Masters, Monsters & Mazes covers a repertory that's often mentioned in the first half of college music history survey courses, often discussed and referred to by composers and theorists in defense of intentionally highly complex music, but not so often actually performed: the arcane polyphony of late fourteenth century France. The best-known example of this music is the manuscript of Baude Cordier's chanson Belle, bonne, sage, using red and black notes to indicate rhythms and charmingly shaped like a heart. That work, strangely, isn't included here, and neither, despite the emphasis
Trefoil places on the role of subtle symbolism in this repertory, is the murky Fumeux fumeurs with its wonderfully strange text about smoke and smokers. Instead, as the album's title indicates,
Trefoil focuses on texts that refer to medieval bestiaries -- books about animals both real and imagined -- and their symbolic uses in poems that praise a sovereign.
Listeners who are in love with what's often called the medieval mind will enjoy this disc. The richly symbolic texts are balanced by music of dizzying rhythmic intricacy, with rare moments of repose quickly dissolving into a shower of rapid-fire two-against-three. Like most really complex music, this is aimed more at performers and devotees than at ordinary listeners, who will find more in Machaut and Landini than in these melanges of courtly love, courtly obsequiousness, and classical allusion. The
Hilliard Ensemble has a much sharper sound when performing French medieval music, but
Trefoil works within a small, intimate dimension that arguably works for this repertory. They perform most of the pieces with one vocal line (countertenors
Drew Minter and
Mark Rimple and soprano Marcia Young all sing), lightly accompanied by a medieval harp or lute. Some of the music is performed instrumentally. The group members brag in the notes that they constructed these performances directly from the original notation, which must have been fun for them but is really no virtue; this music poses difficult problems, and it is desirable to see how informed musicians have solved them in the past. They don't go deeply into the strange society that produced this music, with the papal court exiled to Avignon and a host of forces contending for power. Still, medieval enthusiasts will want this disc, and anyone else who has seen Cordier's red-and-black heart and is curious to go beyond it should check it out.