In honor of the nation’s 250th year, Boston-based ensemble Seven Times Salt with mezzo-soprano Julia Soojin Cavallaro are performing their program “From Plimoth to Yorktown” across New England. They trace a musical lineage from the first settlers at Plimoth to their descendants on the eve of the Revolution and eventual victory at Yorktown. English catches and early shape note hymns lead to songs of liberty, rants against taxation and tyranny, wartime laments, and even some of George Washington’s favorite dances.
Seven Times Salt’s mini-tour began in mid-June at the Connecticut Early Music Festival, where a capacity crowd filled the beautiful Red Barn at Mitchell College in New London. The following day, an energetic audience in Marshfield, MA sang along to familiar songs (Yankee Doodle) and new favorites (The Junto Song).
Later that week in Boston, concertgoers at the beautifully renovated American Ancestors building in Back Bay heard not only period instruments and dialect, but also excerpts from 1770s Massachusetts residents’ firsthand accounts read aloud. This very special collaboration allowed guests an up close and personal look at original diaries and letter fragments brought in from American Ancestors’ archives for the occasion.
In July, the group shares the program with a retirement community in Durham, NH. August takes them to the Monadnock Center in scenic Peterborough, NH, and to the summer concert series at historic St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Kennebunkport, ME. To round out the tour, November concerts are planned at churches in Andover, MA, and Ashfield in western Massachusetts.
(The band encourages VT and RI concert presenters to get in touch so they can visit all six New England states!)
Contact: inquiries@seventimessalt.com
