Sollazzo Ensemble concludes Laus Polyphoniae 2024 with an unprecedented sound for medieval times and a sonic puzzle for today's listeners
01 September 2024/ Belgium / Antwerp
An outrageous sound for the people of the Middle Ages and a puzzle for our ears today: the mediaeval polyphonic motet has been wrongfooting every listener for the past 700 years. Virtuoso music confounds patterns of expectation, accumulations of text conceal mysterious symbols and melodies wriggle out of their Gregorian straitjacket. Counterpoint also shifts up a gear, with vocal polyphony becoming an intellectual latticework.
‘Ars nova’ was the name of the ‘new art’ that unleashed a genuine musical revolution in the 14th century. Sollazzo Ensemble ascends to the highest celestial spheres with devilishly crafty works such as Lunne pleine d’umilité and Apollinis eclipsatur/Zodiacum signis: pinnacles of an age in which compositional conventions had to make way for artistic freedom, and the art of the motet spiralled up to an ambitious climax.
‘Ars nova’ was the name of the ‘new art’ that unleashed a genuine musical revolution in the 14th century. Sollazzo Ensemble ascends to the highest celestial spheres with devilishly crafty works such as Lunne pleine d’umilité and Apollinis eclipsatur/Zodiacum signis: pinnacles of an age in which compositional conventions had to make way for artistic freedom, and the art of the motet spiralled up to an ambitious climax.
