MUSLIVE is thrilled to have a partnership with the Temple Music Foundation and Temple Church.
Temple Church, tucked away off the Strand a stone’s throw from King’s College London, embodies the networks and expanded geographies that are at the heart of the Musical Lives project. The Church was built in the twelfth century by the Knights Templar, an order of fighting monks founded to protect pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem. The first part of the church to be built, the Round Church, was modelled on Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. A chancel in the gothic style was added in the thirteenth century.
Representing a confluence of east and west, Temple Church is the perfect space for thinking about musical lives across the medieval Mediterranean. It is, for instance, the resting place of William Marshal I, a crusader and knight, but also a singer of French trouvère songs. For early visitors (William included), the London church was a setting where they could be mentally transported ‘outremer’, to the spaces of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Jerusalem. MUSLIVE tunes into the sounds and songs heard in northern France and Jerusalem, and across the sea and lands in between. What was the place of songs and poetry in contexts of encounter, conflict and cultural assimilation along these routes? MUSLIVE focuses on traditions of Arabic, Hebrew and French songs and poetry and how they may have co-existed – and potentially interacted.
The Temple Music Foundation, founded in 2002, works to nurture the musical life of the Temple Church and its surrounds. Every year it welcomes thousands of people to an array of musical events. MUSLIVE, in partnership with Siglo de Oro, will work with the Foundation to bring public performances of medieval songs alive again and to engage with the unique geographical resonances of the Temple Church as it does so.
Who were the people, known and yet to be discovered, whose lives were shaped by their songs? Temple Church is not just a beautiful, acoustically appropriate space for the performance of medieval songs and poetry. It is an active part of MUSLIVE’s performance programme, one we will constantly engage with in the stories we seek to tell about people, songs and places.