LuAnn Johnson

With daily comic strips, it’s either a laugh with the next installment or a problem that may not be solved until tomorrow. The lesson either way is that life is short.

In February, it is appropriate to think about roses.

Lindsay was the Grande Dame of gardening in a time when ladies did not have professional careers.

Troubadours have been romanticized and reimagined in popular culture for centuries now, but rarely does that evocative re-imagination include the many women among these elite poet-musicians of medieval Southern France. This week on Harmonia, the music of the women troubadours, known as “trobairitz.”

This hour, we’re going to hear half a dozen pieces from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, each of which begins with the same two words, “Quis dabit” - Latin for “who will give.” We’ll find that for hundreds of years those two words have signaled a call to mourning and have been the inspiration for unforgettable music.

Hell, the underworld, and areas of evil are home to many of music’s darkest scenes. This week on Harmonia, baroque music featuring portrayals of evil spirits, Lucifer, and Hell. Then, darkness turns to light in our featured release, Epiphany: Biber, Buxtehude, Kapsberber, & Bach, by Three Notch’d Road.

This hour, we’ll meet 3 mysteriously related, musically intricate French songs, each beginning with the words “While waiting…” We’ll also meet their common musical and poetical ancestor, which does NOT begin with those words. Intrigued?

Until quite recently, the composer Loyset Compère was considered a “lesser contemporary” of Josquin des Prez. But Compere was the source of many stylistic innovations used by Josquin. Find out more this week on Harmonia.

In December 2024, Paris and the world celebrated the reopening of the Notre-Dame Cathedral of in Paris, five years after it was severely damaged by fire in 2019. This hour on Harmonia, we commemorate the cathedral’s reopening by taking a tour of musical and architectural monuments from Notre-Dame’s first millennium.

We’re hitting all the right notes—as we explore the world of tuning systems from Pythagorean to the first temperaments of the Renaissance, which allowed musicians to go beyond the limitations of a single mode. Plus, our featured recording is A Monk’s Life by the Brabant Ensemble.