Evento

Ergodos (All the Ends of the Earth) + Ekmeles + Ascoli Ensemble

Ergodos, a music production company and record label based in Dublin, presents All the Ends of the Earth, featuring new work and arrangements by Irish composers Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, Garrett Sholdice and Linda Buckley. The backbone of this production is the music of twelfth century French master, Léonin, in particular his elegant and suave organa on the plainchant Viderunt Omnes. Léonin's music represents an elemental purity of counterpoint, seeming ever more transcendental as time passes a transcendentalism that has captured the aural imagination of several composers.

Ekmeles: in Ancient Greek music theory, an adjective used to describe tones of indefinite pitch and intervals with complex ratios, tones "not appropriate for musical usage." In New York City, a new vocal ensemble breathing life into those disallowed tones, new and old. Ekmeles is dedicated to the performance of new and rarely heard works, and gems of the historical avant garde. Program highlights include the US premiere of Johannes Schöllhorn's Madrigali a Dio on texts by Pasolini, and two rarely heard James Tenney miniatures.

The Ascoli Ensemble (www.ascoliensemble.com) is a Holland-based vocal ensemble specialized in the performance of rare and unknown music from the Middle Ages. The ensemble gained international recognition in 2009 for its reconstruction and modern world premiere of a recently discovered 14th-century Italian manuscript. Its first CD, "I Frammenti Ascolani," came out in 2010 with a world premiere recording of late medieval polyphony. Since then the ensemble has been in high demand in Europe and beyond for its unusual combination of musicianship and scholarly rigor. This concert is part of the Ascoli Ensemble's first US tour, which will culminate in a residency at MIT. Artistic director and tenor Sasha Zamler-Carhart is a professor of medieval music and Latin at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague and all the singers are former students of the Royal Conservatoire. Each singer is both a specialist of early music performance and a scholar, contributing to the ensemble's musicological work of deciphering, transcribing and interpreting medieval manuscript sources.