Capturing the Original Essence

The Gregory Walkers

Capturing the Original Essence

‘It is a different and a liberating point of view,’ says Malachy Robinson of the musical practice at the core of the Gregory Walkers, one of Robinson’s latest musical projects. The group — with Robinson on violone, Laoise O’Brien playing recorders, Eamon Sweeney on Baroque guitar and Francesco Turrisi playing percussion — is named after the ‘Gregory Walker’, a popular dance tune found in sixteenth-century England, also known as the passamezzo moderno, which is built around a simple four-chord progression.

Robinson spoke to Benedict Schlepper-Connolly recently in advance of an upcoming Gregory Walkers concert in Dublin. Listen to their full conversation in the latest edition of the The Journal of Music podcast below or download it from iTunes.

The ‘viral’ nature of the Gregory Walker in its own time, as well as the fact that it was rarely written down in detail, means that performances take the form of a structured improvisation. ‘This is an entirely different way of making music,’ says Robinson. ‘It’s attractive and very liberating. Composers then were also performers, and what was written down was never considered to be in the end — what was written down was really a starting point.’

‘The most rewarding way is really quite improvisational, so when you have a set of players that can collectively build something really unpredictable, that’s really quite exhilharating,’ says Robinson, whose other musical routes include the Crash Ensemble, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, Lunfardia, and more recently the Robinson Panoramic Quartet. ‘I think as a listener as well, I’m attracted to that sort of performance — because there’s so much engagement required,’ he says.

One of Robinson’s favourite pieces played by the Gregory Walkers is a Salterello, an Italian dance from the middle ages, performed by just O’Brien and Turrisi — a fast tune that gets faster and faster. ‘There was some kind of mass dancing mania that spread across Europe, apparently, in the middle ages,’ says Robinson. ‘I suppose it’s like a kind of rave: people getting together in huge numbers and dancing themselves into a frenzy.’ The Salterello ‘facilitated’ this hysteria. ‘People, apparently, danced this for medicinal purposes,’ says Robinson about the tune, remarking that sometimes people danced themselves to death.

Reviving music from centuries ago with only scant sources surely leaves a lot of questions about how accurate that recreation is, (if indeed such accuracy is a reasonable goal). ‘You feel, when you get it right, when you feel you’ve captured something of the original essence,’ says Robinson. ‘Then that’s probably close to what they heard then.’

The Gregory Walkers perform at the John Field Room of the National Concert Hall, Dublin on 2 September.

Published on 26 August 2013

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