Designed in collaboration with UCLA Early Music Ensemble (EME) managing director Morgan OShaughnessey and EME guest viol coach Niccolo Seligmann, this June 2017 concert formed around early music from the nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Orkney Islands, and Sweden. Combining UCLA students, faculty, staff, and Los Angeles community members, the program featured several centuries of music.
For this concert, EME members bent their tongues around little-known dialects of Uralic Latin, braved the cold clear linguistic waters of Icelandic and Swedish, and even set foot into Old Norse. Many of them picked up instruments they had never played before and learned tunes by ear without ever having seen them in written form. These adventurous and earthy practices were in keeping with the fundamental spirit of this evening’s concert: a blurring of the lines between “art,” “sacred,” and “folk” music traditions.
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