Piffaro's Harmony of the Spheres: Music of the heavenly bodies by Renaissance composers

When that happened to Shannon Cline, executive director of Piffaro, she reacted the way most of us would. “The Paul M. Angell Family Foundation contacted us in December, 2014, asking if we had any development needs that they might be able to help address,” Cline says. “Honestly, I initially thought it was a scam — who gets unsolicited emails like that? But it didn’t take much research to learn that this is a highly esteemed family foundation that supports ensembles like Apollo’s Fire and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.”

The result of that exchange was a multimedia concert on the ancient cosmological theory called “The Harmony of the Spheres.” According to the Greek philosophers, the sun and its companions hummed as they revolved around the Earth. Each heavenly body had its own tone, and the harmonies they created influenced life on the stationary silent Earth at the center of the solar system.

Scholars and philosophers developed the idea over the centuries. Musicians created music based on it. Each sphere acquired one of the muses and became associated with that muse’s specialty.

The theory may be outmoded but the words and music it generated can still capture the poetry of the cosmos. Piffaro enhanced the effect by staging the concert in a facility with a theater-sized screen: Temple University’s Conwell Dance Theater. Images of the real planets mingled with Renaissance depictions of the gods and muses who inhabited them before the development of telescopes and space probes drove them into exile.

The musical selections started with a hymn to the stars, then moved through the solar system, beginning with the earth, the sun, and the moon. At each stop, the music sampled the musical mode associated with that body and the moods associated with its god and its muse. Elaborate court music alternated with dances and street music with Piffaro’s usual sense of pace and showmanship.

The project director for this concert was Grant Herreid, Piffaro’s lute and guitar specialist. Herreid directs Baroque opera at Yale and he arranged the staging with an operatic touch. Strategically placed vocalists sang throughout the performance area. Spotlights illuminated the performers who occupied the center of attention. At one point, four of the performers suddenly appeared in an opening in the screen near the top of the theater.

In the Harmony of the Spheres cosmology, Mars hosts Erato, the muse of erotic poetry. Erato received a proper share of the vocal material in the Martian section, but Herreid didn’t overlook the opportunity created by the planet’s eponymous deity. A mock battle with wooden sticks added some lively choreography to the popular Renaissance song, “The Armed Man.”

The vocals were supplied by a new addition to Philadelphia’s musical resources, Les Canards Chantants (The Singing Ducks). The Ducks began life at the University of York, where the founding members were earning degrees in historical performance practice and “solo voice” singing. They’ve been refounded in Philadelphia after several successful years in the United Kingdom and now have core members there and in Philadelphia.

The two female Ducks at this concert, soprano Molly Netter and alto Robin Bier, possess voices that suggest the choir boys who would have sung their parts when this music was written. The three men all have strong, forceful deliveries. They make good use of the trills and other ornaments that convey emotion in early music and give it its distinctive sound.

Piffaro’s own players handled their instruments with their customary skill and style. This was primarily an ensemble event but Priscilla Herreid took the spotlight for a high-speed display on the recorder, with Joan Kimball supporting her on a discreet bagpipe. Greg Ingles’ sackbut and slide trumpet provided strategic touches of brass color. Christa Patten’s harp and Grant Herreid’s lute and guitar counterpointed the Renaissance wind instruments that form the core of Piffaro’s instrumental arsenal.

The event’s only flaw was the approach to the theater. The audience had to work its way through the dispiriting nondescript corridors and elevators of an institutional office building. Once you stepped through the door of the theater, however, you entered a magic place.