^{BY SIMON MUNDY | FIRST PUBLISHED 8 JUN 2025}

One of the strange things about the modern classical music world is that it is relatively rare for professional singers to accompany themselves, either on keyboard or guitar. It is perfectly normal in the pop, folk and jazz worlds, but our obsession with specialists has made it feel peculiar, as though multi-talented musicians are somehow not quite the real deal. This is of course absurd, and one young performer who is proving the point is Lucine Musaelian. She sings to the accompaniment of her viola da gamba, which often provides the bass while she carries and decorates the melody. ‘I had been exploring self-accompaniment, and I always loved the Italian repertoire,’ Lucine muses. ‘My gamba teacher was Italian. I find it incredibly useful to sing the melodic line when I’m practising the bass line for recitatives, when I accompany someone else. When I am the singer, my right hand establishes my anchor, which gives my voice more freedom. If I want to breathe, my right hand will wait for me’.

As a member of the Bellot Ensemble, she has been part of a project supported by Continuo Foundation to create a new recording of 17th-century Italian love songs, Cupid’s Ground Bass (which says it all and is a nice change from Cupid's Arrow). This programme will be performed live at the Emerging Ensemble Showcase on Saturday 12 July as part of the Oxford Early Music Day, a collaboration between Continuo and the Oxford Festival of the Arts.

‘I joined the group about a year ago,’ says Lucine. The Bellot Ensemble is led by violinist Edmund Taylor. ‘I met him at the Royal College of Music's ensemble workshop last year, and we clicked immediately. Working with Bellot has been easy because we are so good at listening to each other.’ As well as Lucine and Edmund, for this programme the ensemble has Maxim del Mar on violin, Daniel Murphy on theorbo, Nathan Giorgetti on viola da gamba and Matthew Brown on harpsichord. Tenor Kieran White joins, too, for a programme that includes music by Cavalli, Merula, Monteverdi, Uccellini and Barbara Strozzi. ‘We think,’ Lucine points out, ‘Strozzi normally played the lute as she sang, but it would not have been unusual for her to play the viol too.’

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_{Lucine Musaelian and the Bellot Ensemble perform Barbara Strozzi's famous aria, ‘Che si può fare’}

Lucine also has a duo ensemble of her own, Intesa, formed in 2003 with Nathan Giorgetti. ‘We were the only two studying viola da gamba at the Royal Academy of Music. We had a great rapport and we were both open to exploring folk song and new music.’ They look at the overlap between folk and Baroque music, and the performance of new music on viols, centred around the art of self-accompaniment across different genres. ‘We love creating musical and poetic links and incorporating elements of traditional viola da gamba repertoire in our arrangements of folk music.’

That link between folk and baroque is at the heart of Lucine’s mission, because she has been integrating her gamba playing with the folk music of her ancestral country, Armenia. ‘My parents emigrated from Armenia in the Soviet era, and I was brought up in New Jersey. I studied first at Yale and sang in the Schola Cantorum there under David Hill (see Continuo's recent interview with him) for two years. I am on a couple of the records he made with us. At Yale, I was studying musicology, but doing quite a bit of choral singing and learning the viola da gamba. I knew by the end of the academic courses that I wanted to perform, and I moved to Basel, Switzerland, for my Masters degree.'

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‘People don't hear this Armenian repertoire. We are a mountain people. Our language is very isolated and ancient. We have our own branch of the Indo-European group of languages. So much of our folklore is about the land, because it is so important to us, with our history of genocide and exile.’ Armenia, with a population slightly less than that of Wales, has the misfortune to be almost entirely surrounded by countries that have been belligerent neighbours at one time or another. The present state of truce is still fragile. Inevitably, emigration has been a strong part of Armenian history, and Lucine is part of the resulting diaspora.

As well as her Intesa duo, she has also formed a partnership with the multi-genre and multi-instrumental composer, Fred Thomas. ‘The spirit of improvisation is so important, as is the emphasis on harmony,’ she says. With Thomas and the clarinettist Ewan Bleach, she has just released an EP, called Havoon, pairing their own settings of Armenian poetry with chants from as early as the 11th century.

The recording's description gives a taste of what it is like. ‘Dramatic vocal monodies are enveloped by the nebulous drones summoned by a viola da gamba or a wheezing shruti box; whilst a prepared piano intones ritualistic bell-like patterns against abstract microtonal atmospheres, a haunting Medieval vielle ghosts improvised counter-melodies behind the voice [...] blurring the lines between old and new, and softening the edges between past and present.’

With the freshness of her versatile soprano singing, the courage to take the viola da gamba into new territory, and the solid links to her Armenian heritage, Lucine Musaelian is promising to be one of the most interesting musicians to come to the fore this decade.

Bellot Ensemble's debut album, ‘Cupid's Ground Bass’, was supported by a grant from Continuo Foundation. Hear Lucine perform the showcase programme live with Bellot Ensemble on 12 July at the Oxford Festival of the Arts – Early Music Day, co-presented with Continuo. Lucine will also perform with Intesa in London on 18 June (Stoke Newington Early Music Festival) and 18 July (Islington Festival of Music and Art).