“Thus far, and further” is the translation and the motto for early music singers Ensemble Plus Ultra, who perform liturgical music from the Renaissance.
Ever wonder what Spanish explorers listened to as they mapped the world? Probably not. But worth exploring are the discoveries of Britain’s Ensemble Plus Ultra.
The ensemble is an eight-piece consort of chamber musicians that sings early liturgical music, mostly, from the Spanish Renaissance. Founded by Michael Noone in 2001, EPU formed when Noone discovered previously unknown music from the Spanish composer Cristóbal de Morales in the Toledo Cathedral archive. In reconstructing 16th century choir books and other badly damaged musical texts he became enamoured with their potential for contemporary audiences. Compelled and inspired to share what he’d found, Noone got “the best singers” he knew together, and the group debuted with Morales’ rediscovered work in Toledo in 2003.
Since then, Plus Ultra has recorded 17 CDs, winning the 2012 Gramophone Award for Early Music, toured frequently throughout Europe (and extensively in Spain), performed at various music festivals, and recently introduced itself to American audiences.
The name Plus Ultra (“thus far, and further”) comes from the motto of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and first Hapsburg King of Spain, who modified his original motto of “Non plus ultra” (thus far, and no further) to grant Spanish explorers and the empire greater geographical reign. The ensemble, in turn, gives voice to previously unheard liturgical music and broadens the Renaissance musical canon.
“One of the things we’ve tried to do, very faithfully, is to reproduce the sound of the 16th century as much as possible,” Noone said.
Being faithful to the original music and the structure of the Spanish liturgy means excluding the conductor or minimizing any directorial influence. The point of the performances is to accentuate the voices of highly skilled individual singers while also merging their symphonic qualities. As singer and co-director David Martin said, “We tend to bring in the experiences of all of the musicians rather than just the opinions of one person at the front.” This shared autonomy is what makes the group a chamber and not a choir, and allows for slight improvisation or adjustment and adds to the push for discovery.
Noone, who received his doctorate in musicology from Kings College, Cambridge and now co-directs and does the historical research for the group, feels Plus Ultra’s objective is to emotionally interact with the audience.
“It’s all about moving the audience with the human voice. It’s about direct communication. There’s not very much point in discovering fabulous music if no one can hear it,” he said.
A significant connection is inevitable when eight singers (and six in Charlottesville) stand on an open stage with nothing but sheets of music separating them from the audience. It’s for that reason, among others, that according to Martin, “Classical music is going through a renaissance. The popularity of classical music concerts, and within that vast genre, chamber music concerts, is really increasing. I think its our job to make things a little bit more interesting to entice people in and encourage them to enjoy what we do.”
“I think ‘thus far, and further’ fits in very well with our desire to create new music and commission composers to write new music based on what has come before. The 16th century composer has written the music, it’s our job to bring it to life. They’ve done the ‘thus far’ bit, it’s our job to make it ‘and further’.”
Ensemble Plus Ultra is one of a wide array of classical chamber musical groups performing in the series this year. “We always have a smorgasbord of offerings for the entire season,” said TECS executive director Karen Pellón. The purpose of which, she said, “is to bring the finest classical chamber music to the region.”
Providing the highest quality of music has been the modus operandi of the series since its inception in 1948 when the TECS Group was founded by Martin B. Hiden and presented for its first concert, The Mozart Trio. In 1951, the series took its present form and has been showcasing notable classical musicians, such as Yo-Yo Ma, Yuri Bashmet, Pinchas Zuckerman, and Joshua Bell, ever since.
The Charlottesville audience will bear witness to the group’s chamber music and aural tones in a program that consists of music from Francisco Guerrero, Bernardo de Ribera, Tomas Luis de Victoria, and Morales.
Ensemble Plus Ultra performs at Cabell Hall November 12. Samples of the group’s work are accessible at www.ensembleplusultra.com. Tickets to the Tuesday Evening Concert Series are available at the UVA Arts box office or the website at www.tecs.org.
Tess Taylor turned documents she found during a residency at Monticello into poems for her new book, The Forage House.
In The Forage House, published by Red Hen Press, Tess Taylor explores the historical and individual toll of inheritance and how we are shaped by the legacies that come to represent our past and present realities.
