We’ve come together from Jamaica Plain, Newton, Watertown, Natick, Fitchburg, Clinton, and Conway, Massachusetts, and from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New Haven, to rehearse for our two programs at the Laus Polyphoniae festival in Antwerp. The festival’s theme this year is “Antwerp: Townscape—Soundscape” and on our agenda this afternoon are 16th-century songs by a handful of musicians who worked in Antwerp, including Andreas Pevernage, Séverin Cornet (both chapel masters of the Cathedral of Our Lady), and Cornelius Verdonck, and other Flemish, Dutch, and French composers associated with the city and its thriving music printers—Cipriano de Rore, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, Claude Le Jeune, and others.
Today we dive head first into the Missa Caput by Johannes Okeghem, one of his earliest (and frankly, strangest) works and just possibly a fruit of his time in Antwerp, where he enters the historical record for the first time in 1443-44 as a singer at the Church of Our Lady (made a cathedral in 1559).
