The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: The weeklong 21st annual Madison Early Music Festival is virtual and will be free online here and worldwide starting this Saturday
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has received the following announcement from the directors of the Madison Early Music Festival and the UW-Madison Division of the Arts to post:
Due to the coronavirus pandemic and concerns about public health for performers and audiences, the 21st annual Madison Early Music Festival (MEMF) will be virtual.
It will be held as MEMF Online! from this Saturday, July 11, through next Saturday, July 18. It can be accessed at Facebook.com/MadisonEarly or madisonearlymusic.org.
All events are FREE. Lectures and special features begin at NOON (not 11 a.m., as first listed) and concerts begin at 7 p.m. (CDT). All events will be available nationwide and internationally.
The Madison Early Music Festival is internationally recognized as a top early music festival that features music from medieval, Renaissance and baroque eras from award-winning performers and distinguished faculty.
The uncertainty of the future for the arts and MEMF is daunting, but we have persevered and put together a virtual experience to showcase the musicians and faculty members that were supposed to perform this summer.
Each ensemble prepared a special video of highlights from past performances, and other faculty members recorded lectures.
Our focus was going to be “Musical Life from the Burgundian Court,” and the videos of the Orlando Consort, Piffaro, performances and lectures by Michael Allsen and Peggy Murray reflect that theme.
The other two ensembles, Trefoil and Nota Bene, sent us live concert recordings of Trecento and Italian repertoire.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, we are launching a fundraiser campaign to help support the artists that were to perform this season. It is critical that we help these musicians as many of them have lost substantial and irreplaceable income for the foreseeable future.
People can donate online at madisonearlymusic.org — where you can also see the concert programs — and click on the Support tab at the top of our home page. All money raised is for the MEMF musicians.
HERE IS A COMPLETE SCHEDULE OF MEMF ONLINE:
Different events will be released each day of the festival, but the content will be available after that time for later viewing.
Saturday, July 11, at 7 p.m.: Orlando Consort (below) in 15th-Century Chansons from the Library of Congress
Sunday, July 12, at 7 p.m.: Piffaro, The Renaissance Band: (below) Excerpts from Burgundian Beginnings and Beyond, Philadelphia
Monday, July 13, at noon: Michael Allsen (below), Musical Life and History at the Burgundian Court
Tuesday, July 14, at 7 p.m.: Trefoil (below): Trecento Music from Bowerbird Concert Series, Philadelphia
Wednesday, July 15, at noon: T-shirt challenge! Post a photo wearing a MEMF T-shirt! #MEMF2020; plus Lecture by William Hudson (below) on style in singing and ornamenting Baroque songs
Thursday, July 16, noon: Renaissance Valois Dance at the Burgundian Court, a lecture by Peggy Murray (below)
Friday, July 17, at 7 p.m.: Nota Bene viol consort (below) in Sonetti Spirituali; Italian Madrigals and Divine Poetry of the High Renaissance composed by Pietro Vinci (c.1525–1584) to settings of the poetry of Vittoria Colonna (1492-1547) Brandeis University in Boston
Saturday, July 18, at 7 p.m.: All-Festival Concert videos from previous festivals. There will be a sing-along of Pastime With Good Company! by King Henry VIII (below). It will be led by a virtual MEMF Faculty Ensemble. You can hear the popular song — also known as “The King’s Ballad” — in the YouTube video at the bottom. (You can download the music and lyrics at: https://memf.wisc.edu/annual/online-program/)
We hope to see everyone in 2021, and that a vaccine is approved to help us gather again as a community experiencing all the arts with musicians, artists and audiences — at MEMF in Madison and around the world.
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Classical music: The Madison Early Music Festival’s 20th anniversary Grand Tour includes a silent movie and rare books as well as lots of varied music to mark its success after 20 years. Part 2 of 2
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By Jacob Stockinger
A big anniversary deserves a big celebration – and that is exactly what the organizers of this year’s Madison Early Music Festival, which is marking its 20th year, have come up with.
All concerts include a pre-concert lecture at 6:30 p.m. The concerts begin at 7:30 p.m.
Here’s the link for all the information about MEMF: https://memf.wisc.edu/
Tickets are $90 for an all-event pass. Individual concerts are $22, $12 for students. Tickets are available for purchase online and by phone at 608-265-ARTS (2787) with a $4 service fee; or in person at the Campus Arts Ticketing Box Office @ Memorial Union.
Co-artistic director Cheryl Bensman-Rowe recently wrote about the festival in a Q&A for this blog. Yesterday she spoke about the overall concept and the first weekend’s concerts. Here is a link to Part 1:
Here is Part 2 of 2:
What events take place next week?
The concert on Tuesday, July 9, is going to be a unique experience for MEMF audiences. HESPERUS creates the soundtrack for the 1923 silent film “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” with music (below) from 14th- and 15th-century France. (The cathedral was started in 1163 and finished in 1345.)
