Drums ’n’ Chant
Percussionist Martin Grubinger’s remarkable debut album on Deutsche Grammophon
Now here is something genuinely new: Gregorian chant underlaid and overlaid with percussion. This exciting territory has just been infiltrated and triumphantly occupied by an unlikely team of musical explorers: Martin Grubinger, the “incomparable” (Wiener Zeitung) young multi-percussionist whose “mind-boggling fusion of elemental vitality and artistic polish” (Die Welt) has left audiences cheering in his solo appearances at venues including Vienna’s Musikverein and New York’s Carnegie Hall, and Father Rhabanus of the Benedictine Abbey of Münsterschwarzach in Franconia, a noted scholar responsible for upholding the monastery’s tradition of Gregorian chant.
The idea actually originated with Deutsche Grammophon’s producer Christian Leins. When he proposed it to the percussionist in a meeting at the 2009 Salzburg Festival, Grubinger was at first slightly taken aback by the notion of such a novel form of musical fusion. “I’d never thought about doing this. Then I listened for months to Gregorian chant on CDs by the monks of Münsterschwarzach and got more and more into the music. I realized what a deep impact it was having on me and on my soul. It had a special spirit which could work well with the spirit of percussion. I discovered a way of relating the texts and rhythms to percussion instruments.”
When Martin Grubinger travelled to Münsterschwarzach to explain the idea to Father Rhabanus, he was met with a certain, not unexpected scepticism, though the Gregorian expert admittedly was quite intrigued. Before long, the young musician had the monk totally convinced, and Grubinger relates how delighted he was to discover that Father Rhabanus “knew everything about percussionists, about our instruments and our literature”. When Grubinger presented him with some preliminary approaches, Father Rhabanus’s first reaction was actually that they were “too conventional”, declaring that “we want something new, a real conversation between the chant and the percussion”. Because it wasn’t feasible to record chanting and percussion simultaneously, Grubinger was given permission to use the celebrated Münsterschwarzach recordings made for Archiv Produktion. Grubinger, who knew Latin from school, analyzed the texts in order to have a full grasp of the literary and spiritual content and their historical background.
Realizing that both the Catholic Church and percussion are universal, Martin Grubinger has aimed to create as much musical diversity as possible among the album’s 12 tracks. He invited other musicians to collaborate – including a singer and a ney player from Turkey – and incorporated a range of African and Middle Eastern instruments in the arrangements, as well as the oboe of the Berliner Philharmoniker’s principal Albrecht Mayer, one of that instrument’s supreme exponents.
Grubinger and his fellow players began by singing the melodies themselves. “More and more we got a feeling for it”. They analyzed the chant rhythms and discovered the irregular bar lengths implied by the melodic stresses. Many trial recordings followed as layer upon layer of subtle percussion playing was superimposed on the monks’ chanting. The sessions, he relates, were very intense. It took 16 hours, for example, to record the percussion for one chant lasting just five minutes. “We wanted to create real structures,” the percussionist says, “real compositions.”
“Maybe the secret of why this concept is so fascinating”, says Martin Grubinger, “is that chant and percussion are intrinsically so unalike. Percussion is based on rhythm and metre and offers so many possibilities of sound and colour, while chant is based on the text as expressed in a single voice and is extremely spiritual and lyrical. In the end we hope listeners will enjoy the diverse traditions and cultures we’ve brought together: different styles, different meaning, different systems.”
Weiner Zeitun? Is that like a P e n i s Q u e e f?
