Founded and led by Benjamin Bagby, Sequentia is one of the world’s most respected and innovative ensembles for medieval music. In this new program Muses of the Spheres, the four musicians of Sequentia plunge once again into the rich repertoire of secular song set to music from the 9th to 11th centuries in monastic and cathedral schools, and now brought back to life thanks to recent scientific research and discoveries. These songs, often with texts from late Antiquity and including authors such as Martianus Capella, Boethius and Horace, found their way into writing via learned monks using the same neumatic notations as those used for liturgical plainchant.

Sung for pleasure and instruction in and outside of the thriving schools, there are songs which deal with the subject of Ars Musica, the magic of musical instruments, the power of music as a science, and its teaching as an integral part of the seven “liberal arts” taught to every medieval intellectual. This is in turn related to the poetic concept of the Muses, female allegorical figures which originated in Roman and Greek mythology and whose veneration survived into the Middle Ages.

The focus in Muses of the Spheres includes sources from the European continent, but especially England, and most crucially the extraordinary collection called “The Cambridge Songs,” copied a thousand years ago in Canterbury. This small codex is a meeting place of contemporary musical practice, the science of music, the old gods, and sung stories which entertain and inform young listeners from the intellectual elite of the time. The Festival is excited to welcome back this storied ensemble, which last performed in Berkeley in 2018.

Benjamin Bagby, voice, harp; Jasmina Črnčič, voice, harp; Lukas Papenfusscline, voice; Norbert Rodenkirchen, flute