Mary

Submission by Mary

Hi there, I'm Mary Larew. I've recently returned to my beloved native Iowa, after four years of undergraduate study at the Oberlin Conservatory and, more recently, years of graduate study at the University of York in England. In February I will return to York to defend my PhD, which I submitted in October. The submission includes a portfolio of medieval music-dramas that I directed over the course of three years, along with a thesis that contextualizes the productions.
This year I'm bouncing back and forth between Des Moines and Iowa City -- two very different cities indeed; each with its own 'Iowan mystique'. I'm doing some music teaching as well as working on writing a collection of short stories and composing an opera, for which I'm adapting W.S. Merwin's poem 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' for a libretto, and which I'm scoring for early instruments.
Within the next nine months or so I'm planning to relocate to a larger city, probably on the east coast, intending to settle there for a while. One day, I dream of returning to Iowa and starting an artist colony and an early music festival, but I anticipate -- and look forward to -- many unpredictable adventures in the intervening years.

I suspect that my predilection for early music began one balmy July 4th morning in the early 1980s. I was just barely verbal, but I was swiftly falling in love -- with the distant strains of a bagpipe band, warming up before joining a parade in Columbus, Ohio. Once my parents realized my toddler fascination, they were kind enough to escort me to the source of the sound. We watched the group tuning in a parking lot and ignored the start of the parade as it passed more conventionally before the crowd lining the streets. This love blossomed into an eccentric childhood obsession with all things Scottish -- Scottish Highland dance, food, clothing, fiddling, and, of course, bagpipes. I ate haggis on St. Andrew's Day and danced sword dances in honor of Robert Burns's birthday, competing in Scottish Highland games...throughout the American Midwest.
But what does this all have to do with early music? My instinct is that it has a lot to do with my more adult pursuits.
Culturally, there is the intrigue of the 'exotic'. The mystical aura of 'Celtic' culture, re-invented and dispersed in modern manifestation, is not so far off from the monastic mystery of the similarly re-constructed Middle Ages. Both bear a resemblance to factual culture and time, but both are ambiguous enough for the geographically or chronologically distant -- in the Midwest and the modern era -- to take imaginative license in envisioning what might be or might have been. Musically, there is no mistaking the attraction I feel toward modal melodies and harmonies constructed from drones. And, though Scottish bagpipe music is rigidly structured in much of its ornamentation, and interpretations are dictated by diligent notation, the wider musical world of folk encourages a freedom and individuality of interpretation that is not to be found in more mainstream classical music -- except for early music. This freedom is irresistible and all-important to me.
My first encounter with early music was actually via modern musical theater. The production was 'The Sound of Music'; my role -- my favorite role of all the motherly roles I was type-cast in throughout my high school dramatic career -- was the Mother Abbess. When the director instructed me to take on the additional backstage-role of nuns' choir rehearsal leader, I was all too pleased to take charge. What I didn't realize at the time was that I would soon be pursuing a career in performing the kinds of music these nuns sang as brief interludes throughout the production.
This realization came several years later, at Oberlin, where I sang in the Collegium Musicum. I'd auditioned for the ensemble without really knowing what it was, but it took me almost no time at all, once singing with the choir, to know that singing renaissance polyphony was heaven. By the end of my first year, I'd secretly confessed to myself that if I could do anything at all in life, I wanted to sing early music. By the time I left Oberlin, I was proclaiming this ambition to just about everyone.
Early music is what I love. I love the ways it can sound, I love working with fellow musicians to interpret and perform it, I love the creative and enterprising ethos of the field, I love what is unknown about the music at least as much as I love what is known. Just as I toddled over to the pipers of Columbus because I could not resist them, I sing medieval and renaissance music because they call to me, just as alluringly, from the sidelines of the parade.