Ensemble hopes to delight with music from the Renaissance

Ensemble hopes to delight with music from the Renaissance

BY ELLEN CHANG
Rice News staff

The Shepherd School of Music Early Music Ensemble will perform Elizabethan works in a concert melding spoken poetry with music from the English Renaissance era.

The free concert will be an interplay of vocal music, spoken poetry and instrumental music from the golden age of English culture, said Honey Meconi, director of Schola Pastoris Antiquae Musicae, the Shepherd School of Music Early Music Ensemble, and associate professor of musicology and music history. The performance begins at 8 p.m. Jan. 23 in Duncan Hall, Alice Pratt Brown Hall.

The concert, ”Elizabethan Delights,” features music by composers from the English Renaissance, the time of Queen Elizabeth I. The ensemble, made up of undergraduate and graduate voice majors from the Shepherd School, will perform a dozen works by masters such as John Dowland, John Wilbye, Thomas Weelkes and Thomas Morley.

The works include Dowland’s famous lute song ”Can She Excuse My Wrongs?” and Weelkes’ six-voice madrigal ”Draw on Sweet Night.”

The concert features a guest artist, lutenist Al Cofrin, director of the Istanpitta Medieval Ensemble, Houston and the Tapestry Classical Quartet, Houston.

Meconi said the lute was the most admired instrument of the English Renaissance and is a complex plucked string instrument with a vast but difficult repertoire. ”Most people rarely have a chance to hear it in live performance,” she said. ”Cofrin will accompany singers, perform solo works and improvise, a common practice for instrumentalists during the Renaissance.”

Members of the Rice Players, the college theater group at Rice, will recite Elizabethan poetry between musical selections. Coached by Trish Rigdon, associate director of theater, the actors will recite literary works by Christopher Marlowe, Robert Herrick, Sir Walter Raleigh, Mary Stuart, William Shakespeare and others.

”People don’t hear enough vocal music in English, and they definitely don’t hear enough spoken poetry,” said Meconi. ”This is a great opportunity to hear both.”

The Elizabethan era (1558-1603) and the period immediately following was a great period for English poetry, said Meconi, who is also director of the Medieval Studies Program. Queen Elizabeth I was 25 years old when she was crowned. During her reign, the English Renaissance developed as music, theater and literature flourished. Shakespeare is one of the most famous writers of this period.

Meconi found-ed the Schola Pastoris Antiquae Musicae in 1987. The ensemble, including its subsidiary Men Who Chant, performs vocal and instrumental music from Gregorian chants to Elizabethan madrigals in concerts and worship services throughout the Houston and Galveston area. They have performed for such events as the Neil J. O’Brien Triennial Symposium in Medieval Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Literary Traditions in Medieval Women. The ensemble specializes in the music of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) and has embarked on a long-term project to perform all of the music she wrote.