If retro is in, then the seven freshmen who make up The Renaissance Singers of Northwestern University are as in as it gets. With a concert on Thursday at the Alice Millar Chapel, the group of voice majors will show off some top “hits” from the 1500-1700s. The Current got to sit down with Bienen freshman and singer Jimmy Reese to talk about parts of the Renaissance that don’t consist of statues of beautiful men.
The Current: Who’s your favorite composer, Renaissance or not?
Jimmy Reese: I will go with George Gershwin. I really like classical music, and I really like jazz, and he sort of spanned the two. He was just kind of an interesting guy.
The Current: Are there any particular singers you admire?
JR: There are groups that I really admire. I think when we sing together we try to strive for a sound that’s similar to a group called Pomerium. They do some really great recordings of the same kind of music, and I think that’s what we strive for.
The Current: Which piece are you most looking forward to performing?
JR: We’re doing excerpts from a mass setting by [Giovanni] Palestrina, and I’m really looking forward to that because it has come together really well.
The Current: What’s your favorite part about Renaissance music?
JR: I really like how it forces you to simultaneously be a very strong individual musician, but you also have to be part of something greater than yourself. I think the thing that makes the group work so well is that we’re all really great friends, and we were friends before we all sang together. We have a great chemistry with each other to start with, and I think that contributes a lot to the way we make music together.
The Current: If you could put modern pop in the Renaissance style, what would it look like?
JR: Ke$ha because I think there would be something hilarious with combining Ke$ha lyrics with the really formal Renaissance style.
The Current: What about the other way around?
JR: Yeah, absolutely. In the Renaissance there were these things called madrigals, and they were basically the pop songs of the time. People in the Renaissance had a great sense of humor. They were all very tongue-in-cheek and had lots of puns about sex and love and humor. I think just picking any of them and applying them in a modern setting would work really well.
The Current: Who is your favorite Renaissance figure?
JR: I really like this guy named Carlo Gesualdo. He was a prince in Italy, and he led this really dramatic, troubled life. There was lots of drama in his town and in his palace. He’s a composer who was basically this insane guy who was allowed to do whatever he wanted. So the music that he wrote was really far out and weird, and if you listen to it you’d never expect that it was from the 1600s.
