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Madison Early Music Festival Concert Series
The seven-concert series is open to the public; all evening concerts also include free pre-concert lectures by renowned musicologists, historians, artists, and linguists. All 6:30 pm pre-concert lectures and 7:30 pm concerts take place in the UW-Madison School of Music, Mosse Humanities Building, 455 N. Park Street. Pre-concert lectures are in Morphy Recital Hall and performances are in Mills Concert Hall. See complete descriptions of the concerts and pre-concert lectures for the concert series below, as well as additional special events during Festival week, our weekend hotel/concert package, and ticket information:
Join the MEMF e-mail list! 2012 Madison Early Music Festival Concert SeriesThe seven-concert Festival Concert Series includes four individual concerts featuring MEMF resident and guest artists and ensembles, and a MEMF Faculty Concert of rare collaborations among the various ensemble artists. A free Participant Concert showcases consorts that have been coached throughout the week by MEMF faculty. The week culminates in an All-Festival Concert in which participants, faculty, and guest artists join in a glorious presentation of English choral and instrumental music. choral and instrumental music from early North America. 6:30pm Pre-concert lecture 7:30pm Performance This performance of Gloryland is the diary of our ongoing journey to the roots of Anglo-American vocal music. We’ll sing folk songs, eighteenth-century fuging tunes from New England, nineteenth-century folk hymns and camp revival songs from the rural South, gospel songs originating in Northeastern cities and adopted in the late nineteenth century by rural Southerners, and a few more recently-composed (and recently-arranged, by Anonymous 4) tunes as well. Each of these musical styles has played its own part in a wonderful intertwining of oral and written traditions, in which favorite tunes have survived and flourished for many generations. Some of the best-known songs on our program: a haunting 4-part version of Poor Wayfaring Stranger, Robert Lowry’s original setting of Shall We Gather at the River, the lyric folk song You Fair and Pretty Ladies, and Anonymous 4’s arrangement of Angel Band.
Sunday, July 8 6:30pm Pre-concert lecture 7:30pm Performance Chatham Baroque and wooden flute virtuoso Chris Norman bring to life the energetic dance music of Maritime Canada, as well as the elegant sonatas from the parlours of the British Isles and the salons of Colonial New England. Emphasizng the music's roots in 16th- through 19th-century Scotland, England, and Ireland, and its transmission to North America, the concert also explores the melding of Italian art music with traditional fiddle music of Scotland.
Tuesday, July 10 6:30pm Pre-concert lecture 7:30pm Performance The Rose Ensemble presents some of its most popular music in this joyful program featuring ballads, dances, hymns and anthems. Witness a musical evolution as our singers and instrumentalists journey through the dance halls of Boston, to Shaker villages and the hills of Appalachia, exploring the harmonies that gave birth to bluegrass.
Thursday, July 12 6:30pm Pre-concert lecture 7:30pm Performance Musical reflections of the lives of the first settlers from England who settled in what later was called the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Pro and anti-Puritan broadside ballads, psalm settings and broken consort pieces by John Dowland and Richard Allison, and readings from Good news from New England (London, 1648) by Edward Johnson, the flinty town father of Woburn Massachusetts, who most likely wrote the words to the first known American ballad entitled "New England's Annoyances." "...We have pumpkin at morning and pumpkin at noon; If it was not for pumpkins we should be undone..."
Friday, July 13
1:00 pm Performance
Friday, July 13 6:30pm Pre-concert lecture 7:30pm Performance Presented originally in conjunction with an exhibition at the Newberry Library from the Library of Congress, With Malice toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition, the Newberry Consort presents rarely-heard music from 1860s America: popular songs, minstrel music, and country music, as well as the spectacular art music of America's first bona fide virtuosos, Louis Gottschalk and William Morris. The program of stories, songs, and minstrel comic acts will bring Lincoln's America to life. Featuring David Douglass (violin & director) and Ellen Hargis (soprano), with Paul Hecht (narrator), Michael Miles (fretted and unfretted banjos) and David Schrader (piano).
Saturday, July 14 6:30pm Pre-concert lecture 7:30pm Performance
Special EventsPre-Festival Concert Friday, July 6
Dance Event Monday, July 9
Weekend Concert/Hotel PackageAre you an out-of-towner able to attend only weekend MEMF events? We have packages which include two concerts and two nights’ lodging at Madison’s downtown Concourse Hotel. Weekend 1 includes concerts on Saturday 7/9 (Piffaro) and Sunday 7/10 (The Rose Ensemble). Weekend 2 includes concerts on Friday 7/15 (Chatham Baroque) and Saturday 7/16 (All-Festival Concert). Transportation to and from the concert and a bonus MEMF Tenth Season poster are included. Contact us at 608/263- 6670 or music@dcs.wisc.edu for more information. Ticket InformationWeek-long Festival Concert Passes and individual concert tickets may be purchased at the door or in advance online; at the Vilas Hall Box Office (821 University Ave.); at the Wisconsin Union Theater Box Office (Memorial Union, 800 Langdon St.); or by calling 608-265-ARTS (2787). |
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Last updated:
December 6, 2011
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