Examples of Early Music involving Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Music performed in unusual ways, including new compositions based on styles from the past. The site will likely inspire amateur, and professional musicians, and composers to help make Early Music relevant in today's world. The music links published here may not always lead to audio/visual material, and a word search may be required. Virtually all the links come from youtube and adverts may appear and an ad blocker may be used.
Lucie Skeaping talks to Radio 3's embedded composer Matthew Kaner, New York-based composer Caroline Shaw and viola da gamba player Liam Byrne about how early music pieces and performance practice influence their styles as contemporary composers and performers.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miroque German version at present, but there should be a translation button somewhere which has played up in the bloggers case!
......an ambitious attempt to bring the story of Perceval and the Grail...to life...with a mixture of original compositions and traditional English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh melodies....(edited from youtube)
La Nef (in French wikt:nef means the nave of a ship or church, or a medieval boat) is a French-Canadian early music performance group founded in Quebec in 1991. The founding members were Sylvain Bergeron, guitar and musical director, and Claire Gignac, contralto and recorder, theatrical director and Viviane LeBlanc, soprano.[1]
Their first show was Musiques pour Jeanne la Folle ("Music for Joan the Mad"), later recorded as a CD for Dorian Recordings.
Jump up ^La Nef (L'actualité, Montréal Nov 1997 "Ses trois fondateurs sont toujours au poste: Sylvain Bergeron, le luthiste le plus actif du Québec, est directeur musical; Claire Gignac, flûtiste, chanteuse et comédienne, voit à l'aspect théâtre; et la soprano Viviane Leblanc"
Jump up ^Musiques des Montagnes - Music of Greece, Claire Gignac Atma Essay and Greek sung texts and translations
Jump up ^Oikan Ayns Bethlehem - Celtic Christmas songs Essay with sung texts and translations
The Fifth Estate (band) had a hit record in 1967 with the rock version of "Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead.", in which they interpolated "La Bouree" from the Terpsichore suite.....
Terpsichore is a compendium of more than 300 instrumental dances published in 1612 by the German composer Michael Praetorius. The collection takes its name from the muse of dance.
In his introduction Praetorius takes credit for arranging the music rather than composing the tunes. The collection is based on French dance repertoire of the time, although scholars have identified some of the tunes as coming from elsewhere, for example England.[1]
An illustration of several musical instruments from Syntagma Musicum
The work was rediscovered in the twentieth century by the early music movement. Recordings include a selection performed by the Early Music Consort which was released in 1973.[2]
Terpsichore contains some notes which relate to instrumentation, but does not specify which instruments should play particular parts. A variety of instruments have been used to play Terpsichore.
Sometimes performers draw on another work by Praetorius, Syntagma Musicum, which is an important source of information regarding historical instruments. The Early Music Consort used this approach. However, Syntagma Musicum is not necessarily a guide to the instrumentation of Terpsichore. The musicologist Peter Holman suggests that the dances were conceived primarily for violin consorts, although "Praetorius was clearly aware that potential purchasers in Germany might want to play them on wind instruments".[1]
On Cleveland's classical station WCLV 95.5-FM in the 1970s, Albert Petrak used "La Bourrée" as the theme music for his 6:15 am "First Program." Petrak curated a collection of 32 versions of the "Bourrée" for his show.[6]
^ Jump up to: abPeter Holman: Terpsichore at 400: Michael Praetorius as a Collector of Dances. The Viola da Gamba Society Journal, Volume Six, 2012. S. 34-51. Online
Jump up ^Jancik, Wayne (2010). The Billboard Book of One-hit Wonders (2nd rev. ed.). Oakland: University of California Press. p. 221. ISBN9780823076222.
Rondò Veneziano is an Italian chamber orchestra, specializing in Baroque music, playing original instruments, but incorporating a rock-style rhythm section of synthesizer, bass guitar and drums, led by MaestroGian Piero Reverberi, who is also the principal composer of all of the original Rondo Veneziano pieces. The unusual addition of modern instruments, more suitable for Jazz, combined with Reverberi's arrangements and original compositions, have resulted in lavish novel versions of classical works over the years. As a rule in their concert tours, the musicians, mostly women, add to the overall Baroque effect wearing Baroque-era attires and coiffures.
The orchestra's first decade of albums included only entirely original compositions in the style of the baroque rondò, "a musical composition built on the alternation of a principal recurring theme and contrasting episodes".
In later years, in addition to many new and original albums continuing Gian Piero Reverberi's own unique Rondo style and tradition, Rondò Veneziano also brought their fusion of classical and contemporary instruments to a small number of albums dedicated to some of the great composers of the classical and baroque tradition.
In an interview, Maestro Reverberi said on the sound of Rondò Veneziano: "Rondò Veneziano's music is first of all positive. Also when it seems to be sad, it's never sad. It's always positive in a sense that at the end there's always a good future. So I think that also the reason of the success it that it's music where you don't have to think negative or to feel negative or if you feel negative it should be something that brings you to think positive."
A version of "La Serenissima" (Theme From Venice in Peril) was released in the UK as a single and reached number 58 in the UK Singles Chart in October 1983.[1] The track was also widely used at that time by BBC Television, as the theme tune to Hospital Watch. The track was later to feature on the globally successful Venice in Peril album which was released as part of an international campaign to save Venice from sinking into the lagoon.
In 1985, they provided the score for the movie Not Quite Jerusalem (known as Not Quite Paradise in the USA). This score was a reworking of many of the original pieces featured on the Venice in Peril and The Genius of Venice albums.
The orchestra has produced 70 albums in the 29 years since its founding in 1979.
Atalanta fugiens by Michael Maier was first published in 1617 at Frankfurt at the press of Johann Theodor de Bry. This alchemical emblem book included 50 engraved emblems with an associated 'fugue' or musical canon. In a sense this book with its integration of image, text and sound was one of the first attempts at multimedia.
To make the emblematic images more accessible to the modern eye, I have hand-coloured the images, and have also re-created the music and made it more approachable to contemporary ears by programming it for a modern synthesiser. The music was originally devised as Latin verses sung in three parts.
I have orchestrated the music and played it through a multi-timbral synthesiser (Yamaha SY77) which incorporates sampled instruments. I have used a wide palette of instruments to provide variety, a number of horns (french horn, flugel horn, trumpets), woodwind (oboe, clarinet, bassoon, flute), harp, harpsichord, and some strings, organs and orchestral sounds. I have avoided any modern entirely synthetic sounds as well as the piano. The general sound can be likened to an early music group, but of course with no pretentions to authenticity.
