Musica Subterranea - Meet the Band    

Present Company
Lucia/Kathi
Dafydd/Dave
Drea/Drea
Francesca/Julie
Philip/Phil
Thomas/Tom
Emil/Ernest
Kjartan/Dan

Alumni
Sophia/Lara
Zuzuanna/Susan
Emrys/Gus

Lucia Elena Beatrice Braganza is a calligrapher/illuminatrix in the Metten Abbey Scriptorium, having been sent there to learn patience and restraint after an unfortunate incident with her now-late first husband and a soup ladle. Besides kitchen implements, she is also fairly apt at wielding arrows, puns, and her great-aunt's fiddle.

Kathi Coutinho is a meandering ecologist and weedslayer of greatness, currently based in Indianapolis working for the Indiana state government. (Be afraid.) She began playing violin in 5th grade, and later received 15 seconds of fame on CNN as part of the Nearly Famous Columbia University Non-Marching Band. Afterward, the violin went into mothballs for several years, until a Civic Theatre stint as the title role in Fiddler on the Roof inspired her to take up music again - just in time to get invovled with her sister's plans for an SCA dance band.

Dafydd Arth is a minor aristocrat and aspiring courtier. He is studying under the tutelage of Mistress Urraca Yriarte de Gamboa to become a Master of Dance; in the meantime, he earns his keep as a musician.

Dafydd resides in the Shire of Mynydd Seren, and does his best to find time to pursue his interests in music and dance whenever circumstances allow. In addition to Musica Subterranea, Dafydd is also active in Mynydd Seren's european dance troupe and in the southern-Constellation-based madrigal & part-singing ensemble Crucis Chorus.

Dave Lankford lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with his husband and five cats. In college he studied psychology and symphonic instruments, so of course he now works as a computer consultant instead. Dave has numerous hobbies which compete for his attention, including composing, arranging, & playing music, learning/teaching Renaissance & early folk dances, writing original choreographies, computer stuff, bear-watching, and various kinds of gaming - RPGs, board games, and more.

Drea di' Pellegrini is a 16th century merchant's daughter with a penchant for travel and learning strange customs. She's currently wandering Renaissance Europe with a group of dubious travelling musicians.

Drea Leed lives in Springfield, Ohio where she works as a software engineer. She got a degree in Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, and has played the hammered dulcimer for 10 years. Aside from hanging with musicians and banging on strings, she enjoys historical costuming, medieval research, gardening and kickboxing.

Francesca Ambrogini followed her slightly more famous older brother to the City of Firenza in Tuscany. While her brother labored at tutoring and translating Latin and Greek, Francesca visited often with the well to-do of the city and found herself a good match. With his early and somewhat mysterious demise, she finds herself filling idle hours with traveling, dancing, playing music and making pretty gowns.

Julie Oller is a systems analyst for a large insurance company in Bloomington, IL., despite having a degree in English from IL State University . (See, there really is a use for an English degree!) Yet another of the group that put away her instrument for twenty years, when Sophia found out Julie had a viola and could actually read music, yet another member of the group was found.

Philip the Pilgrim is an Anglo/Scot from the late 1200s. He doesn't seem to mind having fallen in such an eclectic assortment of musical companions.

Phil Reed has parlayed childhood piano and cello lessons and a life-long love of percussion, combined with a fascination of his Scottish ancestry, into a new musical avocation as a drummer. After years of sporadically playing folk music together with his friend Pat, both now belong to a band called FinTan. (We Subterraneans hope that the other members of FinTan don't mind sharing their wonderful percussionist!) In addition to playing the traditional Irish drum, the bodhran, Phil also plays a host of other percussion instruments including wood blocks, various shakers and the vibra-slap.

Thomas of Meadowsedge is still not a well-defined persona within the SCA, but he is known to live somewhere rural in the British Isles and to open his home to traveling musicians one and all.

