Songs of Erosion is the outcome of our handling of the medieval songbook Cantigas de Santa María, a song collection from the 13th Century commissioned by King Alfonso X of Castilla and León (Image 01). From the outset, we decided to take the vast collection of medieval songs as an artefact that has survived until the present day yet has become almost completely alien in the 800 years since it was first written. This is what fascinated us in the first place, how this manuscript has survived yet been eroded, prompting us to discover how we could propose a contemporary reading and thus performance of it.
The Songs of Erosion project has become an open source archive that contains different practices and tasks used in the recovering of the Cantigas material. In this spirit, the participants/performers vary and fluctuate in number and nature, which means that the performance has to be adapted to the context in which each iteration of the Songs is presented. In this essay we present and discuss a number of these appearances: presentation at Lod Studios, Ghent; repetition/erosion at Pilar, Brussels; repetition/erosion in a concert version, Luz-Saint-Sauveur; and Songs of Erosion at Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia – FCAYC, León.
The Task Logbook: Lod Studios, Ghent
- Performers: Charlie Usher, Clara Levy, Victor Guaita
- Setup: black box speakers (some on wheels), phones, zither, viola, violin
In December 2021 we spent 10 days at the studios of Lod in Ghent trying to grasp what the Cantigas represents in all its multiplicity, since it contains not one, but several, manuscripts with a total of 420 songs. Its authorship is attributed to King Alfonso X, although we can only be sure of around 10 of them. It is not only a collection of songs of praise to the Virgin Mary, but also includes miracles, medical remedies, gossip, legends, and courtly love scenes. In order to navigate all this, we had The Oxford Cantigas de Santa María Database to help us – a database as immeasurable as the Cantigas themselves.
Besides its vastness, another aspect of the collection that alienated us was that neither of us speak the language (medieval Galician-Portuguese) nor read neumes musical notation, which in the case of the Cantigas seems to stir quite some polemic among medieval musicologists. This alienation played in our favour since we weren’t interested in a historically informed reconstruction but rather an approximation through the lens of erosion using tools from the language of contemporary music.
We created a list of tasks to be applied to the different materials that the Cantigas offer: musical scores, lyrics, texts, keywords, images, recordings, etc. Some of the tasks would be individual, some would involve two or all three performers. The length of the tasks would also vary, some being very short while others could go on over several performances. The stage was set as a modular laboratory. The lights would be lowered and all elements would be mobile, creating different stations through the space and erasing all sense of frontality.
The performance was a selection of these tasks following no particular order or telos, with different tasks sometimes performed simultaneously, sometimes overlapping. With the audience able to move around the circumference of the space, the overall feeling was of a collective immersion in a strange world with some medieval resonances.
Repetition/Erosion at Pilar, Brussels
- Performers: Clara Levy, Victor Guaita
- Setup: violin, viola, hurdy-gurdy, electric organ, speakers
Following an invitation from Sara Manente to “activate” her exhibition in collaboration with Deborah Robbiano and Sebastien Tripod Towards a ruined theater, we spent three days in Pilar’s exhibition space (during opening hours) to prepare a reasonably long performance of one hour that we would give at the end of our residency. It was the first time we had an opportunity to work on the project since our previous residency at Lod, three years earlier. It was also quite a contrasting experience: while in Lod we had the luxury of time and no requirement to provide a finished work at the end of the residency, this time around we found ourselves with very little time to remember, gather and arrange the material we had generated during our first research period.
These different circumstances allowed us to check the relevance of some concepts we had developed previously: the sedimentation of memory (what elements are left years afterwards) and the influence of external circumstances (in this case the material conditions we were granted) or, to speak in geological terms, “weathering”.
Instead of generating new tasks for the performance, we picked some that we remembered well from our “task logbook” and pushed them further, adapting them to the exhibition setting. One task was transformed into a ready-made multi-channel track that welcomed the audience. Besides the prologue on a moveable speaker, we performed three duos that insisted on the idea of erosion as exhaustion of matter: by accumulation in the first duo, Alluvium; stasis in the second, Ornamented bourdon, performed as a hurdy-gurdy and organ duo; and slow transformation and disintegration in the third, Landslide. All the sound material was taken from Cantigas 27 and 209.
Because only two of us were involved, we were compelled to do a “monophonic” version of the performance: one task at the time.
Repetition/Erosion, concert version at Jazz à Luz, Luz-Saint-Sauveur (Fr)
- Performers: Clara Levy, Victor Guaita
- Setup: violin, viola
Jazz à Luz is a festival of improvised and experimental music in the French Pyrenees where we were invited to present a version of our Cantigas project in a conventional concert setting. The decision was made to bring a spin-off of the version we had recently performed at Pilar in Brussels, but this time limited to only violin and viola because of transportation concerns. That meant no prologue on the speakers, no hurdy-gurdy or organ – everything had to be done as a violin/viola duo.
This resulted in probably the starkest version we have made so far. Not so much because of the sound or content, but mostly due to the setting. Unlike the bright space at Pilar where the audience were free to move, or take a pillow and sit, or follow us through the different spatial dispositions, in Luz, we performed in an auditorium: an elevated stage with blue velvet curtains and rows of seats in the dark in front of us.
Songs of Erosion, a long-duration performance at FCAYC, León, Spain
- Performers: Clara Levy, Victor Guaita, Clara de Asis
- Setup : violin, viola, singing bowls, modular synthesis, live electronics, speakers
In March 2025, we will have a residency, performance and recording session at the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia. The architecture of the foundation is already an inspiration: while the inside facilities have really modern features, the building is unnoticeable from afar as its exterior appearance mimics a barn and mirrors the landscape (Image 04).
Luis Martinez Campos, the sound curator of the foundation, commissioned us to create a two hour performance for the exhibition space. Clara de Asis, a musician and composer friend of ours will join us for this iteration of the performance, as she will record the duo version for her label afterwards. Her set up consists of a modular synth, a laptop, and probably some singing bowls.
Although the final structure of the performance is not fully decided yet, it will address the physical difficulties of repetitive gestures over a long period of time by providing some resting time, thanks to the modular synth and/or some tapes that will be triggered. The material developed at Pilar will be used again and some tasks will be adapted to the new settings of the performance. The performance will be framed by a task performed three times at three different moments with three different timescales.
As we are recording straight after the performance, some of the ‘pieces’ we perform in duo have been reworked so they fit a fixed media format and listening habits.
Adapting Songs of Erosion
From the beginning, the work was thought of as an unlimited collection of tasks so vast that it could never be performed in its entirety but only as a selection – the same way that the Cantigas de Santa María are always performed or recorded as a selection. It is in the nature of the project that each time we bring Songs of Erosion to life involves a negotiation. The conditions given to us (venue, duration, context…) and our personal envies play an important role in determining the content and the form of each iteration. In the same way, the different collaborators that might join a specific performance – like Clara de Asís at the FCAYC in March 2025 – will propose new tasks or will make it necessary to modify already existing tasks.
The writing and compilation of the Cantigas de Santa María spanned over an estimated 12 years, from 1270 to 1282. Maybe Songs of Erosion will take a similar journey where, through the years, it grows and changes with each performance and with each collaboration, blurring all lines and distinctions of authorship and thus becoming, like the Cantigas, a container of collective contemporary music practices.
Text by Victor Guaita and Clara Levy.