Music Divine

Music Divine is a vocal ensemble, founded in 2005, that specializes in performing unaccompanied choral music of the Renaissance. Although we include in our repertoire music of the last one thousand years, from plainchant to Arvo Pärt, our special focus is on the decades surrounding 1500. This is the music heard by Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Rafael, Michelangelo, Dürer; Erasmus, Thomas More, Machiavelli, Copernicus; and patronized by the heads of Europe's nobility and clergy, including Emperors Maximilian I and Charles V, Kings Henry VII and François I, Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and by powerful families like the Medici. It is the original "classical" music, adhering to rules of counterpoint that were already established by the mid-15th century, and still largely observed well into the 19th. Far more than mere Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony is the choral arrangement of chant melodies-and of secular songs as well-into beautiful tapestries of harmonic and contrapuntal sound, completely accessible to modern ears.For a composer of the Renaissance, setting to music the Mass Ordinary-the text sung at every mass: Kyrie,Gloria,Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei-was the equivalent of writing a symphony. The greatest composers wrote dozens masses and other religious works, as well as secular pieces, such as chansons and, later, madrigals. Music Divine's mission is to help make this music as well known and loved as the works of their artist contemporaries.