Compositions include French and Burgundian music from 1300 to 1500, featuring Guillaume de Machaut, Jehan l’Escurel, Guillaume Dufay, as well as lesser-known composers such as Vaillant, Morton and Borlet.
On Friday, July 12, the vocal ensemble Calmus (below) performs “Faith and Madness,” a program of a dialogue between sacred music masterpieces followed by madrigals that portray madness, love, war and loneliness.
Composers include Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Heinrich Schütz, Claudio Monteverdi, Carlo Gesualdo, Clement Janequin and others.
All of the singers are graduates of Leipzig’s renowned St. Thomas Church Choir School. Calmus was founded in 1999. This a cappella quintet embodies the rich choral tradition of its hometown, the city associated with Johann Sebastian Bach and Felix Mendelssohn.
To hear a preview of their arrangement of Bach’s “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland,” BWV 659, visit: https://youtu.be/WNzzUU0GcF4
Can you tell us about the program and performers for the All-Festival concert on Saturday, July 13?
The All-Festival Concert includes all of our workshop participants and faculty. We work together to prepare the concert all week and it is truly a MEMF community project. Grant Herreid (below) has created the All-Festival program this year. Grant is a genius at designing a program that tells a musical story featuring MEMF’s faculty and participants.
“Musical Postcards from The Grand Tour” features a narrator, loosely based on Thomas Coryat (below, at sea and in the Alps), the English 17th-century century travel writer, who, as a young man, travels throughout Europe in search of music. Beginning in London, 1641, the musical itinerary continues to Venice, Rome, Naples, Dresden, Paris, and back to London.
The program features so many wonderful composers, and the large ensemble pieces are: the Gloria from Monteverdi’s Selva morale et spirituale; the beautiful Miserere of Gregorio Allegri; Nun danket alle Gott by Heinrich Schütz; Domine salvum fac regem setting by Jean-Baptiste Lully; and, as an ending, This point in time ends all your grief from Ye tuneful muses by Henry Purcell.
Are there other sessions — guest lectures, certain performers, particular works — that you especially recommend for the general public?
All the planning that goes into each festival leads me to encourage the general public to attend everything! The concert series, lectures and workshops have so much to offer.
The special moments that I’m looking forward to are singing in the All-Festival concert and performing Allegri’s Miserere,a stunning piece that I have never heard performed in Madison. (You can hear it in there YouTube video at the bottom.)
I also look forward to hearing the fantastic musical soundtrack created by HESPERUS for the silent movie “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and the Calmus singing connection back to Bach through their musical education in Leipzig, plus experiencing all the different travelogues of the past as they come to life through narrations and music.
Special events include a dance with a live band drawn from the MEMF Faculty with dance instruction by Peggy Murray, Grand Tour Dance Excursions, at the Memorial Union in the Great Hall on Thursday, July 11, at 7:30 pm. https://memf.wisc.edu/event/07-11-2019-2/
The lecture series features some well-known Madisonians like J. Michael Allsen (below top), who writes program notes and lectures for the Madison Symphony Orchestra and Maria Saffiotti Dale (below bottom), curator at the Chazen Museum of Art.
There will be a special exhibit created for MEMF in the lobby of Memorial Library by Jeanette Casey, the head of the Mills Music Library and Lisa Wettleson of Special Collections at Memorial Library. This curated display includes materials about the Grand Tour, including one of the oldest travelogues from 1611 written by Thomas Coryat.
The exhibit will be in the lobby of Memorial Library (below) and open to the public from Saturday, July 6, through Thursday, July 18, with a special talk about the exhibit during the festival on Monday, July 8, at 11:30 a.m.
This partnership allows the library to display rarely seen original and facsimile publications, some dating back to the 15th and 16th centuries within the context of the MEMF theme.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
In 1611 Thomas Coryat, the author of the travelogue Crudities foretold what you will hear at MEMF in 2019:
“…I heard the best musicke that ever I did in all my life…so good that I would willingly goe an hundred miles a foote at any time to heare the like…the Musicke which was both vocall and instrumental, so good, so delectable, so rare, so admirable, so superexcellent, that it did even ravish and stupifie all those strangers that never heard the like”.
Get your tickets for the concert series. Attend the lectures. Take some classes. See a movie. Come and dance with us. Join us to experience the ultimate musical gap year at our 20th anniversary celebration!
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Classical music: How did a reformation in religion and a revolution in printing change music? The 19th annual Madison Early Music Festival (MEMF) offers answers and samples this week. Part 2 of 2
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By Jacob Stockinger
Starting this Saturday and running through the following Saturday, the 19th annual Madison Early Music Festival will explore the profound effects that the Lutheran Reformation and the invention of printing had on Renaissance and Baroque music of the time.
