Battista Agnese: World Map manuscript/vellum, pen, ink, 1543–4
TOURING PROGRAMS
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Passing Fancy
Beauty in a Moment of Chaos This program features music written by composers forced to hide their identities — social, religious, ethnic, racial, or otherwise — during their lifetime. We will consider the beauty of William Byrd (1540–1623) and Richard Dering (c. 1580–1630), two Catholic composers writing illicit church music in Protestant England; Leonora Duarte (1610–1678), a Jewish woman composing in the home while forced to live as a converso, or New Christian, in 17th-century Antwerp; Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665–1729), whose lost works reemerge with a vengeance in our own time; and other highlights from our 2024 CD release, Passing Fancy. |
Photo of Sonnambula by Tatiana Daubek.
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The Salon of Leonora Duarte
17th-century Converso Composer In the middle of the seventeenth century, Leonora Duarte (1610–1678), a Jewish Converso living in Antwerp, wrote seven five-part Sinfonias for viol consort — the only known seventeenth-century viol music written by a woman. Duarte was born in Antwerp to a prominent family of jewel merchants and art collectors who had immigrated from Portugal in the early sixteenth century. Both a Jew and a woman, she received no commissions from church or court, and thus the existence of the Sinfonias grants us a remarkable opportunity to engage with a marginalized voice and its relationship to the musical canon. The survival of Leonora Duarte’s Sinfonias demonstrate the uses of music making at a much wider and fundamental level in early modern European contexts, and in ways that make evident a role and place for music that is neither the church nor the state, but instead an investment in a sort of bourgeois identity that in many ways foreshadows the use of music as a cultural performance in later centuries, including our own. |
Portrait of a Lady (late 16th century). Hispanic Museum and Library, New York.
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Virtuosos Españoles
Spanish Masterworks of the 18th Century with Jude Ziliak (violin) & James Kennerley (harpsichord) Sonnambula's Jude Ziliak and James Kennerley present an enchanting pre-recorded concert of baroque music from the eighteenth century, featuring rarely-heard gems by José Herrando, Juan Oliver y Astorga, Domenico Scarlatti, and Marianna Martinez. Audiences will be treated to Herrando's vivid sonic depiction of the celebrated Garden of Aranjuez in springtime — and the North American premiere of an as-yet unrecorded virtuosic sonata by Oliver y Astorga (1676). |
L: James Kennerley (Tim Greenway); R: Jude Ziliak (Tatiana Daubek)
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El Laurel de Apolo
Zarzuela from the Baroque to the New World The Palacio de la Zarzuela, a royal hunting lodge just outside Madrid, takes its name from the brambly thicket of woods on which it stands. Beginning in 1657, a new genre of musical drama was performed there, including Calderón de la Barca’s El Laurel de Apolo — featuring a blend of elevated spoken verse with rustic folk music, dances, and imitations of Italian opera. This new genre, called “zarzuela,” also references the wild, tangled vegetation around which it was born, a crown of laurels on Spain’s musical history. Join us on a journey through the some of the most scintillating moments in Baroque zarzuela and contemporaneous dramatic pieces from the Latin world. |
Gustave Doré (1832-1883), Une scène du Tio Caniyitas, Zarzuela de M. Soriano Fuentes, Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1874
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Sounding the Dutch Baroque
A Musical Kunstkammer There was an exceptional quality to the music created and performed in the early modern Low Countries, something that Italian traveler Guiliano Calandrini remarked upon in a letter home in 1638 -- he had heard in Antwerp, he wrote, “music only comparable to what I had experienced in Venice under the guidance of Monteverdi.” What was this music? From Dutch compositions with Continental influence, to English and French works known via the print trade, we take the conceits of Dutch and Flemish painting as our guide to create five sonic portraits of musical life. |
Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632–1675), Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, ca. 1662, oil on canvas © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Sound and the City
Street Cries from Renaissance London “Hot codlings, hot!” "New mackerel!" The chaos and cacophony of the busy city was inspiration to some of the most innovative composers in Renaissance London. Sounds from urban life — markets bustling with merchants, tunes overheard from dance halls, and chapels pulsing with holy revelation — all provided material for new genres of music, such as street cries (polyphony built from sounds of the market), catches (rounds), and quodlibets (musical games). Like many artists working today, composers of these works made use of found sounds to preserve a soundscape of modern life. Perhaps the genres most stunning example, Orlando Gibbons’ famous “Cries of London” places competing market vendor’s cries against a repeating In Nomine theme derived from the Mass — the work encompasses a full day beginning with a night watchman announcing the 3 o’clock hour; visits to early morning fish sellers, greengrocers, and tinkers; the town crier’s daily calls; and finally the closing of the market at the end of the working day. |
Francis Wheatley, Street Cries: "New Mackerel!" (1792–95)
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