​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.