Benjamin Bagby

about

Benjamin Bagby is a singer, composer, harpist, and groundbreaking performer of medieval music. Educated at Oberlin and the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Bagby founded the ensemble Sequentia with Barbara Thornton in 1977. This group takes an innovative approach to medieval repertoires, especially with respect to their treatment of mode: they rely on the harmonic qualities of their voices to guide them through the different modes. Sequentia has released many fine recordings, most of them on Harmonia Mundi. During the 1990s, the group specialized in the music of Hildegard von Bingen; many of their most famous recordings are from this period. The group has also performed music written in the 12th century from the musical centers Santiago de Compostela, Aquitaine, and Notre Dame. Benjamin Bagby work as a composer is seen in his recreations of the ancient epics, such as Beowulf, the Icelandic Edda and German music from the 10th and 11th centuries on their recent recording Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper. Bagby (widowed from his longtime collaborator Barbara Thornton) recently married Croatian chant scholar Katarina Livljanic. The Harp The 6-string harp used by Benjamin Bagby was built by Rainer Thurau (Wiesbaden, Germany), based on the remains of an instrument excavated from a 7th century Alemannic nobleman's grave in Oberflacht (south of Stuttgart). The remarkably intact pieces of oak clearly show a thin, hollow corpus with no soundholes. Like a similar instrument unearthed at Sut

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