Jason Liebson
Compendium
Dr. Graziano
Early Music Concert
For this concert report, I attended the Chapman Early Music Ensemble concert at the Salmon Recital Hall at Chapman University on May 1 at 5:00PM. The performance was titled “Artusi’s Nightmare”, and focused primarily on Renaissance and early Baroque composers, and the distinction between the prima pratica and seconda pratica that arose at the turn of the 15th Century. The many composers covered a vast span in the compositional timeline; the middle Renaissance composers included Josquin des Prés,
Luys de Navares, Christóbal de Morales, Adrian Willaert, Gioseffo Zarlino, Vincenzo
Galilei, High Renaissance composers included Giovanni Gabrieli, Claudio Monteverdi,
Alessandro Grandi, and early Baroque composers included Alessandro Grandi, Biagio
Marini, Salome Rossi, Tarquinio Merula, Giulio Caccini, and Heinrich Schütz. The group was the Chapman Early Music Ensemble, a group of about twenty-five music students, directed by Dr. Bruce Bales, who introduced each work, as well as played alongside the students for a majority of the program. The concert as a whole was very well put together, drawing inspiration for the programming from a lecture by Dean Giulio
Maria Ongero taken by Dr. Bales’ during his doctoral studies at the Thornton School of
Music. While the program was inspired, and clearly had a through-line (as thoroughly explained in the brief program notes), I feel that it is very difficult to create an engaging concert that is entirely Renaissance and early Baroque music. As a lecture, this line-up was thrilling. The use of music to describe Artusi’s grievances with this new practice of