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Our 2023 season!

We are thrilled to announce that Musica Vocale has returned! After a too-long, pandemic-driven hiatus, we are singing together to prepare for our 13th season this spring. We return with a change in artistic leadership. Our esteemed founder Arnold Epley has chosen to step into the role of Artistic Advisor, remaining deeply involved in the organization as both an advisor and singer. Jay Carter and Ryan Olsen take on the roles of Artistic Directors and Conductors, equally sharing these responsibilities. Jay and Ryan are eager to continue Arnold’s vision of creating beautiful, meaningful, timely, and collaborative experiences for all involved.

 

We have missed you and hope to see you at our concerts in March and May!

Modern Madrigals
Modern Madrigals
Ryan Olsen, conductor


June 4, 2023 at 3:00 PM
Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral

Click the photo above to see the printed program for this concert. 

Musica Vocale continues to reimagine ancient and modern choral music with a series of modern madrigals by composers from the 20th and 21st century inspired by the traditions of Renaissance Italy and England.

 

Morten Lauridsen, Professor of Composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, is renowned for his choral part-songs and motets which are performed worldwide. The Madrigali Six Fire Songs On Italian Renaissance Poems premiered in 1988 in Los Angeles and have become a staple in the modern choral repertoire.

 

Melissa Dunphy’s Suite Remembrance features is a cycle of four contrasting “memorial dances” in dance forms that were popular in the late Renaissance and early Baroque Eras: saltarello, gavotte, sarabande, and a gigue in the Venetian double chorus style. Musica Vocale proudly performed her multimovement AmericanDREAMers in 2018.

 

Finally, Joshua Shank’s Color Madrigals (2007) are settings of six poems by John Keats, each featuring a different color from the spectrum and various musical “colors” commonly found in Renaissance madrigals. These three song cycles capture various aspects that characterize Renaissance madrigals utilizing modern harmonies and tonal structures, rhythmic and metrical figurations, as well as other modern compositional techniques.

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Brave New World
Brave New World
Music from Puebla de los Àngeles

Jay Carter, conductor

March 12, 2023 at 3:00 PM
Grace and Holy T
rinity Cathedral

Click the photo above to see the printed program for this concert. 

Musica Vocale continues a commitment to lesser-known but worthy choral works.  Against the backdrop of European colonialism, the Cathedral de los Àngeles nourished a musical alliance between the best musical minds of Imperial Spain and the supremely skilled indigenous peoples of the New World.  As the cultural center of Novohispanic holdings, Puebla attracted musicians and artists from both sides of the Atlantic, and many European-born composers, like Juan Gutierrez de Padilla, spent their entire career working there.  Francisco Lopez Capillas, the first ‘American-born’ composer of note, trained under Juan Gutierrez de Padilla before becoming the primary musician at the Cathedral in Mexico City. 

 

This program includes 17th century motets and villancicos Francisco Lopez Capillias, Joan de Cererols, Gaspar Fernandez, and Francisco Guerrero interspersed with Juan Gutierrez de Padilla’s Missa ego flos campi for double choir. 

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