The festival is called “A Cabinet of Curiosities: A Journey to Lübeck.” For a complete listing of programs, lectures, concerts and workshops, with information about tickets, go to: https://memf.wisc.edu
Soprano Cheryl Bensman Rowe — who directs the festival with UW Arts Institute’s Sarah Marty and her husband and UW-Madison baritone Paul Rowe — recently agreed to do a Q&A with The Ear about the upcoming festival. Here is Part 2 of 2. And, if you missed the beginning, here is a link to Part 1:
How does early north German music differ from its counterparts in, say, Italy, France, Germany and England. What is the historical origin and aesthetic importance of the music from that era in that part of the world?
One of the biggest changes during the Reformation in Germany began with sacred music and the far-reaching changes in the way it served the church. The music of mass, motet, psalm and hymn heard in the great urban cathedrals, cloistered chapels and royal palace churches of Catholicism represented the “otherness” of the divine, a God unreachable by the untutored masses.
Written in an intellectual language which required years of rigorous training to learn and understand, it was only the disciplined, practiced choir boys and men who could perform this sacred polyphony in all its wonder and glory.
Luther sought to traverse this divide. Though he held the existing music of sacred polyphony in high esteem, he felt that music could be used to even greater effect in furthering the education and religious commitment of the people.
Luther (below) chose the hymn form as the principle means to his musical aims. A prolific hymnodist himself, he authored hymns such as the famous “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God“) several settings of which begin the All-Festival concert, attempted to connect existing high art with folk music in a style that would appeal to all classes, clergy and laity, men, women and children. His texts were in the German vernacular in order to convey messages that would be understood by all in a way that the Latin of preexisting hymns were not.
The culmination of those first 100 years of reformed musical development and the composers whose works will be performed throughout the week at MEMF, launched the reformed hymnody of Luther (below) and his followers into the stratosphere of such giants as Heinrich Schütz, Dietrich Buxtehude, Johann Sebastian Bach (all the Bachs for that matter) and on, a trail that continues to the present day.
What music and composers of that era have been most neglected and least neglected by historians and performers? Does rediscovery of works and composers play a special role this year?
Throughout the week we will be featuring compositions from the Choir Library from the Marienkirche in Lübeck (below) is a collection of music that Lübeck scholar and Buxtehude biographer Kerala Snyder catalogued and reconstructed.
The collection ended up in Vienna in the 19th century, and is a comprehensive data base that includes compositions by German and Italian composers, including Heinrich Schütz, Hermann Schein, Palestrina – the list starts with Agazzari and ends with Zucchini.
Besides the Choir Library compositions, audiences will have an opportunity to hear works of Buxtehude that have never been performed in Madison.
Can you tell us about the program and performers for the All-Festival concert on Saturday, July 14?
The All-Festival Concert (below) includes all of our workshop participants and faculty. We work together to prepare the concert all week and it is truly a MEMF community project. The music will be drawn from settings and compositions based on Lutheran chorales such as Ein Feste Burg and from the Choir Library of the Marienkirche.
The concert concludes with Buxtehude’s Missa Brevis and concludes with his grand motet, Benedicam Dominum in omne tempore, written for six contrasting choirs, which Buxtehude surely composed to match the structural design of the Marienkirche. (You can hear the Kyrie from Buxtehude’s “Missa Brevis” in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
Are there other sessions — guest lectures, certain performers, particular works — that you especially recommend for the general public?
All the planning that goes into each festival leads me to encourage the general public to attend everything. The concert series, lectures and workshop have so much to offer.
Special events include a dance with a live band drawn from the MEMF Faculty with dance instruction by Peggy Murray, Tanzen und Springen,at Memorial Union in the Grand Hall on Thursday night.
The lecture series features some well-known Madison scholars — John W. Barker and J. Michael Allsen, plus Michael Alan Anderson (below top), director of Schola Antiqua and professor of musicology, and Jost Hermand (below bottom), Professor Emeritus at the UW-Madison.
There will be a special exhibit created for MEMF in the lobby of Memorial Library by Jeanette Casey, the Head of the Mills Music Library and Lisa Wettleson of Special Collections at Memorial Library.
This curated display reflects the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. The exhibit will be in the lobby of Memorial Library and open to the public through Thursday, July 19, 2018, with a special talk about the exhibit during the festival on Monday, July 9, at 11:30 a.m. This wonderful partnership allows the library to display rarely seen original and facsimile publications, some dating back to the 15th and 16th centuries within the context of the MEMF theme.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
Martin Luther, who was a great lover of music, said: “The riches of music are so excellent and so precious that words fail me whenever I attempt to discuss and describe them…. In summa, next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world. It controls our thoughts, minds, hearts, and spirits…”
Join us to hear what Luther was talking about! Get your tickets for the concert series! Attend the lectures! Take some classes! You’ll find a link for all the information about MEMF at www.madisonearlymusic.org
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