Passing Fancy: Beauty in a Moment of Chaos, featuring music by early modern and contemporary composers whose resilience despite pressure to hide their identity, or "pass," inspires us. 

This program features music written by composers forced to hide their identities (either social, religious, ethnic, or racial) while working within the structures of European high culture during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. We will consider the beauty of William Byrd (1540–1623) and Richard Dering (c. 1580–1630), two Catholic composers writing illicit church music in Protestant England; Leonora Duarte (1610–1678), a Jewish woman composing in the home while forced to live as a converso, or New Christian, in 17th-century Antwerp; composers under the patronage of Victoria della Rovere (1622–1694) Grand Duchess of Tuscany, who notoriously subjected those close to her to conversion; Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665–1729) and other women composers at the court of Louis XIV whose lost works reemerge with a vengeance in our own time; and Johann Nepomuk Maelzel (1772–1838), a German composer of Czech descent, who struggled to establish his mark in the midst of the Napoleonic era, when nationalistic tensions ran high. The voices we will hear in this program continue in our day to be locked behind unjust historical ignorance, rendered silent by gendered language, or forgotten amidst the shifting priorities of classical performance.

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