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Cellists Daniel Gaisford and Coleman Itzkoff, violinist Miranda Cuckson, and soprano Ah Young Hong are among the performers in this series who regularly engage with a variety of repertoire. The FLUX Quartet is a well-known new music advocate, while their violist, Max Mandel, also serves as principal viola of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Emi Ferguson, principal flute of the Handel and Haydn Society, performs with several historical and modern ensembles. Hersch’s compositional catalog includes arrangements of early music as well as Poppaea, an opera with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann set for world premiere in September in Basel, Switzerland. Pairing yestercentury’s works with pieces fresh from composers’ pens is just part of the job for the artists in this series. Hersch points to “an avoidance (though not necessarily a deliberate one) of sentimentality, nostalgia, and certain elements of predictability in much new music and certain music of earlier periods.” Early music aficionados and experimental music lovers can both find something unexpected, original, and moving. They both upend expectations, whether through harmonic crushes, melodic curveballs, formal deviations, or “unusual” instruments. As just one example, des Prez’s “Douleur me bat” and Feldman’s “Only,” though separated by centuries, are both animated by a reflective, at times haunting atmosphere and bold - but not self-conscious - rejection of cliché.Įarly music and contemporary works provide a different experience from what’s offered in the average concert hall. Even the recorded music before and after each show includes Renaissance works by Orlando de Lassus among serialist and electronic works from the likes of Milton Babbitt and Luigi Nono.Ĭonnecting these two ends of music history results in some intriguing musical as well as emotional parallels. Concerts in the spring of 2021 will include chamber music by Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625) in both original scoring and arrangements by composer and concert co-organizer Michael Hersch. On opening night in October 2020, songs by medieval composer Guillaume de Machaut and Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez buttressed vocal works by 20th-century composer Morton Feldman. The five-concert series, presented in a sculptor’s studio in Pennsylvania and alert to pandemic protocols, incorporates early music alongside contemporary works with a refreshing lack of present-day prejudice.

Early Music News & Press Release submissionsįlutist Emi Ferguson performing amid Christopher Cairns’s sculptures in October 2020 (Photo by Mike Maguire)įor “…thus far and no further,” the past is quite avant-garde.

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