Sue Chenette: Serpent, singer, trompette marine

“Le chant du serpent.” We found the listing in Pariscope, one of two weekly guides, along with l’Officiel des Spectacles, to concerts, movies, plays, circuses, art exhibitions, operas, puppet shows, dance, sound and light extravaganzas—and variétés, a catch-all for events that don’t quite fit anywhere else.

This concert, devoted to the large serpentine wind instrument from the sixteenth century that is an ancestor of the tuba, took place in the Salle Turenne of the Musée de l’Armée, at Les Invalides. A trompette marine—a one-string instrument taller than the woman who played it, dating from the middle ages and named for its trumpet-like sound—was featured along with the serpent.

Who would have expected the hall to be packed? Then again, in Paris, a concert of musical sounds that might easily be lost to memory, or a curated display of garden gnomes, a series of photographs from the new National Automobile Museum in Turin, or an exhibition of medieval beds—all find sponsors and an audience. Such richness!

The performers on this concert, Michel Godard on the serpent, and Linda Bsiri, who sang and played the trompette marine, carried the ancient sounds into the present—new musical wine in old bottles, jazz dialogues between serpent and soprano, some with the low accompanying drone of the medieval string instrument. And sometimes their sounds resonated as they might have centuries ago, in plainchant, the different times and musics mingled for all who had come to listen.