FOCUS ON
An Interview with Drew Minter
By Constance Whiteside
From the HHS Bulletin; The Quarterly Publication of the Historical Harp Society; Volume
11, Number 2, Spring 2001
Among the world’s foremost countertenors, Drew Minter has appeared in leading roles with the opera companies of Brussels, Toulouse, Boston, Washington, Santa Fe, BAM, Wolf Trap, Glimmerglass, Nice, and Marseille, as well as the Skylight Opera, Opera/Omaha, the Berkshire Opera Festival, and at the Halle, Karlsruhe, Maryland, and Goettingen Handel festivals. He has sung with many of the world’s leading early music ensembles, including Les Arts Florissants, the Handel and Haydn Society, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Freiburger Barockorchester, and as a guest at festivals such as Regensburg, BAM’s Next Wave, Boston Early Music, Edinburgh, and Spoleto.
Mr. Minter is a founding member of the Newberry Consort and performs regularly with My Lord Chamberlain’s Consort, ARTEK, and the Folger Consort. His newly formed group, TREFOIL, an ensemble of singer/instrumentalists, performs 14th century music from original notation.
He is represented by over 40 recordings on Harmonia Mundi, Decca/London, Newport Classics, Lyrichord and Hungaroton. His articles and reviews have appeared in Opera News, Musical Times, and Early Music America.
Widely acknowledged for his significant performances and recordings of the operas of Handel, he has sung leading roles in and/or directed over two dozen of Handel’s dramatic works. Drew Minter is also a lauded opera director; this past year he directed productions of Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte,” for Boston’s Opera Aperta, Pauline Viardot’s “Cendrillon” for the BU Opera Institute and Purcell’s “Fairy Queen” at Vassar College. In the upcoming year, he will direct both Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” and Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” in his own English translations.
In addition to master classes and workshops at Amherst Early Music and the San Francisco Early Music Workshops, he teaches on the voice faculties of Vassar and Smith Colleges.
CW: How did you become
interested in performing early music?
DM: As a countertenor, I’ve been
performing early music ever since my voice changed, which was at age fifteen. I grew up singing as a boy chorister in the
Washington National Cathedral from the age of nine, so I was familiar with all the great
renaissance polyphonic composers fro Josquin to Byrd, as well as a great deal of baroque
music. When I attended Indiana University as
a comparative literature major, I began voice studies in the voice department at the same
time. That was when a whole world of early
music began to open to me, starting with singing in annual madrigal dinners. The first performance I ever did with period
instruments was a Monteverdi “Vespers” which I remember as if it were yesterday. For the first time, the music sounded so much more
rhythmic than the more labored modern instrument baroque music I was used to.
CW: What qualities of a
countertenor’s voice are particularly suited to early music.
DM: I think the lightness and general lack
of steady vibrato are good for a start. Today,
however, countertenors are training more and more in an opera way and are starting to
sound more generic as a voice type. This is
excellent for opera, because countertenors are by and large producing more decibels than
they use to (people forget that Deller was not able to sing loud enough over the orchestra
of Britten’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” when it was first performed,
and the revival of the production was sung by Russell Oberlin). But many of the subtleties of the chorally trained
countertenors, and most of the individuality, are growing less. On the plus side, there’s a much larger pool
of countertenors out there, so inevitably, as in any art form, there are more good ones
than there used to be.
CW: What led you to take up the harp?
DM: The mezzo-soprano Judith Malafronte
asked me six years or so ago to play “three notes” in a medieval song she was
singing in a concert at the Amherst Early Music Festival.
But where a harp is concerned, one can hardly stay satisfied with three
notes for long! The group I’ve had the
longest association with, The Newberry Consort, had inherited a number of instruments from
Howard Mayer Brown upon his death, and so one of Howard’s harps became my first.
CW: Why did you choose
the harp, as compared to another instrument such as the vielle or lute?
DM: I was looking for a way to accompany
myself in a very specific repertoire, namely the high medieval art song, especially
troubadour and trouvere repertoire. Judging
from the documentation, the troubadour repertoire was most often accompanied on a vielle,
but the trouvere repertoire, especially the lai repertoire, was accompanied often on a
harp. I was familiar with this repertoire
from years with the Newberry Consort. Since I
am a rather incompetent keyboard player, but nonetheless able to get around the keyboard,
the transfer to the strings and orientation of the harp was a natural for getting started
on a new instrument. However, I have tried to
do a little playing on the vielle as well, but it doesn’t feel natural to accompany
one’s own singing on this instrument…as a matter of fact, the sources that
describe troubadour accompaniment (and many of the pictures) show one vielle player
accompanying a non-playing singer or reciter.
CW: Has playing the
harp changed your singing and/or your approach to the vocal performance of early music?
DM: I don’t think it has changed my
singing in any direct way, but accompanying myself on the harp has forced me to confront
many issues of breathing and timing. It has
especially helped me talk to my accompanists in other repertoires as regards how to
anticipate phrases, how to breath and phrase, where to place notes in a phrase.
CW: In what period(s)
of music do you combine harp and voice, and why?
DM: I combine harp and voice in the high
medieval song repertoire. Aside from
troubadour and trouvere repertoires, my group TREFOIL accompanies itself with plucked
strings in the ars subtilior repertoire of late 14th century France, and the
Italian lauda repertoire. I have also done a
lot of Gallician lyrics accompanying myself on the harp, and some German minnesang. The minnesang repertoire is the one I most hope to
expand for myself next in my solo repertoire.