A descendant of Thomas Jefferson, Taylor was greatly affected when, in 1997, University of Virginia biologist Eugene Foster discovered a genetic connection between the relatives of Sally Hemings and the country’s third president and UVA founder.
“It was a fierce wake-up call,” she said, in a Publishers Weekly interview earlier this year.
Taylor was dually affected by her California upbringing and by her ties, through Thomas Jefferson Randolph and the Randolph-Taylors, to slavery, and propelled as a journalist and a poet to uncover the truth of her family lore. During the years of 2005 and 2006, she was in residence at Monticello, where she worked with archaeologists and historians, combed family attics, and pored over historical documents, including letters, wills, and auction records, in research for the book. In an effort to name and give record to the past, Taylor infuses many of the documents she found into poems like “Southhampton County Will 1745” and “Martha Jefferson’s Housewife,” but also enlivens the spirit of her grandfather in “Oral History 1963,” and sings of her literary and American bequest in “Song for Cerrito” and “Reading Walden in the Air.”
While The Forage House is Taylor’s press debut, she also wrote a chapbook, entitled The Misremembered World, which was awarded the New York Chapbook Fellowship and was published by the Poetry Society of America. Her journalistic work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, and her poetry, acclaimed by Natasha Trethewey and Eavan Boland, has been published in Shenandoah, The Harvard Review, and Poetry Magazine, among others. She currently lives in her hometown of El Cerrito, California and teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.
In anticipation of Taylor’s book signing at New Dominion Bookshop on September 11, C-VILLE spoke to Tess Taylor by phone.
C-VILLE Weekly: How are you specifically related to Thomas Jefferson and what role does inheritance play in this collection?
Tess Taylor: Thomas Jefferson Randolph [Thomas Jefferson’s grandson] was the grandfather of Bennett Taylor, who went off and fought in the Civil War, and Bennett Taylor is my grandfather’s grandfather (Lee Taylor, who is mentioned in the poem “Oral History 1963”). So as I thought about this book and which stories to feature and which characters were going to pop, and as I was kind of learning this genealogy, those people as markers of proximity or distance to Jefferson were really fascinating to me.
Jefferson is very interesting, but you might also think about this book—in its small way—not only about literal family but also as framing a kind of dialogue with inheritance itself, or as a proxy discussion for any flawed thing we inherit. You might notice references to Auden, Hopkins, Ginsberg as well—there are some literary figures passing through this somewhat historical gathering. Think about the literary past—also based on haunting exclusions, and full of cruelties and riches. We look back and critique it, we also can’t simply throw it away; we find ourselves and orient ourselves through recourse to it. We reinvent it, but we are also sticky with associations.
In “World’s End: On the Site of Randolph Wilton,” you write, “O descendants, I am sorry/Ancestors I would undo this if I could.” Why is it important to undo or sort out the transgressions of the past?
As a writer I became really preoccupied with the questions of what it meant not to write people down. This is a book that is enthralled with documents and a lot of the poems are achieved through looking at documents and looking for documents. So the fact, then, that the documents don’t reveal people became something that was haunting for me. It became a thing where I could say, well, whether or not you agree with the story about Sally Hemings, something we can all agree with is that this was something that happened, where we didn’t write people’s names down. You can say there’s no proof, but we’re the very family that created the condition by which there is no proof.
How does writing a collection of poems with a historical basis differ from writing poetry based on personal and narrative impressions of life?
I thought I was going to be writing essays and some kind of journalistic book about what had happened in my family. As I started working with it, the material, I found that it was overwhelming to try to create a complete and coherent account of what had happened; that some people in my family felt threatened by the project of journalism whereas poetry somehow didn’t threaten them as much. Also, I was dealing with these very haunting documents. Poetry kind of presented itself as a form that made use of absence. You could be working with shards because poems are like shards. I had the chance to work with archaeologists at Monticello. I would go out and see the things that they had dug up, and I’d see these tiny little buttons. These little buttons or these little pipe stems that they’d excavated from the ground, and see the enormity of the absence around them, and, to me, that suggested a poem more than a big long essay.
What are you trying to accomplish, personally, as a poet?
