Music for an Antwerp Church
Graindelavoix, Björn Schmelzer
Music for an Antwerp Church
Graindelavoix, Björn Schmelzer
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About
Music for an Antwerp Church is the soundtrack for the exhibition Divine Interiors (Antwerp, 2016). This production partially contains audio material which is also included on Glossa GCD P32113 Orazio Vecchi: Requiem, available both physically and digitally. Some of the paintings of church interiors in the early Baroque show people singing in a chapel during High Mass or at Vespers, while empty church interiors devoid of staffage suggest the reverberation of sound through space. A virtual aural dimension adds to our experience of these generally Gothic spaces and their decorative interiors, but which sounds and repertoires would allow us to hear what it was like to be there? In the late sixteenth century, Antwerp’s two most prominent printers, Christophe Plantin and Pierre Phalèse, published a local and international musical repertoire which in many ways matched these paintings of church interiors. These were compositions in a late style that stretched the spatial elasticity of polyphony to its limits. Just like the paintings, they suggest an affective three-dimensionality that, because of its retrospective nature, belongs as much to the Counter-Reformation programme as it does to the Baroque. The Belgian ensemble, Graindelavoix, directed by Björn Schmelzer, produce another of their impressive vocal soundscapes in order to illustrate the sound which might have been heard in Baroque Antwerp churches.
Contents and tracklist
- Graindelavoix
- Björn Schmelzer
- Graindelavoix
- Björn Schmelzer
- Graindelavoix
- Björn Schmelzer
- Graindelavoix
- Björn Schmelzer
- Graindelavoix
- Björn Schmelzer
- Graindelavoix
- Björn Schmelzer
- Graindelavoix
- Björn Schmelzer
- Graindelavoix
- Björn Schmelzer
