Sequentia Rheingold Curse imageSequentia, led by Benjamin Bagby, will be performing The Rheingold Curse at the Boston Early Music Festival in June. I’ve just gotten my tickets in the mail.

I’ve been “prepping” for this concert for awhile already, listening to to Edda - Myths From Medieval Iceland. I’m glad that I’ve spent some quality time with this CD, because even if one has some familiarity with early music, foreign language operas, modal Scandinavian folk music, and even Old Icelandic, this is just … really, really different.

The Edda CD was quite inexpensive. Now that I’ve been listening for some time, I’m ready to take the next step, and I’ve ordered the Rheingold Curse CD.

At first I was quite put off by the use of reconstructed 13th-century Icelandic pronunciation and the original modal musical “language” that Sequentia employs on the Edda disc. I was searching for something “authentic,” but found myself listening instead to a new idiom that no one had ever heard before. But this is really not all that different from the project of “reconstructing” Northern culture or spirituality: we use the research that’s available, but we fill in the gaps with our own creativity, and the product is something new and beautiful. It’s not quite the music that was heard a thousand years ago, but the song itself lives on.