AEM ONLINE Classes March 2 & 3

The Art of Music Appreciation – or how to recognize and enjoy what you are hearing when you listen to music. Enjoying music can happen on many levels, from the unlearned listener who just likes the mysterious sounds floating past, to the astute listener who can hear and perceive all the lines of a composition at once, savoring the harmony, following every aspect of a piece. Most of us fall somewhere between these two extremes. My own experience has been that, the more I perceive and understand, the deeper my enjoyment and satisfaction become. Now I want to help you get a grasp of some of the various elements that make up the river of music as it flows by: melody-accompaniment, rhythms, imitation, phrasing, tone colors and recognizing various instruments and voice, texture from simple to complex. This is a listening class rather than a playing class. We will listen to recordings, follow along in scores, and discuss features of each piece. And in the process, you can enjoy hearing many pieces of many types – what a joy! Open to: all Pitch: A= 440, mostly listening.

Sing in the Spring - medieval songs for Lent and Spring from the original manuscripts. Together we will sing and play some lovely medieval pieces for the season of Lent and Spring including an ancient chant from 10th century notation, a song about a horse by Adam de la Halle and a Benedicamus Domino for the young nuns at Las Huelgas in Burgos in Northern Spain on the route of the Camino to Santiago. We will use the original manuscripts, but don't worry, no previous experience required. You will mostly listen and learn by ear and there won't be any complex technical explanations - the notation is anyway very pragmatic!

This class is open to everyone, singers and instrumentalists playing at 440 Hz. The opening warm-ups will focus on singing and breathing (but this is important no matter how you make music) and the early 10th century notation is best sung as it won't be at a specific set pitch. The pieces though could be played on an instrument as well as sung as I will be playing my harp at A=440 to accompany myself singing them. Open to: all singers and instrumentalists. Pitch: A= 440.

Whether it's working with treatises, performing, or constructing concert programs, translation of foreign languages is a vital skill for early music enthusiasts. Using tools as varied as Google Translate, Power Thesaurus, and historical dictionaries, this lecture/workshop will use famous texts to introduce participants to three main categories of translation that are useful for the practical musician.

We will start with calques, literal translation, especially useful for those preparing vocal music for performance. Even with this basic category, however, participants will be alerted to potholes along the road to understanding the texts. The second category, paraphrase, can be steered from the first or be its own destination. This is useful in written or oral program notes, when you simply want the audience to have a general idea of the text, a summary. The final, literary translation, is the most complex, but serves multiple purposes. In this category, the translator aims to produce elements of style, rhythm, rhyme, and “feel” found in the original text that read naturally in the target language. You do not need to have expert knowledge in any of the languages. Open to all.

Composers of the 15th-17th centuries were inspired by the poetic works of 14th c. Italian writer and humanist scholar Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374). This class explores various musical settings of Vergine Bella, the final poem in Petrarch’s collection “Rerum vulgarium fragmenta” (“Fragments of common things”), also simply referred to as Il Canzionere (“The Song Book”). Il Canzionere comprises 366 Italian poems, and is a collection of poetry composed over 40 years expressing unrequieted love to a certain “Laura” - Petrarch even continued writing love poetry to her after her death.

In an AEM online class back in December of 2022, we played settings of Vergine Bella in 2-5 parts by Guillaume Dufay, Vincenzo Ruffo, Palestrina, and Cipriano da Rore, and explored a few analytical tools to help us understand what sets these different versions apart. Since then, Allen Garvin has made excellent transcriptions of further settings by composers Faa di Bruno (5vv), Merulo (5vv), Portinare (6vv), Romano (4vv), and Ruffo (6vv). In this “sequel” class, we will explore these pieces together. Open to: recorders, melody instruments, intermediate and up. Pitch: A= 440, play-along tracks on recorders (4-foot).