touring programs: bring us to you!

Trobár presents the story of a lavish thirteenth-century anthology of French music, known today as the “Manuscrit du Roi.” The diversity of its content makes it unique for its time, containing sacred and secular songs, vocal and instrumental pieces, works in three languages, and originally sixty-two miniature artworks. While much of its history remains murky, the manuscript itself gives clues as to why it was created and what it was originally intended to be. The gilded illuminations indicate the wealth and importance of whoever commissioned it and the multiple layers show it changing hands from owner to owner, with some of these owners having music added to empty corners or blank pages. Ultimately landing in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the manuscript also sheds light on former library practices in the preservation and maintenance of books. This concert provides a glimpse into the medieval experience through the music and images of a songbook fit for a king!

Love. Romantic love, familial love, religious love - in any age, its course never does run smooth. Devotion, conflict, separation, entreaty, and restoration pepper the epic struggle between love and power. In wrestling with these forces, humans tend to express themselves through art, especially in poetry and song, and the people of the Iberian peninsula in the 12th and 13th centuries were no strangers to these expressions. Within the spoken and sung words that survive, we can see the common thread of humanity’s struggle with love winding throughout Iberian thought, whether sacred or secular, personal or communal, Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. In this program, Trobár manifests disparate voices of medieval Iberia as they grapple with the dynamics of love and power.

Featuring music from our upcoming album, recorded August 2021, this not-so-traditional Valentine’s Day program explores themes of dialogue and viewpoint in early 15th-century French love songs. Il Dit / Elle Dit includes works with two or three equal high voices, in the formes fixes as well as canons and through-composed pieces. Frequently, these voices exhibit an equality of role, trading off contrapuntal functions, and sometimes even with dialogic texts sung concurrently. Set alongside chansons with more standard musical layouts and instrumental tracks, performed by a mix of voices, vielle, rebec, harp, and flute, we hope to paint a picture of French courtly love from multiple perspectives.

During the fourteenth century, or the Trecento, Florence was just beginning its rise to prominence politically and financially, with this rise fueling artistic pursuits in poetry, sculpture, architecture, and music. This program sets some of our favorite Trecento polyphonic works against the monophonic lauda, a sacred Italian offshoot of the troubadour tradition, as well as instrumental dance songs collected from the period. These genres all intersected in the city of Florence, home to many of the century’s leading composers as well as numerous laudesi companies. Within a framework of the seasons, drawing on the music’s many references to themes of nature, love, birth, death, and rebirth, this program provides a glimpse into everyday Florentine lives - the mundane, the passionate and the sublime - through music that speaks to the universal human experience. 

Trobár presents a program of music that would have been performed by musicians who undertook the perilous journeys to Europe’s famous menestrel schools in the Middle Ages. The word menestrel, literally “minstrel,” refers to the secular musicians who were active in Europe between 1250 and 1500. I Sing a New Song tells the story of a menestrel and her companions as they journey from Paris to a menestrel school in Brussels. These schools were international conventions where musicians gathered to buy instruments, network, compete for prizes, and learn new songs to take back to their home cities. France, Germany, and the Low Countries were popular locations for menestrel schools, though participating musicians came from around Europe, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles through challenging territory.

For this program, we are pleased to collaborate with Chicago-based early-music ensemble Newberry Consort. Two shawms, organetto, and a medieval slide trumpet join the cast for rollicking dances and ornamented song melodies. 

We often view the troubadour through nostalgia-tinted glasses - as a traveling minstrel with a lute slung across his back, singing love songs and breaking hearts, a sort of old-timey rock star meets crooner. The reality was in some ways much more prosaic, and in others much messier. To begin with, the art of the troubadours and trobairitz (female troubadours) emanated from a highly refined and aristocratic society. Their complex syntheses of words and music, written by the elite for the elite, both codified and reinforced cultural tropes and norms. Together with expressions of love, joy, regret, and loss, their texts also frequently exhibit misogyny, racism, and violence which must be grappled with. In this program, we recount the lives and re-enact the art of the troubadours and trobairitz, both in the original Occitan and in English verse translations by modern poets Ezra Pound, W.D. Snodgrass, and Robert Kehew. By setting these languages side by side, we capture both the beauty and craft of the original text and their immediacy and vitality through translation, simulating the two halves of their first audiences' experience.

We take a musical journey through the English Yuletide season, stopping in various spaces to celebrate the major holidays of the church’s liturgical calendar, travel through the biblical Christmas story, and traverse English musical style from the 13th through the 16th centuries. From Advent through Twelfth Night, from Gabriel’s Annunciation to the arrival of the Magi, we present a veritable feast of musical selections including chant, carols, drinking songs, and courtly love songs interspersed with a few readings from a 16th-c. collection, known as Richard Hill’s Commonplace Book. This joyous sojourn blends the voices and instruments of Trobár’s members with the percussive skills of guest artist Allen Otte.

The medieval concept of the Florilegium, or “gathering of flowers,” referred to the process of picking and choosing passages from important early writings and gathering them together in a new arrangement or anthology. Likewise, in this program, Trobár plucks excerpts from four medieval stories with music, two allegories, a pastoral comedy, and a political satire, exploring the ways that the music embellishes and amplifies the stories, heightening the drama or offering moments of reflection. With music by Hildegard von Bingen, Adam de la Halle, and others, alongside images from the manuscripts, and presented by a mix of voices and instruments, including guest artist Nathan Dougherty, this program is a bouquet of medieval storytelling.