Singing the Reformation. St Machar's Cathedral : Dunedin Consort, Scotland's premier baroque ensemble

Singing the Reformation. St Machar's Cathedral

St Machar's Cathedral
Saturday, 08 October 2011, 7.30pm

This concert that will take place at St Machar's Cathedral, Aberdeen, is part of the Singing the Reformation Exhibition that is taking place from the 6th of August until October the 28th in Edinburgh.

This exhibition aims to:

Step into the world of Reformation Scotland to see and hear how singing touched everyone.
Listen to the early music that was sung and played in early modern Scotland whilst viewing the original musical manuscripts and musical instruments.
Investigate how music was found within church and chamber and was part of life in ordinary households as well as in the royal court.
See how contemporary visual images of the natural world found in wall panels and paintings, minatures and needlework complement the songs and all ‘sing’ together with a 'chereful voyce'.
Examine the most important surviving source for Scotland’s early music found within Thomas Wode’s partbooks.
View all eight Partbooks brought together from across the world for the very first time.
Follow the careers of Thomas Wode, the man who preserved the music and of his patron Lord James Stewart, Regent Moray.
With the help of contemporary books, manuscripts, paintings and maps enter into the soundscape surrounding a Scot during the reign of King James VI.
Understand the role of psalm singing before and after the Protestant Reformation and how it continues to this day.

Five singers from the Dunedin Consort will be joined by a consort of Renaissance viols and lute to reproduce domestic music-making in late 16th-century Scotland; the Renaissance Singers will represent church choirs and congregations and will lead the audience in singing a couple of psalm settings from the Wode partbooks.

The progamme features music from the various layers found in Wode’s partbooks: psalm settings by David Peebles and John Buchan; anthems by Thomas Tallis, Andro Blackhall and John Fethy; Latin motets by Robert Johnson and Jacob Clemens; French chansons by Orlandus Lassus; Italian madrigals by Jacques Arcadelt and Sebastiano Festa; instrumental music by Tallis and an arrangement of a piece by Giovanni P. da Palestrina; anonymous Scottish lute songs and a Round.

The concert will also mark the launch of a CD ‘The Wode Collection’, recorded by Linn Records, featuring The Dunedin Consort, the viol consort Fretwork, and the lutenist David Miller in a programme of music taken from the Wode partbooks.

iPhone app accommpanying the exhibition available from the iTunes store. Link