Renaissance ‘Back to School’ - Music for Learning & Scholarship

All singers and instrumentalists are welcome: winds – cornetts, curtals, recorders, sackbuts and shawms – and string players, plus continuo who can bring their own instruments. Modern string, wind, and brass players are also warmly invited, provided they can read concert-pitch notation and blend sensitively with the group.
The inspiration for this workshop comes from the historical engine rooms of Renaissance music: the university towns, collegiate chapels and elite choir schools across Europe where the great masters first learned – and later taught – the intricate art of polyphony. In the 16th and 17th centuries, music was part of the Quadrivium, studied alongside arithmetic, geometry and astronomy.
This workshop brings a diverse European repertoire to Chester, focusing specifically on substantial works that double as masterclasses in compositional design, and exploring how major figures used structural devices, imitative canons and acoustic layouts to challenge and delight singers and players alike. The day will be balanced between technical problem-solving and the immediate satisfaction of putting the music together; rather than saving everything for a massive sing-through at the end of the day, we will work through each piece sequentially, building to a satisfying, full run-through of each work as we go.
In the morning, we will warm up our ears, voices and instruments with Palestrina’s definitive textbook model of clean eight-part line management, before moving into a fascinating side-by-side study of Josquin’s iconic six-part ‘Praeter rerum seriem’ and Sethus Calvisius’s clever 1603 Protestant text adaptation, focusing on structural rhythmic security and a seamless ensemble blend. In the afternoon, we will tackle Alonso Lobo’s brilliant double-choir ‘Ave Maria’ – where four of the eight voices are derived from the other four – and Hassler’s magnificent twelve-voice triple-choir texture, shifting our focus to multi-choir spatial awareness, antiphonal echoing and sensitive dynamics. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of the brilliant minds behind these structurally stimulating works.