Performance of Medieval Plainchant Seminar

St Patrick’s College and NUIM Music Department present
A Seminar on the Performance of Medieval Plainchant

With the Maynooth Schola Gregoriana and visiting Professors Katarina Livljanic and Benjamin Bagby (Sorbonne University, Paris)

Time & Date: Monday, February 4th at 7:30pm
Venue: Renehan Hall, St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth (South Campus)

Additional Performances and Masterclasses (Open to public):

Monday, February 4th :

• 3:00pm in St. Joseph’s Oratory:
  NUIM Undergraduate Public Performance/Examination
  
  
• 4:00pm in the College Chapel :
  SPCM Postgraduate Public Performance/Examination

Tuesday, February 5th :

• 9:30am- 1:00pm in Renehan Hall:
  Chant Masterclasses with Professors  Katarina Livljanic and Benjamin Bagby (Sorbonne University, Paris)

Katarina Livljanić

Katarina LIVLJANIĆ, singer and musicologist, is one of the principal international specialists in medieval chant performance. Born on the Adriatic coast of Croatia, she trained at the Zagreb Music Conservatory before moving to France to study voice (with Guillemette Laurens and Glenn Chambers) and musicology (with Marie Noël Colette). She directs the vocal ensemble Dialogos, specializing in medieval chant and liturgical theatre of the Glagolitic tradition. For her work in this field, she was decorated for cultural achievement in 2002 by the president of Croatia. Katarina Livljanić She obtained a Ph.D. at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, based on research of medieval chant manuscripts of Southern Italy. She is currently Maître de conferences in medieval music at the Sorbonne University in Paris where she codirects a medieval music performance Master programme. As a vocalist, she performs in major international festivals with the ensembles Sequentia and Alla Francesca. She spent a semester as visiting lecturer and directed a Gregorian chant schola at Harvard University. In 1998 she founded a chant performance program at the University of Limerick in Ireland. She is regularlyinvited to numerous universities in Europe, in the United States and Canada as a teacher and resident artist. She has emerged as an important international speaker about medieval chant performance and publishes articles in specialized reviews wordwide. In 2002 she was a guest artistic advisor at the Early Music Festival in Utrecht, Netherlands. With Benjamin Bagby (Sequentia), she has been awarded a Cornille Visiting Professorship at the Wellesley College (USA) in 2007. Her most recent solo project, a musical theatre production entitled Judith based on the masterpiece by the 16th-century Croatian poet Marko Marulić, was premiered at the Ambronay Festival in 2006.

Benjamin Bagby

Benjamin Bagby is descended from a Germanic clan which emigrated from Jutland to northern England in ca. 630, from where his branch of the family emigrated to the colony of Virginia almost a millennium later. Following 321 years of subsequent family wanderings, he was born on the shores of the Great Lakes, and twelve years later was captivated by Beowulf. Several years after moving back to Europe in 1974 he founded – together with the late Barbara Thornton – the ensemble for medieval music, Sequentia, which was based in Cologne, Germany, for 25 years. Both Mr. Bagby and Sequentia are now based in Paris. In addition to his activities as singer, harper and director of Sequentia, Benjamin Bagby writes about performance practice and teaches widely in Europe and North America. He is currently on the faculty of the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he teaches in the master’s program for medieval music performance practice. In addition to his work with Beowulf, Mr. Bagby and Sequentia have produced two CDs of musical reconstructions from the medieval Icelandic Edda, the most recent of which, ‘The Rheingold Curse’, was also staged by Ping Chong. A more recent CD, ‘Lost Songs of a Rheinland Harper’, explores Latin and German song in the period around the year 1000. A DVD production of Mr. Bagby’s ‘Beowulf’ performance, filmed by Stellan Olsson in Sweden, became available in summer 2006. It contains numerous extra features, including interviews with noted Anglo-Saxonists and the performer.