Project overview
Markets for the Masque is a follow-on project designed to consolidate the success of practice-based research started in 2005, AHRC-funded for its first three years and supported by the University of Southampton since then. It takes the outcome of the research in two new directions, one championing the performance of masque music to a classical music circuit with the group Theatre of the Ayre, and the other exploring the connections with plucked improvisation across genre boundaries, in collaboration with members of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. Both approaches bring a quasi-theatrical style of presentation and correspondingly adventurous improvisation to mid seventeenth century English vocal music, and beyond it to uncover similar structures in other kinds of music with plucked accompaniment. The practice-based research encouraged florid ornamentation of vocal lines, opening the way both to enjoyment and to appreciation of swathes of sketchily notated material produced by leading English composer-performers of the early baroque period. This project will take this to new audiences worldwide through the recording of a CD for Linn Records, and develop relationships with festivals and venues across the UK (Salisbury, Buxton, Swaledale, St David's, The Stables Wavendon). A new rationale has emerged for musical collaboration between players of early plucked instruments like the lute and baroque guitar and not-so-early cognates like the ukulele. Collective improvisation across genre boundaries encourages listeners to cross them too. I first encountered the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain on CD and via YouTube. Their bravura musicianship and unshakable sense of ensemble seemed to me to set a standard to which Theatre of the Ayre's lute section should aspire. Subsequent personal contact and a series of trial workshops led to Lutes & Ukes, a hybrid group whose eclectic programmes mix seventeenth and twentieth century music, switching seamlessly and repeatedly between old and relatively new. All the group's singers self-accompany on their plucked instrument of choice. Lutes & Ukes draws inspiration from the world of the seventeenth century English masque without attempting to recreate it. Performances range from serious to riotously comic in the same way (masque-antimasque), and through sheer variety they help promoters cast audience development nets wider than ever. The next phase of development both for Theatre of the Ayre and for Lutes & Ukes will be to increase both groups' visibility on the promotional circuit and build market value for their respective repertoires.