Well, Elizabeth Bishop once said that, “If you came in contact with a work of art it would make the world look different for 24 hours.” That’s always something that I’ve looked for in the work that I read. I like the idea that poetry can unsettle the present, in a way that it can make the day that we live in feel more mysterious if we engage with it. That’s my hope for the work that I make.
Wilfred "88 Keys" Wilson at Fellini's #9. Photo: Justin Ide
It’s been nearly two decades since Atsushi Miura routinely stepped out from slicing yellowtail behind the sushi bar at Tokyo Rose and climbed on stage to perform his trademark satirical ode to local culture—one that served to bring down the house full of indie rockers, goths, and punks with its title chorus “I hate Charlottesville/too boring/I hate Charlottesville/nothing, ohhhh.”
The topic of whether or not Charlottesville has a healthy local music community is still widely debated. Overall there is something for everyone. Ask the fans and you get a picture of a thriving scene led by a variety of Billboard charted names and those climbing the Pitchfork lists. The club kids are excited about a once quiet scene now bolstered by touring bands that roll through the ticketed venues on a nightly basis. Ask the musicians, and you’ll get a high percentage of complaints, all mixed with gratitude for the increase in opportunity and exposure that comes from gigging in the town that Starr Hill Presents pinned to the booking map.
In between lies another stratum of live music. While many local musicians play around town frequently, and others are selective, trying to avoid overexposure, it’s the regulars who take up residence and hold court, providing the everyday currency for our musical image, as they do in vibrant locales such as New Orleans.
Scattered along the Downtown Mall and across the city, when the theaters let out, dinner rush is over, and the evening crosses into late night, resident musicians punch in and take the stage. Most of these acts book their own gigs, haul their own equipment, then settle up and load out at the end of the night with little fanfare other than a black-slap and a drink. There are no meet and greets, catering or handlers to be found, and it’s only the occasional overwrought newbie who fawns over their performance or asks for a signature.
The regulars reach an audience never defined by class or creed. They play for the chat-while-listening crowd, the loner drinking away the pain, the hustler on the make, the elderly woman sipping in the corner, and the gregarious co-eds with their newly minted IDs. They play to be heard, and to unleash the muse, stoking the fire within and building a following that over time becomes a family.
Profoundly talented musicians play regular gigs at Blue Moon Diner, C’ville Coffee, Durty Nelly’s, Escafe, LaTaza Tiki Bar, Miller’s, Rapture, The Whiskey Jar, Wild Wing Café, and in the surrounding breweries and wineries. And if local music has a soul, it can be found at Fellini’s #9 on Mondays when Wilfred “88 Keys” Wilson plays and sings, “You wander down the lane and far away/leaving me a song that will not die/love is now the stardust/of yesterday/the music/of the years/gone by.” —Tami Keaveny
Photo: Justin Ide.
Wilfred “88 Keys” Wilson at Fellini’s #9
Every Monday evening at Fellini’s #9, Wilfred Wilson’s lithe, well-worn fingers tap out tunes that, to the cultured ear, are recognizable as jazz standards, the soundtrack of post World War II America. Professionally known as “88 Keys,” a nickname given to him by Clarence “Dinky” Monroe that reflects his propensity to use every note available to him, the 87-year-old Wilson wore a short-sleeve blue collar shirt and brown suspenders when I went to see him play, like a cross between Thelonious Monk and a ’60s factory floor manager.
Playing “Moon River,” “Almost Like Being in Love,” and “Over the Rainbow,” his music exists in a time warp, transmitting the energy of an age when Nat King Cole and Johnny Mercer filled the airwaves, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire tapdanced across the silver screen, and bars were places to drink, dream, and forget. It was also a time when, in Charlottesville and the rest of the segregated South, the best jobs for African-Americans were in entertainment and service.
Born in 1926, Wilson grew up on Page Street, in what used to be Vinegar Hill. His mother was a music teacher, who “didn’t have a whole lot of students, but I think I was one” he said, and his father was a waiter and a bartender in the club car for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. From an early age Wilson knew it was music and music alone that interested him. His mother taught him to play the piano at age 7 and a few years later he took up the trumpet.
“I’d just bang on [the piano] and make noise—disturbing the peace,” said Wilson. “Pianos were pieces of furniture in everyone’s house. I’d try all the pianos in the neighborhood.”
