The HMC Early Music Ensemble

J. Winthrop Aldrich, Caroline Chun, Aimee Co, Kenneth Cotich, Aaron Galper, Sebastian Heredia, Viv Huang, Rose Schupakdias, Adam Tang, Grace Williams, Louis Ye, and Bill Alves, director

The HMC Early Music Ensemble performs music from the European Middle Ages and Renaissance with instruments of the time.

Sunday, April 20, 2025, 7 p.m.
Drinkward Recital Hall

Jan Steen (Dutch, 1626-1679), The Family Concert, 1666, oil on canvas, 34 1/8 x 39 3/4 inches. The Art Institute of Chicago. © CC0 Public Domain Desgination.



Tielman Susato was a Dutch musician who played a variety of wind instruments in civic bands of the region, but he is best known for his business venture in music publishing. His publications were some of the most popular in Europe during this early period, and he often included his own works of instrumental dances, part songs, and sacred music. Dances of the period were usually in pairs, with a slower duple-meter dance followed by one in quick triple-meter. Unlike most of these dances, this pavane has a special title meaning “The Battle” followed by a galliard whose translates as “My Heart is Wounded.”

Dietrich Buxtehude was a Danish composer who spent most of his career as an organist in Lübeck, Germany. There he established a famous instrumental concert series, for which he composed works such as this, though he was better known for his organ compositions and sacred works. He was a major influence on Handel and J.S. Bach, who as a youth walked over 250 miles to hear the concert series and church performances.

Diego Ortiz was a Spanish composer who spent at least the later part of his career as the musical director (maestro de capilla) for the Spanish court in Naples. Although he composed sacred music for that position, he is best known for his Trattado de glosas (“Ornamentation Treatise”), a theoretical work on the interpretation of instrumental music of the period. The second half of this book includes a series of musical studies or recercada, including the one here based on the passemezzo, a form consisting of variations on a repeating harmony and bass line.

Giovanni Legrenzi was a prominent Venetian composer of the middle Baroque period known for his sacred music but also his innovations in instrumental music, including the trio sonata. Legrenzi sometimes named his sonatas after local places. This one is named for Villa Benaglia near Bergamo, Italy, a fifteenth-century palace named for the counts of Benaglio.

William Byrd, one of the best-known composers of the 16th century, was patronized by Queen Elizabeth and was a music director of the Royal Chapel. In that role, he composed many innovative motets, madrigals, and anthems, but was equally famous for his many instrumental compositions, including viol fantasias and keyboard works. These compositions were frequently in the form of variations on a popular song, such as this one.

Although he died young, Henry Purcell became, along with the German George Frideric Handel, the most famous composer of the English Baroque, not least for his influential opera Dido and Aeneas from about 1688. This story, adapted from Virgil, is about the love of Dido, the Queen of Carthage, for Aeneas of Troy. Evil witches conspire to convince Aeneas that the gods command him to leave Carthage for Italy. When he agrees, Dido in her grief tells her servant Belinda of her resolve to kill herself. The following song, popularly known as “Dido’s Lament,” is one of the most well known of the period. It is built on a repeating bass line that mirrors Dido’s grief by walking slowly downward, as if to the grave.

Thanks to the Scripps Music Department and Prof. Anne Harley for the loan of their harpsichord and other instruments.



HMC is deeply grateful for the generous support that created The Ken Stevens ’61 Founding Class Concert Series.