Of Sackbuts and Sausage Bassoons
The sometimes strange sounds of the Middle Ages and the renaissance are music to Jack Ashworth's ears. A virtuoso on dozens of antique instruments, his mission is to probe and teach ancient music.
Medieval troubadours and the Pied Piper have not been unleashed in the halls at U of L's School of Music.
Unless you chose your eyes and imagine...
Mellifluous sounds from centuries past often waft through he school's second-floor hallways. They come from professor Jack Ashworth's Office.
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Professor Ashworth and freshman John Aurelius.
Ashworth's specialty is music dating from the Middle Ages through the Baroque periods, roughly the 10th through the early 18th centuries.
It's a vast era of musical history cloaked in mystery. So vast and mysterious that Ashworth says he has barely scratched its surface in his 28 years studying, teaching and performing early music at U of L.
"In music from the late 18th century to today, scores tell you what instruments are to be played and include articulation marks, speed markings and indications of dynamics--how loudly or softly to play," he says. "Earlier music often tells us few or none of these things--and that makes it a challenge to study, perform and teach.
"My job as a scholar of performance practice is to figure out what the options are--and there often are no set answers."
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On one recent day in one of Ashworth's early music ensemble/historical instruments classes, he and sophomore Ty-Juana Taylor, graduate student Allen Gilfert and freshman John Aurelius tackled an obscure piece of 16th century composer Orlande Lassus.
Ashworth's objective is to help the students understand and follow the score and listen to what the other players are doing to create a seamless ensemble sound. Along the way, he shows them some of the arcane techniques of blowing, fingering and even holding replicas of antique instruments.
Through trial and error, the group playing soprano, alto, tenor and bass recorders produces moments of warm, blended sound--while Ashworth gently advises: "Try blowing it without knocking your teeth out," he says. "Hold the recorder like this..."
"As your finger wanders, that's when your pitch wavers..."
At one point, Taylor seems to lose her place, yet music performance often reveals happy accidents:
Ashworth: "Let's take the penultimate chord and see what comes up..."
Taylor: "I don't know what we're playing."
Ashworth: "You played it right--the system worked!"
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In one of his early music classes, music professor Jack Ashworth (above left) and sophomore Ty-Juana Taylor (right) "take five" while playing a 16th century score on recorders.
Ashworth's low-stress style of teaching, he says, stems from the nature of the music itself.
"Early music is a different kind of music making," he says. "There are relatively few players in these small consorts, so there's nowhere to hide and everyone has to take ownership of tuning and ensemble. I don't stand in front and give orders; we sit in a circle and each member has input. We're all in it together, and I goof up as much as they do. Well, hopefully not quite as much."
Finally it all comes together. They play the two-minute piece from first to last note beautifully.
At one point, Ashworth changes instruments and grabs a stubby wooden cylinder that looks like a pepper grinder. A first blow on the reed produces a squeak. A second blow produces a sound that might charitably be described as someone passing wind through a kazoo.
The instrument is a replica of a 16th century rackett (aka, Wurstfagott, or sausage bassoon, due to its long tubing folded into its compact shape). Told by a visitor that the rackett looks like a pepper shaker, Ashworth grins and shows his playful side: clasping the instrument and simulating the motion of a waiter grinding herbs.
Ashworth can play most of the 70 replicas of early string, wind and keyboard instruments in the music school's collection.
The unusual looks, sounds and even the names of some of the instruments (e.g., sackbut, krumhorn, lizard) are some of the reasons that students find them fascinating, Ashworth says.
"The curiosity and the adventure of trying something different appeals to them."
In a typical semester he offers instruction in viola da gamba, harpsichord, recorder and chamber music, with an additional three hours rehearsing the choral group.
He also teaches music literature from the Renaissance and Baroque periods as well as other courses, including a class in Appalachian folk music.
Ashworth has performed across the country with leading early music ensembles, including the Folger Consort, the King's Noyse and the Newberry Consort.
His honors include the Thomas Binkley Award from the professional organization Early Music America, received in 1999 for "outstanding achievement in both performance and scholarship by the director of a university or college collegium musicum." He was named U of L Distinguished Teaching Professor in 1995.
Attending high school in the late 1960s in Pullman, Wash., Ashworth had an epiphany.
"I don't know why but I became entranced by the sound of the recorder," he says.
With ambitions to become an organist and composer, he enrolled at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. There, a professor encouraged his interest in early music. Later, he entered the graduate program at Stanford University that emphasized performance and scholarship equally, and graduated with a doctor of musical arts.
Luckily, Ashworth's growing interest in early music at the start of his career coincided with a boom in early music scholarship in the late '60s and '70s.
"New programs on early music were starting in colleges all over," he says. "I was able to catch this huge wave at the beginning."
Even so, not everyone in academia was on board.
"In some places there was a condescending attitude about early music," he says. "Some would sniff and say 'Go play your little toys,' or 'Do you really play that weird music?' Fortunately I never encountered that kind of attitude here at U of L."
Ashworth was the only member of his graduate school class to find a job devoted primarily to early music when he came to U of L in 1977. His charge was to teach music history and direct the school's Collegium Musicum (now called the Early Music Ensemble).
Since then the ensemble--consisting of students, faculty, staff and community players--has grown from seven to 35 members. The group plays at various community events and in concert at the school.
Such developments point to acceptance of early music in recent years, he says.
"It used to be that classical radio stations would never play anything earlier than Bach, but now they play all kinds of earlier music," Ashworth adds.
"There's been a cultural shift in academe," he adds. "It's now thought that you must have at least some exposure to early music to have a good musical education."
Although Ashworth considers his students his proudest work, he also contributes to scholarship.
His latest project is researching and writing a manual on basso continuo, a type of accompaniment improvised over a bass line and used in most music from the 1600s and 1700s.
"There aren't a lot of references out there that tell a performer how to learn and play basso continuo--especially one geared specifically to players and not scholars," Ashworth says. "I'm working on an affordable manual aimed at amateurs and students, yet based on scholarship."
The sense of give-and-take that marks early music-making extends to another of Ashworth's passions: old-time and bluegrass music.
"Ralph Stanley and Bill Monroe are some of my heroes," he says. "I have a piece about the banjo soon to be published in American Icons: An Encyclopedia of People, Places Things That Have Changed Our Culture."
"Whether playing early music or fiddling in an old-time string band, I love playing in groups the most.