Tom Lee is a computer programmer, but music is an important part of his life. Over the years he's taken lessons in piano and several woodwind instruments, such as flute, bassoon, saxophone, and, yes, recorder, and played in bands, orchestras and other ensembles. However, since graduating with his bachelor's degree from Drake University (Des Moines, Iowa) in 1990, his only musical outlet has been playing recorder for his own enjoyment until recent years, and he is grateful to be able to play with such a wonderful group of people and musicians. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Emil Allzuwissender studied at half the universities of Europe in brief (sometimes very brief) stints. He learned two things: middling competence with a variety of musical instruments, and a sense for when RIGHT NOW becomes an expedient time to leave. His latest (and apparently final) departure from scholastic life left him adrift in Elizabeth's realm with depleted funds. His education serves him well as he pursues twin vocations of itinerant musician and occasional specialist in general salvage.

Ernest Clark writes and maintains firmware for a major electrical equipment maker in Lafayette, Indiana. Power To The People (and billing info to the utility)! He paid singer/songwriter dues during the '80s in SF and SCA venues, then took a dozen years off for Real Life®. The SCA music scene exploded in the interim, or perhaps his wife Sara/Olwen's many skills now permit him to notice a lot more than he ever did in grad school. Sing! Do guitar! Write! Accept the challenge to develop those other incidental instrumental skills! Musica Subterranea is an indication that These Are The Good Years.

Kjartan Hakonarson is a young freeman during the landnam period in Iceland. When he's not taking care of the homestead, he helps support the trips to the Althing, swings a sword at those who deserve it, and putters away making interesting and useful things out of metal and wood. Exactly how he came to possess a strange looking assembly of wood and wires, and why he's able to make music out of it, is yet to be determined.

Dan Grabski is an engineer for an Indycar team based in Indianapolis. He started playing cello in 3rd grade, after realizing that a string bass was twice his height at the time. In later years, he also started playing trombone, percussion, and piano. His interests focused on jazz trombone and percussion while attending college at the University of Rochester, where he was able to take lessons at the Eastman School of Music. He left the cello behind for years, until he, Sophia's cello, and the members of Musica Subterranea happened to find themselves in the same place at the same time.

Sophia the Orange is a late 16th century bar wench from Rotterdam, Holland. She’s currently trying to break into polite society by entertaining the Italian nobility with her commedia dell’ arte troupe, i Scandali.

Lara Coutinho put her Environmental Science degree from Barnard College to work by serving the Indiana National Guard as the Environmental Specialist (civilian) at Camp Atterbury. She also serves the Woman Within community in Indianapolis, learns as many different forms of dance as she can, and visits the east coast often.

Back in early 1997, frustrated by the effort, expense, and copyright problems of assembling a good collection of SCA dance music, Lara assembled her fellow dance enthusiast/musician friends into a new ensemble dedicated to producing inexpensive music for SCA dancers of all levels. Thus began the group that would come to be known as Musica Subterranea.

Zuzuanna a Zenész is a 16th century Hungarian traveling musican. She settled in Sternfeld for many years, but eventually the wanderlust took her. She traveled to Carolingia, then turned around and journeyed all the way to the desert barony al-Barran in the Kingdom of the Outlands. Exhausted and travel-weary, she plans to once again try to settle down and make a home.

Susan Rati Lane has made a new home in Albuquerque, NM in her new house with her husband, old veteran cat, and young naive cat. By day she works as a contract code-slinger and part-time manager for Respec Consulting. By night she plays viola with the Albuquerque Philharmonic Orchestra and St. John's Church Ensemble. After many years working with World Weavers Collaborative Fiction Club, she's broken off on her own to work on more personal writing projects. Her other hobbies include skiing, hiking, a myriad of crafts, woodworking, gardening, and perpetual home improvement.

Emrys Penhedog, better known to his kin as Augustus von Metten, is currently wandering the far reaches of Ansteorra, seeking continued spiritual enlightenment and other family members under the stars. He has one daughter, Katarina von Metten, who is currently studying at the Abbey. We are the von Mettens, resistance is feudal. You will be assimilated.

Gus Sterneman will soon be relocating to Indianapolis after 7 years in beautiful Austin, Texas. He will be doing graduate studies at Butler University in Orchestral Conducting and Music History. When not teaching, studying, or in rehearsal, he spends as much time as possible making music with his wife Mary, an elementary school music teacher, and teaching his son Karl the ways of the world, including how to grow tomatoes. His fondness for Thai cuisine has led him to combine his love of the culinary arts and gardening into a small grove of citrus trees and various native southeast Asian herbs and vegetables.