The Ancient's Mariner

"At sea," says Noah Greenberg, "you have a great deal of time to think --and I thought." What he thought about during his five years as machinist-messboy with the merchant marine was forming a group of professional musicians and singers to revive the all but forgotten music composed and played during the five centuries before the birth of Bach.

The group he formed was the New York Pro Musica. In a performance last week of Elizabethan music in honor of Shakespeare's 400th birthday at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., the six singers and four instrumentalists served eloquent notice that pre-Bach music was not to be forgotten. Drawing from the works of Shakespeare's contemporaries--Thomas Morley, William Byrd, Tobias Hume, John Wilbye, John Dowland--Pro Musica shook the dust off a score of Elizabethan madrigals and lute songs, embellishing the rarefied melodies with a rhythmic liveliness and delicate twining of voices and instruments to produce, in Shakespeare's words, "sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not."

Hit Unearthed. Pre-Bach compositions, Greenberg insists, are "not little delicate museum pieces. This was music of an exciting time, full of violent contrasts." The Tanglewood program presented by Pro Musica ranged from the solemn Lamentations of Jeremiah to the sprightly "hey ding a ding" of It Was a Lover and His Lass, an exquisitely chiseled duologue for recorder and flute, a blatantly comic Tobacco Is Like Love, and a spirited London Street Cries, alive with the calls of street vendors and town criers.

Since its founding in 1952, Pro Musica has introduced a steadily growing audience to the curious delights of a long and varied line-up of forgotten composers, such as the polyphonic wizardry of Ludwig Senfl, composer to the court of Maximilian I, the mystical motets of Martin de Rivaflecha, chapelmas-ter at the Cathedral of Valencia, and the Rabelaisian merriment of Adriano Banchieri, abbot of an Olivetan monastery. Its most ambitious undertaking was The Play of Daniel, a 12th century music-drama that was unearthed in the British Museum. Elegantly staged in medieval setting and dress in a Manhattan church, Daniel was a solid off-Broadway hit of the 1959 season, won further acclaim during a 40-perform-ance tour of Europe. Today Pro Musica can boast a season of some 25 concerts in New York and 16 weeks on tour. In September the ensemble embarks on a seven-week State Department trip to Yugoslavia and Russia with an increased complement of six vocalists and 13 instrumentalists.

Exotic Wildlife. The problem with pre-Bach music, explains Greenberg, is that "you're never certain exactly what scoring the composer has in mind. All the notes are there, but the composer very rarely put down who was to sing or play them." To the formidable task of determining the tempo, dynamics and instrumentation of the worm-eaten scores, Greenberg brings a composer's skill, a musicologist's interest in research and instinctive good taste. He searches for clues to instrumentation by digging through such obscure miscellanea as the purchasing orders for a 16th-century English town band.

To come as close as possible to the texture of the original music, Greenberg has" amassed an impressive arsenal of strange medieval instruments whose names sound more like exotic wildlife--zinke, rebec, shawm, sackbut, regal, krummhorn, Rauschpfeife. * In addition, Greenberg's Renaissance ensemble, which in costume looks as if it had just stepped out of a Fra Angelico painting, comes armed with a medieval bagpipe, hurdy-gurdy, viola da gamba. harpsichord, dulcian, portative organ, psaltery, and a family of recorders. All but a few of the pieces are reproductions made by European craftsmen from museum originals or copied from instruments depicted in paintings.

Dark Corners. A native New Yorker. Greenberg, 45, studied piano as a child. first became intrigued with antique sounds while learning composition and conducting from a Renaissance-minded teacher. While in the merchant marine. (1944-49), he spent his off-duty hours on board ship poring over armfuls of old manuscripts and tomes covering the history of Medieval, Renaissance and early Baroque music. When discharged, he took a job with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and soon had a select group of the members singing madrigals and motets plus an occasional union song to keep the officers happy. In 1952 Greenberg talked Esoteric Records into bankrolling a professional ensemble to record Renaissance music. It was the birth of Pro Musica, but Esoteric died.

Now fueled by a $465,000 Ford Foundation grant awarded in 1963. Greenberg plans to explore further the uncharted "dark corners" of ancient music. "We have just barely skimmed the surface," says Greenberg. "There are vast continents of music that have yet to be discovered, understood and performed."

* In order: a woodwind with a cup mouthpiece, a pear-shaped viol, a double-reed ancestor of the oboe, an early trombone, a small organ with reed pipes and wooden resonators, a double-reed hook-shaped wind instrument, another double-reed wind instrument with a piercing tone.

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