Musician Musings: John Lenti

I love Renaissance music. I have always loved Renaissance music. The story of my love affair with Renaissance music isn’t too complicated. I heard a little bit of it when I was 14 and just getting serious about classical guitar. It was a recording, I’m not sure whose, of the Fantasia que contrehaze la arpa in la manera de Ludovico by Alonso Mudarra. Then I went and found lots of other recordings of Renaissance music, first all lute and vihuela (Spanish instrument tuned and played like a lute but shaped like a guitar) music, then instrumental ensemble stuff, then the vocal polyphony, and that was that. Renaissance music was the whole world to me. I made my way through music school as a deeply unhappy classical guitarist, and then my Dad told me to get a lute. I did so. Then I heard Jacob Heringman play a recital of Josquin intabulations (Renaissance lute music has a preponderance of arrangements of vocal polyphony, which are called “intabulations”) and I realized that I had to play the lute and play nothing but the lute, especially because of Jacob’s rendition of Simon Gintzler’s intabulation of Josquin’s chanson Nimphes nappes, which Gintzler identifies by its tenor line, which is the Gregorian chant Circumdederunt me. So I moved to London to study with Jacob. When I was thoroughly homesick, I came back to the USA to study with Nigel North in Indiana. I fully intended to play Renaissance music, and Renaissance music alone, for the rest of my life, but during my first lesson with Nigel, Paul Elliot, the voice teacher in the Early Music Institute at the time, came in and without even looking at me addressed Nigel: 

PAUL: Can this one play continuo*? 

NIGEL: I’m not sure. [turns toward JOHN] Can you read bass clef?

JOHN: Yes?

[NIGEL turns back toward PAUL]

NIGEL: When do you need him?

PAUL: When is he finished?

NIGEL: In about ten minutes.

PAUL: [thrusts a sheaf of papers at NIGEL] Well, send him along with this when he’s done here.

NIGEL: All right, then.

[exit PAUL]

JOHN: wha?

NIGEL: Oh, it’s d’India**. Damn, that’s actually kind of hard. Well, play the bass line, chords when you can, stay ahead of the singer.

[JOHN now plays BAROQUE MUSIC]

[enter THEORBO]

fin

*Basso continuo, or, to the initiated, continuo, is the characteristic accompanimental technique for all baroque music, in which a player of a chordal instrument improvises harmonies above the bass line. It’s what the keyboardist, theorbist, harpist, etc., do in all your favorite PBO shows.

**The song was Sigismondo d’India’s “Piangono al pianger mio.”

What it means to be a performer

A poem by John Lenti:
when i was really quite bad
at playing the lute
i gave up my carefully constructed identity
as a folksy intellectual southerner with literary pretensions
and pretty good guitarist
and school teacher
and lover of a fabulous little redhead
and ultra orthodox appalachian oldtime musician
and weekend fisherman
and all round outdoorsy hail fellow well met son of a gun
i gave up the only version of me that i’d ever been able to stand being
though some of that identity was flimsy as tissue

the new version of me went to london
a bumpkin of a nobody
who was just plain bad
at playing the lute
i had an american expat landlady
she was a psychotherapist
she had two friends who were married to each other
they were also psychotherapists and they were both blind
not thick-glasses blind but with a cane and can’t see nothing blind
they had a daughter who wasn’t blind who was maybe ten years old
and one night they all three of them came to dinner
i had intended to spend the evening holed up in my room getting drunk
but my landlady asked me to play for her guests
(and whenever i did that for her she’d give me a break on the week’s rent)

so i played for the four of them
atrociously
on the lute
and then much better on the guitar
and sang them the songs of not-really-my-people
so everybody was charmed
and i would have retreated
because it looked like my landlady and her friends were going to be talking shop
and the little girl was going to read a book
but hell if the little girl didn’t absolutely pin me down
and ask me a million highly articulate questions
the only really childlike one of which was
out of left field
can you do any magic tricks

well i may not be a great lute player
and i’m not a real southerner
and my whole folksy schtick is rather pretentious
but as a matter of fact i darn well can do a tiny bit of magic

i’m going to take this quarter
or whatever you people call a quarter
well it’s not a quarter
but
it’s the size and shape of a quarter
and it’s worth what? twenty of something
anyway
this one
i’m going to take it and rub it on my elbow
and it’s going to disappear
and hey presto abracadabra
oh shoot i dropped it
okay take two
here’s the quarter again
and hey presto abracadabra
it’s gone

wherever could it be
it has disappeared

or wait no it hasn’t
it’s right behind your ear

that got a better reaction than maybe anything i have ever done
her reaction was so ecstatic and cinematic
she was hopping around like a little bird
she was all your favorite parts of mary poppins
and bedknobs and broomsticks
english kids are great

she asked me to do it several more times
and i did it several more times
and i asked her if she’d like to learn how to make a coin disappear
and then to extract it from behind somebody’s ear

that got even more of a reaction than the trick itself
so i showed her how the trick was done
and we practiced the trick a few times until she had it down
then she excitedly summoned her parents
to do the trick for them
her blind parents
and i realized in that moment
that everything this little girl had ever been proud of
or everything that she had excitedly shown them
every pretty shell and pebble and leaf she had found
and all the pictures she had drawn
and all the look-ma-no-hands
all of that kid stuff you do for your parents’ approval
they couldn’t see
she’d had to describe it to them
that’s why she was so brilliant and cinematic
besides being a precocious little girl with loving parents

so she started the trick

now mummy daddy
i have a twenty pee
and i’m holding it in my right hand between my thumb and my first and middle fingers
and i’m going to rub it against my elbow
i’m using my right hand palm to rub it against my left hand elbow
hey presto abracadabra
but oh bother clumsy me i’ve dropped it on the floor
now i must pick it up again so i shall bend over and do that
i’ve picked it up with my right hand between my thumb and my first and middle fingers
i’m waving it around now to show everyone that i’ve picked it back up
and i’m going to try again
now i’m rubbing it against my left elbow again just as before
hey presto abracadabra
and it’s gone
wherever could it be
mummy it really has disappeared
hasn’t it
here you can feel my right hand and my left elbow
and it’s vanished
did it really go through my elbow
yes it appears so
oh but no it hasn’t
it’s behind daddy’s ear
i’m taking it out from behind his ear using my left hand
see i’ve found it there
here it is
you can hold it
and it really is the very same twenty pee

and i agreed with her parents that it was a really great performance of the trick
and she was the most magical thing in the world