Ensemble 642 with Jacob Lawrence – Between Earth and Sky

About the concert

Their performance in Primrose Potter Salon invites the listener to experience the emotion, virtuosity and vitality of secular and sacred vocal music of the early Italian Baroque, which, hundreds of years later, still has the power to enthrall and delight.

At the turn of the 17th century, newfound approaches to musical expression exploded into every European musical community. At the heart of this movement were the courts of great Italian families such as the Medici, Sforza, Gonzaga, Pamhpili, and Colonna. To enthrall their patrons, court musicians broke many of the formal constraints that had bound them throughout the Renaissance and extracted every ounce of expressive possibility from ancient formulae.

Composer-performers such as Caccini and Frescobaldi used popular musical forms as vehicles for their intellectual prowess, transforming them with unexpected harmonic treatments, all with the aim of moving the emotions of the audience, who just like today, were delighted by songs that articulated the human condition, in particular the pleasures and pains of love.
Well-known madrigals were adorned with breathtakingly virtuosic ornamentation showing not only the compositional facility of the performer but their skill in the ‘cantar della gorgia’, a type of singing where rapid articulation in the throat enables great agility and speed.

In the religious sphere, these new expressive approaches were used just as effectively. Popular secular songs were appropriated for religious settings and overlaid with spectacular new melodic treatments. Composers such as Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, one of only a handful of prolific female composers of this period, used the sacred genre as a vehicle for the expression of intimate devotion and ecstatic elevation.