Utopia Early Music event preview 

• John Olshinski

There are people you can't get to listen to music from five years ago. So how do you go about building an audience for concerts that showcase songs that might be literally a thousand years old?

Soon to head into its 15th season, Utopia Early Music has created a unique arts organization built on showcasing the kind of tunes that even standard symphony orchestras might consider too obscure to play—music of the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque eras. According to Utopia's executive director and co-founder Emily Nelson, it was in some ways easy to create the organization, because there was nothing else like it locally. "It was this little garden waiting to be planted," she says.

Nelson's own background is in music with an emphasis on vocal performance; "I've always been a singer," she says. "I can't remember when I decided to be a singer, I was so young. If I have a core identity, that's what it is."

Nevertheless, it took her some time to work up the courage to study music in college—and she certainly didn't expect to find herself immersed in this particular specialty. It was thanks to a class she took from University of Utah professor Dr. Margaret Rorke that she was first exposed to early music, and found herself fascinated by its unique qualities.

"She played all of these wonderful recordings, and I just fell in love with it," Nelson recalls. "I think it was because it sounded so different to my ear from the Romantic era music. Don't get me wrong, I do love singing Mozart and Schubert; that's still a big part of my career. [But] Medieval music used different modes. It was some of the first music I heard that used different musical scales."

It took several years, though, for Utopia to come into being, with the collaboration between Nelson and co-founder Christopher LeCluyse. "Chris and I formed Utopia when he was fairly new to Salt Lake City," Nelson says. "Some mutual friends said we should get together, they knew both of us were interested in early music. We had coffee together, and just decided, 'Let's put together this group.' Because there wasn't anything else that was like it."

Through the years, Nelson and LeCluyse have put together programs with a variety of fascinating themes, including the popular Christmas-themed program. And among the most intriguing things about these programs for the artists in them is that they're working with compositions that often come with incomplete histories, allowing for a great deal of creative interpretation.

"It gives us a huge amount of freedom and creative agency," Nelson says. "We can shape it to sound how we want. There's not very much on the page, so I can almost be like a co-composer. ... [We're] putting together for next season a concert that's going to have a lot of Medieval song, and in one case, there's just one line of music, there's no rhythm. Even the instruments are also imaginative recreations. So basically, I can add rhythm to it, add a drone underneath it."

Nelson understands that the idea of a concert representing centuries-old music can be a hard sell, and as a result, there's an emphasis on building programs that are entertaining, and not designed to be lectures. "I think it does sound stuffy a little bit," Nelson says, "but it's important that the audience does have a great time. We're looking for things that will be eye-opening about the past, that will be playful, sometimes unexpected, and to sound beautiful. We try to talk as little as possible; it is really just a concert."

And it's clear that Utopia knows how to keep audiences engaged, based on feedback Nelson has received from, for example, students who came simply as part of a school assignment, and wound up loving what was offered. She also has a favorite anecdote about a patron who definitely wasn't expecting the program that he ended up seeing.

"One patron who was there at the beginning, I can't think of a time I haven't seen him [since]," she says. "He thought he was going to a Kate McLeod show that first time; he actually went by mistake. But he really loved what we did, and wasn't interested in what we were doing before."

Nelson does love the opportunity to share with people things they otherwise might not have known about the music of this era, like how much unexpected diversity can be found among the composers; "people will say, 'I didn't know there were any women writing music back in that era," she notes. The focus, however, remains on emphasizing the pleasures of the works themselves, and bringing them to life for people 40 to 50 generations removed from its creation.

"More than trying to do what they used to do in the past," she says, "because we really can't, we're just trying to do something beautiful in the present."