Friday 12 July 4.30pm
Free of charge, booking essential.
Venue: Bedern Hall

Obrecht and Barbireau: Celebrating the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin in Golden Age Antwerp

A lavishly illustrated lecture by Professor Jennifer Bloxam offers an insider’s introduction to the concert by Cappella Pratensis & I Fedeli. Her talk explores the Antwerp context of the music featured in a program that evokes the procession, Mass, and Salve service of the city’s opulent August celebration of the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. Special attention is paid to Jacob Obrecht’s splendid Missa Sub tuum praesidium, its Antwerp origins and its surprising use as an Easter mass for the Emperor Maximilian I.

Professor Jennifer Bloxam

Musicologist Professor Jennifer Bloxam is Herbert H. Lehman Professor of Music Emerita at Williams College, and past president of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music. Her projects focus on sacred music of the Christian West before the Reformation, especially the ritual contexts of sacred polyphony, the interactions between plainsong and polyphony in mass and motet, and strategies of narrative and exegesis in sacred music and the arts. She has a particular affection for Franco-Flemish composers active in the decades around 1500, especially Obrecht. Recent publications include essays in The Museum of Renaissance Music (Brepols, 2023), The Book of Requiems (Leuven University Press, 2022), Early Music (2020), Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation (Liturgical Press, 2019) and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music and Theology. Since 2006, Bloxam has collaborated with the Dutch vocal ensemble Cappella Pratensis, directed by Stratton Bull, on film, recording, website and concert projects dedicated to rebuilding the ritual frame around late medieval sacred music. She is the recipient of fellowship support from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and the Alamire Foundation.