NYC ensemble A Golden Wire brings Restoration music to St. Paul’s
The English Renaissance is familiar to many Americans: Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Sir Francis Drake likely ring a bell. Not nearly as many have encountered the period known as the Restoration, named for King Charles II’s restoration to the throne in 1660.
Charles spent his exile in France, and when he returned, brought with him French customs, fashions—and musical tastes. As the founders of period instrument ensemble A Golden Wire put it, “new life was breathed into music of the British Isles.”
A Golden Wire will give Chattanoogans a chance to experience the beauty and vitality of that era’s music on Friday when the group brings its program “No Noise or Silence: Music of the English Restoration” to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in downtown.
Arnie Tanimoto and Parker Ramsey founded A Golden Wire in 2019 after meeting at a gig a few years earlier. “The early music world is a small one,” Ramsey said. Yet despite both attending Oberlin Conservatory and Julliard, their paths hadn’t crossed until then. They bonded immediately over their love of this music and the unique instruments used to make it.
Tanimoto plays the viol da gamba, which despite its physical resemblance to a cello, is more closely related to the lute and guitar, he explained. Ramsey’s instrument is the baroque harp, which, with its light weight and 93 strings, is not an ancestor of the modern harp but designed to be “the glue in an ensemble,” he said.
Yet another little-seen instrument that will be part of the program is the theorbo, played by Kevin Payne, and described by Tanimoto as “a lute on steroids.” Soprano Sara MacKimmie will complete the quartet.
Tanimoto and Parker are especially drawn to the compositions of England’s Henry Purcell (1659-1695). “His music is wonderful and bizarre,” said Ramsey. “He is almost the Bach of England,” said Tanimoto. Purcell’s works like “If Music be the Food of Love” and “Strike the Viol” will be represented along with several others.
Other composers on the night’s program include Thomas Campion, Matthew Locke, Marin Marais and several others, both French and English. “There is almost too much to choose from,” said Tanimoto. “We never have to do the same program over and over.”
Each performance is unique in another way. “You don’t just play what is written on the page. There is lots of improvisation,” said Ramsey. Instead of being “rule-driven”, playing this music is more like using a “sourdough starter that you then build on,” he explained. Rehearsals create guidelines, but these are flexible in performance. “That’s why we love this music,” said Tanimoto. “There is a lot you have to infer, rather than defer to.”
Audience members will be surprised and, they hope, enchanted, at how expressive music can be “below a certain volume level,” said Ramsey.
Tanimoto described it as an emotional experience for listeners, one that is not a museum piece but instead a living, relevant musical journey. “The music comes from a time when people were feeling alienated,” he said. “It can be both very mournful and extremely exuberant.”
The classic, comely beauty of St. Paul’s 1886 nave, which is on the National Register of Historic Buildings, combined with its outstanding acoustics, make it an ideal site for looking and listening back into the past and at the same time, hearing its resonances for the present. — Janis Hashe