Eugene C. Braig IV > Owain Phyfe of New World Renaissance Band fame was > playing. For any who have not seen this spectacle, Mr. Phyfe plays on a > modern steel-string guitar with six single strings...but crafted to ape the > aesthetics of the old Guadalupe vihuela. Afterwards, I engaged Mr. Phyfe > in conversation specifically to discuss his instrument, which I thought was > very amusing for what it was. Rather than discuss the true nature of the > piece, Mr. Phyfe went into a great long pseudo-historic spiel to try to > legitimize the thing as authentic by giving it the name "chitarra > battente!" This spiel is probably very amusing to ren-faire fans, but I > regarded it as a blatant effort at deception. I really enjoyed the > performance as folksy and non-HIP. I was a bit soured by the effort to > convince me it was all somehow authentic.
Many of us are acquainted with Owain. He attended two or three LSA seminars and brought that instrument to one of them. There was a chat about it with Owain and Ray Nurse and a few other people; I'm sure anyone less stupid than I am about lute construction would have been fascinated, but I remember nothing of what was said except the expression "X-bracing" from Ray, and the notion that it was essentially a 20th-century instrument. Owain's approach to the music is informed by modern folk/pop sensibilities. Sometimes it works. It was Owain I was thinking of when I wrote yesterday: > musicians who approach earlier music from an > uneducated or semi-educated, folk or pop direction aren't particularly > irritating, and indeed occasionally offer a useful perspective about music > composed when the concept of "classical" music didn't really exist. I had the experience, a few years after the last time I saw Owain, of trying to get a singer to be less stentorian and blustery -- more like talking and less like singing Wagner at the Met over a brass section that won't shut up --in "Since First I Saw Your Face. I saw a light go in his eyes, and he told me that I was asking him to sing it like the guy in the New World Renaissance Band. He played a recording, and while it wasn't exactly what I was trying to get from the singer, he could have done a lot worse than sing it that way. Lots of singers do a lot worse. And I can't say that some Welsh singer in 1604 didn't sound a lot like Owain.
