From time immemorial, mankind has used the arts of literature, sculpture, painting, music not only to glorify the divine, but also to describe and record the various aspects of human existence. From the lowest to the highest, human passions and appetites have been motivations for art. The themes of love and sex of course, still continue to dominate modern and popular music, but Renaissance treatments of them such as Clemens’ Entre vous filles and the anonymous villanesca ‘Voria che tu cantassi’ can be surprisingly frank, possibly shocking, even to modern sensibilities.
Food, a rarely treated topic, is the subject of some of our pieces (e.g. Lumps of Pudding and Sermisy’s je ne menge), but man does not live on bread alone, and so we have included pieces about drinking, such as the English ballad Watkin’s Ale and . Tobacco and smoking, still a burning topic today, are not forgotten—Tobacco is an Indian Weed and Hume’s Tobacco, Tobacco seek to give a philosophical slant to the phenomenon of smoking.
Human passions such as hunting, war, and gossip are also explored in our programme which promises not only to entertain (with animal and battle sound effects) but also to provoke thought—it often surprises modern audiences how relatable Renaissance music about these universal human themes can be.
Pieces will be sung in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish, with full translations of sung texts.
Cappella Martialis (Latin for ‘The Tuesday Singing Group’) coalesced in 2011 as a collective of singers enthused about the lesser-known gems of the early choral tradition from the Baroque and before, particularly the Renaissance and Mediæval periods. Our aims are to sing sacred music liturgically and secular music in historically-informed performance. We are not religiously-affiliated and welcome new singers based in Singapore. Instruments are added as appropriate for the repertoire. We also have a small band for Mediæval, Renaissance, and early Baroque instrumental dance music.