn, Kotzwara, Pleyel and Corri.

Texts are taken from plays and poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries authored by Dryden, Etherege, Dekker, Lillo, Marston, John Scott of Amwell, and others. Some of the theatrical devices include Scots dialect with certain texts, a mask, and an elaborate costume that comes off in layers through the course of the show which heightens the changing aspects of Anne's character as well as emotional states and age.

The harp acts as both a musical instrument and as a symbolic representation of Johnnie, Anne's lover. One of the new additions to the performance are the puppets Punch and Judy which enliven a jovial dialogue or two!

Through my research, I have found that the "real" Miss Barsanti was enormously talented and resourceful.
A quote from Fanny Burney's Diary in 1771 describes her as "extremely clever and entertaining, possesses amazing power of mimickry, and an uncommon share of humour".

She studied singing with the renowned Charles Burney, and reportedly was his favourite singing student.
She went on to perform at Covent Garden, from 1772 to 1776. The following season, which saw Miss Barsanti in Ireland, a correspondent of the "Morning Chronicle" wrote on 12 June 1777 that "two years ago we gave her credit for the sprightly, genuine effusions of true comedy; we now behold her with equal delight in the sublime and pathetic".

Later in 1777, she fell in love with and married the distinguished Irishman, John Richard Kirwan Lyster, who unfortunately died shortly after in 1779.

She then married actor-manager Richard Daly. She not only ran his household for him while he was gallivanting about with women and fighting duels, her acting actually financially sustained the theatre!

I view my fictional show as one of Miss Barsanti1s creative responses to the necessities of keeping that theatre "in the black".

She died in 1795. Having created, compiled, written, directed, produced, and performed "If Love Be the Food of Musick", I now have an intimate understanding of the challenges inherent in bringing together theatre and music.
And, Miss Barsanti/Anne has inadvertently given me deeper insights into the characters of Lucia and Queen of the Night in ways that I could never have dreamed of!

Be it my lot to waste in pining grief, The remnants of my days for his known loss or live, as now, uncertain and in doubt.
No second choice shall violate my vows.

Ulla P. Will: Harpo Marx: "Portrait of a Non-Lady Harpist".

HARPA No. 12 (4/1993)
2 Nancy Thym-Hochrein: Judit Kadar (Portrait).
HARPAPIANO No. 2 (Herbst Automne Autumn 1997)
Barbara Hebeisen Schäubli: Susanne Weinhöppel (Interview).
HARPAPIANO No. 2 (Herbst Automne Autumn 1997)

Siehe auch Voir également See also:
Rudolf Frick: "Prova d'orchestra". Nino Rota (1911-1979) Federico Fellini (1920-1993)

HARPA No. 13 (Frühling Printemps Spring 1994) 4 George Lillo (1693-1739), "Fatal Curiosity", Act I, scene ii.

Write a note to Zoë Vandermer: zoesings@aol.com

Links Odilia Verlag: www.odilia.ch
Classical Singer Magazine: www.classicalsinger.com