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Winner of two Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Awards:
Best Local Drama Production and Best Program of the Year (1978)
Two one-hour programs based on the Old English epic poem Beowulf, with portions of the poem performed by Robert P. Creed, translations by Burton Raffel, and music composed and performed by Mary Remnant. Script by Robert P. Creed. Narration by Earl Hammond. Mixed by David Rapkin. The programs were originally broadcast over WNYC-FM in New York City.
John M. Foley, University of Missouri, Columbia
Donald K. Fry, SUNY, Stony Brook, NY
Mary Remnant, Royal College of Music, London
Bruce Rosenberg, Brown University, Providence
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Beowulf’s early battles against the monster Grendel and its mother. Includes narration of Beowulf’s swimming match against a boyhood friend, Breca. Four Commentary breaks for discussion of: the language of the poem, the performance setting, the music and the monsters. |
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Beowulf’s old age and death in a battle against a dragon. Flashbacks to Beowulf’s youth. Three breaks for commentary on epic performance and epic audience, research in existing oral traditional societies and the light it throws on epic, the function of this poetry in its culture. |
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In 1962, when, with the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship, I was working on a critical study of Beowulf as a traditionally (and possibly orally) composed poem, I decided that I had to know more about the way it had been performed. I had been performing Beowulf for my classes by following -- as closely as I could -- John Pope’s guidance in his monumental 1942 book, “The Rhythm of Beowulf.” Finding that I had problems with Pope, I decided that I would spend part of the next few months of my first sabbatical leave figuring out for myself the versification -- the prosody. That was the beginning: I have been working on that problem ever since. The prosody I have been reconstructing is based on the poem as it survives in the unique manuscript, on my discovery that those who devised the prosody created a remarkably simple yet powerful way to generate and control variation, and, perhaps most important, on my constant performing the poem to test what I see as a brilliant and beautiful way to tell a great tale.
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Mary Remnant studied the piano and violin at the Royal College of Music, where she was awarded the Tagore Gold Medal. Meanwhile she started to search for minstrels in church carvings and to have reconstructed instruments made for performance. She went to Oxford to learn more about mediaeval music and wrote a D.Phil. thesis about bowed instruments in mediaeval England. In 1967 she was awarded a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship to continue her research on the Continent. She taught the History of Instruments at the R.C.M. for 25 years, and has written extensively on the history of instruments. She continues to teach piano and violin, and to give lecture recitals on mediaeval instruments in Europe and the U.S. In 1980 she constructed The Musical Road to Santiago de Compostela and as a result became a founder member of the Confraternity of St. James. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
Beowulf was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington , DC , a federal agency. |
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Willy Nilly
