The scope of Michael Eberle’s musical repertoires extends to early European music as well as music of the eastern Mediterranean.

His main field of expertise is the music of the early and high middle ages, including both vocal and instrumental repertoires. His interest is especially dedicated to narrative songs and liturgical plays, Gregorian chant and earliest stages of polyphony. With both the voice and the lute he is eager to reconstruct lost music by a creative process of re-creation based on preserved musical sources.
He performs both as soloist and ensemble musician.
With the lute, he either accompanies himself or other musicians or he presents reconstructed as well as popular pieces from the instrumental repertoires between the 8th and 15th century.

As a singer, his repertoire exceeds the 15th century to the world of renaissance and early baroque vocal polyphony and the responsorial Oratories of the 16th and 17th centuries. From time to time, he even takes part in the performance of contemporary music.

Michael’s second field of expertise is the modal music from the eastern Mediterranean – mainly the repertoire of byzantine (until 1453) and post-byzantine (1453-20th century) Greek chant. He is acquainted with the fields of classical Arabic and Ottoman music which are closely connected with the musical style of post-byzantine music.

Michael’s style and approach mainly rely on the principles of text and melodic modality. His theatrical and scholarly backgrounds allow him an intense relation to the sung or spoken text, conveying it convincingly and touchingly in both sacred and secular genres. His dedication to musical modes enables him to emphasize the character and behavior of melodies, always aiming to a horizontal sound, both in monophony and polyphony.

As lutenist, Michael specialized in early instruments such as the carolingian cythara and the fretless lute from high medieval Spain, for which he tries to reconstruct plausible repertoires, the late medieval lute and the Arabic and Turkish Oud. In his technique, both approaches are apparent, oscillating between the musical style of the transition from Middle Ages to Renaissance and the energetic use of the plectrum.

In both singing and playing the lute, Eberle is able to switch quickly between the musical idioms and technical approaches of early European, byzantine and classical Arabic/eastern music. He is eager to transform experiences from one idiom into the other while respecting their musical and culture-historical distance. Especially in medieval music, it is of utmost importance for him to balance out historical authenticity and accessibility for the modern audience. His own programmes rely on strict dramaturgical concepts with the goal of conveying an authentic imagination of a repertoire’s historical, cultural and intellectual background.

Since 2023 Michael teaches workshops in the fields of medieval, byzantine and sometimes Arabic music, collaborating for instance with Montalbâne early music festical, German singer Maria Jonas (Ars Choralis Coeln) or Jeunesses musicales Deutschland e.V.
When teaching, it is his first priority to convey an understanding and authentic aesthetic imagination of the respective repertoire and its cultural historical background.

Education

Michael Eberle studied musicology, theology and religious studies at the Universities of Heidelberg and Hamburg, Germany, where he received his MA (Hon.) in 2019 with a Master thesis on aspects of ritual and theater in liturgical plays from 12th century Catalonia.

Afterwards, he studied medieval and renaissance music at Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland, in the classes of Marc Lewon (lute), Katarina Livljanić, Kate Dineen (voice) and Baptiste Romain (Improvisation), finishing in 2022.
Masterclasses, lessons and workshops with renowned performers such as Benjamin Bagby, Agnieszka Budzinska-Bennett or Peppe Frana completed his education.

Michael as well received training in the vast field of eastern Mediterranean music. He studied byzantine and post-byzantine music with Emmanouil Giannopoulos, Gerasimos Papadopoulos, Dimos Papatzalakis and Adrian Sîrbu. With Khaled El-Hafez, Lamia Yared (voice) and Nehad El-Sayyed (Oud) he entered the world of classical Arabic and Ottoman music. Among his teachers for a general understanding of eastern modal music should be mentioned Ross Daly and Efrén López.