Baptiste Chopin took off his alpine cap that he had previously worn in the TGV. The musician and researcher, a specialist in medieval zithers (psalterions, cannons, etc.), despite the cold, looked serious under his short red beard and solemnly placed his right hand on the keyboard of the square box, which is the size of a toy (5 kilograms , 45 centimeters on each side and a board like a chess board) and everyone held their breath. This Friday, January 26, in the icy air of Saint-Julien Cathedral in Le Mans, the sharp sound of the “musical chessboard” rang out for the first time in seven hundred years.
It is the story of a resurrection. There were written traces of this missing instrument, citations in Latin texts in various kingdoms, and studies of its use, but we had never seen or heard of it. Only two representations existed worldwide. Both in the Cathedral of Le Mans. One on the vault of the Lady Chapel, in the middle of a farandole with angels making music, the other on a stained glass window in the north transept.
The object has previously been a local curiosity, the origin of which is traced to the capture of John the Good by the English in 1356, at the start of the Hundred Years’ War, at the Battle of Poitiers. Born here, baptized in the cathedral, he spent four years in prison in London. By Edward III. Treated royally, he then received it as a gift “Eschiquier” or musical chessboard that he will bring back to France. The 14th-century composer and canon of Reimse In the 19th century, Guillaume de Machaut also quotes in a poem: The capture of Alexandriaamong the instruments of his time “The Chessboard of England”.
Work on intuition
The fact is that we knew practically nothing about this instrument other than this iconography. We had to work on intuition, explains Maël Robichon, maker of old keyboards in La Gacilly (Morbihan) and architect of this welcome renaissance – as part of the Le Mans Sound Biennale, which took place for the third time from January 20th to 28th Edition-Electroacousticians, Sound designers and musicians of all stripes, from Jean-Michel Jarre to Jeff Mills.
A pianist and double bass player, trained at the Nantes Conservatory, professor at the European Technological Institute for Music Professions (Itemm) in Le Mans, this specialist in the construction of old violins is not his first attempt. But while he wanted to reconstruct the clavicymbalum, an ancestor of the harpsichord, he (like others before him, including Philippe Humeau) had turned to the highly detailed Latin manuscript of a 15th-century scholare Century, Henri Arnault de Zwolle, doctor, astronomer, who was organist to the Duke of Burgundy, Maël Robichon had to work empirically this time “Many deductions” : “For example, we see angels playing it on their knees, so we know that it is rather light… We see that it is the size of two shoulders… From this we derive lengths, a number of keys, a tuning fork. »
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