Wilson’s professional music career began in the Army during World War II. He was in special services, the entertainment division of the military, and co-directed a show called “The Regimental Rhythm Revue,” which was so good that it was put on a six-month tour throughout Western Europe, playing at bases in Geneva, Naples, and Reims for GIs. When he came home in 1947, Wilson missed the Army life.
“I got in the reenlistment line, and then, looking around, I quickly got out,” he said, laughing and then soberly nodding his head.
“88 Keys” Wilson has been a Charlottesville jazz mainstay since the 1950s when his band played clubs (like Miller’s Flat and Kenny’s Hall) and entertained at parties and weddings around the area, traveling to Washington, D.C. to play at Midwinters and Easters, sometimes in the same lineup as acts like The Temptations and The Four Freshman, and other times sharing a stage with jazz legends such as Sarah Vaughan and Count Basie.
Charlottesville’s music scene was lively then.
“We used to have a lot of bands coming in, years ago, for different things,” Wilson said. “We had a lot of clubs. We don’t have the clubs no more, and we don’t have the people that used to go to them. They were good times. There were good things to remember, they’re just not happening anymore.”
In the ’60s and ’70s, as the club scene died, Wilson, like other local musicians, gravitated to the UVA fraternity and formal circuit. Recalling those times brings a wry smile to his face.
“We’d come out from playing and another fraternity would catch us and ask us to play their party,” he told me, sitting in front of his portrait hanging on the wall at Fellini’s #9.
Wilson also worked for 30 years at the UVA Medical Center as a driver, an assistant in the radiology and special procedures departments, and as the hospital’s in-house piano man, playing for patients, staff, and passersby during his lunch break. He still plays there a couple times a week and is greeted by old friends and coworkers, children of former coworkers, and patients who have listened to his soothing reprieve for years.
Growing up, Wilson’s primary musical influence was church music, gospel, but it was songs like “Stardust,” by Hoagy Carmichael, and trombonists like “Tricky Sam” Nanton who inspired him.
“I love ‘Stardust,’” said Wilson. “I’m always going to play ‘Stardust.’ It used to be that was a key song for big bands over the years. ‘Stardust’ was one of those songs you got on the floor with.”
After nearly two decades playing at Central Place on the Downtown Mall and in lobbies of various hotels, Wilson was offered a regular gig in 2007 by Fellini’s #9 owner Jaclynn Dunkle, which he happily accepted. Dunkle was introduced to Wilson by the late George Melvin, a local jazz organist who played at Fellini’s, and she knew instantly that “88 Keys” fit her vision of the new Fellini’s.
“He’s old school,” Dunkle said when asked what it was that convinced her to hire the octogenarian jazz pianist.
When you go hear him, it’s easy for the tunes to lull you into the sense that you’re listening to background music: saccharine old film scores and songs you’ve heard repurposed in commercials 1,000 times. But listen carefully and you start to feel Wilson’s gift, the way he moves in front of and then behind the rhythm, the way he weaves his own improvisations into the tunes.
“In jazz, you know, you do a lot of stuff,” Wilson said. “I put a lot of mixed-up stuff in there. I recreate the song in my own way. Ad-libbing, they call it.”
It’s in the effortless way he infused limiting conventions, both in life and at the piano, that has made Wilson a local icon. Art Wheeler, who is himself a piano legend and has played for five United States presidents and served as the musical director at Mount Zion First African Baptist Church, credits his own career to Wilson’s indirect influence.
“I was immediately inspired with the possibility that one day I would feel comfortable and secure to play outside, to play in public,” Wheeler said. “I eventually did, and I owe a large part of that emotional change to watching his confidence and listening to him play.”
Wheeler sees in Wilson a man who made a living and provided for his family, who broke barriers and crossed lines, and who did it all so gracefully that he was hardly noticed: “He was playing lovingly, casually, friendly in a time when this country and this city were divided because of appearance. That influence is immeasurable and real and not random, and it’s substantial.”
If you want to hear Wilson play and talk he has a CD called My Way, which consists of his set favorites, like “Satin Doll” and “Misty” alongside a biographical interview that serves as an interlude. Or you could just walk down to Fellini’s #9 one Monday evening and see him for yourself. —Justin Goldberg
