Exploring a Lost Continent

Come hear the sackbut, shawm and Medici Philharmonic

The period before Bach was long the Atlantis of musical history: an entire realm sunk into oblivion, remembered only in legend. The poets, painters and architects of the time--roughly the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance--had been gloriously gifted; it stood to reason that the musicians had been too. Yet there was scant record of what their work sounded like. The scores that survived were in archaic, sometimes cryptic notation. The original instruments--for instance, the sackbut, a precursor of the trombone, and the shawm, a sort of oboe with a cold--often were found only among museum relics or glimpsed in old paintings; even when they were reconstructed, few performers knew how to tune or play them. But in the past few decades there has been a revolution in early music. Dozens of scholarly, dedicated ensembles have sprung up to try to reclaim Atlantis, not in the spirit of archaeology but of art, by reimagining it. In the U.S., no other group approaches the task with more style and verve than the Waverly Consort.

Now in its 15th season, the Waverly consists of six singers and four instrumentalists. They take the stage in modified period costume, the men in loose peasant blouses, the women in simple long dresses. Their performing delightfully blends the contrasting austerity and amiability of early music. Over the drone of string tones, plangent woodwinds pipe and trill, punctuated occasionally by bells or the shiver of tambourines. The singers spin out long, pure lines, immaculate in pitch and virtually free of vibrato. There are intricate madrigals, courtly love ballads, ribald drinking songs, solemn liturgical anthems, sprightly dances. Between numbers, Director Michael Jaffee, 41, may look up from his lute and chat engagingly to the audience about the music. The whole effect is blessedly unfussy, with none of the chilly fastidiousness of those early music groups that bear their authenticity like a penance.

Jaffee and his wife Kay, 42, who is the group's specialist in recorders, call the Waverly "a mom and pop operation." She does the research, he does the arranging. "Even in modern notation," Kay explains, "a piece we select will typically be nothing but a melodic line, with no sharps or flats, no tempo or dynamic markings--just a clue." How to flesh out the melody, how to pace it and color it, when to use voices and when instruments, and even where a touch of improvisation might spark things along: these are decisions Michael makes. He plans the Waverly programs around a theme. Their annual December concerts in a 12th century Spanish apse at the Cloisters range over medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Christmas selections. Recently, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they encompassed "The Gothic Era." Next week, at Lincoln Center, it will be "The Music of Spain, 1250-1550."

The Waverly repertory also includes more ambitious staged works. For Le Roman de Fauvel, a 14th century satirical fable about an ass who rises to rule the world, they use sets, elaborate masks and costumes. At times they expand their forces to the 23-member Waverly Waits in order to present large-scale compositions. It is a practice Jaffee would like to step up. He believes that the custom of performing early music in small groups is like representing the repertory of the 19th century solely through chamber music. "They had their equivalents of the Medici Philharmonic too," he says.

The Waverly owes its existence, in a sense, to two highly unlikely and unwitting patrons: Arthur Godfrey and an unmusical Greenwich Village landlord. It was Godfrey's ukulele playing that first prompted Jaffee, a furrier's son, to begin strumming the guitar as a boy in Brooklyn. Later, while studying musicology at N.Y.U., he met Kay, a pianist whose landlord had forbidden her to practice in her apartment. She took up the recorder as a consolation, and Michael experimented with accompanying her on the lute. Inspired by Noah Greenberg's pioneering New York Pro Musica, they "roped in a few friends," and the Waverly Consort--named for Waverly Place, a street that runs past the N.Y.U. campus--was born.

In its first seasons, the group could scarcely fill a hall in New York. Now their annual schedule of 59 concerts includes 17 appearances in New York, all of them sold out. Their four LPs on Vanguard and Columbia, while hardly rivaling the Boston Pops, have broken out of the confines of the specialized early-music market. In addition, they are moving into national television. They have video-taped four 20-minute recitals of music by such contemporaries of Shakespeare's as Dowland, Byrd and Weelkes, for inclusion in PBS's Shakespeare series starting this month. "The potential audience for this music goes far beyond even the usual classical audience," Jaffee insists. "It is immediate and unpretentious, with roots in popular traditions. People have gotten over the feeling that they need a Ph.D. to listen to it. And at that, our performance practices are still 99% conjecture. What a fantastic sound it will be once we really figure out how to do it."

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