Author: efarrell

Capitol Early Music continues to bring top flight musicians to perform and teach in Washington.  Please join us in 2016-2017, at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Arlington!

♦  December 4, 2016 3:00 pm The Rose Ensemble performs A Rose in Winter: The Miracle of Life in the Dark of Night. 

Medieval and Renaissance Choral Music for the Christmas Season.

♦  February 3, 2017 8:00 pm  Kleine Kammermusik performs Tides and Treaties: Music of the 1720s

Chamber music for paired oboes and bassoon, strings and keyboard continuo.

♦  February 4, 2017  Baroque Ensemble Workshop with Kleine Kammermusik.  For continuo and melody instruments.

♦  March 31, 2017  8:00 pm  Paige Whitley-Bauguess in Characters of the Dance: A Baroque Dance Performance. 

17-18th century dances performed in costume.  With instrumentalists Heloise Degrugillier, recorder; Mary Findley, violin; Douglas Poplin, cello; and Patrick Merrill, harpsichord.

♦  April 1, 2017  Baroque Dance Workshop for dancers and instrumentalists.

For more details, see our Concerts and Workshops pages.

Alkemie is an early music ensemble that specializes in medieval music for voices and instruments.  Read the bios of these exciting young performers and listen to a sample of their performances.

With Alkemie’s concert on January 30, Capitol Early Music opens another door in the mansion of early music. Our past concerts have featured music of the Baroque, the late Renaissance, and even contemporary works specifically composed for early instruments. This time we’ll hear vocalists as well as instrumentalists performing the wondrous polyphony of the French Ars Nova and Italian Trecento styles.

The composers featured on this concert represent the flowering of this period. Guillaume Machaut (1300-1377), renowned for his poetry as well as his music, was educated and lived much of his life in Reims, within the orbit of the French royal court. His compositions exploited the rhythmic and melodic possibilities of the Ars Nova mensural notation and served to establish the importance of the French poetic forms well into the fifteenth century. The Franco-Flemish Johannes Ciconia (1370-1412) worked primarily in Italy: Rome, Pavia and Padua. He composed in both the Italian style, using Trecento notation with the smooth florid upper voices characteristic of that style, and in the French “ars subtilior” style, which developed the rhythmic and notational possibilities of Ars Nova notation to their utmost. Guillaume DuFay (1397-1474), born and educated in Cambrai, was regarded in his lifetime as his era’s preeminent composer of polyphony. Widely traveled in Italy, Savoy and the Low Countries, his music masterfully incorporates the traits of these locales as well as of English music that was captivating the Continent.

Wonderful music performed by an ensemble that specializes in this period!

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.