Early Music

This week on Harmonia, we’re continuing our Listening to Art mini-series with the sounds of 16th and 17th century public spaces: patrolling the city walls, heading to market with its melodious fishmongers and greengrocers, and dancing in the streets.

Come along on a musical pub crawl. We’ll hear from hard-partying musicians of the past and enjoy tunes about beer, tavern life, and the consequences of imbibing. Raise a glass and join the convivial chorus for a round of intoxicating early music.

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 week on Harmonia, we celebrate the life and music of William Byrd 400 years after his death. Byrd was Catholic in a time and place where it was easier to be Protestant. A favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, Byrd survived when others did not. Plus, our featured release is George Frideric Handel: Coronation Anthems.

We’re sounding the trumpet this week on Harmonia, with magnificent baroque trumpets in virtuosic solo music and majestic choral and orchestral works from Monteverdi to Telemann. Our featured release is Altissima: Works for High Baroque Trumpet with soloist Josh Cohen.

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.

Fantasias were a popular instrumental genre during the lifetime of Thomas Tallis. They had a sense of fancy with a free structure centered on short melodies passing through each part. Join us this week on Harmonia as we take a deep dive into the fantasias of Renaissance England.