In a recent radio interview, Schmelzer said he was surprised by these various honours. His work, he said, was way too “experimental” and “alternative” to attract the attention of all but a niche audience. True, his edgy and uncompromisingly brainy approach stands out like a sore thumb amid the slick and bloodless productions that seem to dominate the early music world today. What else would you expect from an ensemble that takes its name from the title of an essay by French critic and semiotician Roland Barthes?
In “Grain de la Voix”, Barthes, a keen music lover and pianist in his spare time, made the grain in a singer’s voice a metaphor for the writer’s physical mark on a literary work: “The grain is the body in the voice that sings, in the hand that writes, in the limb that executes,” he wrote. Graindelavoix likewise insist on the personal imprint they leave on their music: they say it’s as much an act of creation as interpretation.
If all this sounds like abstract, academic hair-splitting, rest assured that Graindelavoix’s music is anything but. With its gritty and diversely inflected voices, it bristles with arresting effects and ornaments, some of which recall the pungent polyphonies of Sardinia and other traditional communities. You would never have thought these dusty old compositions could sound so earthy and intensely alive.
Graindelavoix’s fourth release, La Magdalene is a collection of works inspired by Mary Magdalene, the object of much discussion and devotion in the early Renaissance after a French humanist contented that she had never actually existed but was a compound of three historical figures merged into one.
The programme’s centrepiece is a mass by Nicolas Champion, a now forgotten but immensely talented composer from Liège.
The ensemble recorded the CD in an Antwerp church that was erected roughly at the same time as the music was composed. No doubt the rich and strange harmonies of Champion’s mass will also work their spell amid the old stones of Brussels’ Kapellekerk.
28 October, 20.00OLV ter KapellekerkKapellemarkt, Brussels
www. graindelavoix.be