Performance highlights formally censored music
Throw out your flux capacitors, because time travel just got a whole lot easier. Show up at Beall Concert Hall at 8 p.m. Monday, and you will be transported to 11th-century Germany, to a region known as the Rhineland.
Sequentia, an acclaimed international quartet that specializes in recovering some of the first Western non-liturgical music ever written, will present its full program, the culmination of its visit to the University. The group gave a shorter pre-performance and lecture at Beall Hall on Wednesday.
What’s so exciting about Western, non-liturgical music? It is the music of the people, the oral tradition, mythology, and storytelling medium of Medieval Europe.
According to Benjamin Bagby, the musical director of Sequentia, some of the material was so scandalous that monks censored it — literally inking it out of manuscripts.
Bagby and his fellow players are “musicians in a down-and-dirty sense,” he said. They formulate their music based on the barest description. The main source for their performance Monday is a set of ancient manuscripts believed to be the work of a single musician. Much of it is nothing more than the lyrics, which include epic stories about the seduction of nuns, adulterous sea merchants and tributes to kings.
The players in Sequentia use only the instruments available at the time the original music was made — primitive harps, flutes and the human voice. Their instruments are expert-made copies of artifacts and statues.
Among the instruments demonstrated Wednesday by Norbert Rodenkirchen, the group’s flautist and harpist, was a flute made out of polished swan bone. The instrument sounded like an immaculately tuned dog whistle. “The swan was already dead when it was made,” Rodenkirchen said after the demonstration, to laughter from the audience.
Vocals are a huge part of the Sequentia experience. Rich, booming, operatic harmonies filled Beall Hall on Wednesday as the harps and flutes accented and strummed in the background. Eric Mentzel, an associate professor of voice at the University, is a featured singer in the group and the only locally based member. The other members are from Germany, Denmark and France.
Nicolas Peslin, an international University student studying romance languages, said he was impressed by both the music and the players’ stage presence.
“Benjamin Bagby is quite a showman,” he remarked.
After Monday’s performance at Beall Hall, Sequentia is off to New York and then Europe.
— Jon Itkin
Student reaches settlement in federal suit against EPD
A former University student and a Eugene resident have accepted $22,500 to settle a federal lawsuit they filed against the city of Eugene last March.
Phillip Piper, who attended the University from fall 2002 to winter 2004, and Eugene resident Julie Dickenson filed a lawsuit March 18 alleging that two Eugene police officers illegally entered their apartment at 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 26, 2002, detained them and raked through their belongings for more than an hour in a search that produced nothing illegal.
One of the officers, Roger Eugene Magaña, is currently serving a 94-year prison sentence after being convicted of sexually abusing women while working for the police department. The other officer is Melvin Thompson.
Piper and Dickenson will each receive $11,250 in the settlement, which was reached Sept. 27.
In the lawsuit filed March 18 in federal district court, Piper and Dickenson asked for payment for punishment and damages and requested a court order to prevent police from conducting unwarranted searches in the future.
According to a police report, the officers were responding to a noise complaint and received permission from a supervising officer to perform a welfare check. Magaña cited Piper and Dickenson for a noise violation, but the charges were later dropped in Eugene Municipal Court.
The EPD has no written policy in its operations manual that specifically addresses the investigation of noise complaints and does not plan to develop one, according to settlement papers written by the city.
— Kara Hansen