To say that change is life’s only constant is something of a truism, but it couldn’t be more applicable to the career of Early music specialist Andrew Arceci. Having cut his teeth in period ensembles across the UK and US – including the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Oxford Baroque and Musica Sequenza – his freelance activities have expanded to take in lecturing and research, folk-fusion performance with his band Floyds Row, and curation of the Winchendon Music Festival, set in the small Massachusetts town where his family come from. Arceci’s current base, however, is a hilltop village in Umbria where he lives with his wife, the violinist Asako Takeuchi, with whom he has just returned from a trip leading workshops in Japan and Vietnam.
Performing mainly on viola da gamba, violone and double bass (along with the occasional dalliance with guitar, mandolin, electric bass, cittern and ‘giraffe-lute’ colascione), Arceci’s interest in historically-informed performance was piqued when he began exploring the instrumental requirements of classical bass repertoire, often unsuitable for the modern four-string bass, while studying music and art history at Johns Hopkins’s Peabody Conservatory.
“Initially I was interested in the history, the variety of tuning systems, the variety of instruments. And that paralleled with my interest in art history,” Arceci says. “With art history, there are no recordings, and so the aesthetic is in the visual art. Of course there are treatises, but I think that with the general aesthetics for the Renaissance or the Baroque, you can find some of those details in the visual arts, because that’s what we have in terms of angles and shading.”
The simultaneously scholarly and practical bent of Arceci’s interests were nurtured during further studies, in historical performance at Juilliard and in musicology at Oxford, undertaken while leading and recording with various period ensembles. Speaking to Arceci, you get the sense that this omnivorous approach is a way of staying true to older forms of musical practice: “Now, within classical music, people specialise in Renaissance or Baroque repertoire. But many of the great composers played at least two or three instruments, and they had viewpoints from different instruments. They also composed, they also conducted. Not in the formal way with the baton in front of an orchestra, but they led. I think that a lot of these things were more connected than now, certainly through the 18th century, even into the 19th century.”
Arceci’s academic work has included undertaking research at Harvard into the representation of Skanderbeg, a hero of modern-day Albania venerated for his resistance to the Ottoman Empire, in a partially-surviving opera by Vivaldi and in renditions by the French composers François Francœur and François Rebel. The project nourished Arceci’s concern with tracing musical transitions across apparently distinct cultures and geographies: “There are a number of connections between what is now Albania and Italy but specifically the Vatican, trying to hold off the Ottoman Empire.”
“With trade, Venice was a centre of so much of that culture… Musicians travel a lot today, but they did throughout history, and they travelled along the trade routes. In many ways, that’s where ideas were exchanged, instruments and foods were shared. I'm interested in a lot of those stories of where cultures meet and then maybe create something new.”
It’s a concern that also animates his work with Floyds Row, an ensemble initially formed during Arceci’s time at Oxford and named after a side-street close to the music faculty. The idea blossomed from conversations with another American, Chris Ferebee, about traffic of folk tunes, both across the Atlantic and across oral and classical traditions, during the 17th and 18th centuries. “Like Skanderbeg, I was really interested in the history of some of these tunes, and the transition from tunes that were used in the British Isles for several hundred years, but were brought to the colonies and specifically the States, and how they were used in the States and how they changed. And then, in some cases, they were brought back to the British Isles.”
Arceci maintains a boundary between the rigours of his period-specific work and the freer modus operandi of Floyd’s Row, which allows him to explore these tunes’ tangled histories in a more mixed context, taking in Baroque and Classical repertoire, folk songs of varying antiquity and compositions by the members themselves. “For me, there’s a clear divide between doing something in a historical way, which I do most of the time, with musicology, with instruments with gut strings. We don’t use “authenticity” now, but historically informed performance.”
With the band, however, “We’re not trying to be historically accurate. We’re trying to look at the history of some of these tunes and create modern renditions… There’s the historical way to preserve these tunes and to appreciate them, like you would at a museum. And then there’s the living tradition, which is what Floyds Row is doing: adapting these tunes which have long roots and several hundred years’ worth of renditions. It’s nice to honour that, to think about, explore and then to use some of those renditions and create something new, something for us.”
The lineup of Floyds Row fluctuates according to availability and the requirements of touring and recording projects (the group released an album in 2018), and currently features Arceci and Takeuchi alongside soprano Hailey Fuqua, violoncello and banjo player Jacques Lee Wood, accordionist and pianist George Lykogiannis and percussionist Mike Williams. With the group’s varying musical backgrounds comes an agility that is for Arceci as much an opportunity as a requirement.
“We use a number of notating systems because some of the artists read Western notation, others use tablature, others use a chart system where you write the chords, and even a figured bass shorthand system.” At the same time, “It’s very liberating to play off the page. We basically have a chart, but much of it is improvised. Which is actually similar to earlier repertoire, because there’s quite a lot of improvisation in it. In the 17th, 18th, even into the 19th century, classical musicians were expected to improvise. We lost that in the 20th and 21st century. But most genres of music still improvise. We were attracted to that.”
The repertoire for the ensemble’s autumn tour, a coheadline with Americana songwriter Chris Moyse, intersperses early, folk and original works with compositions by English Baroque composers John Eccles and John Playford (publisher of the country dance compendium The English Dancing Master), alongside New Englander Jeremiah Ingalls, who similarly worked with settings of folksong. It takes in a date at the Winchendon Festival, originally set up as a series of memorial concerts for Arceci’s father, now in its tenth year.
With a genesis so close to his heart, it’s unsurprising that Arceci’s approach to curation is highly personal, and he encourages dialogue between artists and audiences. “In general, we don’t book anyone unless I’ve worked with the person or I’ve seen them live. Similarly to AI, there’s so much that you can do now with videos and recordings, there’s just nothing real about so much of that… My parents and grandparents are both from this small town. When we book artists, the artistry is important, but there’s also an element of how the artists will interact with the audiences. Because these venues are intimate, it’s not just doing a formal concert.”
The series’ blending of classical, jazz, folk and non-Western music is designed to foster physical intimacy between players, listeners and sounds which are often heard in the town’s historical spaces. “I think, post-pandemic, there’s something nice about intimate venues. We can experience so many concerts online now, but there’s something very different about hearing an artist or a chamber ensemble in a small room where you’re actually in the room with the vibrations… There’s something about being in that small room with others, feeling the vibrations, but also maybe listening to the artist about his or her travels, or about ‘unusual instruments’, because we’ve tried to have several ‘world’ programmes where the artists will talk about either their languages, or their approaches or the instruments.”
A partnership between Winchendon Festival and the local Worcester Chorus on a ten-year project to perform the entire works of Bach, and potential further recordings with Floyds Row, are on the horizon. For now, however, the demanding enterprise of running a free festival takes up plenty of time in Arceci’s peripatetic existence. Keeping the festival free, he tells me, helps to facilitate attendee’s own travels across genre lines, a practice of no little importance in our isolationist times (the practical problems caused by Brexit, and the effects of the US administration’s policies on booking international artists, come up in our conversation).
“I’ve noticed over the years that some people will attend just the classical programme. Some people will attend just the jazz programmes. But more and more, I see people who will come to all the programmes. I see people exploring… It’s not an educational enterprise, but I think that because the programmes are free, people can explore between classical, jazz, but especially the ‘world’ programmes. All of us desperately need that access to different ways of thinking about the world.”
More information about Winchendon Music Festival.
This article was sponsored by Hemsing Associates.
