The Tudor Fair Blog
Old Music Monday: The Cardinall’s Musick and Elizabethan religious PR gigs
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bMiYnzkZx4?list=PLhHbeycso61VkjUYaeHgmoVrs1lkU8Q_f] This week The Cardinall’s Musick has seen some heavy rotation on my Spotify. They are a UK based ensemble that, like many early music groups, is scholarly in their recordings of 16th and 17th century music. They mostly record with Hyperion – a label I love – but…
Old Music Monday: Mary Tudor and Choral Music
I just finished another episode of my Renaissance English History Podcast (the most uncreatively named podcast ever!) (get it on itunes!) on Mary Tudor, and it got me thinking about church music during the five years that Mary reigned. She wasn’t famous for endowing any colleges, or really supporting scholars,…
Random Friday Fun Facts: The Music of the Spheres
“music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired” Boethius: De institutione musica Most serious musicians understand that music and math are inextricably linked. The early mathematician Pythagoras discovered many different ratios within musical harmonies (a perfect fifth, for example) by…
The Week in Books: Every Valley
I’m a big fan of the Messiah. Every year I go to a sing-a-long, and since I’ve been in LA it’s been at the Disney Center. I used to play my parents’ old record of the complete recording (vinyl, before it became trendy) and would study to it. I can…
Old Music Monday: Palestrina, The Sixteen and music for Lent
I’m sitting at home nursing a cold, the last of the three of us to catch it. Being sick with a kid is infinitely worse than being sick on your own. Because when the kid is awake, you’re awake. And not only are you awake, but you’re also keeping them…
The Fetal Brain on Music (for Lennon James Picco, the son of our pediatrics nurse Ashley Picco)
On Tuesday of this week we went to our pediatrician’s office to pick up paperwork for Hannah’s labs, which we needed to get done before her appointment next week (I lagged on doing them and then lost the paperwork – typical me). Instead of the calm doctor’s office, things were…
Old Music Tuesday: Ensemble Cinquincento
If any of you are into early music, and you have sirius radio, there is a wonderful program called The Millennium of Music, on Symphony Hall, channel 76, at 11am eastern/8am pacific on Sunday mornings. I generally catch it in snippets when I’m on my way to walk Hannah at…
Old and New Music Friday: O Magnum Mysterium and Danse Macabre
I’ve talked a lot about the Old Music I love – the English choral evensong tradition, and Renaissance polyphony from the Flemish composers like Gombert, and even the Grandaddy of them all, Palestrina. But what many casual choral enthusiasts don’t realize is that there is a huge upsurge in amazing…
Hildegard of Bingen: another in the line of cool medieval women mystics
In my quest to turn my library completely digital and get rid of all my paper books, I’m finally catching up on some of the books that have been on my shelf for years, and one of those “finally” books is Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age by…
Voces8 and Purcell
Henry Purcell is a Grandaddy in the world of early music. There are a couple of Big Names that most people who are into music, but not early music, have heard of, and Purcell is always one of them. He lived in the late 17th century, and was right on…
Old Music Tuesday: Alamire
I spent the weekend working with the Golden Bridge Choir in Los Angeles; a new choir formed by Suzi Digby (Lady Eatwell, and a choral goddess in the UK) to explore the musical links between the Golden Age of the Tudor/Elizabethan composers and the current choral Renaissance that Southern California…
Old Music Monday: New York Polyphony
One of the many things I lurve about autumn is that all my favorite choral groups start releasing Christmas albums. I can’t get enough Christmas music. Though with the caveat that I don’t mean “I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” kinds of Christmas music, but rather the good O Come O…