This concert, performed by the UCLA Early Music Ensemble, featured environmental early music. Combining UCLA students, faculty, staff, and Los Angeles community members, I designed and directed this performance. Europeans have recognized the existence and importance of other beings within their ecosystems for centuries. As a performative contribution to conversations in conservation, environmentalism, the ethnomusicological and musicological subdiscipline of ecomusicology, and others, this December 2017 concert presented medieval, renaissance, and baroque European early music with an ecological focus. Concert highlights included Jean-Féry Rebel’s “Chaos” from the symphony Les Élémens, the 13th century English “rota” canon “Svmer is acumen in,” the madrigal “il bianco e dolce cigno,” Josquin Des Prez’ “El Grillos,” and other gems by Handel, Dowland, and Hildegard Von Bingen.
