To The Muse

Description

Asya Fateyeva sets out to rethink the idea of the muse. She applies herself to asking what truly supplies the inspiration that a person needs to be active, to generate art. Is it perhaps the unattainable as such? "The troubadours of medieval France sang of unrequited love," says Fateyeva, "but more than that, they sang of l'amour de loin - love from afar." This "fin'amor" applied to the "distant beloved", the romantic attachment to an unattainable person. The songs of the troubadours are now so distant from us themselves that most of them scarcely make sense to us. "Sometimes only a few lines of text have survived, and there are very few works with music and words," says Fateyeva. "And we can only guess what the tempo was, or the metre - it really is the stuff of fantasy, in the best sense of the word." Fateyeva and her fellow musicians Matthias Loibner (hurdy-gurdy), Bo Wiget (cello) and Emil Kuyumcuyan (vibraphone, darbuka) do not seek an exact reproduction of the troubadours' music. On the contrary, they take inspiration from the material and play free arrangements, constantly improvising over the melodies.