Event Location: Kislak Center of Van Pelt Library, 6th Floor, 3420 Walnut Street (entrance on campus side)
How did medieval German aristocrats satisfy their appetites for long stories about beautiful, wealthy and tragic fictional characters? What themes motivated the best storytellers, and how might they have gone about fashioning a real ‘performance’? How did music and the voice figure into this world of noble entertainment—in an age long before printing and widespread literacy—when a story might require a dozen long episodes to be told in full?
Taking their own work with Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius – The Holy Sinner as an example, Benjamin Bagby and the members of Sequentia discuss and demonstrate how music serves von Aue’s story, using both voices and instruments. They examine how a flourishing courtly audience ca. 1200 devoured this and other noble stories as live performances and only later through reading, leaving the living transmission in the hands of dedicated minstrels (Spielleute) who were the beloved entertainers of their time.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested. » Register now
