The Musicians in Ordinary are named after the singers and lutenists who performed in the exclusive chambers of England's Stuart monarchs, and is composed of soprano Hallie Fishel and lutenist John Edwards. Focusing on vocal chamber music from the 16th and 17th centuries, the duo also play the theorbo, and have been described as “winning performers of winning music.” The Varsity sat down with Edwards over Friday brunch to discuss what it's like being a Baroque artist in 2009.

Hear Musicians in Ordinary perform "Where Art Thou God of Dreams"

The Varsity: How would you describe your music?

John Edwards: We play Renaissance and Baroque music. Usually, we do vocal music, but the November 28 concert is a bit of an exception for us because it will be mainly instrumental. We'll be doing violin music from the time of its first invention right up until about the 17th, into the 18th century.

alt text TV: Why the violin, in particular?

JE: The violin was invented shortly after 1500 in Italy, but it was a dance-band instrument at first—it had sort of the place that the saxophone has today. You don't see many amateur saxophone players. You meet a lot of amateur guitarists and amateur piano players, but the sax is a professional instrument, and the violin was the same for its first hundred years. It seems incredible to us now. In fact, in France, it goes on even longer. By the 1600s, you start having virtuosos using it as a solo instrument in the new Baroque style. Because in the Baroque, they like that sort of polarity between high instruments and a low bass. So, I mostly make up chords from the bass line. Like a “continuo,” as they call it.

TV: Is that how you primarily create your sound?

JE: The harpsichord and I get it from the bass line, and we make up chords over the top of it like a jazz player does. The violin, over those hundred years, becomes the primo solo instrument. We’ll be doing music by Giovanni Paolo Cima—he worked in Milan as a church musician, and so they needed the mass at the time. They would very often break up the priest, which would just sit and mumble the service while you had all this fabulous music going on. And so these sonatas would be used for that, as well as in the house. So we have music by Cima, who is one of the first five composers for violin solo.

TV: Whose work has influenced your music?

JE: Bianco Morini, who was kind of a funny guy. He was one of the first virtuosi… he also worked all over Germany and sort of exported the new Italian style—Italian Baroque, which of course becomes Bach later. [Morini] was always looking for a better job. He's a great virtuoso violinist. We'll also be doing some music by Muffat. And he's towards the end of the century. He's German and he goes and studies his music in France and then studies music in Italy. So, he writes a lot about these two styles. And so his pieces are either always very self-consciously in French dance-band style or in this new Italian rhapsodic style. He's a very interesting composer—a German guy interpreting for a German audience these two styles. He's trying to explain, "Here's how they differ."

TV: What first got you into making music from the Renaissance and the Baroque periods?

JE: When I was 12 or 13, like everybody else, I thought I was going to be a rock star. I got a guitar. And I knew that in playing classical music, [I] would learn a really good, solid, efficient technique that would help [me] play faster. So I was playing classical guitar and I knew that the best composers were using plucked string instruments in the 1500 and 1600s, and the piano was the predominant instrument in the 19th century and also the 20th, so I was sort of drawn to it by that....And lutes were the accompanying instrument for 300 years—they sort of took the place in the Renaissance imagination that the lyre took in Ancient Greece.

TV: What interested you in picking up such unconventional instruments?

JE: Mainly the marriage between poetry and music of the time. We play music right from 1450 up to 1850. I've got a 19th-century guitar. Schubert was known to have played guitar and they've seen him singing his own songs to his guitar. The plucked string really comes down to the present day—the troubadour.

TV: What are your current projects?

JE: Well, Hallie and I just got back from the University of Maryland. There was a conference on early modern women. We did a concert of the very few female composers of our time. But women in music, especially in England, were very important to patrons. And it's almost like their taste would define music. In some ways, they're more important than composers because it's their taste. And we did some music of the Sidney family, which includes Mary Sidney, the poet, and Mary Roth, her niece. We did a session on that with a woman from U of T Scarborough, Katie Larson—she's a prof there. And our concert was some music that was written for young women who were learning music. A composer called John Daniel wrote a dedication in his book to the woman he was teaching music to. And he says, "These songs were written for your private pleasure," so they were written for her to learn. So the music was not by female composers, but it was written for women. And it was about their skills as musicians. So our concert was all about that sort of thing.

And on January 1, we do our New Year's Day concert. As you may know, in Vienna, they have New Year's Day concerts but it's all 19th-century polka, Blue Danube, waltzes and such, and we do the same thing, except it's 17th and 18th century music. So if you don't like polkas, and you prefer minuets, ours is the concert to go to. There's not much else going on New Year's Day, really. So you can either see waltzes and polkas or us. But of course in Vienna, in the 1600s, all the musicians were Italians. Vivaldi, in fact, was in Vienna for a while.

TV: Tell us about your New Year's concert series.

JE: Well, there are too many damn concerts before Christmas—from the last week of November until three or four days before Christmas, it's like, Messiah, Messiah, Messiah, and other Christmas-y concerts. So eventually, we just said, "To hell with it! We're going to do something else!”

At first, we did some Christmas concerts. But the best ones are definitely the New Year's concerts. [In the past], we've sold completely out. We had to turn people away! People were banging on the doors, and we just said "Get lost!" so we decided to add another show.

If you can't wait for New Year's, the Musicians in Ordinary play Emmanuel College at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 28. For more information, visit musiciansinordinary.ca.