Word: musicae
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Died. Noah Greenberg, 46, founder (in 1952) and director of the New York Pro Musica, a group of ten musicians whose performance of the 12th century Play of Daniel revived interest in the all but forgotten music composed during the five centuries before Bach; of a heart attack; in Manhattan. Greenberg dressed his players in medieval garb and used original instruments, mostly odd-looking woodwinds with such names as zink, shawm and Rauschpfeife...
When Gian Carlo Menotti took over the cobbled Umbrian city of Spoleto in 1958 for his first Festival of Two Worlds, the musical fringe of Manhattan's cocktail circuit followed him and introduced the martini to local opera buffs. Italian bluebloods rapidly caught on, and musica é martini dry became the order...
...rhythms and instruments were not. Scholars aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation prepared the work for a stunning performance at the Metropolitan Museum's Cloisters last December. The recording, also, comes alive, thanks to the musicality and dedication of Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica (TIME, July...
Since its founding in 1952, Pro Musica has introduced a steadily growing audience to the curious delights of a long and varied line-up of forgotten composers, such as the polyphonic wizardry of Ludwig Senfl, composer to the court of Maximilian I, the mystical motets of Martin de Rivaflecha, chapelmas-ter at the Cathedral of Valencia, and the Rabelaisian merriment of Adriano Banchieri, abbot of an Olivetan monastery. Its most ambitious undertaking was The Play of Daniel, a 12th century music-drama that was unearthed in the British Museum. Elegantly staged in medieval setting and dress in a Manhattan church...
...Unearthed. Pre-Bach compositions, Greenberg insists, are "not little delicate museum pieces. This was music of an exciting time, full of violent contrasts." The Tanglewood program presented by Pro Musica ranged from the solemn Lamentations of Jeremiah to the sprightly "hey ding a ding" of It Was a Lover and His Lass, an exquisitely chiseled duologue for recorder and flute, a blatantly comic Tobacco Is Like Love, and a spirited London Street Cries, alive with the calls of street vendors and town criers...