The Tempest Study Day

... hosted by the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in association with Jericho House, will take place on Monday 3rd October. The Study Day will interrogate the sound world of the play, drawing on the company’s work reconstructing historical music and investigating its interaction with the performance. Leading Shakespeare and Early Modern Music experts are gathering to explore these themes.

Speakers include:

* Professor Ann Thompson, Director of the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College, London
* Anthony Rooley, Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Switzerland and The Consort of Musicke
* Dr Gwilym Jones, Lecturer in English at Queen Mary, University of London and Visiting Lecturer Shakespeare’s Globe
* Jonathan Holmes, Artistic Director of Jericho House and Director of The Tempest
* Emily Baines, Musical Director of The Tempest and The Fellowshippe of Musickers
* Professor Gordon McMullan, Professor of English at King’s College, London

To book, please go to: http://www.barbican.org.uk/education/event-detail.asp?ID=12635

Further information on Jericho House’s The Tempest:

The Tempest premiered in 1611 with the most extensive sound world of any play yet written. Most of the music Robert Johnson wrote for the play has been lost, though some songs famously survive. This project begins from the hypothesis that Johnson transferred musical ideas and techniques from his contemporaneous work on court masques to his design for The Tempest, the most masque-like of plays. If so, these ideas would have included extensive improvisation and unconventional instrumentation by large groups of musicians. The result of doing so is not only a more voluminous use of sound, but rather a startlingly new musical dramaturgy for the time, one which casts sound, text and action in a highly novel light, and one which was not again repeated in the period. It is this dramaturgy which has been the subject of our research, and which has led us to see the play very differently. We view it essentially as a collaboration between two authors, from which substantial areas of musical text are missing, and so very much of a piece with the collaborative nature of other of Shakespeare’s late romances. Jericho House’s production stems from these ideas.

For more information on the production, or to book tickets, see: http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?ID=12493

Please email research@gsmd.ac.uk for any other enquiries.