As the Black Death ravages their city, ten people leave Florence and go into the countryside to build a fortress of songs, stories and dances that will protect them from pandemic induced soul-destroying fear and creeping dispassion. This is the frame story of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, the iconic masterpiece of Western literature written during and relating to the plague that swept through Asia, North Africa and Europe between 1347 and 1351. While the cataclysm of the Plague always remains suspended in the background, the songs in The Decameron centre on the joyful, hopeful, anxiety-ridden, obsessive & painful aspects of romantic love an enduring preoccupation of humanity. The seven young women and three young men who flee Florence spend ten days feasting, conversing and telling stories. At the end of each day, when ten stories have been told by each of the ten storytellers, one of them sings a song. The lyrics to the songs by Boccaccio are given, the music is left to the imagination of the reader. I have swum back against the tide of time and reconstructed the songs, setting Boccaccio's lyric poetry to music from that time and place. Anakronos true to its name has taken these songs from seven hundred years ago and fused them with sounds and moods of today. CITADEL OF SONG sings the story of romance against the backdrop of imperilled humanity. Pain, Beauty, Hope, Life. All ten of Boccaccio's Decameron songs are in ballata form, a typical 14th century Italian song form. I plunged into the surviving codices, looking for ballate that most closely matched the syllable count; and, after carefully following the underlay of the original borrowed songs (exquisitely florid phrases, funkily syncopated hockets, rest-broken words and all), took them to my bandmates for us to use as the starting point in our (often very quick) journey to somewhere else entirely. Caitriona O'Leary
