The Roaring Fifteen-Twenties

You are about to enter a chapel where Arte Minima is working, in full view of the public, on a single print: the Motetti della Corona (Rome: Giovanni Giacomo Pasoti and Valerio Dorico, 1526). This is not a rehearsed concert or a guided tour in the usual sense — it is a working process under way, exposed exactly as it happens.

The works in this print are being explored on two fronts: musically, through the reading, rehearsal and interpretive decisions made from full-scale facsimiles; and literarily, through the theology, imagery and codes of the sacred texts that the composers — churchmen in many cases — knew intimately. The two readings cross throughout the four days.

Enter freely and stay as long as you like. Pedro Sousa Silva leads the musical mediation; Pedro Braga Falcão comments on the theology and the texts. Ask whatever questions you want, request repetitions, and interact directly with those at work — what is played follows the curiosity of those present. Anyone who wishes may return on the following days to follow the work as it develops.

The recorders are exact replicas of originals by Sigmund Schnitzer (Nuremberg, c. 1520); the viols are reconstructed from period iconography and from instruments held in museum collections. Choices that bring sound and gesture closer to the context in which the print was published.