PROGRAM HISTORY
LOVE TO MY LIKING
Refrains of Desire in Gothic France
Can include medieval dancing
Continuing the tradition of the troubadours, the trouvères of Northern France wrote some of the most captivating vocal music of the 13th century. Their songs of public and private adoration wove together allusions both sacred and secular—creating mystical and spicy meditations on love and longing, punctuated by repeating refrains that recur across songs and texts. Alkemie reimagines these courtly love lyrics for our time, transforming songs typically sung for and written by men into passionate evocations by female singers. The lush musical textures are equally informed by historical performance practice, bluegrass, old-time, and Celtic music, creating an alien yet familiar soundscape that bridges the past and present.
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES
PAST PERFORMANCES
Verdant Medicine
VERDANT MEDICINE celebrates mystic, medic, and musician Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), a medieval polymath who expanded both Christian theology and the humoral theory of Galen to connect the viriditas (living greenness) of plants and the metaphorical viridity of spirituality directly to the human body and its functioning. Her beliefs are mirrored in the music she wrote for her nuns—ecstatic chants in which unfurling branches, earthbound roots, and medicinal spices are depicted in soaring melodies that swirl throughout an almost three-octave range.
PAST PERFORMANCES
Pentiment
Alkemie presents a live concert of music from the BAFTA-award-winning video game PENTIMENT – a narrative RPG murder mystery set in 16th-century Bavaria. Alkemie composed, curated, and performed all of the music heard in this acclaimed game, directed by Josh Sawyer and released by Obsidian entertainment.
PAST PERFORMANCES
a fine companion
A FINE COMPANION is an album of newly composed settings of troubadour songs and texts, written in a dream-pop /shoegaze/ psychedelic rock style for an amplified combination of medieval and new instruments. The texts of this project were chosen by Charles Mueller (composer) and the ensemble, with a focus on troubadour lyrics that expand or refute the standard tropes of chivalrous love by choosing poems from a feminine perspective, and by delving into the metaphysical and spiritual subsets of the genre. The unbridled sensuality of the arrangements creates space for a raw experience that inspires a visceral reaction in the listener. Mueller has used pre-existing troubadour music as a melodic and modal prompt on a number of pieces, with direct quotations organically morphing as if in an inspired game of telephone.
PAST PERFORMANCES
Call Me Marie
Fables from Marie de France
CALL ME MARIE is a new program based on the fables told by a 12th-century woman who pen-named herself “Marie de France.” Created and performed in collaboration with the Grammy-nominated duo Chapter House, this English-language version of her tales told by master storyteller Sarah Walker is sure to delight children and adults alike.
Alkemie & Chapter House will regale listeners with tales of love, magic, and cautionary wisdom, punctuated by music from the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine as well as from Harley Ms. 978, a 13th-century English source of Marie's fables as well as the only extant version of the famous round "Sumer Is Icumen In."
PAST PERFORMANCES
A Worthy Mirror
A WORTHY MIRROR represents a time-traveling dialogue with the 12th-century trobairitz–the feminine counterpart of the poet-composers known as troubadours. Together with Forward Music Project, we are commissioning eleven female and non-binary composers to respond to and converse with the 36 extant trobairitz texts (of which we only have music for one). This body of lyric poetry represents a large group of historically female and anonymous femme voices in the literary tradition. Witty, ironic, heartbreaking, and erotic—these texts present a mirror to reflect upon what feels foreign about the past and what feels familiar, what is the role of gender and self in relationships, and how do we make space for the multiplicities of identity, both in the 12th century and today.
PAST PERFORMANCES
Awesome Is This Place
the music of Dufay and Kammen
This new program presents Alkemie’s creative arrangements of favorite works by Guillaume Dufay – considered the foremost European composer by his 15th-century contemporaries – alongside the compositions of modern medieval luminary Shira Kammen. Though written centuries ago, many of the texts on this program have a strong sense of place recognizable to us today – like a beloved home, a garden, or a place of spiritual worship.
Alkemie is joined for this program by Corey Shotwell and Shira Kammen.
Past Performances
Singing Truth to Power
Medieval Protest Music
Rousing, wry, and sublime - this concert of medieval and traditional protest tunes call on us all to continue the centuries-old tradition of resistance to the forces of corruption and oppression. This program includes works from the Carmina Burana and the Roman de Fauvel, as well as the region of Brittany, and also features new modern poetic interpretations by Niccolo Seligmann.
Past Performances
Like a Woman
Finding the Feminine in Medieval France
15th-century French songs from the female or non-gendered poetic perspective. These pieces, wrenchingly emotional and playful by turns, provide a counternarrative to the pedestals & pitfalls of courtly love . . . a paradigm with a legacy that complicates partnerships to this day. With readings from the works of Christine de Pizan (1364 – c. 1430).
Past Performances
Florilegium
Plant Strains across the English Channel
Interactive Concert Experience
Violets, grapes, roses, and medicinal herbs and Tolkien's "Simbelmynë" (or Evermind) all make an appearance in this concert of 16th-century music from England and France. Alkemie members are joined by Corey Shotwell (tenor, melodica), Harrison Hintzsche (baritone, melodica, percussion), Ben Matus (tenor, winds, composer), and Jim Hopkins (baritone, harmonium).
This concert comes with the option of custom-made cards with 16th-century botanical images that smell like herbs and flowers mentioned in the music.
Past Performanaces
Sweet Friendship
Courtly Songs & Dances from 15th-century France & Italy
Includes Renaissance dancing
Alkemie celebrates seven years of friendship with our most diverse program yet: dancing with choreographies old and new, rarely heard songs from the Loire Valley Chansonniers, and new tunes by band member Niccolo Seligmann.
Past Performances
Beautee & Bountee
An Arthurian Refraction
Alkemie joins forces with composer ELLIOT COLE to reanimate the ancient tale of King Arthur. Cole combines new and old words and music in an original setting of the fourteenth-century stanzaic romance, the Morte Arthur. Spoken word, monophonic songs, motets, and instrumental commentary and interludes are woven together to tell the age-old story of Arthur, Guenevere and Lancelot, exploring themes of love, honor and duty that still resonate today. Flashes of transmuted medieval melodies, motifs, and works act as points of light that are variously refracted and recombined.
Past Performances
Cyprus 1400:
Island at the Crossroad of Cultures
Alkemie voyages to this island crossroads of French, Greek, Armenian, Italian, and Ottoman influences. Their program explores the complex ars subtilior melodies of the Torino manuscript J.ii.9 and rousing folk tunes from the area.
Past Performances
Diana’s Hunt
Songs of the Bestiary
Alkemie joins forces with composer Elliot Cole to craft new arrangements of stunning music from 14th-century Italy and newly-composed repertoire inspired by the medieval bestiary. Vielles, harp, recorders, percussion and voices evoke soaring birds, slithering reptiles, wondrous creatures, and the goddesses Diana and Venus. Serving as both mythology and Christian allegory, these fantastic visions of the animal kingdom continue to provoke the modern as well as the medieval imagination.
Past Performances
Mirroring the Other
Reflecting Jewish Experience in Medieval Germany
Alkemie looks at the Jewish experience in medieval Germany through newly-composed musical settings of Jewish texts and transcriptions of extant chant, monophonic (one voice) & polyphonic (multiple-voice) works. Stories are drawn from Yiddish epic tales and the Codex Manesse, as well as secular songs, religious poems, liturgical texts, and contemporary chronicles. Delight in the antics of an early Purimshpil and the onomatopoeic sounds of medieval life as well as the sheer beauty of the earliest Jewish chants that survive in Western notation.
Past Performances