Media
Music you can feel.
What’s in a song?
The music we’re drawn to is many-layered, audacious, and pushes singers to the outer edges of their vocal abilities:
Polyphony
Whether it was written in the 16th century or the 21st, music that weaves together many vocal textures at once, that celebrates the independence of every voice, is what we’re after.
Community
Music that inspires people to gather, to collaborate, to make connections across genres and eras, and to celebrate those qualities that make us human is music we want to perform.
Adventure
We understand why Handel’s Messiah is a thing. But it’s not our thing. Music that wanders into uncharted territory, that embraces mystery, that dares listeners to feel and feel deeply—that’s our north star.
Sounds From the Soil: A Salon
We previewed our 2021-22 Season with an all-virtual salon of performances recorded live at the lovely Lone Hawk Farm, including this recording of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Summer is Gone.”
Discover more of Ars Nova on Apple Music, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Youtube.
Palestrina’s Double-Chorus Mass
Sample some of our December 2019 program, Northern Lights, which featured the double-chorus Renaissance mass Missa Hodie Christus Natus Est by Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina:
Kyrie
Gloria in Excelsis
Agnus Dei
Will Todd’s Mass in Blue Recorded in 2018; video by Tom Morgan
Blue True Dream
Explore tracks from our 2006 release, Blue True Dream:
Together/Apart
Our first performance in the wake of COVID-19, Together/Apart: Awake with Heart, featured works by Black American composers Undine Smith Moore, Carlos Simon, and Marques L. A. Garrett, and closed with English composer Benjamin Britten’s stirring World War II-era Advance Democracy with words by Randall Swingler:
Across the darkened city the frosty searchlights creep,
Alert for the first marauder, to steal upon our sleep.
We see the sudden headlines float on the muttering tide.
We hear them warn and threaten and wonder what they hide.
There are whispers across tables, talks in a shutter’d room.
The price on which they bargain will be a people’s doom.
There’s a roar of war in the factories and idle hands on the street,
And Europe held in nightmare by the thud of marching feet.
Now sinks the sun of surety, the shadows growing tall
Of the big bosses plotting their biggest coup of all.
Is there no strength to save us? No power we can trust.
Before our lives and liberties are powder’d into dust.
Time to arise Democracy, time to rise up and cry,
That what our fathers fought for we’ll not allow to die.
Time to resolve divisions, time to renew our pride,
Time to decide, time to burst our house of glass.
Rise as a single being in one resolve arrayed:
Life shall be for the people that’s by the people made.
Discography
Solo Recordings
A Floweret Bright: Christmas Music of the Renaissance and the 20th Century (1993)
Soundscapes (1995)
A Shadow and a Dream (1997)
Midwinter: Carols in Concert (2000)
All Sky (2000)
I Heard a Voice (2002)
Luminescence (2004)
Rachmaninoff Vespers (2005)
Blue True Dream (2006)
Yuletide (2009)
Featured On
Circle of Moons (Bill Douglas, 1995)
Deep Peace (Bill Douglas, 1996)
Songs of Earth & Sky (Bill Douglas, 1998)
Earth Prayer (Bill Douglas, 1999)
Eternity’s Sunrise (Bill Douglas, 2000)
A Place Called Morning (Bill Douglas, 2001)
Homeland: A Prayer for Peace (Bill Douglas, 2002)
Sky (Bill Douglas, 2005)
Prayer of Compassion (David Darling, 2010, Grammy Winner)
Very fine… a richly reverberant world of sound.
The Choral Review