As Magnificat turns our attention to December's performances of the mass setting by Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, I decided it would be a good time to repost and expand this article that I wrote two years ago after our performance of a reconstruction of the mass celebrating the 1607 re-dedication of St. Gertrude's Church in Hamburg. The performance of sacred works within a re-construction of a contemporaneous liturgical context has been of feature of Magnificat's concert series since our first season in 1992 with our performances of Schütz's Weinachtshistorie (Christmas Story) in collaboration with the San Francisco Early Music Society. Since Read More...
Chloe Veltman recently posted an interesting commentary on the notion of "site specific theatre" with reference to the recent production of Dido and Aeneas by San Francisco's Urban Opera ("Not All Site Specific Theatre is Created Equal"). She proposed that "in order for a theatrical production to be site specific, it needs to be conceived specifically for the space in which it is produced," and therefore "space becomes a performer, with the potential to change the entire relationship between text, visuals, sounds and the human body in fascinating ways."
In the context of her article I personally like her narrow definition, Read More...
In Bruce Haynes’ thought-provoking, persuasive, and thoroughly entertaining book “The End of Early Music", he devotes a chapter to a comparison of Baroque Expression and Romantic Expression. Appropriately, Haynes begins his discussion with a quote from “La Musica” speaking in the prologue of Monteverdi’s Orfeo:
“With sweet accents I can make every restless heart peaceful and inflame the coolest minds, now with anger, now with love.”
In reading Haynes’ revealing discussion of Rhetoric, Declamation, and “Affekt”, as understood before the Enlightenment, I am struck anew that the goal of the musician in the performance of Baroque music is to engender emotions in Read More...
When St. Benedict established the first monastic order in Western Christendom in the sixth century A.D., he prescribed round-the-clock prayers for his monks consisting of eight separate services, one every three hours. These services, the primary texts of which were the Old Testament Psalms of David, comprised the Office Hours, and the most prominent became the evening Office, Vespers, from the Latin word for evening.
All of these Offices were sung throughout to music commonly known as Gregorian Chant—a large repertoire of single-line melodies that dates back to the earliest years of the Catholic Church.
At some unknown point in history Read More...
One of the fascinating aspects of presenting this old music for a new audience is the question of translations. Attitudes to translation change and different circumsstances require different approaches to transaltion. When we're performing liturgical music in Latin, many traditional translations exist. I have long prefered to draw biblical translations from the Douay translation of the Vulgate, first published in 1609, one year before the King James version. More than once after concerts, members of the audience have asked why the translation of some psalm wasn't the one they'd always known. After all the King James translation is a 17thy Read More...