Listening to Heinali’s Imaginary Cathedrals

Text:
Ivan Shelеkhov and Oleg Shpudeiko

Photos:
Oleksii Karpovych

Ukrainian electronic music composer shares his favourite music of the Western European Middle Ages

Kyiv-based musician Oleg Shpudeiko is better known under his moniker Heinali. He has been composing and performing electronic music since the 2000s. Mostly associated with ambient, the artist played quite frequently at local niche events in Ukraine and released his music through labels abroad.

In recent years Heinali is fascinated by Medieval and Renaissance polyphony. It seems that he lives a sort of scholastic life, studying history and music of that era. Oleg regularly shares enlightening gems with his audience on social media, and also in a podcast АШОШ, hosted together with his partner in crime, a classical composer Alexey Shmurak (the name of the show is an acronym of their names in Russian).

Since Oleg associates his own work with so-called historically informed performance (as curator Sasha Andrusyk cleverly noted that it’s rather “a reverie of the music of that era”), it became slightly more visible in the media. Because of that “medieval” tag, it created a distinct image. Even the composer himself once mentioned in his podcast that this new style helped him to achieve a kind of ironic distance that seems to be lacking with many ambient artists. But at the same time, it’s not just a stylistic game, but rather a personal way to work with the category of beauty, unpopular in art nowadays, how it was accurately noticed by the artist Katerina Lisovenko who was responsible for the visuals at Heinali’s latest show at Bouquet Kyiv Stage festival. His most successful one to date.

Last year Shpudeiko released an album in the UK called Madrigals which rose to а certain critical acclaim. It consists of four polyphonic pieces performed on the custom modular synth featuring parts on Baroque instruments. If this record had more to do with the Rennaisance and a metaphor of a garden, his newest live show dealt with the period of Western European history known as the High Middle Ages, so the first metaphor that came to my mind was an imaginary cathedral. The major part of the performance referenced the Gregorian chant, and the polyphony of the famous Notre Dame school in particular, but there was also an homage to the idiosyncratic work of a Catholic saint Hildegard von Bingen. It’s worth adding that the festival traditionally holds its place in the court of the XIth century Sophia Cathedral of Kyiv, so you may mind some parallels.

We asked Oleg to introduce the readers to the context of the Medieval vocal music and compose a rough guide for those who’d wish to delve into this maybe unfamiliar world. The musician’s commentaries are tightly bound with his own experience, so it’s not only a map but also an interesting narrative. Below he shares thoughts on his three favourite records of historically informed performances with a longer list in the appendix. The keywords to notice are “plainchant”, “organum”, and of course “polyphony”. The names you should remember are Pope Gregory, Leonin, Perotin, Hildegard von Bingen.

Ivan Shelekhov

Choeur des moines de l'Abbaye de Saint-Pierre de Solesmes - Solesmes 1930

(Solesmes)

Solesmes Abbey was responsible for the Gregorian chant revival at the beginning of the XX century. Which, as you know, had nothing to do with Pope Gregory—his authoritative and universally (in the Christian world) venerable image has been utilised by the Roman Church more than two hundred years after his death, in the IX century, as a tool of centralisation of power and displacement of otherness. They invented a myth of Pope Gregory composing these chants (with the Holy Spirit singing the chants to him in the form of a dove) to legitimise and advocate the superiority of the Roman style over a myriad of regional ones.

Centralisation of power, fake news, and influencers are surely nothing new. We could relate.

However, this particular record is my favourite rendition of plainchants. It’s performed by the monks of Solesmes Abbey, who believed Pope Gregory actually wrote the chant and tried to reconstruct it in the XIX century from the earliest sources available (instead of sticking with the 'corrupted' XVII century sources). It’s not a music record per se—they don’t sing these chants as music, they sing them as prayers, an audial religious practice, as it was in the middle ages; and we, well, most of us, can't help but listen as if they were music — something medieval people had a quite different understanding of.

Boethius’ three types of music come to mind: musica mundana, musica humana, musica instrumentalis, only the latter bearing any similarity to what we consider music now. However, if we recall the extent to which St. Augustine was conflicted on this matter — the ability of music to act as a powerful medium or a tool for a religious, mystical experience and, at the same time, its Midas touch — to aestheticise anything it encounters, turning everything it touches into beauty, that is, the vain pleasure of beauty (still nothing new, though, taking into account the recent discussions on music in Islam ignited by the threat of Taliban ban on secular music).

Another thing that makes this record interesting is the distance in time it manages to capture. It’s a mono recording from the early era of sound recording, with all its imperfections, surface noises, modulations, artefacts resounding the grain of time passed (hence the name Graindelavoix of my favourite early music ensemble — I stole this marvellous idea from Bjorn Schmeltzer’s Time Regained — great book, by the way). It almost sounds medieval, bringing forth, resounding the compression of time, of our past. Sometimes it feels like we’re standing at the same distance from the people of the tenth century as from the people of the first century. And, maybe, the same uncanny proportion could hold for the XX and X centuries?

