Ashley Mulcahy, writing for Early Music America, chronicles the history of the Boston Camerata, an ensemble formed 70 years ago in a musty museum basement, that went on to explore periods and genres that were long considered peripheral, even antithetical, to Western classical music.
Long led by Joel Cohen, now led by Anne Azéma (Cohen’s wife), the group has performed and recorded medieval and Renaissance songs and dances, hymns and popular tunes from 18th- and 19th-century America and other repertory that inhabits “the frontier of so-called ‘learned music’ and oral and popular traditions,” as Cohen puts it.
The ensemble continues to push the boundaries: “If the goal is only to reproduce what the generation before has done and what is now an accepted canon,” Azéma tells Mulcahy, “I’m not interested.”
Boston Camerata’s First 70 Years
(via http://artsjournal.com)