Angela Mariani joins this episode of the Front Row to talk about the upcoming Early Music Ensemble concert.
How do you do all of what you do?
That’s a very good question. I’m very fortunate in terms of the radio show, we have a whole team that works on the radio show. Not only do we have people who help us out right here, at KTTZ, but we also have a team at WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana, which is where the program originates from. So yes, I have helpers.
Tell us about what you do at the school of music.
I do a number of things. One of the things that is probably most relevant to what we’re going to talk about today in terms of our concert, is that I direct the TTU Collegium Musicum. Collegium Musicum, is a term that hundreds of years old, and it refers to a community of musicians. In particular, a community of musicians that is connected with some kind of educational institution or university or something like that.
It’s a essentially an early music ensemble. So I direct that, but I also teach musicology courses. I teach courses in performance practice, which has to do with the study of the techniques and practices and processes of earlier music. The instruments that they use. What kinds of performance decisions they made, different techniques and so on and so forth…I teach a medieval music course…
Because of the university environment, you’re not only a performer, but an academic. So it must a major interest of yours.
Yes, it’s tremendously interesting to me and in fact that curiosity about those types of things is what lead me to end up studying that formally at Indiana University’s Early Music Institute, now called the Historical Performance Institute. And the practices and processes are very much a part of the study of what we might call historical performance, or early music. I am particularly interested in medieval music. I just actually had a book published on improvisation in the performance of medieval music.
Listen to the full interview at the top of the article.
