Program for the December 17 concert

We’re starting to get settled on the program for the concert
we’re playing at the Boston Public Library at 2 PM on December
17, in the Rabb Lecture Hall. There’s not a lot of time for
rehearsing, so we’re having to limit the amount of new stuff we
play, but these are mostly people who haven’t heard us before,
so it won’t matter to them.

There will be three sections, with me playing Diego Ortiz
Ricercada’s in between sections.

First there will be songs about drinking, dancing, and
smoking. Most of these we’ve performed many times before, and
the one that we haven’t is mostly a vocal solo by a very
experienced performer.

Then there will be a group of “religious” music. When you
first start playing Renaissance music, you tend to think that
everything religious was church music and everything secular was
performed in the home, but in fact there were wide swaths of
Europe where the established church discouraged polyphony in the
church, and people liked it, so they played it in the home. There
are a couple of carols that everybody knows, and a Byrd about
Susanna, and a round about Judith and Holofernes.

The last section will be all Thomas Morley. We’re mixing the
Fantasias from the Two-voyce canzonets with the vocals from both
the two and three voice canzonets.

There’s a flyer, which includes the program
which you should give to all your friends. If you’re someone
who could possibly go to a 2 PM concert in Boston’s Back Bay,
you should come.