To open its season, The Newberry Consort, an early music ensemble, performed “I Tremble Not” at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on Saturday. It featured music from Jacobean England.
The concert, which incorporated historical instrumentation like viols, brass and voice, contained six sections of music from various stages of King James I’s 22-year reign.
Artistic director Liza Malamut said music from the Jacobean era is as vast and complex as the political and cultural shifts that occurred during the period. While thousands of seventeenth-century England pieces remain, Malamut said she chose a repertoire that tells a comprehensive story of James’ reign.
“The first thing that attracted me was really the music,” said Malamut, who plays the sackbut, a historical trombone. “It’s just incredibly complex and beautiful, and I wanted to find some way to perform it. It’s so interconnected with daily life and politics and these very consequential world events that were happening while it was being written.”
Malamut said the title of the concert, “I Tremble Not,” was based on a song by Orlando Gibbons, whose music both opened and closed the program. The opener, “Great King of Gods,” celebrated James’ coronation, while the closing song, “O Clap Your Hands” exhibits bravery as England nears civil war.
Other songs on the program, such as an English broadside ballad “The Gunpowder Plot,” may have been performed for the first time in centuries this weekend, Malamut said.
“It was a lot of following rabbit holes, like diving through music collections, looking at digitized manuscripts and then also just looking up different texts, trying to find pieces that work together, both musically and that further storylines,” Malamut said.
While most of the musicians are local to the Chicago area, some flew in from as far as Minneapolis and New York.
Trumpet and sackbut player Paul Von Hoff (Bienen ‘00) was one of a few Northwestern alumni on the program. He said performing with NU musicians is special because their multidisciplinary interests, such as English and history, come through in the music.
Von Hoff said performing music from 17th-century England on historical instruments allows both audiences and musicians to experience history in a different way.
“Everyone will take something from this concert and add it to their life,” Von Hoff said. “Everyone’s going to sort of grab something different from the concert, but they’re all things that you would have no access to otherwise.”
Viola da gamba player and Bienen prof. Craig Trompeter said Newberry Consort members interpreted the music for themselves during rehearsals, since the pieces have no fixed instrumentation or conductor.
From singers’ hyper-accurate pronunciations of English words to the viols’ real gut strings, Trompeter said the ensemble creates sounds unlike anything most audience members have heard.
“It’s just like going to the art museum and spending time in the medieval painting rooms,” Trompeter said. “You kind of have to change the way you see when you go to those things, and you have to spend time experiencing them. The only way to do that is to hear it live.”
Trompeter said teaching at NU allows him to expose young people to musical ideas left in centuries past, creating richer and more authentic sounds.
“If we can kind of examine some of those ideas, it improves our own performance of this music, rather than approaching that music from a modern day sensibility and kind of maybe missing some of the important things about it,” Trompeter said. “We can look and see what they were thinking about at the time. I love exposing students to these ideas for the first time.”
Malamut said the next two programs in The Newberry Consort’s season will also feature Evanston performances, likely at St. Luke’s.
Malamut added that the Chicago area is generally very welcoming to its large early music repertoire.
“We just really connect well with the audiences there, and it’s nice to carry on that relationship,” Malamut said. “And it’s just really nice to be in a place where people appreciate this kind of music.”
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