by Amanda Vail
SK: We had all worked together in various combinations—the other three members were at the Early Music Institute at Bloomington together—but we came together as a foursome for the first time in order to do the 2009 EMA Medieval/Renaissance competition. The impetus came from Linda, and she’s married to Nathan, so he was an easy recruit. John and I both have a particular love for Elizabethan stuff, and Linda and John had a significant lute-song rep built up over their years as a duo. Best of all, there are the three Dowland lute songs with instrumental cantus and bassus, so we were eager to dig in on those with the instrumentation we have. There’s great music all over Europe around the turn of the seventeenth century, but the English geeked out on it in a wonderfully fruitful way, in that there is more play--more experimentation with instrumentation and texture, a lot of riffing off of other composers’ ideas, a great musical cornucopia. Perfect for an ensemble that doesn’t have a standard consort instrumentation.
EMA: How have things been going for you since winning the 2009 EMA Medieval/Renaissance Competition? Has anything changed?
SK: We’ve had the opportunity to do some touring this year to the three cities that presented us as part of the award, along with a couple of additional cities that asked us after the competition. These performances have required us to delve deeper with the music, developing three full concert programs in a relatively short time, and learning a lot as we went. It’s been really wonderful to meet new audiences in these places and enjoy their generous hospitality, and to realize how many of our teachers, mentors, colleagues, and friends played on the same concert series and sat at the same hosts’ dinner tables before us.
We’ve gained wonderful exposure as an ensemble and as individuals. It makes me think a lot about Malcolm Gladwell’s point that any success is always largely to do with luck and opportunity, and also about the hard economic realities that affect what happens in our field. Pre-Baroque ensemble work where you have to develop your own arrangements with divisions, counter-melodies, et cetera, as we do, is pretty labor-intensive. It’s hard to carve out the unpaid rehearsal time to get off the ground with a project like this if you’re busy paying the rent in an expensive city as a musician. We’ve worked hard, but we wouldn’t have been able to do it without the competition coming at the right time with the prospect of some tangible benefit. It’s so great that EMA created this opportunity as a motivation for ensembles to make the investment in the earlier repertoire. It’s wonderfully rewarding music, and audiences seem to love it.
EMA: The press seems to often reference the youth of your group--does this perception prove to be a challenge at all?
SK: I think just like the rest of the classical music field, early music audiences are torn between their love of their favorite ensembles of many years and the very conscious need to keep bringing in new performers and new audiences. The test for younger performers is always going to be how they develop over time—and it should be said that the increasing cost of living and the cramped state of arts funding these days makes it harder in many ways for today’s younger musicians to sustain their efforts than the generation or two before—but in the meantime, I think it’s wonderful that audiences are eager to give new groups a chance to show what they can do.
So far we’ve only experienced the references to Plaine & Easie’s youth as a positive thing, because it has always come in the same breath with praise for our music-making. Each of us is at a wonderful moment in our careers where we still have some of the benefits of being seen as young and new, but at the same time, we’ve already been hard at work for ten years building up a track record individually. We’re not fresh out of college; as of this coming summer, all four members will be in our thirties. We all have busy lives performing, and some of us teaching, at home and on the road. We’ve all had a chance to show what we can do in a range of contexts and are looking forward to more. So right now we have the best of both worlds.
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To learn more about Plaine & Easie, and to see a list of their upcoming performances, visit their website: www.plaineandeasie.com
To find out more about Early Music America's Awards & Competitions, check out this portion of our website.
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