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We hope you’ll join us for our next concert:

Womansong: Medieval Pilgrimage

including special guests
Annette Bauer, recorders
Therese Honey, harp

8pm, Saturday, February 20, 2010

St. Mary Cathedral, 203 East 10th St., Austin

Admission $20; $15 seniors; $5 students (at the door only)
Tickets available by cash or check at the door or online
Call 512-377-6961 to make reservations.

Many thousands of people from around the world make modern day pilgrimages to various religious or political sites. However, there was never a more popular time for religious pilgrimage than during the Middle Ages. In those times, people made long and dangerous trips, lasting months or years, in a search for spiritual meaning or fulfillment or as an act of penance.

Several of the most important sites of pilgrimage during the Middle Ages were located in what is now northern Spain. The monastery at Montserrat in Catalonia (a shrine to the Virgin Mary) and the Santiago de Compostela in Galicia (a shrine to the apostle St. James the Great) attracted pilgrims from all over Europe. Stories and songs by and about the pilgrims, as well as the liturgical and para-liturgical music at the shrines became celebrated in literature and music.

We are fortunate that we have access to much of the music from both of these important sites, as well as related music from the Cistercian convent in Burgos and also from Las Cantigas de Santa Maria from the royal court of Alfonso X. Much of the music from the Lliber vermell from Montserrat was intended to be sung by the pilgrims themselves, in their nightly celebrations, and included chants, rounds, folk songs, circle dances, and some bits of polyphony as well. The music from the Codex Calixtinus at Santiago de Compostela was performed in church services, and contains meditative chants as well as lively and spirited motets and dance-like “call and respond” pieces.

It is fitting for TEMP’s performance of this beautiful and mesmerizing music to be held in the glorious acoustic at St. Mary Cathedral, similar in size and resonance to those of the first performances 700 years ago. This performance is also a part of our “Womansong” series, celebrating the richly transparent timbre of treble voices, whether in unison or in polyphonic settings, which makes the most of sweet consonances and pungent dissonances. Much of this music was intentionally scored for higher voices, such as works from the convent in Burgos, which were written for the nuns to perform, and many of the Marian pieces from the Llibre vermell. Among the ten women singing in the concert will be featured soloists Kathlene Ritch, Stephanie Prewitt, and Jenifer Thyssen, and the small medieval orchestra will feature guest harpist Therese Honey and German recorder player, Annette Bauer, who has been featured most recently in TEMP’s Sephardic concerts.