CW: Would you give us an example of a piece where you sing and play the harp, and describe the process by which you:
DM: I usually identify a piece I want to explore initially by the text. Having examined a poem I find interesting, I next play the melody a number of times to see if I like it. Presuming I do, the next step is to memorize the tune and see how much melodic material can be mined from it. How flexible and responsive to different rhythmic manipulations is the melody? In a long piece this can be critical. For instance, I’ve performed as a single concert, half of the “Titurel” fragments by Wolfram von Eschenbach (with support from David Douglass on the vielle). In this fragmented epic poem, an adjunct to the great Parsival, there are five characters. We performed 70 of the 140 verses, chosen for their ability to narrate the story as well as their delightful rhetoric (there’s a marvelous section which is a discourse on the nature of courtly love).
The poem itself is very complicated verse form consisting of four lines of five, seven and ten feet. The tune we think it was performed to is a complex, partially melismatic tune—a high art form, if ever there were any. With this level of complexity in a tune, it is easy to simplify the tune, one way of manipulation. The tune itself suggests some moving drones in the accompaniment. I started with these progressions (two, and sometimes three droning tones). As there are five characters in the “Titurel,” I chose a different voice for each of the five: my “normal” countertenor voice for the narrator; a gentler alto for the heroine Sigune; a hearty baritone for Schionatulander, her lover; a light speaking voice for Sigune’s aunt and confidante; and a more worn speaking voice for Schionatulander’s lord. Some of the vocalized sections were sung to the full tune in a free rhythm and accompanied by droning and “ghosting” along with the tune; some were more recited, with a reduced drone accompaniment, and some where sung as dance tunes. In addition, I created dances with David from the tunes as interludes to the story, especially as ways to get from one place in the story to another.
CW: Do you play other
instruments?
DM: I play piano well enough to accompany my
students in their lessons (perhaps some students would dispute this!). And I play frame drums and the tambourine, a
recent and enthusiastic fascination.
CW: You performed music
from several periods and cultures. Do you
have a favorite? If so, would you tell us
why?
DM: I am most fascinated at the moment by my
work in medieval lyric. However, as I answer
this, I’m in the midst of a string of performances of Handel’s
“Messiah”, and though I’ve performed this piece more than two hundred
times, I’m still finding interesting choices, and consequently, fascinated with it. Handel was for a very long time my favorite
composer, for his incredible understanding of the human condition in operas. Last year I was directing “Cosi fan
tutte,” however, and Mozart was my favorite while I was working on that. At the same time, TREFOIL was performing the
incredibly complex late 14th century French repertoire, so I was most
fascinated with that. I guess in a general
way, my “favorite” repertoire is the one I’m working on at the moment. For me as a singer at the moment, that’s
mostly medieval song, as a director, that’s Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” and
Rossini’s “Barber of Seville; and as a teacher, that’s mostly the 19th
century French song. It’s hard to play
favorites with repertoires of this caliber.
CW: How do you prepare
for a performance-to put yourself into the mood and time of the piece?
DM: I try to get centered in my body: to be
aware of my breathing, to be present. If I
know the music, this is enough.
CW: As a singer, what
do you look for in an instrumentalist accompanying you, particularly a harpist?
DM: A good sense of rhythm is the main thing
I need in an accompanist. Next I want them to
breathe. Next, I prefer if they know the
text. You’d be surprised how many
instrumentalists never bother to find out what they’re accompanying. If the singer is really gifted, the song can still
be effectively performed, but another level of communication is attained when the
accompanist knows what they’re playing about.
CW: Would you give some
specific advice for harpists (or other instrumentalists) when they are accompanying a
singer?
DM: I think accompanists should try as
closely as possible themselves to sing with the singer.
The more they can do this, the more of the placement and agogic of the
accompaniment will explain itself. This does
not mean being entirely passive to the whims of the singer.
If the accompanist knows the song, it’s possible to influence the
singer’s breathing and phrasing (in positive ways) by the spreading of a chord, or
even by the strength or softness of the playing of a single note. These things cannot happen in any sort of
meaningful way, however, unless the accompanist knows the words as well as the music.
CW: What to you, is the
most important aspect in performing early music?
DM: The most important aspect in performing
any music at all is being convinced of the importance of doing so. If you love the piece, that’s a good start. If you learn as much about the piece as you can
before performing it—its structure, its reason for existing in the first place, its
historical context and how it may have been performed originally—the chances of
making meaningful communication with your audience are greatly enhanced. Of course, no performance is perfect. Always more can be learned and put into the
performance. With good music, you never mind
returning to the piece again, because you get the chance by the next performance to
perform it with greater investigation to back it up.
This means you will have more to say, and hence, your performance will be
more rewarding.
CW: When you perform a
given piece, what do you hope the listener will carry away with them?
DM: I hope they will take away a greater
sense of themselves.
CW: What do you think
the future holds for early music and early music musicians?
DM: A great deal of enjoyment, and also
certain frustrations. The increased amount of
information about all these early music repertoires makes investigating a given piece or
performance so very exciting! At the same
time, in our country, funding for chamber music, under which heading most of early music
can be lumped, is not high. Early music is
not glitzy in the way that happenings like big opera productions, or certainly films and
other entertainment media events are. In
addition, the recording industry, long a major outlet for early music musicians, is
experiencing a slowdown. We must be patient
with these events and hold on to the fascination with our work.