Month: August 2015

Meet Les Bostonades

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les bostonades
les bostonades

Capitol Early Music is pleased to welcome Les Bostonades to its first appearance in the Washington area. This flexibly sized period instrument ensemble, based in Boston, brings four members to perform an array of obbligato sonatas, trio sonatas and quartets from the French and German Baroque. Two members of the ensemble are familiar to Capitol Early Music audiences: Héloïse Degrugillier (recorder and traverso) performed with Three Part Fugue in October 2014 and Laura Gulley (violin) with Renaissonics this past April. They are joined by colleagues Carol Lewis (viola da gamba) and Akiko Sato (harpsichord). Read more

What Do We Mean by Early Music?

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instruments

Recorders – the instruments that are our gateway to the musical world- flourished in the Renaissance and Baroque eras and it is music from these times that we most frequently play. We apply the generic label “early music” to this repertoire.  But that label is, at best, only a shorthand to distinguish music composed or performed in those times from music of the more recent Classical, Romantic and contemporary music eras.  So, it is a label of exclusion rather than a description of the music included.  And how could it be otherwise?  For, the label encompasses music from the 12th through 18th centuries and includes musical styles and performance practices that range from those of the Baroque masters such as J.S. Bach (1685-1750), G.P. Telemann (1681-1767) and G.F. Handel (1685-1759), to the Renaissance geniuses of polyphony such as Josquin des Prez (1450/55-1521), Guillaume Dufay (1397?-1474), William Byrd (1539-1623) and Tomas Luis Victoria (1548-1611) and even to the exciting mediaeval music of Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377), Adam de la Halle (1237?-1268) and their anonymous contemporaries.