EMA FEATURES & PRESS RELEASES
Musings: So Good a Thing
From Tom Kelly's MUSINGS column: We spend a lot of time studying instruments of the past for what they can tell us about music they were designed to play...but the voice is an instrument that can do almost anything. In early music, I think we tend to constrict it a lot.
Repertoire Is a Labor Issue
An early-music field with a desire to sustain specialists — and, notably, to keep its academic programs in existence — must treat repertoire planning as a labor issue, not just an artistic one.
Seattle’s Building Boom
After pandemic stumbles and closures, a few key leaders are recharging Seattle's early-music landscape with a home-grown, artist-led business model. 'I think people have had enough of consuming art online. They want in-person experiences again.'
Training the Compleat Musician
New England Conservatory's Pratt Early Music Program aims to teach historical performance practice to "modern" instrumentalists and to populate symphony orchestras in the future. As collegiate early-music education is facing budget cuts across the country, the Pratt Program shows a way forward — with dedicated funding.
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EMA RECORDING & BOOK REVIEWS
Byrd in Conversation with the Italians
William Byrd was influenced by Italian madrigals and sacred choral music as well as the colorful keyboard music from Venice. British keyboardist Freddie James puts the English composer in a lively dialogue with the Italian Renaissance, often with hair-raising results.
Bruce Dickey and Friends Find Unique Styles from Milan
The canzon-mottetto, a 17th-c. Milanese genre, is a hybrid work that alternates, then combines, an a cappella motet with an instrumental canzona until it becomes a double-choir motet in which one choir sings, the other plays. The Breathtaking Collective and Cappella Mariana join for an inspired exploration of this delightful repertoire.
A Powerful B-minor Mass from Apollo’s Fire
Apollo's Fire, led by Jeannette Sorrell, has just released possibly the best available small-sized period-instrument recording of Bach's B-minor Mass. This is thanks to their vision of Bach’s concept of the Mass as a whole with nothing amiss: correct choices of tempi, balances of orchestra, chorus, and solo voices.
Soundscapes of the Holy Land
'Christian Music in Jerusalem' is a notable introduction to a subject that has been largely shrouded in obscurity, a historical blank into which we project our own preconceptions. Author Alexander Rosenblatt helps to dispel some of this fog through an ethnomusicological examination — involving Christian, Jewish, and Arab music — of traditions that continue to exist in the Holy Land today.
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COMMUNITY NEWS & PRESS RELEASES
Call for applicants to our 2027 Early Music Academy led by Alan Choo, violin and Olivier Fortin, harpsichord! Deadline to apply is Sunday November 15, 2026. Spend a week in ...
Registration is now open for "Gesture & Style in Romantic-Era Conducting," taking place January 9-10, 2027, in New Haven, Connecticut! Presented in collaboration with the Yale Collection of Historical Sound ...
After two sold-out performances at New Stage Performance Space, Alkemie’s queer Medieval chamber opera Eleanor is headed to the movies! Join us at Low Cinema, Ridgewood’s first new movie theater ...
On the feast of St. Cecilia, Sunday, November 22, 2026, at 3:30 PM, the Schola Cantorum of St. Agnes and guest musicians, directed by Eva Sze, sing an hour of ...
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: The GRAMMY-winning Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Opera Series presents Pyramus & Thisbe: A Mock Opera by John Frederick Lampe based on a Shakespeare text—this Thanksgiving weekend ...
