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Singing performance of medieval classic "Beowulf" scheduled Tuesday at IU
Feb. 22, 2001
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- "Beowulf" will be sung in Old English by vocalist, harpist and scholar Benjamin Bagby on Tuesday (Feb. 27) as part of this year's Patten Lecture Series at Indiana University.
The public is invited without charge to the 8 p.m. event in Auer Hall in the School of Music. To aid the audience, the performance will include supertitles in modern English.
Bagby is director and co-founder of the medieval music ensemble Sequentia, which has performed programs of medieval music and drama throughout Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Near East, Japan, Korea and Australia.
Bagby has been involved in performing the Anglo-Saxon, ninth-century epic "Beowulf" for the past 14 years. "Beowulf" is a story of good and evil in which a knight defeats a monster and his mother with his magic sword and rules for 50 years.
In describing his work on "Beowulf," Bagby said, "The resulting performance attempts to help both me and the audience to enter into the world of the voice and the lyre as instruments in the service of the story, so that we can bypass the epic's modern status as a work of literature, as a masterpiece -- or even as a poem -- and instead begin to gain direct access to the power of the word as an aural phenomenon in which the voice, the sounds and the meaning are one with the listener."
In addition to the Tuesday performance, Bagby will present a lecture and demonstration titled "Beowulf, the Singer of Tales, and the Genesis of a Performance" on Thursday (March 1) at 7:30 p.m. in the Fine Arts Auditorium. This also will be open to the public without charge as part of the Patten Lecture Series.
The Patten Lecture Series was established by 1893 IU graduate William T. Patten in the 1930s to enrich the intellectual life of the campus. Over the years, guest lecturers have represented more than 50 academic departments and programs.
For more information on this program, contact Mary Tilton, executive director of the Patten Foundation, at 812-855-6398 or mtilton@indiana.edu