Michael Praetorius: Dances from Terpsichore, La Bourée; Voices of Music 4K UHD

The Bourées from Terpsichore (1612) by Michael Praetorius. Live, 4K UHD video from the San Francisco Early Music ensemble Voices of Music concert, December 17, 2016. Please consider a donation and we will make more videos like this one :) Michael Praetorius was one of the most important composers and theorists of the late renaissance and early-17th century. His astonishing encyclopedia of music gives us an intriguing glimpse into the instruments and performance practices of the time, and his writing covers all aspects of music. Praetorius wrote popular hymn settings, as well as large-scale compositions that borrowed elements of the polychoral Italian tradition. Praetorius was a tune collector, just like the musicologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who collected songs and dances from different countries; he planned eight volumes of these secular works, but he only finished one: his book of French instrumental dances Terpsichore, named after the muse of dance (1612). Orchestration: in the 1960s and 1970s, these works were heavily orchestrated--and conducted--in a neo-renaissance style. Although not grounded in historical performance, these orchestrations did, however, introduce a wider audience to the different kinds of instruments in the late renaissance and early baroque and helped popularize the music before Bach. The string band at this time was the core group for dance dance music, so our performance is primarily strings using early 17th century bows, although a more complex orchestration is not incompatible with Praetorius’s large scale works. Voices of Music Hanneke van Proosdij and David Tayler Directors Musicians (left to right) Hanneke van Proosdij, recorder Carla Moore, Gabrielle Wunsch, Lisa Grodin and Maxine Nemerovski, baroque violins Maria Caswell, baroque viola Peter Maund, riqq Elisabeth Reed and Tanya Tomkins, baroque cellos Farley Pearce, violone David Tayler, archlute