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Blue Heron (vocal Ensemble)
Blue Heron, directed by Scott Metcalfe, is a professional vocal ensemble based in the Boston area. The ensemble presents an annual concert series in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and performs throughout New England as well as touring the US; it made its European debut in the United Kingdom in 2017. Blue Heron's repertoire extends from plainchant to new music, with a particular focus on 15th- and 16th-century polyphony. Its performing style is informed by the rigorous study of original source materials and historical performance practice, with the general goal of expressing the text dramatically and revealing the music's rhetorical momentum. The group has experimented with the historical pronunciation of Latin and other languages, vocal scoring, the use of instruments, and pitch level. Alex Ross in ''The New Yorker'' described the ensemble as offering "imaginative realizations" of earlier repertory. The ensemble has recorded a number of CDs; the fifth disc in the ''Music from the Peterh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plainchant
Plainsong or plainchant (calque from the French ''plain-chant''; la, cantus planus) is a body of chants used in the liturgies of the Western Church. When referring to the term plainsong, it is those sacred pieces that are composed in Latin text. Plainsong was the exclusive form of Christian church music until the ninth century, and the introduction of polyphony. The monophonic chants of plainsong have a non-metric rhythm. Their rhythms are generally freer than the metered rhythm of later Western music, and they are sung without musical accompaniment. There are three types of chant melodies that plainsongs fall into, syllabic, neumatic, and melismatic. The free flowing melismatic melody form of plainsong is still heard in Middle Eastern music being performed today. Although the Catholic Church (both its Eastern and Western halves) and the Eastern Orthodox churches did not split until long after the origin of plainsong, Byzantine chants are generally not classified as plainso ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
