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Early Music Singers and Collegium Musicum to perform

By Margaret Wade '08
April 21, 2008

Music of the English Renaissance will be the focus of this year's Early Music Singers and Collegium Musicum concert, which will be held at St. Olaf College April 25.

Featuring musical works from 1490 to 1630, the performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. Friday in Boe Memorial Chapel. The event is free and open to the public.

The Early Music Singers and the Collegium Musicum instrumental ensemble focus on music of the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods. The Early Music Singers includes 16 members and performs regularly as a choral group. The Collegium Musicum consists of three separate four- to six-member ensembles. The instrumentalists learn to play historical instruments from the ensemble's collection, which includes recorders, violas, sackbuts, lutes, harps, harms and many more early instruments.

The Early Music Singers will begin the program with "Salve regina" by Richard Davy, a composer who was active during the reign of Henry VII. They will also perform a mass movement by Christopher Tye based on the English folk song "The Western Wind" and three pieces by William Byrd, a foremost Elizabethan composer. Those pieces include a setting of Psalm 150, a motet for Pentecost and the motet "Ave verum corpus."

The Collegium Musicum consists of three ensembles that perform separately since Renaissance music was originally intended for small groups. The Wind Band, which consists of four players on shawms (predecessor of the oboe), sackbut (Renaissance trombone), curtal (predecessor of the bassoon) and recorders, will play a set of pieces typical of town pipers in 16th-century London. The five-member Recorder Consort and the Viol Consort will perform a set of viol fantasias, pavans, and madrigals, the type of music that would have been heard in domestic music-making.

The concert will close with the setting of music for the Evening Service of the Anglican church by Orlando Gibbons, performed by solo voices, choir and viols.

"This is the music that I love," says Gerald Hoekstra, professor of music and director of Early Music Singers and the Collegium Musicum. "It's a privilege to be able to perform this with such fine musicians."

Contact Kari VanDerVeen at 507-786-3970 or vanderve@stolaf.edu.