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What a season it’s been!  After Purcell Fantasias by New World Recorders and music of Petrucci’s era by Ensemble Gentil Galant, we close with a concert of virtuoso baroque chamber music by The Medici Ensemble on April 24.  The Ensemble members will also coach baroque ensembles in an all-day workshop on April 25.  Concert ticket sales and workshop registration open on February 28. 

All spaces in Ensemble Gentil Galant’s February 1 workshop are filled.  If you are interested in being placed on a waiting list in the event of cancellations email us at info@capitolearlymusic.org.  You might also consider registering for Amherst Early Music’s Spring Break workshop in Washington on March 21-22. Details

The title of Ensemble Gentil Galant’s concert on February 2 refers not only to the popularity of music of the Franco-Flemish composers and the Italian composers who followed them in the early 16^th century but, more specifically, to the source of this music in the printed books of the Venetian publisher, Ottaviano Petrucci.  He was the first publisher to harness the technology of moveable type and multiple impression printing to print mensural polyphony, publishing some 67 editions and reprints between 1501 and 1520.  His earliest publications Odhecaton A, Canti B and Canti C together contain hundreds of songs by the 15-16^th century masters, such as Josquin, Isaac, Ockeghem, and Obrecht.  Some survive only in these sources.  He later published editions of masses and motets by these and other composers as well as Italian frottola and lute intablatures of Spinacino and others.

To apply the 15^th century invention of moveable type to printing polyphonic mensural notation, Petrucci needed specialized printers who understood mensural music (where notes indicate a time value), could lay out multi-voice pieces, and set the exacting registration to align multiple impressions: first printing the staff lines and then overlaying the staves with notes in a second – and, if text was underlaid, a third – printing.  In the 1520s, publishers developed a single impression method for printing music: each scale degree and each time was cast as a separate piece of type by creating the note along with its staff lines as a single piece of type.  Appropriate pieces of type representing each note or rest with its staff lines were placed next to each other, allowing a printer to set an entire line of music.   

These enterprising publishers marketed to the tastes of cultured amateur musicians interested in playing polyphonic music but not accustomed (or perhaps wealthy enough) to collect hand copied manuscripts.  In so doing, they created the music publishing industry and preserved hundreds of works that we enjoy today.  You can hear some of these pieces at the concert.  Purchase tickets

All currently available places for recorders have been taken for our Franco-Flemish music workshop with Ensemble Gentil Galant.  We are exploring options for accommodating more recorder players.  So email us if you would like to be on the waiting list. 

Space is still available for lute and viol registrants.

The Capitol Early Music community is proud to have been with New World Recorders at its beginning.  Hear the quartet perform again on Friday October 11.  Recently, they have told us more about the ensemble’s members, its founding, and its vision:

Gwyn Roberts, Rainer Beckmann and Héloïse Degrugillier all studied at Utrecht Conservatory in the Netherlands, and Priscilla Herreid studied at Temple University and the Juilliard School.  As individual players, we perform with nearly every ensemble that hires recorders on the East Coast and beyond, including the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, Handel and Haydn, the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, Boston Baroque, Curtis Opera, the Washington Bach Consort, Piffaro, the Renaissance Band, Trinity Wall Street Baroque Orchestra, the Four Nations Ensemble, American Bach Soloists, Portland Baroque and many more.  You can find us teaching at the Amherst Early Music Festival, Pinewoods, Mountain Collegium, Peabody Conservatory, the University of Pennsylvania, the Texas Toot, Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute, the Madison Early Music Festival, and anywhere else where recorder players gather to study and play.

The quartet had its genesis in the summer of 2017 when four recorder players who perform with Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra Tempesta di Mare agreed to play Bach’s Art of the Fugue together on Tempesta’s Artist Recital Series. Those concerts in April were followed by an additional performance and a full-day workshop on Fugues, presented by Capitol Early Music in Washington DC. We enjoyed the project so much that we decided to name the group.

Professional recorder quartets are fairly common in Europe, where three of us studied, but not so much in the US, where we all live. We are excited to fill this special niche in the musical world.

 

Enrollment in the New World Recorders workshop is full.  Cancellations have occurred in the past.  So please email us if you would like to be put on our waiting list.  

Individual tickets are now on sale for New World Recorders’ Purcell Fantazias concert on October 11, 2019.  You won’t want to miss this remarkable set of pieces in a stunning performance by a superb recorder quartet. Concert details here; purchase tickets here.

Recorder players can also now register for the quartet’s workshop on October 12, 2019.  A day of fantasias and chaconnes in consort-sized classes taught by the experts.  Details and registration here.

We are thrilled to present a chock-full season of concerts and workshops for 2019-2020. To open on October 11, we welcome the return of the Recorders of Tempesta di Mare – who have officially become New World Recorders since they performed Art of Fugue here – in a program of Purcell Fantazias. In February, Ensemble Gentil Galant, a versatile trio of voice, plucked and bowed strings, and winds, presents Franco-Flemish polyphony from the turn of the 16th century. In a final flourish in April, The Medici Ensemble, a baroque ensemble of winds, violin and continuo, performs a musical conversation of virtuoso chamber music. See details for each concert here, here, and here.

Subscribe now to the full concert season. Tickets for individual concerts go on sale approximately 8 weeks before each concert.

Each performing group will also conduct an all-day workshop. See here for brief descriptions. More details and registration available 6-8 weeks before each workshop.

Thanks to everyone for the interest in our workshop.  We have now filled all available slots.  Join us next year for more exciting programs.

Through Saturday January 26, dancers and instrumentalists can register for our workshop “Le Mouvement:  Baroque Dance for Dancers and Instrumentalists” for only $70 ($35 for students).  Dance instruction by renowned baroque dancer, Caroline Copeland, of the New York Baroque Dance Company; instrumental instruction on technique and ensemble performance by popular performer and teacher Alison Melville. See here for details and registration