Cappella Clausura Extends Troubadours 2021

Due to overwhelming demand, the Cappella Clausura Troubadours 2021 program will continue to stream through August 20th. The groundbreaking work combines poetry from the 12th-14th centuries with music by an eclectic assortment of female composers. The new music was recorded live at Emmanuel Church in Boston. All of the pieces are available online now on Cappella Clausura's YouTube channel.

"Troubadours 2021" features four composers and one interpreter creating new music to texts written by ancient songwriters. These living composers will bring back the voices of some of the women who have been virtually erased from history until recent rediscoveries by feminist scholars such as Meg Bogin, whose book, "The Women Troubadours", provided the texts for this performance.

"This is a powerhouse program. Each unique piece is impactful, capable of being both therapeutic and tremendously uplifting at the same time," said Amelia LeClair, founder and Director of Cappella Clausura. "These accomplished women took the text and ran with it, creating something that exceeded my wildest expectations. It is truly a performance everyone should listen to."

Composers representing the various genres of music for "Troubadours 2021" include:

Elena Ruehr is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a renowned composer in demand with many string quartets, and operas to her oeuvre. She has written a piece for soprano, alto, tenor and bass with flute, violin, harp, and percussion.

Tal Shalom-Kobi is a bass player and jazz composer, and an active member of Women in the World Jazz and has written for alto solo, harp, flute, violin and percussion.

Be Steadwell is a songwriter, LGBTQ activist, and filmmaker known for composing live, using a loop station and beatbox, and has written a hip hop inspired piece for soprano, alto, tenor and bass.

Maitreyee Chakraborty is a renowned interpreter of the poetry of Tagore, a Bengali poet. She will be interpreting a piece utilizing the Indian harmonium and tabla, written by Amelia LeClair on a text by the Contessa de Dia.

Amelia LeClair, Resident Scholar at Brandeis University Women's Studies Research Center, is Director of Cappella Clausura and a composer of choral works and has written for soprano, alto, tenor and bass with flute violin, harp and percussion, as well as Chakraborty's piece. She also composed two instrumental dance pieces in the style of medieval "estampies".

"This project will engender and combine music from different genres and cultures, represented here as Black, LGBTQ, hip hop, Eastern Indian classical, Jewish jazz, and White European classical," said LeClair. "We maintain the concept of music as a truly universal and truly ungendered language, while continuing to dispel the notion that women did not write music until relatively recently."

Although our modern notion is that troubadours were traveling minstrels, in fact these musician poets lived in the houses of and were cared for by their local lords and ladies. The women most probably were the ladies of the house. We know their texts were sung, and probably accompanied by harp or lute, because many of the texts are found in ancient music manuscripts, however only one includes musical notation.

The texts are in the tradition of what is called "courtly love", which would have been between lovers who were not spouses. Marriage in that time and place was an arranged social contract between families: courtly husbands as well as wives were more or less expected to take lovers. For the women, the texts vary from how or even whether to find such a lover, to extolling the worthiness of a man, or bemoaning one who is untrue, abusive, or gone to war.

The ancient singer and songwriters are:

The Contessa Beatrice de Dia (Southern France 1100's), Gertrude, Duchesse de Lorraine (northern France 1200's), Azalais de Porcairages (Southern France 1100's), Castelloza (Auvergne 1200's), Clara d'Anduza (Languedoc 1200's), and the trio of Alais, Iselda and Carenza (possibly Toulouse in the 1200's).

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