The Music of Siena: Graindelavoix
Musical selections responding to the special exhibition Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450–1500. The Antwerp-based ensemble Graindelavoix, led by Björn Schmelzer and celebrated for its visceral, ornament-rich approach to early music, closes our series on the Music of Siena with a program that listens to the city’s golden
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age through the voices that filled it. In the closing decades of the fifteenth century, the legendary Franco-Flemish polyphonists who traveled south across the Alps were singing in Siena’s cathedral, their music as much a part of the city’s splendor as its bronzes. At the program’s heart is Sena vetus, the only known fifteenth-century ceremonial motet in honor of Siena—the “city of the life-giving Virgin”—composed by the Franco-Flemish Arnolfo Giliardi for a Sienese patron. Around this motet unfold laments, Marian hymns, and devotional songs by Du Fay, Ockeghem, Josquin, Isaac, and Agricola—music that, like the reliefs and statues it accompanies, gives form to grief, beauty, and the sacred. Image Credit: Graindelavoix, photo by Frank Emmers