Early Music at FIU

Professors of Musicology David Dolata and Music Theory Joel Galand will offer a summer study abroad program in Tours and Paris this summer focusing on the music of France. Much of the content will focus on early music. Field trips will include chateaux where Renaissance music was widely performed and visits to musically significant sites and events in Paris, particularly the Gregorian Chant Mass at Notre Dame. Classes in Tours will take place at Europe’s leading Renaissance music research institute. For more information, contact Dr. Dolata at dolatad@fiu.edu.

View flyer as pdf: Music in France

On Saturday October 10, David Dolata and students and community members from the Collegium Musicum, FIU’s early music ensemble, presented a lecture-recital on The Music of Shakespeare’s Period in support of FIU’s exhibition of Shakespeare’s First Folio at the Frost Museum in February 2016. Following Dr. Dolata’s lecture, he and his colleagues performed a variety of music that would have formed Shakespeare’s musical soundscape including drum marches, trumpet fanfares, viol consorts, lute solos, music for recorder and lute, a one-on-a-part sacred anthem and madrigals, several lute songs, ballads, music for solo harpsichord, and a newly composed text to the tune of Greensleeves, demonstrating the contrafactum technique that provided much of the vocal music in Shakespeare’s plays. The performers were:

Raven Reynolds: percussion
Sofia da Silva & Erik Hagen: trumpets
Kip Irvine & Ricardo Rodriguez: bass violas da gamba
David Dolata: lute
Gitta Montoto: recorder
Adriana Ruiz: soprano
Naomi Mercado: soprano
Beatrice Murray: soprano
Edgar Sanfeliz-Botta: countertenor
Adolfo Rodriguez: tenor
Roberto Lopez-Trigo: bass
Matthew Steynor: harpsichord

For more information on FIU’s exhibition of the First Folio, click on the Shakespeare First Folio tab above.

Il Furioso returns to South Florida for two concerts, one in Coral Gables and the other in Delray Beach. Martin Luther loved music, saying that one of its chiefest charms was that it “put the Devil to flight,” chasing him away with the sweet euphony he so despised. In “Putting the Devil to Flight” we present a program featuring the previously unrecorded, bravura “Amen, Allelujas” composed by G. F. Händel for the daughters of George II. Male soprano Robert Crowe joins Il Furioso in a recreation of the lively, private, Sunday evening musical amusements of the Protestant upper class.

Concert information is provided in the flyers below.

We look forward to seeing you there.

David Dolata

We are pleased to announce that Carol Pollard, the Associate Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at the Yale University Institution for Social & Policy Studies, will teach our Viol Class commencing with the Fall 2015 Semester. Through the magic of the internet, she is able to continue to fulfill her Yale administrative duties from her home in Boca Raton. Carol studied with Wieland Kuijken in The Hague and with America’s most rigorous viola da gamba expert, Grace Feldman. She has been a member of Feldman’s viol consort for 38 years. Carol Pollard has been teaching advanced viola da gamba technique privately and in group class settings for many years in New England and now brings her expertise and experience to FIU. Welcome, Carol!

Collegium Musicum in 2015–16 will include both Viol Class throughout the school year and/or participation in Collegium Musicum’s involvement with the many musical events associated with FIU’s exhibition of Shakespeare’s First Folio in February 2016 and the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music (SSCM) annual conference hosted by FIU in Coconut Grove in April 2016. These events will involve two separate repertoires. To see a preliminary list of events associated with the First Folio, select its menu item above. We will prepare for these and other as of yet unannounced fall events during the fall semester. For both the First Folio and SSCM conference Collegium Musicum will partner with FIU’s Opera Theatre to present John Blow’s short opera Venus & Adonis based on Shakespeare’s poem of the same name. In addition to vocal soloists, the score requires strings, continuo, and two recorders.

To sign up for either Collegium Musicum or Viol Class, register for the following:

MUN 1471: freshmen and sophomores

MUH 3474: juniors and seniors

MUH 5477: graduate students

Contact Dr. Dolata for permissions if necessary.

Viol class will take place on Tuesdays from 3:30–5:00 in WPAC 157. Rehearsals for First Folio events will take place on an ad hoc basis depending on the participants schedules, however, our only guaranteed rehearsal times are Tuesdays 3:30–5:00 (at the same time as Viol Class) and Thursday evenings. Other times TBA. Scheduling of opera instrumental rehearsals will be TBA in the fall. Continuo players may be required to attend some Opera Workshop rehearsals T & H 12:30–3:15.

Contact Dr. Dolata with any questions.