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Echoes of the Renaissance — Program Notes
In his magisterial The Rise of European Music, 1380–1500, Reinhard Strohm traces the development and dissemination of complex styles of music written with multiple voice parts using measured (‘mensural’) notation that enabled precise rhythmic coordination of the voices. By the middle of the fifteenth century the most notable centers for the production of this polyphonic…
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Handel’s Messiah — Notes by John Butt
Messiah The libretto that the irascible Charles Jennens sent to Handel at some point in the summer of 1741 was not in itself an extraordinary document within the Christian tradition. After all, the Gospels and Epistles already made ample reference to the way in which the New Testament was foretold in the Old, and this tradition…
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