Grammy nomination for York music student
Transcript of Anna Maria Friman discussing her Grammy nomination
It was a big big surprise because we didn’t know it was under consideration, that CD, we thought it was probably, I mean, we didn’t even think about it because we never thought it would be. But we received a text message from our American agent and – total surprise. And we immediately decided to go actually because, hopefully we’ll experience this sometime in the future again maybe, but when you get a nomination like that it feels like a once in a lifetime kind of thing.
We have been performing a lot in America. Now in March after the last tour we have been performing in 30 states in America which is a lot. So we’ve been doing a month in the States every year for the last seven years or so. So we feel that America has always been a very very enthusiastic performance arena for us and radio has been broadcasting a lot of our concerts and we have been in studios and they have been looking after us really well over there. So we really felt that we wanted to go over for the ceremony as well. And also just for the fun of it really to experience that kind of event in the musical business.
It doesn’t matter really if you win a Grammy or not, just being nominated I find is a wonderful thing and we shouldn’t forget that the record business is a very very hard one. And there are very many groups who are wonderfully good who don’t even have a record company supporting them. So of course it’s a wonderful thing to have been nominated for a Grammy so it’s important to remember there are wonderful performers out there who do great things and really their audiences are very very happy after their concerts and want to hear them.
The medieval music is very very exciting from many points of view. I love the sound of it but one of the slightly difficult things with medieval music is that there is no way we can know what it sounded like in the medieval times and we totally recontextualise the music in the present. So what the medieval singer experienced when he or she sang the music in the Middle Ages is a totally different experience to the one the modern performer has. And also from an audience perspective, I mean there wasn’t really an audience in the medieval period inside the monasteries. As an audience, as we look at the term today, is very very different from the medieval original listener. So we totally take the music out of its original context and create something new with it today. And you can see that as a difficult task but you can also see the lack of original information as a useful resource for being creative with the material.
The future for the group is hopefully loads of projects we haven’t even thought of at the moment. And that is really something we have been very aware of all the time. Not aware of but we have been quite restrictive in making decisions for a long time, decisions about what we want to do, just because we want to have the possibility to jump into new things that we didn’t know exist. But at the moment now we are working on another programme of English medieval music from the Worcester Cathedral from the 12th Century, 13th Century, and that is a ladymass and the music has been collected and edited by Nicky Losseff who is a lecturer here at York University in the music department.
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