The Tudor Fair Blog
Old Music Monday: Tudor Anthems from the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge
One of the things I love about Spotify is that when you ‘follow’ an artist (ie click ‘follow’ on their artist page), you get a notification whenever a new album from that artist is added to the database of music. I adore that. I don’t have the time to keep…
Six Reasons why Studying History is Still Important (a cheat sheet for parents of reluctant students)
This won’t surprise anyone who knows me, but I was a history geek in school. Somewhere around sixth grade I realized that I loved history. In high school I was introduced to early choral music, the great English anthems of Byrd and Tallis, and suddenly my passion for history became…
Random Friday Fun Facts: Dr. David Skinner and the music of the 16th century
About a month ago I was in the UK for a girls’ weekend (by myself), and as I’ve been trying to do more with my Renaissance English History Podcast lately (like my Tudor Minutes on youtube), I decided to find an interesting person to interview for the show. At the…
Old Music Monday: The Spy’s Choirbook from Alamire
A few weeks ago I had the privilege of going to Sidney Sussex College, in Cambridge, and interviewing Dr. David Skinner, the choral director there, and a brilliant musicologist. In addition to being incredibly charming, he is also bursting with information which he relays in an approachable way. I taped…
Random Friday Fun Facts
I’ve started doing something fun on youtube this week. I run the Renaissance English History Podcast, which currently gets about 120k listeners each month, and I’ve been trying to figure out ways that I can make more of a community out of it. Do more episodes, lead tours of England,…
Favorite Places and Spaces – Cirencester
So let me tell you about my trip to the UK last week. It was full of excitement (ie meeting with one of my idols, the early music expert David Skinner, to interview him for my podcast), and peace (long train journeys criss crossing the country, listening to my music…
Old Music Monday: Voces Thules and the music of Medieval Iceland
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stNVhyvxJTA?list=PL954osbzAArlFZCstNqg0cC9U7ZqXCH_E] I’m going to Iceland next week. I first went there in 2012, just for a few days, at the suggestion of several friends who had visited and loved it. We were on an extended visit to the UK, and decided to take a few days to make the…
Old Music Monday: Jordi Savall, La Capella Reial de Catalunya
In a few months I’m going to be moving to Spain. Specifically Ronda, in Andalucia. An area loaded with history dating to the pre-Roman times. I’m super stoked for this move. So in advance, and because I speak no Spanish other than the words I pick up living in Southern California,…
Favorite Places in England: Getting chased by wild dogs in Cornwall
So let me tell you a story about a weekend in Cornwall in 2000. I had just moved to the UK about 4 months before, and one of my dear friends was having a party in Cornwall. He rented out a farmhouse, and was going to have a massive end-of-summer…
Old Music Monday: The Fasch Clan
Yep, I’ve had a little break from blogging recently, mostly doing a lot of writing and working and other fun creative things. But let’s get back to business, shall we? Everyone who has studied even a smidgen of music has heard about the Bach clan. Johann Sebastian and his son…
The Week in Books: England before William, the hilarious and the boring
This past week I’ve been reading two books, one of which, by the previously-blogged-about-and-Monty-Python-esque Howard of Warwick was a murder mystery set in a monastery near Lincoln, and the other, a fairly scholarly book about King Oswald and Britain around the time of Bede, was mind-numbingly boring, though based on…
Old Music Monday: Blow Northern Wynd
I’ve been busy the past few days getting another Renaissance English History Podcast episode researched, written, recorded, and posted. I’m always getting emails and facebook messages asking me what the music is that I use in the intro. So I decided to do my Old Music Monday on the intro…