Most of this album was sourced from the top drawer of a filing cabinet I’ve not laid eyes on in decades. Located in a room on the third floor of Peabody Conservatory’s Leakin Building, the filing cabinet sat just to the right of the giant instrument lockers that dominated the space. Its worn gunmetal gray finish practically begged you to look right past it to the shelves full of colorful books, but I knew its top drawer was set aside for the viol. Inside there were spare strings, rosin, and, at least from my then-youthful perspective, so many odd books. These books were small and oddly shaped, they were full of music I couldn’t read, and even the ones with English text were hard for me to make much sense of. What I didn’t know then, but have come to appreciate now thirty years on, was that among those books was a fine selection of what I call the “mother texts” of the viola da gamba. Primarily written and published in the 16th and 17th centuries, these books and the music within came from a time when the viol was new, and music’s very nature was being redefined again and again across Europe. Each of these books contain music and perspectives I turn to continually in my practice as a performer and a teacher, so I thought it would be fun to get them out of my own filing cabinet and document a few decades of thought, practice, and appreciation in a project that eventually became Unaccompanied Vol. 3: Didaktika.
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With selections spanning from the renaissance to today, from my schooling to some of the last concerts I played prior to the coming of COVID, Portrait of Melancholy became a scrapbook not just of those strange days, but of my life with the viol.
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Unaccompanied: Volume 2 is an album that explores the French influence on German music for solo viola da gamba in the 17th Century. Drawn from a manuscript dated to 1674 the album pairs music from known French composers and their anonymous German counterparts.
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Consort music is a conversation between musical minds, but when you’re in the midst of playing it’s hard enough to execute your part with certainty, much less to listen or speak musically to others at the same time. But it’s no wonder: we are managing the technical realities of playing the viol, often while sight reading an unfamiliar work, all while trying to expressively and intelligibly perform an often-dense polyphonic composition. Though this can feel overwhelming, below you’ll find some of my insights that have helped me organize the consort experience in a way that allows me to quickly make sense of it while enjoying myself and the music.
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I might be a 44 year old fat dude but down deep I’m forever a 14 year old goth girl, bedecked in a Ministry shirt and black eyeliner, holding a cigarette in my mesh gloved hands, sitting on the curb at the mall waiting for mom to pick me up. Seeing as that’s the case it should be no surprise that I was drawn to Oblivion Soave, one of only two reasons to sit through Monteverdi’s opera “L'incoronazione di Poppea” (for the curious, the second reason is the closing duet, Pur ti miro).
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When I first saw the title “Le Dodo” I was confused. At the time I had no clue why François Couperin, imminent composer of exquisite beauty and depth, would dedicate a work to an awkward bird that went extinct just prior to his birth. As it turned out, I had it all wrong.
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Today I’m releasing Greensleeves to a Ground, the first single off of my upcoming album, A Portrait of Melancholy, coming out in 2021.
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