Musicians perform selection of European songs

8:00am Friday 2nd May 2008

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MISERICORDIA will be bringing music to the Church at Aust on Saturday, May 17(8pm).

Misericordia are Anne Marie Summers and Stephen Tyler - regular and popular performers at Aust.

Joined by singer Helen Barber and percussionist Terry Mann, they will resurrect the manic dance music of Northern Italy, popular pilgrimage music from Spain, and the intensely passionate and polyphonic love songs of England and France - using medieval instruments such as hurdy gurdy, bagpipes, gothic harp, citole, recorders and voices in consort.

The subtitle of the performance is Passion, Pilgrimage and Plague'.

Music in the Church at Aust' organiser Peter Dobbins said: "The fourteenth century was a time of plague, war, and famine, when the old certainties of the feudal order began to crumble.

"After the Black Death destroyed a third of the population, the world would never be the same again.

"In the grip of social upheaval, fourteenth-century Europe produced some true oddities: processions of German Flagellants; a French king who thought he was made of glass; a hysterical dancing mania; a war between two popes . . . surely, this was the end of the world, the Judgement Day.

"But this was also a time of increasing musical freedom, inventiveness, and complexity - this emergent musical style was dubbed Ars Nova, The New Art', by Philippe de Vitry in 1329."

Tickets for the event are available from Olveston Stores or the Boar's Head, Aust. Concert-goers can start the evening with a pre-concert supper at the Boar's Head, to be booked in advance.