Nexus Winchester. A Coup in the Cathedral Around the Year 1000

Katarina Livljanić and Ensemble Dialogos turn the Winchester Troper into an audio drama set on a single day in 964. In the programme’s story, Bishop Æthelwold expelled the cathedral’s canons, replaced them with monks from Abingdon, and was said to have survived their attempt to poison him. The troper is one of the earliest collections of notated polyphony in the West. The narrative thread comes from Wulfstan of Winchester’s life of Æthelwold, which survives without music. Livljanić sets it with a mix of the troper’s sound world and denser, more experimental colours, and her programme is built almost like a detective story. It opens with the bishop’s vision, moves through the canons’ debauchery, the expulsion and the monks’ arrival, and reaches its dramatic nexus when the bishop drinks the poison. It continues with an inner crisis, a first recording of the polyphonic tract Deus, Deus meus since the tenth century, and a final jubilant celebration of Æthelwold with Laude celebret.

The troper’s chants are notated in unheighted neumes, which can’t be transcribed unambiguously, so every performance is a hypothetical reconstruction informed by Guido d’Arezzo and the treatises of the era, in collaboration with Professor Susan Rankin of the University of Cambridge. Two voices and two instruments, fiddle and flute, carry the story. The instruments also explore virtuoso textless sequences with curious names such as Berta vetula, Bucca extensa, Tuba and Cythara, in improvised responses to the vocal scenes. Recorded at St Jacques Church in Feldbach, the album treats medieval musicology itself as a drama, the past seen through the present.

Ensemble Dialogos
Katarina Livljanić, voice and direction
Clara Coutouly, voice
Albrecht Maurer, fiddle and rebec
Norbert Rodenkirchen, flutes