OXFORD, Miss. – The Mississippi Early Music Ensemble
performs a concert Monday (April 21) at the University of
Mississippi.
The 8 p.m. program in Nutt Auditorium of the Music Building
is free and open to the public. Soloists include UM music
faculty Cynthia Linton and Debra Spurgeon, and music
students Kevin Dyess and Christian Feazell, both of Oxford;
Paul Gamble of Tchula and Davis Jones of Sunnyside, N.Y.
Co-directed by music faculty Laurdella Foulkes-Levy and
David Warren Steel, the ensemble specializes in the
interpretation of European music before 1700. Besides
choral and solo vocal music, the group performs on a number
of instruments, including trumpets, timpani, violin, viola,
recorders, viola da gamba and harpsichord.
The evening repertoire includes French chansons from the
Renaissance and passionate “madrigals of love and war” by
early baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi, Steel said. The
concert also features work by English composer Henry
Purcell that depicts the four seasons.
“This masque was originally inserted in a revival of
Shakespeare’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ as an entertainment
for Oberon’s birthday; the four seasons appear as
characters, offering their fruits to the sun god, who is
acclaimed as the ‘parent’ of the seasons and of life on
earth,” Steel said. “Purcell’s dramatic treatment may be
compared to other works on the seasons by Lully, Vivaldi,
Haydn, Tchaikovsky and John Cage.”
For more information on music education at Ole Miss visit