BLUE HERON TO SING FOR DALAI LAMA AT MIT, NEW AFFILIATION WITH BOSTON UNIVERSITY, AND OPENS 2012-13 SEASON WITH PREMIERES

BLUE  HERON  TO  PERFORM  FOR  DALAI  LAMA  AT  M.I.T., LAUNCHES  NEW  AFFILIATION  WITH  BOSTON  UNIVERSITY,  AND

OPENS  2012-13  SEASON  WITH  PREMIERES

 

“passionate expression and dramatic attention to text…nuanced dynamic shadings and emotive conviction”

     The New York Times

 

“one of the most successful advocates for Renaissance music in the country”

     The Boston Musical Intelligencer

 

The Renaissance vocal ensemble Blue Heron and its music director Scott Metcalfe have announced important new collaborations, path-breaking projects, and the opening performances of the ensemble’s fourteenth season in Greater Boston.

 

METCALFE AND BLUE HERON APPOINTED TO BOSTON UNIVERSITY’S NEW

CENTER FOR EARLY MUSIC STUDIES

In a development that will help shape the training of early music performers and scholars in  Boston and throughout North America, Scott Metcalfe has been appointed co-director (with Professor Victor Coelho) of the new Center for Early Music Studies (CEMS) at Boston University, and Blue Heron has joined the Center as ensemble-in-residence.

 

The CEMS, an initiative of the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, is charged with coordinating, promoting, and developing the study and performance of music before 1800 across the entire University, as well as stimulating inter-disciplinary research on early music and its place in the broader contexts of cultural history. Boston is already “early music’s Silicon Valley,” a hotbed of research and its practical application in performance, according to Professor Coelho, who played a major role in the Center’s creation. Metcalfe and Blue Heron will deepen and enrich the university’s expertise in the Renaissance era and strengthen BU’s position at the leading edge of the early music movement with concerts, classes, lecture-demonstrations, and participation in conferences, including the upcoming “Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe” next February.

 

BLUE HERON TO SING FOR DALAI LAMA AND PARTICIPATE IN RESEARCH AT MIT CENTER

The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values and the Prajnopaya Institute of Buddhist Studies have invited Blue Heron to perform for the visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to MIT on October 14-16. Blue Heron will perform on Monday, October 15, from 4 to 5 p.m. at the MIT Chapel as the closing event of the day’s sessions entitled “Global Systems 2.0,” and on the morning of Tuesday, October 16, the ensemble will sing before the Dalai Lama’s teaching, “Stages of Meditation: Buddhism for the 21st Century,” at Kresge Auditorium.

 

A profound honor in itself, this invitation is expected to be the first step in a long-range collaboration between the Dalai Lama Center and its director, the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi, the composer, inventor, and professor Tod Machover and the MIT Media Lab, Le Laboratoire in Paris, and Blue Heron, to study the psychological, cognitive, and spiritual effects of singing on singers and listeners. 

 

BLUE HERON LAUNCHES SEASON WITH PREMIERES IN CAMBRIDGE, BOSTON, AND NEW YORK

Blue Heron launches its 2012-13 season in October with concerts in Boston (Oct. 11), Cambridge (Oct. 13), and New York (Oct. 14), featuring the North American premiere of the Missa Inclina cor meum by Nicholas Ludford and the modern world premiere of John Mason’s Ave fuit prima salus. Both works, composed in the decades before the English Reformation of 1547, have been recently restored by the English musicologist Nick Sandon: one or two of the five voice parts has been missing since the 17th century. More details are available at blueheronchoir.org and will follow in a further press release. 

 

Blue Heron is recording the two works this fall for a planned 2013 release as volume 3 of its acclaimed series Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks.

 

“This album [Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, vol. 2] and its predecessor…are the beginning of an exciting series, more than hinting at the wealth of great sacred music written by English composers between roughly 1500 and 1540. …top marks in all respects: engineering, liner notes—by the group’s director, Scott Metcalfe—and, of course, the performances themselves”

     Barry Brenesal, Fanfare | September/October 2012

 

 

RESIDENCY CONTINUES AT BOSTON COLLEGE

Blue Heron is delighted to be continuing its residency in the Department of Music at Boston College and its collaboration with the department’s chair, Michael Noone. This season Blue Heron will present two concerts and associated lecture-demonstrations at Boston College and Scott Metcalfe will coach vocal ensembles and teach classes.