It was quite popular, in the Baroque era, to use numbers and equations for riddles and the hiding of messages; and the study of J.S. Bach's work has revealed that he used numbers symbolic of notes in the major and minor scales formulated into equations and then composed his works around these equations. It was with one such series of equations ...
The motets of Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) are complicated works. Even casual listeners will notice that each of the three lines of music has its own text -- one rapid and wordy, one moderate in speed, and one just a few words long. Musically they contain structural intricacies to which scholars devote pleasant lifetimes of research in old ...
The period covered in the Hilliard Ensemble's 1982 recording Medieval English Music extends from the fourteenth century to the late fifteenth and was actually late-Medieval for England, though roughly contemporaneous with the beginning of the Renaissance era on the European continent. In musical terms, this album surveys from its outset the ...
It might seem foolhardy to set about to compose a piece based on the same text as that of one of the seminal works in twentieth century music, but British composer Roger Marsh has taken the risk and succeeded in creating something entirely new and hugely engaging. His choral cycle, Albert Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire, uses the same texts as Schoenberg ...
The music of Flemish composer Nicolas Gombert (accent it like "Dilbert"), active in the first generation after Josquin in the 1530s and 1540s, has remained almost completely untouched by the growth in audience enthusiasm for Renaissance music in recent years. Is this because, according to one of those music-historical sidelights reproduced in the ...
The Hilliard Ensemble's Hilliard Live series, now three discs strong with a fourth on the way, has offered superior live performances of Renaissance and Medieval sacred pieces. These male singers mix clarity and a kind of gutsy lyricism that are rare in performances of this music but in their hands seems totally appropriate. The programs are based ...
On the list of the most adventurous contemporary music projects one certainly should find this collaboration among music-makers who have been consistently innovative on their own and who have pulled out all the stops here. Bloed (Blood) is the brainchild of Dutch composer Cornelis de Bondt. It is what young people would call a mashup, joining ...
The consistently superb Hilliard Ensemble here sets itself the difficult task of making Johannes Ockeghem's music immediate and showing the modern listener some of what was admired in Ockeghem's music in its own time. The group succeeds brilliantly. The immediacy comes partly from the fact that this is a live recording, part of a series the group ...
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