You could’ve heard two Gregorian chant fragments that were the foundation of my live show. Ave Maris Stella and Viderunt Omnes. I transformed them in a way not too dissimilar to how the Notre Dame school composers of organa would've done it in the XII century. What is an organum?

The Hilliard Ensemble - Perotin

(ECM Records)

Organum is a time machine.

And has (probably) nothing to do with organs, with these enormous sonic marvels flexing the most advanced technology their age could offer (and unimaginable wealth and power, of course). The earliest organ at Notre-Dame was built in 1403, more than two centuries after the supposed lives of Leonin, optimus organista, that is, the best composer of organa, according to an anonymous visiting English student (sadly, now forever known in history as Anonymous 4) and Perotin, quoniam optimus discantor erat (ibid) that is, the best composer of discants (roughly speaking, a type of organum). It looks like the term organum has more to do with the human voice as an organ, referring to vocal music in general. Both Leonin and Perotin (as well as probably numerous other composers we know nothing of since they had a quite different view on authorship in the middle ages) were faced with the challenge of writing contemporary new music — the beautiful and virtuosic compositions that could attract people to the new recently consecrated cathedral under construction (completed in 1345). What were they up against? Why, the parties! Popular festivals in the city kept people away from the church and went kind of out of hand with Parisians merrily indulging themselves with all the alcohol, devilish dances, and all the other stuff that happens during the wildest parties you can imagine. It's an XII century Paris, after all.

Imagine facing the task of composing liturgical music that could compete with that. But they succeeded.

Maybe they were even a tad too good — let’s recall how pissed off Robert of Courçon, a contemporary Notre-Dame chancellor was with their new music, urging singers to stop chanting all these ‘effeminate’ ornamentations right away, especially in the presence of the youths and their 'fragile and susceptible minds' (reminds you of something, doesn’t it). Every year there was a competition for the 16 best singers from the whole Holy Roman Empire. 2-6 of the most virtuosic singers were selected among them to perform organa, the earliest marvels of polyphony (polyphony is, roughly speaking, several independent and equal in importance melodies performed at the same time). They were based on the fragments of well-known plainchants which were called tenors and were time-stretched (not unlike Christopher Nolan’s Inception and Hanz Zimmer’s clever work), sung nearly ten times slower, holding every note, while the newly composed rapid upper voice melodies (with up to 4 voices in total) ran swiftly and virtuosically, with all the embellishments, bells and whistles imaginable (apparently wildly infuriating the aforementioned Robert of Courçon).

Heinali's performance at the Bouquet Kyiv Stage 2021 in St. Sophia Cathedral

My organa, as I mentioned earlier, are based on plainchants as well, however, all the upper voices are generative, that is, they feature self-playing melodies, generated by a modular synthesizer set up (patched, as we say in a modular synth sect) in a certain way. It allows me to improvise them on the fly, not too far from what singers did in the XII century — the music notation we have from that period is more like a memory aid for the singers, akin to the XX century real/fake jazz books with the chord changes and basic melody outlines.

Leonin and Perotin composed organa for human voices, the most timeless of all instruments. Human voice existed for as long as we existed, was our first musical instrument (organ), and presumably will be our last. There’s nothing like it in electronic music, where any timbre lives a secret double life of a semantic fly trap — promptly and deadly it glues itself to the cultural context around it. Just how much easier it is to name the decade when a certain song was recorded just by hearing the electronic or electric timbres employed in it: overdriven guitar in the heavy metal of the 80s, hoover bass in the 90s jungle, etc. But the nearest I could get to the timelessness of the human voice is by sticking to the basic waveforms, building blocks of synthesis, the closest to neutral of all electronic timbres: triangles, saws, and squares. It's not a perfect solution, after all, even these basic waves are rooted in certain contexts, but the best I could think of.

Sequentia - Von Bingen: Canticles of Ecstasy

(Deutsche Harmonia Mundi)

My show, however, wasn't based solely on organa. Certain parts of it were a homage, if you will, to the music of Hildegard von Bingen, an XII century Benedectine abbess, polymath, composer, poet, visionary, philosopher, and mystic. She exchanged letters with Pope Eugene III and Pope Anastasius IV, Emperor Barbarossa, invented her language, her medicinal writings are still in use to this day. And as Margot Fassler piercingly noted, her music is like dynamite thrown into a Gregorian chant. It has not much to do with the composed, balanced, carefully organized nature of plainchants (a natural outcome of a scholastic way of understanding God through intellect and reason). Instead, it's a raw, unbalanced emotional, powerful, divinely inspired mystical experience. Her melodies (that came to her in her visions and were recorded by her secretary) often break the rules of medieval modes and transgress the comfortable ranges of singers.

And this particular recording of Hildegard’s music has a curious connection with the electronic scene. Canticles of Ecstasy is, if I’m not mistaken, is still the best-selling Early Music record. In large part because of the label’s marketing genius — of all people, they sold it to the early 90s ravers. It was a huge success and quickly filled chillout rooms around the world with Hildegard’s chants and exhibited a rather cringey but successful tagline “chill to the chant”.