Programme for two women's voices a cappella

Available as well in a form of a lecture-concert of introduction to medieval music, for adult and children audience

Dialogos created this a cappella programme which explores the intimate and powerful world of medieval liturgical music. As we open the door to musical worlds from a thousand years ago,

For medieval singers, this was never "early music." It was a way to express themselves, to breathe and rest, to mark time, to confront the fear of the Others they called Barbarians, to drive out inner demons, to curse—or tame—forces beyond their control.

Woven of shadows and light, this programme lets two voices converse across the centuries, linking music by medieval composers with the words of great poets of the 19th and 20th centuries: Constantin Cavafy (1863–1933), Elias Canetti (1905–1994), and Giorgio Manganelli (1922–1990). Their texts rise in counterpoint, opening a passage between the Middle Ages and our present.

The selected pieces are not presented chronologically; rather, they form circles of meaning—an intimate meditation on the connections that link us to voices of the past. These songs probe exile and wandering, the love and cruelty of divinities, sons cursed by their fathers, and the nobility of the spirit, which sometimes awakens at the dawn of an inner journey, a fragile figure suspended between wakefulness and sleep.

Some highlights from the medieval repertoire punctuate this journey: monumental virtuoso pieces of plainchant (such as the offertory Vir erat, which portrays the biblical figure of Job in his full human depth), early polyphonies, including the oldest known version of the tractus Deus, deus meus from the Winchester Troper around the year 1000, sumptuous polyphonic conductus frepertoire from the Notre-Dame school of Paris in the 13th century (Pater noster, A deserto veniens, Si quis amat). Complementing these, the programme features a Genealogy of Christ from the Dalmatian coast, a dazzling fireworks enumerating generations from father to son, a liturgical exorcism from Monte Cassino, of surprising intensity, a medieval Croatian malediction, an incantation infused with fear of the Other—a fear that endlessly re-emerges throughout history, impoverishing our world…

"Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some of our men have arrived from the frontiers,
and say that there are no barbarians anymore.
—And now, what will become of us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution."

(Constantin Cavafy, 1898, tr. by Evangelos Sachperoglou)