Robin Verheyen Marc Copland Goeyvaerts String Trio Blues Reds & Other Songs for Madonna Vinyle -

In this day and age, who still writes love songs for a chosen woman of yesteryear? With sounds that whistle deep blue and remind you of the blues - the origins of jazz? - in his new composition Robin Verheyen takes colors from Jean Fouquet’s ‘Madonna’ and assigns them to his tenor and soprano, the three musicians of the Goeyvaerts String Trio and the 88 keys of Marc Copland’s piano. The masterpiece ‘Madonna’ in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp dates to around 1452 and is the right half of a diptych. The other piece, in Berlin, depicts the client of this work of art and his patron saint. Together, they form the so-called Melun diptych. In Antwerp you can see a ‘Maria Lactans’: the intimate theme of a mother breastfeeding her child. Because the subject was always updated to the fashion, taste or insights of the time, it continues to give new meaning. In Master Fouquet’s version, seraphs and cherubs appear. Throne and crown also replace the old-fashioned Gothic gold aureole. But the Madonna remains exalted with all good things: ‘de tous bien plaine’. That is certainly how the coveted chanson by Hayne van Gizhegem from Fouquet’s time sounds (which was incorporated by Robin Verheyen into his composition). They both free their art from devotion and cautiously put the autonomous aesthetic experience first. Mary becomes heavenly and profane, simultaneously. Her ivory skin remains unblemished, but - so the gossip of the time wants: “Isn’t that Agnes Sorel”, the mistress of the French king? Is the most beautiful woman of the beau-monde a model for the Mother of God? In ‘Blues, Reds and Other Songs’, Robin Verheyen draws inspiration from the characteristic harmony of the budding renaissance with quotes (such as the hymn Ave Maris Stella), canon techniques and faux-bourdon. Could the musical ornaments and fugal imitations of that period already have predicted the uniqueness of jazz? A composition is made up of different layers. In a painting, this is represented by the harmony between horizontal, vertical and the suggestion of depth with a front, middle and back plan. Mary with child, the throne and the angels, especially the blue ones, in the depths can be translated into the polyphony of the music. In contemporary music we may too often listen to what’s on the surface: the highest voice, the melody. Polyphony, on the other hand, is an exercise in a continuous interaction between all voices that shift in a virtuoso way between foreground and background. Verheyen’s composition makes the connection between all these voices and layers in an organic way. Tempo and rhythm is the flow with which the eye explores the composition. The exposed bosom probably lingers on many retinas a little longer. Let’s not view that perfect geometry by today’s standards lest this noblewoman be suspected of plastic surgery. The idealized form fits within a Platonic perspective and is even a compelling moral exhortation to relationships stripped of sensuality or desire. The mysterious appeal of the painting and this newly created music corresponds precisely within the search for what perfection and aesthetics mean in a given time.