A Worthy Mirror: Alkemie Album Release Show

A Worthy Mirror is a time-traveling conversation with the trobairitz, the women poet-composers associated with the troubadour tradition of 12th- and 13th-century Occitania. Music survives for only one of their approximately 23 to 46 extant lyric poems and fragments, but the remaining texts, which are by turns witty, ironic, heartbreaking, erotic, and sometimes tantalizingly incomplete, offer rare perspective within a literary culture whose conventions frequently made an idealized and silent woman the object of someone else’s song.

These special album release concerts include Alkemie’s commissions by 8 women and non-binary composers who approach that perspective in a variety of compelling ways — moving between Medieval practices and contemporary ones, and freely mixing elements of monody, organum, ecstatic vocalism, spicy harmonies, and shifting timbres along with their own viewpoints. Experience these new works for old instruments alongside “A Chantar” aka the only musical trobairitz piece that survives from the time.

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