Luke Conklin, artistic director of Early Music Michigan, vividly recalls the first time he “just went off the deep end” for a piece of historical music. The piece was George Frideric Handel’s Concerti Grosso, whose style of music is commonly known as “water music,” or music for the royal fireworks.
“I literally danced around my dorm room to it,” says Conklin, now 40. “I was just so excited by it, by the sound I was hearing, by the energy and the rhythm, that I was just dancing around my room to it. It just spoke to me.”
Conklin’s group is made up of musicians who perform early music in historically informed styles. His passion for music has been evident since he first picked up a saxophone in the fourth grade. Today, his main instrument of choice is the oboe, but he also plays modern and historical reproductions of the flute, clarinet and bassoon.
When someone asks him how many instruments he plays, Conklin says, “How many do you want me to play? I’ve never met a woodwind instrument that I didn’t like.”
How did you get where you are today?
I heard a small community group very much like Early Music Michigan at Groton High School in Groton, New York, playing on reproductions of historical instruments. I just loved it. As an undergrad, I sought out opportunities to learn about historical performance — we didn’t have it at Ithaca College — but I did every workshop I could find. I zoomed in on historical performance, in particular the Baroque oboe, but I was up for anything. I would play any historical instrument, any historical music. I took classes in history and art history because I was really interested in the periods as well.
Then I got a scholarship to get a master’s degree in Gregorian chant in Ireland. When I came back, my intention was to continue with a master’s in Baroque oboe, but it didn’t work out. Then the Juilliard School announced they were starting a historical performance program. My undergrad oboe teacher insisted that I apply. I got in and was in the first class of historical performance majors at Juilliard.
After Juilliard, I went to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland for a doctorate. They have an excellent department for studying historical performance and historical music. While there, I taught history of rock ‘n’ roll and history of the Broadway musical while studying Baroque oboe and medieval music. We ended up in Kalamazoo because my wife, Dr. Marjorie Harrington, became the program manager for the Department of Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University. When I got here, I got involved in Early Music Michigan. It has a fairly long history (beginning in 1996 as the Michigan Bach Collegium before changing its name in 2009), and it needed a director.
What is a historical performance?
Historical performance isn’t just a repertoire; it’s an attitude towards how you put together a performance. It involves gathering the materials, including instruments and music, and attempting to approach the music in the mindset that they might have had when it was composed. We’re trying to inform our performances based on what the people who wrote the music wrote about it 200 to 300 years ago.
For example, when Bach wrote a lot of his most famous music in 1720, he thought about and heard music differently than we do today. Bach never knew a saxophone, an electric guitar or a modern piano; the instruments he had sounded different. People who only play modern instruments made in this or the last century are going to play a piece of his music differently than if we use the tools that Bach was familiar with.
The second level of it is that people wrote a lot then and now about music. We read whatever we can find about how people described music. There’s a fine art to that thinking: When I read this book about music from 300 years ago, are they describing what was done? Are they describing what they wanted to be done, so it’s actually the opposite that was being done? Are they off the deep end, and the book that they’re writing nobody else read and isn’t representative of what was going on? Or is it very representative?
Tell me about Feb. 7 workshop, Chant as Early Music.
Last year we invited everyone to come for a Gregorian chant workshop. I did some lecturing on Gregorian chant, not just as liturgical music or as this thing from the church, but liturgical chant as early music. If you go to Notre Dame (Cathedral in Paris) today, they still do Gregorian masses, but they don’t sing them the way they were 1,200 years ago. The workshop was on what can we learn from a 1,200-year-old manuscript about how it might have been sung. People walked away being able to sing a couple of chants in this historically informed way.
In February, we’re going to be doing Part Two of that workshop, diving into the same things with a little bit less lecturing and more singing. We’ll broach the topic of the first experiments people did with polyphonic music, because chant is, by definition, where everybody sings the same note at the same time, so how can we have two voices singing two different things?
Most of our events are pay-what-you-will because we don’t want anyone to miss out because they don’t have the money.
— Interview by Jordan Bradley, edited for length and clarity
