Benjamin Bagby has been played on NTS shows including In Focus, with O Euchari, Columba Virtutem Illius first played on 19 November 2021.

Benjamin Bagby is a singer, composer, harpist, and groundbreaking performer of medieval music. Educated at Oberlin and the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Bagby founded the ensemble Sequentia with Barbara Thornton in 1977. This group takes an innovative approach to medieval repertoires, especially with respect to their treatment of mode: they rely on the harmonic qualities of their voices to guide them through the different modes. Sequentia has released many fine recordings, most of them on Harmonia Mundi. During the 1990s, the group specialized in the music of Hildegard von Bingen; many of their most famous recordings are from this period. The group has also performed music written in the 12th century from the musical centers Santiago de Compostela, Aquitaine, and Notre Dame.

Benjamin Bagby work as a composer is seen in his recreations of the ancient epics, such as Beowulf, the Icelandic Edda and German music from the 10th and 11th centuries on their recent recording Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper. Bagby (widowed from his longtime collaborator Barbara Thornton) recently married Croatian chant scholar Katarina Livljanic.

The Harp The 6-string harp used by Benjamin Bagby was built by Rainer Thurau (Wiesbaden, Germany), based on the remains of an instrument excavated from a 7th century Alemannic nobleman's grave in Oberflacht (south of Stuttgart). The remarkably intact pieces of oak clearly show a thin, hollow corpus with no soundholes. Like a similar instrument unearthed at Sutton Hoo in England, there are strong indications, supported by contemporary iconography, of six gut strings, a tailpiece and a free-standing bridge.

This ‘bardic’ instrument serves as a key piece of evidence in reconstructing the performance of "Beowulf", for it provides a series of six tones. Although several possible tunings present themselves, the six tones used tonight were arrived upon through a careful study of early medieval modal theory, yielding a gapped octave which contains three perfect 5ths and two perfect 4ths. The resulting series of tones serves as a musical matrix, upon which the singer can weave both his own rhetorical shapes and the sophisticated metrics of the text. The Anglo-Saxon ear was finely-tuned to this web of sounds and syllable lengths, which was always experienced as an aural event, inextricably bound up with the story being told.

The harp is a relatively quiet instrument, but in the ear of the bard it rings with an endless variation of gestures, melodic cells and repetitive figurations which give inspiration to the shape of the vocalization: in the course of the story the bard may move imperceptibly or radically between true speech, heightened speech, speechlike song, and true song. The instrument acts as a constant point of reference, a friend and fellow-performer, a symbol of the scop and his almost magical role in the community of listeners.